Embodying Equality: Realizing the Democratic Imaginary

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.