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.

Misnaming Democracy: The Colonial Heritage of National Democracies

                The British empire is coming under criticism in news reports about recent court decisions striking down legal bans against same-sex relations in India and Singapore. Section 377 in the Indian penal code criminalizing certain sexual acts was the direct model for penal codes in other colonies, such as Section 377A in Singapore’s criminal code. In borrowing from the Indian penal code and other legal conventions, Singapore took India’s legal system as a model adaption of the British legal and constitutional system.

                Little is being said about other aspects of the colonial heritage that remain embedded in democratic governance and legal practices globally. The adoption of electoral democracy and bicameral parliamentary systems after gaining independence from direct European control was widespread, for example, even though the European claims to democracy were also part of the colonial heritage. Even those countries who were not directly colonized by European powers, like Japan and Thailand, drew on European models for their constitutions and legal systems. These colonial practices at the founding of modern nation-states is one form of the founding violence of many national democracies.

                The Kenyan social critic Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s essays and novels have explored multiple ways in which the Kenyan postcolonial political and legal system reproduces the British colonial governance system and legal order. Like Section 377 in the Indian penal code, Kenyan practices were put into place after the British lost direct political control, and they have proven very effective in producing small economic and political elites rather than social equality for all. Ngũgĩ has detailed specific legal codes, government departments, and other aspects to the Kenyan postcolonial state that were effective in putting him in prison and then chasing him out of the country, just as these codes and departments have been effective to silence other critics in other postcolonial nations. This oligarchic pattern may be found across the former colonies not only of Britain but of France and other European colonial powers.

                In the United States and other British settler colonies, the legal framework used by nations claiming democracy as their own is not always so directly related to the colonial legal heritage. Take the important 1823 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Johnson v. McIntosh which provides the foundation for the U.S. legal system of private property. This decision, taught in every introductory course on property law, draws not on British but on Spanish and Portuguese legal doctrines known as the Doctrine of Discovery that continue to rely on papal bulls issued from Rome. This legal decision was central to the theft of the heritage lands of Native Nations in the United States. It continues to provide an important pillar for colonialism in the Americas long after the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the British have lost direct political control of their colonies.

                None of these legal instruments and government practices produce the equality that democracy promises. They were put in place centuries ago in order to produce and preserve inequality between colonizers and their subjects.

When they are left in place in postcolonial, settler colonial, and other national legal and constitutional after the colonizers have left, they do not serve democratic ends. Rather, they contribute to the inequality that characterizes so many national political systems that claim democracy as their own.  

A wide range of organizations have opposed various specific items in these legal codes, as has been seen not only in the recent Section 377 decisions but also in the opposition to the Doctrine of Discovery by the Presbyterian Church, the Episcopal Church, and other religious organizations. It will take longer for consolidated opposition to emerge against other aspects of the colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial heritage of present-day democratic practices. Only then will democracy become a decolonized form of government.

Misnaming Democracy: Responsibility to Others

In modern political practice, democracy has frequently degenerated into self-interested political parties aggressively pursuing narrow benefits against competing parties and social groups. Party democratic practice is determined by interest groups aligned along political divisions often shaped by class and race. This is not a new problem. It is also not a local problem. As one British commentator has pointed out, “No constitutional system should allow a partisan group to hijack the interests of the whole.” Individual interests drive party divisions. Party interests become poison.

Narrow interests fighting over the levers of democratic practice can only cause problems. In just one recent week this month, July, 2018, a blizzard of reports of serious and even foundational problems for party democracies found their way into news reports: courts are increasingly polarized politically in Poland and the U.S.,  the legislature is threatening multi-party systems in Romania, and elected leaders aligning themselves with autocrats across multiple nations.

Those who can conceive of democracy only in the terms of party politics are misnaming democracy, since electoral party democracy is not its only form. Partisan monopoly claims on democracy attacks a broad-based conception of “the people” that founds democracy. By dividing “the people” among different interests, liberal European democracy and its many global cognate forms is prevented from benefitting society at large.

Once again governance turns out to benefit a small sector of society, just as aristocracy and monarchy once did. In different ages and sites, democratic government in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries tilted towards different groups. In the last 50 years across the globe democracy has most benefited the wealthy.

Yet democracy can serve the interests of all. Gayatri Spivak has urged readers to adopt a notion of democracy that benefits the planet. In naming “planetarity” as a goal for democracy, she plays with the undecidability of the term, which may mean either all people of the globe, nor limited by party affiliation or wealth or race, or it may mean the globe of lands and seas beyond the human, or it may refer to both simultaneously.

                For Spivak, democracy becomes a form of responsibility to our others, those against whom we define ourselves as individuals, in identitarian groups of gender or race or class or reproductive heteronormativity, or as nations. Persistent interruptions of these normalized frames for understanding democracy requires re-imagining our citizen selves as we might be seen by those for whom full democratic participation is not even a dream, those who have learned from centuries of abuse under electoral democracy to not even dare hope for full participation. When these figures, found in every democracy under the sun, come to haunt our day-to-day democratic practice, then an ethics of responsibility to democracy’s others becomes possible.

These possibilities may be unimaginable within the limits of the entrenched norms and power inequities of party politics misnamed as democracy. But they are still possible means of building relationship with the others of the middle-class citizenry, of reframing democracy in terms that serve “the people.” Such a responsible practice takes democracy beyond benevolence and the savior complex, and beyond helping those we see in our self-interest as less than ourselves, to carry out politics for all.

In giving attention to specific others often blocked from full democratic participation, Spivak draws on aboriginal, pre-capitalist approaches to planetary care of the other as a supplement to Reason (344). The emphasis in these democratic practices on care for all produces strategies to control corporate-dominated globalization by interrupting its logics and (lack of) ethics. Rather than allowing democracy to fix interests in narrow terms defined by established interest groups, responsibility to others disrupts capitalist and identity obsessions with private gain as a type of training.

Rather than taking the modern nation-state as an unquestioned reality, Spivak also suggests that we see it as a deceptive cipher hiding the work of the nation-state against redistributive social justice. Once we recognize this problem, then we can begin recoding democracy into something other than allegiance to those who would demand we agree to elected leaders giving away national wealth to global corporations. (281)

Some have suggested that the current troubles of democratic practice in the U.S. are not new developments, but it may reflect outcomes of particular histories of compromise and contingency as narrow interests worked to bend the interests of “the people” in their favor. Depending on their particular perspective, different critics have defined democracy’s troubles in various ways. For those who feel that electoral democracies have been hijacked by the economic interests of large industries, the problems with democracy have their origins in the last century. Other critics have argued that democracy was profoundly compromised since the founding of the United States, since its practices were characterized by eighteenth century’s limits of the vote and other unequal practices, one saying the U.S. was flying “the false flag of democracy.”  

Moving away from party politics as the only measure of democracy can take place on many fronts and different scales. Individuals can keep their responsibility to others in mind when practicing democracy in organizations and neighborhoods and many other sites in addition to the ballot box. Because of the well-known risks of narrow partisanship, many electoral governments have installed safeguards and counterweights. Some of which invite or even require responsibility to others, such as safety nets and welfare policies, referendums and term limits, town hall meetings and consensus.

Each of us must determine our ethics through day-to-day democratic practices, and responsibility to Others is one way to make ethics central to politics. By keeping our others in mind, even those others who we do not yet know, we may keep the future open for new possibilities, and even for the impossible, that which is outside of our horizons and is limited only by our imaginations.