Waves of Black progress have historically been accompanied by waves of significant backlash. Anthony Walton is a poet, professor and the writer-in-residence at Bowdoin College, and he joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why gains in Black life have so often come with periods of reckoning, why racial trauma in this country so often repeats itself, and why the country wasn’t prepared for its first Black president. His book is “The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning With His Life and His Nation.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Say you want to ascend from the basement of a tall building to the top floor. There is an elevator in the building, but the people who have the keys to it are reluctant to let you ride along. They point you instead to a spiral ramp, so you essentially have to travel many yards, going around in a circle for every inch you rise. It takes a long time and it often feels like you are making no progress at all. Meanwhile, the people who got those elevator keys step off fresh and rested at the top and then wonder why you are so exhausted. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think I’m Krys Boyd. That metaphor kept coming to mind as I was reading Anthony Walton’s collection of essays on the perpetual struggles of black Americans in a society that often forces them to go the long way around for even the tiniest gains. Walton is a poet and professor and writer in residence at Bowdoin College who has been publishing observations about race in America since the 1980s. Now, in his 60s, Walton has collected some of his most insightful essays in a book called “The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation.” Anthony, welcome to Think.
Anthony Walton [00:01:09] Hi, Krys. And thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Krys Boyd [00:01:14] I am as well. You introduced this collection with a paradox. You say America is one of the best places in the world for people of African descent. And at the same time, one of the worst the worst part I get and we’ll talk about this in the conversation. How, though, is America one of the best places for black people?
Anthony Walton [00:01:34] If you look at what a certain cohort of African-Americans have been able to accomplish. There are black billionaires. There are black people that run multinational corporations. There are black folks that are professors at most prestigious Ivy League universities. There are black people throughout our society, whether it’s in law enforcement or the school system and on and on, who are doing quite well and have made middle class lives for themselves, sometimes upper class lives. But there are also a great many African-Americans who have not been able to advance since the civil rights movement, and some have gone backwards.
Krys Boyd [00:02:27] The paradox is a great opener for a book like this, in that the sentence takes just a few seconds to read, but maybe decades, maybe your whole life to try and come to come to terms with.
Anthony Walton [00:02:40] That’s part of why I wrote the book. Perhaps the major reason because I’ve been thinking about this for 40 or 50 years and still don’t have a definitive answer, but have a lot of forays into things that I’ve learned about. And that’s something I’ve tried to do, is learn as to I think of it as figuring things out and trying to answer that. And that’s a lot of what the book is about.
Krys Boyd [00:03:14] I think one reason we struggle to have productive conversations about race in this country is that we can see racial advantage and disadvantage through such different lenses like white privilege may seem invisible to white people. Black people may wonder how that is even possible. Well, you share your stolen car allegory.
Anthony Walton [00:03:33] Let’s say that your grandfather has just the most wonderful muscle car that there ever was. Let’s say a 65 Shelby Mustang. And it was his pride and joy. He took care of that every week. And as you grew up, you worked with him in taking care of it. It became a way of you and him bonding. You learned to wash it. Maybe you even learn to drive with it. You loved the car so much that he left it to you and you thought of it as part of your patrimony in life. Then a few years later, you come to find out that that car was stolen and it had belonged to someone else, and your grandfather had got it by some kind of nefarious means. Now, what do you do? Do you give it back? Do you accuse the person that it was stolen from or that person’s descendants of somehow infringing upon your life? I think that it becomes a metaphor for American society and sometimes not a metaphor. For example, what happened in California at Manhattan Beach with the land that was taken from the family, and that they have been working to get back and have gone a long ways towards doing so.
Krys Boyd [00:05:18] I think what works for me about the metaphor is this idea that it’s not saying you are like an evil person to have inherited the car, but the fact that you didn’t steal it doesn’t entitle you to keep it either. There is a moral decision to be made.
Anthony Walton [00:05:32] Yes, you may have had the car for ten years. 20 years. That does not change the fact that the way the car came into your possession was not right. And so I think it’s a way what I’m trying to do with that metaphor is just shake things up a little bit and help people maybe think about how our society has worked for hundreds of years and how things that exist today, things that are happening today have their roots in behavior in the past, decades, centuries ago that create these concrete realities that have very troubling moral realities.
