Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Breaking Out of the Cage

They will get you. If you are black in America, they will get you. They will get you before they get anyone else. And they will get you more forcefully and more ruthlessly just because you are black. Everything depends on this: politics, economics, education, crime, defence, corporate health and the general well-being of America. It is the unwritten constitutional guarantee of the country - whatever happens will happen first and worst to black folk. Glaude is unequivocal: “Our democratic principles do not exist in a space apart from our national commitment to white supremacy.”

Black wealth, and the lives associated with it are the insurance premium paid involuntarily by black people to cushion national disaster. Everyone paid for the financial insanity of Wall Street in 2008, for example. But black people paid most, as they have paid most in the various American international military adventures during the last 60 years. They will also pay most during the current Covid-19 crisis. More will be impoverished, more will die proportionately than anyone else. Black people are the shock absorbers of American culture; they are disposable. This is the function they perform in a society that considers this normal by not considering it at all.

And yet, incredibly, this is not a central issue in American politics. “What happens in black America is not a matter of national concern—unless, of course, it threatens people who ‘really matter.’” Unless they shoot someone, or are shot by police, black people are politically invisible in America. Black misery has been privatised. This is three or four generations after the civil rights leaders and their victories in the 1960’s. How did this happen? How did a rising political and economic power in America become so marginalised, so irrelevant to its existence?

“The United States remains a nation fundamentally shaped by its racist past and present.” The forces that were temporarily overcome in the 1960’s were never eliminated. The white supremacy that has existed from its founding continues to run the country. The proof of this is that black people are less valued by any reasonable standard - unemployment, health, mortality, rates of incarceration, education, pay. The gap in value between white and black is part of the American DNA. “At every crucial moment in our nation’s history, when there have been fundamental changes in how we’ve dealt with race, white people asserted the value gap and limited the scope of change.”

The political strategy by which race became a non-issue in America has many sources. But I think the dominant meme is that of ‘identity politics.’ Race has progressively become incorporated into a portmanteau of ‘interests.’ Everyone has interests. And according to the logic of democracy, diverse interests must balanced against each other. The interests of the financial entrepreneurs who create new trading instruments or the real estate developers in large cities are analogous to other ‘life-style’ interest-groups - gay, LGBT, feminists, veterans, environmentalists, and religious adherents.

The civil rights gains against racism in the 1960’s revealed the possibilities for addressing injustice in many areas. But racism is not one among many injustices. It is the root of them all. To treat it otherwise is to make it subservient to the interests of the entrepreneurs and the developers. Race is not an interest. It is not an ambition or a hope that people have. It is not something that can be accumulated or a means to a more fulfilling life. And it is certainly not something that can be ‘balanced’ against the well-being of others.

Race is an existential not an economic, political, or even sociological category. It cannot be changed, modified, mitigated, or traded-off against what others want, need, deserve, or have. Ultimately race is not even a criterion for the attainment of justice. Race is an absolute right which has been degraded into an arbitrary desire with the explicit purpose of making it irrelevant. This is an elemental subversion of democracy by those who reject that fundamental principle.

The degradation of race to the status of interest is the mechanism of white supremacy in America. It allows racism to be practised while never using the historical terms of racial abuse or the arguments of racial inferiority. Economic slurs about the ‘takers’ in society; sociological references to ‘criminal classes’; religious tirades against unAmerican ‘values,’ are now the ways in which racial hatred is expressed. As Glaude says, “Republicans wrapped the flag around their bigotry and couched it in criticisms of big government.” In this way white supremacy disappears, except as extremist nutcases on the FBI watch-list. But the real racism is acted out systematically by conceiving race as just one more claim to be politically assessed.

Glaude, therefore, is treading a dangerous line when he opens with his examples of black poverty. He knows this. Poverty is a consequence of race, but the issue is race not poverty. Actions to alleviate poverty may be required for humanitarian and ethical reasons. But, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, such actions have no significant impact on the fundamental issue. Race is non-negotiable. The recognition of race is not a political variable; it is a pre-condition for democracy tout court. The existence of systematic racism in America is a fundamental block to democratic politics. If you are black in America, democracy simply does not exist. This is the “great legacy of unfreedom at the heart of the American project.”

Glaude is insistent that white supremacy is so deeply built into the thing Americans call democracy as to be the standard of democracy. “We keep treating America like we have a great blueprint and we’ve just strayed from it,” he says, “But the fact is that we’ve built the country true. Black folk were never meant to be full-fledged participants in this society.” Without recognising this, American democracy will remain a caricature, a bad joke, a regime as oppressive and depressing as that of any other preferential ideology. That this may be difficult to comprehend is evidence of just how successful this ideology has been. It hides in plain sight; it is so pervasive that it cannot be seen except by those it crushes.

Trump is right: the system is rigged. But not against him and his supremacist allies. Their gripe is that the system might become unrigged, that voting rights will continue to be curtailed, that police will continue to be justified in providing ‘special treatment’ to black youth, that spending on black education and social welfare will be a fraction of that for white folk, that black infant mortality should remain twice the national average, that the American rate of incarceration is the highest in the world,wildly over represented by black people. All these things have to be ‘dis-remembered’ in order to bluster about maintaining American ideals. These are the ideals. They are what the system wants not incidental or accidental damage. This is Glaude’s central point. And it’s very difficult to find fault with it.

The ‘unit of change,’ as it were, that Glaude has in mind is not law, or attitude, or mental state but “racial habits,” those aspects of behaviour which are the carriers of racism. Primary among these is language. While the old fashioned racial epithets are largely gone from intelligent company, they have been replaced by the PC phrases which are the modern equivalent of the epithets that were common in my lifetime. And first among these is that race is not mentioned at all. We are to pretend that the way to deal with killings by police, riots, even complaints of racism, is by not referring to race. Race should be removed from the analysis and discussion of these issue as inflammatory and not relevant to their resolution. This is a racist tactic to divert attention from the pervasive fact of racism.

The second related habit can be summarised as white fear. This is “a deeply felt, collectively held fear shared by people who believe, together, that some harm threatens them and their way of life.” It is group behaviour passed from generation to generation through advice and admonition. Fear too is generated through language. Such fear is not a response to threat but to myth: “It isn’t based in any actual threat of harm. Instead, the idea of black violence or crime does all the work. The mere possibility of danger is enough to motivate us to act as if we are in immediate danger.” One cannot help but notice that the language of drugs is really that of racism revealing itself as moral panic - something repeatedly demonstrated about race throughout American history.

Ultimately the solution to bad racial habits has to do with unravelling the stories told by Reagan Republicans and their descendants about what race is in America. “We have to tell better stories about what truly matters to us” Thereis no alternative. This involves constantly harping on the real racial history of America and its legacy. To a significant degree, this means recapturing the spirit of Dr. King, black religious congregations and organisations like the original NAACP who sought to create a new narrative for being black in America. This narrative is not that of the co-opted liberal establishment for which race has become a political bargaining chip, one among many. It is a narrative which “will disrupt how society responds to black suffering and imagines black political participation.” This Glaude calls “a civil power outage.”

This undoubtedly means action in the streets rather than the statehouse, and making noise as well as writing and speaking. And, therefore, likely tear-gassing and arrests. And hostile media coverage. This is a necessary complement to voting in the non-democracy that is America, which may indeed involve an “electoral blank out,” the submission of blank/spoiled ballots to demonstrate disgust for the system. For Glaude, this is a route out of the political cage that the black population is in. I don’t know if this is good advice or not. But I can understand entirely the justified rage which provokes it.

Postscript 23 April 20: https://thebaffler.com/latest/ill-wil...

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