Racial Inequality and Democracy

Democracy promises equality in the abstract, but often does not deliver. Sometimes it takes a crisis to bring this inequality to wide attention. Our present day has plunged into just such a crisis in at least two ways.

Since members of some social sectors continually confront the violent impacts of what passes for democracy in most nation-states, they already know that inequality is a major weakness for democracy. But among those belonging to privileged groups generally protected from democracy’s destructive daily impacts, crises like the COVID19 pandemic and the police shootings of innocents are what it takes to wake them up to the problem.

During the Corona virus pandemic inequality in health care and job markets became more obvious to those in more protected groups. News media began reporting on higher rates of unemployment, infection rates, and deaths among African Americans and Latinos in the U.S. context, and similar impacts were found in Britain and other countries.  

Increased awareness and outrage at the unequal impacts of police violence has emerged from recent successes of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., and this outrage has found resonance from London and Paris to Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town, South Africa. As U.S. resistance to state violence increases, some Black parents of young people killed by the police have even asked for an intervention from the United Nations.

Racism also has violent effects in more subtle ways. Communities of color often enforce racist preferences for light skin tones internally, a problem that is found in the Caribbean, Latin America, India, and England and is not limited to the United States and Canada.  While these self-inflicted modes of racism can have significant economic and social impacts, they also impact the sense of self worth and value that may make healing internalized oppression an important part of anti-racist work.

Equality itself is a value that derives from a time when slavery and colonialism were widely practiced, the eighteenth century. The recent decision by British corporations such as Lloyds of London founded in that era to acknowledge their complicity with slavery and pay reparations.

As Emmanuel Eze has shown, race was a central theme in the production of the “universal” subjects who may have appeared to be equal to white Europeans, but who were actively being enslaved and colonized during the Enlightenment. Gayatri Spivak has shown how such major European thinkers as Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel privileged European populations in their thinking about the ideals and practices of “modern” practices like the nation-state and democracy.

As anti-racists reconsider the effectiveness of courts, electoral systems, and other institutions that have their origins in a period of European history known for its white supremacy, they may also come to reconsider whether equality itself is an effective belief in fighting racism and white supremacy. The persistence of police and other state violence despite reforms suggests the problem will require solutions that go well beyond simple policy changes.

               The decline of trust in the police, courts, and governments as a result has pressured those who still believe in equality to widen the horizons of needed solutions. Wresting decision-making from the “experts” who have made democracies into austerity zones protecting oligarchies who hate democracy will take more than street protests. Our historical moment will surely test us to see if it is really democracy we want.