Krys Boyd [00:06:23] And of course, throughout our history, we have examples of people stealing those metaphorical cars who knew exactly what they were doing, knew exactly what this would do to and for subsequent generations. You recount Lee Atwater’s revelation to this political scientist in the early 90s about the so-called Southern strategy. What was that strategy?
Anthony Walton [00:06:44] Basically, it began in 1964 when there was a landslide with Barry Goldwater on the Republican ticket. What was then noticed, though, by Republican strategists, particularly Nixon and Kevin Phillips, he noticed that the Southern states went completely for Goldwater, though pretty much everywhere else went against him. Out of that, they began to realize that there was a way to build a workable strategy for the Republican Party, that if they could hold on to those states and then begin to add to that, that would become majority for a presidential contest. And so since then, 68, 72, 76 on up to famously 88. And what I think we have seen recently, that has been basically how they have acted to stir up a certain kind of racial tension that keeps fear and anger front and center, particularly in the southern states. And then start adding to it wherever else they can. And that basis of the south starts them off very well in each campaign.
Krys Boyd [00:08:22] So the way our society works right now for many millions of people, this was not some unintended consequence of race neutral policies. These were policies crafted as a deliberate workaround to create plausible deniability.
Anthony Walton [00:08:36] I don’t know if I would think of it as plausible deniability. I think that it was just a way to win and a way to sell otherwise often unpopular policies. And I think that they were often the Republicans were often very clear in what they were doing, such as Atwater admitting that he was very conscious of putting race baiting things in for each campaign that he worked on to make sure that he kept a certain base up in arms. And I don’t know that he wanted to deny it. I think that it was just one of those silences in our society, something that was only talked about among specialists and has only moved into discussion. The last mainstream discussion, the last, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years, in my judgment.
Krys Boyd [00:09:49] Your writing career took off back in 1988, 89, when you were in your late 20s. The George H.W. Bush campaign created this infamous and highly successful TV ad for listeners who maybe too young to remember Were you remind us of what the so-called Willie Horton ad was about.
Anthony Walton [00:10:08] Yes. Willie Horton was a prisoner in Massachusetts who under a program that was championed by Michael Dukakis, was granted a weekend furlough. And during that furlough, he raped and terrorized a white woman and her partner. Now, what he did was horrible. And it was kind of unconscionable. But the 88 H.W. Bush campaign crafted a commercial in which Horton was made to represent a kind of black male boogeyman. And the way that he was presented, the way that he looked, it was basically trying to say that black men needed to be feared and it worked.
Willie Horton Ad [00:11:06] Bush and Dukakis on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received ten weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnaped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes Dukakis on crime.
Anthony Walton [00:11:36] What happened with me was that I started to realize that I was part of that. I was a young black male. I started to wonder if some of the thing I was experiencing I was living in New York City at the time in terms of how I was treated in the wider society, whether it was not being able to get a cab, not being allowed into stores, having people cross the street. Things like that. I started to connect that this kind of race baiting and fear mongering on the part of the campaign had something to do with that. And that was new to me because of how and where I had grown up.
Krys Boyd [00:12:27] Yeah. You write about the adults in your life maybe trying to protect you from the worst of those realities when you were a kid.
Anthony Walton [00:12:35] Most definitely. And I think and part of this is because I’m now a father and have a child that I have to think about in terms of this. The day after the election, my daughter was very upset and worried about going to school. But what do you do when you are a black parent and you want your children to advance and to study hard and have hopes and dreams? Do you tell them that this is waiting for them? Or do you protect them and encourage them so that they keep going and are not defeated too early? That was what I think that not only my parents, but so many of the other older black folks that I grew up with, that’s what they were trying to do. And not just for me, but for all of us in our community. I came from a very sort of special, I think, kind of community of African-Americans who were from a certain place in Mississippi. And interestingly, many of them all moved to the same place in Illinois. And they very much wanted to create a bubble for us. And in many ways, they were successful.
