When does democracy fulfill its
promise of equality? For some communities, democracy means putting up with
unequal economic policies, with elections that don’t represent all, with barriers
for some to social power, with police brutality targeting certain social
groups, and more. So how can democracy come to something other than reinforcing
entrenched inequalities?
Danielle
Allen argues in her reading of the U.S. Declaration of Independence that equality has been overrun
with other goals. Elected officials and powerful
corporate officials frequently argue that freedom must trump ethics and
other values, often in ways that serve their own narrow interests rather than
the interests of the entire political body.
The U.S.
Constitution was one reason why equality has never been realized in the
United States, and may never be realized.
Even when a democratic nation goes to war with itself in an attempt to
produce equality, as in the U.S. Civil War or the Mexican Revolution, equality
is often the first casualty when the conflict ends. The outcome of the promise
of equality in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War is well-known, and some have
argued that the Jim Crow South has spread
to infect the entire nation in the present day. The wealth
gap that has characterized Mexican society since the Revolution is one type
of physical evidence that electoral promises of land reform and the uplifting of
the poor were not fulfilled. As Fanon warned, even wars of national
liberation have not succeeded at producing equality of social elites and
the general populace.
Why do many U.S. citizens continue
to see their home as a place of equality? The African American artist Sonya
Clark deployed her own woman’s
body to interrupt business as usual this summer, mopping the floor
of a Philadelphia museum by hand where the U.S. Declaration of Independence
is inscribed. Embodying the long history of domestic work as the most that
African American women could hope for in the United States, Clark’s performance
piece reminds us that employment in the United States not only never was equal
but may never be equal across racial differences.
Since wages for the same work still
differ based on gender and race, since domestic
violence against women continues without abating, since sexual violence
against women continues to pervade nearly all societies, since police violence against women of color
continues without reserve, embodying equality is no easy task.
Many experts would agree with Sonya
Clark when it comes to economic inequality. A major recent study
of the history of tax payments has documented how tax policies over the past
half century in the United States have unequally benefitted the wealthy. For
the authors, both academic economists, that means that even a nation that
claims to be at the forefront of world democracies can be practicing policies
that produce injustice.
The economist Thomas Piketty
demonstrated that capitalism produces inequality in his well-known critique, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
in 2013. His new book on
capitalism includes many specific policy solutions to economic inequality
that would force the superwealthy to share the wealth society produces. Capitalism
and the spread of neoliberal poison have spelled the near-death of the
ethics of sharing, if we focus not on individual virtuosity but on social attitudes
and policies.
What would it take to embody
equality? How can we do that as individuals? How can entire societies and
nations put such abstract ideas into practice? Giving attention to the concrete
evidence of women’s bodies is one way to interrupt
pie-in-the sky abstractions like “equality,” according to Gayatri Spivak.
So when Sonya Clark works with the gendered
and racialized working body to interrupt business as usual, it becomes possible
to interrogate democracy as we know it. Clark’s clearing away of the dust of
unequal history also allows her audience to imagine the new forms that
democracy must take if equality will ever become anything more than the seductive
work of flim flam artists, of elected leaders, and of others unable to pursue the
general interest.
