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.

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.

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.

Defend Democracy: Oligarchy or Democracy?

Recognizing when democracy deteriorates into oligarchy, or rule by the few, is an important skill for defending democracy. Oligarchies are not always dominated by a small group of families; sometimes they simply benefit the same small social sector, such as the super wealthy or a small gendered racial or ethnic group. Persistent wealth or racial and ethnic inequality may be a warning sign of oligarchic rule.

Asking about oligarchy is very important in democratic systems where elections are central, since elected representatives are elites and often have been able to manage policy development to serve their narrow interests. So the border between democracy and oligarchy may be surprisingly easy to cross not just for small organizations but for large ones as well.

Many indigenous communities have not traditionally used electoral practices to choose leaders, instead preferring selection by consensus or through various careful vetting practices to ensure leaders advocate for the common interest. In the views of some, this is because electoral systems themselves are a form of oligarchy, centralizing power in the hands of the few.

The question of oligarchy is also important in organizations where the founding members were not fully committed to democracy, or the rule by all. Many nation-states were founded by wealthy merchants and their land-owning allies in struggles with queens and kings, aristocrats and church leaders, colonial governments and neighboring nations, so many of their founders compromised democracy with other interests.

One quantitative study from 2014 compared the impacts on national policy in the United States of ordinary citizens and elite groups, such as business elites. The study found that economic elites consistently had a determining impact for over 20 years on more than 1,500 different policy issues. This suggests that those who see the United States as a democracy may be confusing oligarchy with democracy. Similar problems may be found in those electoral democracies where a small part of the general population, such as property owners or the wealthiest 1% or 10%, has consistently benefited most from government policies and practices.

There are many strategies to defend democracy from attempts by small groups to impose their interests on the entire organization. Aristotle suggested one very long-established method: draw lots to select representatives, rather than use elections. This view requires that all citizens be prepared to hold office, and rejects the commonplace view in some circles that only experts are qualified to rule. It also requires that all citizens be educated sufficiently to prepare them to govern their own affairs, rather than leaving government to small social minorities. By decentralizing the right to rule the people, this practice certainly democratizes governance.

Another effective strategy for combating oligarchy is the assembly: large gatherings where not only decisions are made but also policies are drafted together. By allowing everybody into the policy development process, those with narrow interests may be challenged before they can restrict policies to those that benefit their narrow interests. Instead, discussions will encompass a wider range of ideas.  And policies will emerge that benefit all.

Assemblies are widely used in rural communities and indigenous nations that have proved impervious to the influence of European models of democracy, and even at global scales. Though this practice is not well-known among urban residents in democratic nations, it still may be useful for rejecting oligarchy.

There are many other practices that prevent narrow interests from dominating democratic bodies. Which ones do you practice?