Krys Boyd [00:13:57] Anthony, you are now twice the age you were when you wrote that essay Willie Horton and Me twice the age and then some. I mean, none of us, you know, will see things exactly as we did as young adults. If injustice is every bit as evident to you now as it was then. Have you changed the way you orient yourself toward it? Your sense of who has the power to do anything about it?
Anthony Walton [00:14:21] Well, Krys, I think that that is dependent upon the context to look at the situation. I feel like I have power, different kinds of power in different places. For example, if I’m at the college where I teach Bowdoin, I have a significant amount of power to be able to go talk to folks, to participate in various kinds of governance of the college, to talk to the deans, president, fellow professors and move some things along. On the other hand, if I’m on the street in New York City or Boston, I might think a little differently and I might kind of be more recessive and try to where I think of it as stay out of trouble because I don’t want to provoke anything or provoke anyone. I’m also very alert of trouble coming my way. And I’m particularly alert and I’m sorry to say this, but of the police. So it just kind of depends. And there are just different ways. If I’m in, you know, an airport, I feel like that’s a kind of neutral space that I can fully assert myself. Be myself. I just think it kind of depends. And you have to know where you are and kind of set yourself accordingly. Now, I’m sorry to say that and it doesn’t please me to say that, but it’s true. And it’s part of why I feel like I’ve been able to make it to my age and to do many of the things I’ve been able to do.
Krys Boyd [00:16:22] Yeah, I mean, it’s really poignant to me when you share in the book that one of the ways that you have tried to fight the conditions of a society that chooses to see you as a black man first with whatever racist negativity white people have layered on that identity and as a complex individual, a distant second. One of the things you’ve done is to avoid those situations where you know you will not be seen as an individual. I wonder if you think you can change that in your seventh decade of life or whether you believe it would even be worth the effort were you to try.
Anthony Walton [00:16:56] Now, I don’t think I can change it. I mean, I tried to work on the margins of things, and I have been fortunate to be able to participate in various things. For example, I served for several years on the advisory court, sorry, the Advisory Council for Arts and Letters at my alma mater, Notre Dame, and was able to have very frank conversations with administration and alumni. So a place like that, a situation like that, I will fully try to push and say what I think and ask that things be reconsidered and looked at. As I said previously, I will do that at Bowdin. I can talk to folks in my neighborhood, things like that. But if I’m in a situation where I’m more anonymous, I’m going to be more leery and I’m kind of focused more now on working on preparing my daughter and other young people I know and trying to share what I’ve learned with them in the hopes that they can do more, go farther.
Krys Boyd [00:18:20] As you and I speak, the country is absorbing the results of the 2024 elections. We know Donald Trump will return to the White House in January. When you hear the slogan Make America Great Again, Anthony, where do you imagine you fit in in that vision of greatness?
Anthony Walton [00:18:38] Well, I think that that’s a very complex question and it takes a kind of parst answer. I think that there is a place for African-Americans in the kind of cyclemania, to use a fancy word, which is the battle between good and evil in an individual. So I think that in those folks, there is a place for black people. But I think it’s a secondary place. And I think that they see black people as. Second class or a lower caste or even you could say mud still, which goes back to the 1850s pre-Civil War. This view that certain southern whites had that some people were just destined to be part of the mud. So that supported everyone else and supported society and that they should be content with that. I mean, when I think about and this is something that I write about a lot in the book, you know, you had a candidate, a ticket that engaged in blatant racism. And I would also add misogynist language and tropes. And a substantial majority of the Electoral College voted for. That gives me pause. I feel like black folks kind of always end up as the collateral damage of that. And it’s like, we don’t matter what we think, doesn’t matter what we feel doesn’t matter. And I think that we’re expected to just kind of take it and keep moving along. And that’s a lot of what my book is about. What I mean by the end of respectability, that we just can’t do that anymore. We have to speak up. We have to start articulating what we say, what we feel, what we think. And it’s a lot of why I wrote the book. You know, one of my core experiences was dealing with end of life with my parents. And those are two people who were born in the Great Depression in Mississippi, and particularly my father, who was a sharecropper on a plantation, but also my mother. They were very poor. They moved to Chicago and they moved to the suburbs. That worked really hard. They held jobs for decades. Both of them. They participated in community election judges, Boy Scouts, little League, all those sorts of things to try and participate. They ended up in a nice house, on a nice street in Batavia, Illinois, a lovely suburb. And, you know, you could say in so many ways, their life was an American success story, but they died under Trump in his first presidency. And my father in particular, was very disturbed by that because it made him wonder, you know, what he had done, if it really mattered. Now, it’s not that he didn’t have white friends, neighbors who were extraordinarily good to him. In fact, one of his white neighbors gave a beautiful eulogy at his funeral. But. You know, X number of people in that town voted for Trump in that county, etc.. And it just makes you wonder, where do I fit? Maybe I don’t.
Krys Boyd [00:23:12] How do you account for the doubling of black support for Donald Trump between 2020 and 2024 in places like the state of Wisconsin?
Anthony Walton [00:23:22] Well, that’s a really good question and it’s really hard to answer. And I’m sure that people are going to be studying it. And I have not studied it academically, but I can share some gut thoughts with you, some feelings that I have and I think if you start chopping it up, for example, I think a lot of black men are, first of all, men. And I think they see the sorts of power and privilege that white men seem to have in our society, and they want that. And so they see Donald Trump as a sort of avatar of a sort of kind of male dominance and privilege. And they go with that. And for them voting for a woman and I’m sorry to say it, but this is my kind of anecdotal observation. I think some of them just couldn’t get there. And they identified more with this kind of dominant thing. I think others felt that the economy was better, and I think they don’t. Kind of get it. What was going on? That’s another thing I write about in the book. I have an essay reading in writing and the Risk of Failure, where I talk about how the failure of public school systems, particularly in urban and rural areas, are kind of handicapping people’s ability to interpret and understand our society. And I think that that’s one of the issues and I’ve thought about that. I’m not an economist or a sociologist, but just from my observations as a fellow citizen, those are the sorts of things that I see.
Krys Boyd [00:25:37] I’ve wondered if, you know, black voters moving into the Trump camp are fully aware of the racist comments and actions that have been attributed to him, but maybe don’t draw a distinction between like the in-your-face statements he makes and the perhaps more reserved language made by earlier presidents who nevertheless failed to make things more equal for them.
Anthony Walton [00:26:01] Again, I’m not a sociologist. I’m not an economist. I’m not a pundit. But from my gut, I think that it’s something that needs to be parsed. First of all, you have this kind of entertainment, Trump, which I think many of them remember. They remember him hanging out with Mike Tyson and Don King, you know, things like that. Some of them remember him on television and their knowledge of him may not go much past that. You know, they think of him as this mogul. I think also a lot of his uneducated white voters think of him as I think that others. Identify. With that power and. You know, that idea of being dominant in society. And again, purely anecdotal. But I think some of them think it doesn’t apply to them. You know, I think that they think that they’re with Trump. They agree with him. And they think that what he says does not apply to them. And and I think you could probably slice that much, much more. And I think that people will be studying that very carefully in the next five, ten years. And it’ll be interesting to see what they discover.
Krys Boyd [00:27:47] Something you write in this book, Anthony, that I cannot quite get out of my head is that it’s occurred to you that maybe this country elected its first black president, maybe 25 years too soon. And I know you’re not saying that you necessarily agree that a black person isn’t qualified to be president. So so talk us through your thoughts on this.
Anthony Walton [00:28:09] What I mean is and I also write about I think Barack Obama is one of the most important Americans that has ever lived. He is perhaps the most important black person that has ever lived. And I say that and I write about that in the book, that in many ways he, from my point of view, exceeds even MLK and Mandela because he did it through the system. His right is through the just kind of regular retail politics. You know, he went to law school. He became a state senator. You know, senator ran for president. And quite frankly, I thought myself that there was no way that would ever happen. And I was very pleased to be proven wrong. But I wonder if Obama’s success and ascension was such a shock to the system and to I mean, we forget MAGA in many ways has kind of wiped out the Tea Party in our just kind of way of thinking about all this. And I think it was such a shock to the system and we forget just how vitriolic the Tea Party was and how organized the GOP was against him. And I just think that if it had been a little longer, maybe we had had another generation. That passed before black president. I think that maybe it wouldn’t have been such a shock to the system and it wouldn’t have inspired this just backlash that has now been going on almost 20 years.
Krys Boyd [00:30:24] You write, Anthony, that as an African-American, you have traveled from WTF in 1989 to we ain’t having it in 2024. What does we ain’t having it look like in practice?
Anthony Walton [00:30:37] First of all, it means speaking up. It means saying very clearly what I think. For example, as we’re doing here this afternoon, talking and I’m just saying what I think. I’m no longer couching, you know, things, trying to, as I say, fit in and to not create discomfort. Now I say what I think and let the chips fall where they may. I think you’re seeing that throughout this society. I think you’re going to see that a lot more. But for example, you know, I mentioned earlier working with administration fellow faculty here at Bowdoin. Now, when we talk about race and talk about class and things like that, I speak very frankly, very clearly. And I just, you know, and I’m finding that it helps. And I think that in so many ways, it’s just time for African-Americans to. Just take the gloves off, so to speak. I am very much still a follower of Dr. King and believer in nonviolence, but I think we have to start thinking about ourselves and just speaking up and moving forward. And, you know, I write a lot about Al Sharpton, for example, in the book. And sometimes I think that perhaps he was right all along. You know, And if you think about he’s come a long way also from being a kind of mocked gadfly to being someone who’s very much in the middle of things, both in the black community and in the mainstream white media system. And I think that. That way of doing things is probably more what we’re going to have to do. I’m not saying that there haven’t been African Americans who spoken very clearly all along, but I am saying that there are folks like me who have tried to split the difference, have tried to participate, but also try to move forward a little at a time. And I just don’t think that that’s going to work anymore.
Krys Boyd [00:33:36] Did it ever work, do you think? Was it necessary for previous generations? I mean, the book The End of Respectability, you know, reminds us of respectability politics.
Anthony Walton [00:33:45] I think that it did work. I think that it was essential, for example, going back and, you know, we have to remember, Dr. King was not the first black leader and was not the first person that pushed African-American interests forward. I think in all kinds of ways, you know, some folks think that it takes two kinds of push inside, outside. So I’d say Dr. King and Malcolm X and then you might go back. You know, you have someone like a Philip Randolph or Charles Hamilton Houston versus someone like Marcus Garvey. You also have all long, very strong women to Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, many others. And so there’s always been this kind of tension. And I do think that it was necessary in many ways to have negotiators. And another one I would mention would be Bayard Rustin, who extraordinarily sophisticated understanding of organization and how to use public activity to advance our issues. But I see now kind of moving more just I don’t know. It’s hard to say, but it’s something that I think about a lot in the book and try to talk about a lot.
Krys Boyd [00:35:25] You write about the United States undergoing a third reconstruction, the first being the period we actually call reconstruction right after the Civil War. The second being the MLK era civil rights movement. This one, you think started with George Floyd. As we speak now, in November 2024, after the 2024 elections. Do you think that Third Reconstruction is still alive?
Anthony Walton [00:35:50] I think it’s probably coming to a close. When you look at all the anti DEI activity, the ways that right wing operatives are ginning up anger at things that don’t even really exist, like CRT and things like that, and the push back and even this election, I think, might be an indicator that things have started to move away from that sense of reckoning. But I feel like something happened after George Floyd’s murder. And I think one of the things you saw was young white kids standing up in ways that they never had and in numbers that they never had before, and embracing BlackLivesMatter and things like that. I wonder if that is what set off this backlash. You know, you had a couple of generations of people being taught to think about Martin Luther King’s ideas and to try to. Reframe the way they saw American society. And in that moment, after George Floyd’s murder in those protests, you saw that. And I think what is going on now may be a backlash to that, which would mean that it’s probably ending or at least it’s entered a new phase. I also would like to say I’m not the only person that thinks of that metaphor, because it’s something throughout our African-American experience we always see advance and then backlash. Professor Linda Anderson of Emory has written about that very eloquently and with a lot of depth. And I, at the same time feel like we are advancing a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time and a little bit at a time. And the fact that, for example, I’m sitting here talking to you, talking about a book that I wrote and 80 years ago. My family was on Plantation in Mississippi. I’m sitting here at Bowdoin College. You know, there have been advances. So we have to count that as well. But I think any time that we do advance, there’s going to be a push back. And that’s just how it is.
Krys Boyd [00:38:53] I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the expression divide and conquer, which these days we use, like splitting up a task to get something done. But its origins, of course, lie with ancient military leaders who recognize that the easiest way to take an enemy’s territory was to start by getting its people to fight one another. How do you see divide and conquer tactics used in politics today?
Anthony Walton [00:39:17] Well, I think, first of all, the most obvious would be the way that white working class whites, poor whites are divided from working class and poor people of color, not just African-Americans, but also Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, indigenous. I’m sorry. But I think that when you think about it that way, it sheds light on our society in a certain way, because one of the reasons that that divide and conquer strategy works is the working class whites, poor whites, in my opinion, they get what Dubois and others called the wages of whiteness, and they want to protect that. So when we say, why don’t you vote your interests, I think they actually are voting their interest. And we started to see some work on that. But to me, it’s better to be the poorest white man. A lot of people think than the richest black man. And I think that one of the things the Republicans do is very deftly split that line and keep that going.
Krys Boyd [00:40:48] You acknowledge in this book that some Americans, including presumably Americans of color, are tired of talking and worrying about race. I wonder if you think this kind of weariness is what stalls progress on these issues in every era when they come up and we try to confront them?
Anthony Walton [00:41:09] I think so. For me, one of the things that kind of reignited my thinking about this and my curiosity was becoming a father, becoming an uncle. Having friends with children and starting to think about how is this impacting them. And once you are in it, so to speak, you kind of have to think about it. And you can’t get away from it. But I think that people do get tired of it because it’s like a Groundhog Day kind of. I’m referring to the film situation of where we just it seems like every time that we’ve gotten somewhere, one would think that the election of a black president would indicate that there had been some kind of resolution. But in fact, we end up in a more virulent and more contentious time after that black president. And so it is weary. But also we’re in it and we can’t give up. Speaking for myself, I think about my parents and I think about what they did for me and my siblings. And so I feel like I have to honor that and respect it.
Krys Boyd [00:42:43] Have you felt the urge to tell your own daughter that her future might look substantially brighter than you sense that it will?
Anthony Walton [00:42:56] I think that she will have a very interesting life. She will be a person that has a great deal of privilege. She will particularly have information privilege, which is a very huge advantage in our society. She will know, you know, the soft skills. She will have contacts and friends. There’s all kinds of advantages that she will have. She will also have to deal with many of the things that I have had to deal with that my parents had to deal with, that their parents had to deal with. I’m sorry to say it, but she was frightened the day after the election and actually tried to not go to school. And we had to have a discussion at 630 in the morning about you’ll be all right. And this is what happens. It’s happened before. Blah, blah, blah. And don’t be afraid. You know, a lot of people, you have friends, etc.. And so I’m hoping to be able to tell her the truth. I’m hoping to tell her these truths at the right times in her life. I would not have commented on the election if she herself had not brought it up. But she’s getting to the age of where you can’t keep anything from her anymore. So as she wants to discuss these things, I will tell her. And in fact, I will tell her more explicitly and more carefully than I feel like I was told. I understand, as I write about in the book, that my parents and the elders around me did not want to discourage me. That was so important to them to not discourage any of us. And so I think they didn’t tell us everything they knew. I think I’ll handle it a little differently. But I think that she will need to understand and she will also I think she already understands that she’s fortunate to live in a bubble. And, you know, we’ll see.
Krys Boyd [00:45:29] Anthony Walton is a poet and professor and writer in residence at Bowdoin College. His book is called “The End of Respectability: Notes of a Black American Reckoning with His Life and His Nation.” Anthony, thanks so much for this conversation.
Anthony Walton [00:45:42] Thank you, Krys. It’s been an honor and my pleasure.
Krys Boyd [00:45:46] Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
