Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

their own. Something different was definitely

In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. argued, among other things, that white supremacy stood in the way of democracy in this country, that it was an ever-present force in America frustrating the dreams of the nation’s darker citizens and undermining any pretense to racial justice.

In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. argued, among other things, that white supremacy stood in the way of democracy in this country, that it was an ever-present force in America frustrating the dreams of the nation’s darker citizens and undermining any pretense to racial justice. He wrote:

It shows how what I call the value gap (the belief that white people are valued more than others) and racial habits (the things we do, without thinking, that sustain the value gap) undergird racial inequality, and how white and black fears block the way to racial justice in this country.

For us, hope has always come with a heavy dose of realism. It couldn’t be otherwise in a world such as ours, where the color of your skin closes off certain possibilities from the moment you draw your first breath.

Obama is not alone in falling short of a real response. Most black liberals (elected and otherwise) have stood silently by as this economic devastation swallowed black America.

the United States remains a nation fundamentally shaped by its racist past and present. This is a hard fact for some Americans to accept. Of course, we are not the same country we were in 1860 or even 1960.

The phrase white supremacy conjures images of bad men in hooded robes who believe in white power, burn crosses, and scream the word nigger. But that’s not quite what I mean here. On a broader level, white supremacy involves the way a society organizes itself, and what and whom it chooses to value. Apartheid in South Africa, the Jim Crow South, and Nazi Germany are clear examples of societies organized by white supremacy. In each case, the belief that white people are valued more than nonwhite people shaped every aspect of social and political life. It determined where you lived, which schools you attended, and what jobs were available to you. It reminded you daily of your status and station in life. And that’s white supremacy without all the bluster: a set of practices informed by the fundamental belief that white people are valued more than others.

that no matter our stated principles or how much progress we think we’ve made, white people are valued more than others in this country, and that fact continues to shape the life chances of millions of Americans. The value gap is in our national DNA.

The American Idea has never been quite the pristine paradigm we make it out to be, and it is our inability to acknowledge this fact that nourishes the value gap.

Think about it this way. When Communists declare that Stalinism wasn’t really communism or when Christians and Muslims say that the horrific things some Christians and Muslims have done in the name of their religion isn’t really Christianity or Islam, what are they doing? They are protecting their ideology or the religion from the terrible things that occur in its name. They claim only the good stuff. What gets lost in all of this is that the bad stuff may very well tell us something important about communism, Christianity, or Islam—that there may be something in the ideology and in the traditions themselves that gives rise to the ugly and horrific things some people do in its name. (Minimally, it shows us that these traditions are hotly fought over and never that stable to begin with.)

When we understand American democracy and white supremacy as inextricably connected we can see how tortuous our efforts have been to accommodate the value gap.

Since the 1980s and the advent of the Reagan revolution, the majority of Americans tend to see racial inequality, if they acknowledge it exists at all, as the fault of black people. Too many black folk have failed to take advantage of the successes of the civil rights movement, the argument goes.

When we disremember an event, an egregious moment in the past, we shape how we live in the present. I borrow the word from Toni Morrison.

I like this thought of dismembering.

James Baldwin’s words haunt: “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” Are we a nation of monsters?

Responding based on habits formed without context, it’s no surprise that so many white Americans today believe black people are lazy: that they don’t want to work and are looking for a government handout.

I have even found myself laughing at an off-color joke in order to avoid appearing overly sensitive about racial matters (only to beat myself up afterward for doing so).

In the end, we have to understand that we, as a nation, must be in a continual crisis of racial awareness—awareness of the ways we continue to consign large numbers of fellow Americans to the shadows for no other reason than because they are black.

When I drive down Stuyvesant Avenue in Trenton, New Jersey, at night, I feel a deep concern about my own safety.

President Obama trades in this kind of talk without any shame. His words stand as the flip side of the racial dog whistle. It’s not that he seeks to trigger the racism of whites with coded language, as Republicans do with their talk of entitlements. Instead, with these words, Obama assuages, or so he hopes, the fears of white America. He confirms, at least for those who are listening, that he isn’t some Manchurian candidate for black revenge.

Malcolm X’s insistence on “frank and fearless speech” may be just the remedy to how we dance around the subject of race in this country. Not that we should set white people’s houses on fire (funny how calls to burn down the country don’t make white Americans feel any better), but that we embrace his claim that only by telling the nation exactly “what kind of hell we’ve been catching” will we achieve true racial justice.

In fact, in August of 1967, King stated plainly, “The vast majority of white Americans are racists, either consciously or unconsciously.”

As I suggested a few chapters ago, disremembering involves active forgetting. Societies disremember all the time; in fact, it seems to be an intimate part of collective memory itself. Societies bury the historic wrongs that lie beneath their feet and tend to remember their heroes and heroines minus the darker sides of their characters. But disremembering historic wrongs leaves vulnerable those among us who are the inheritors of historic wounds, who still bear the scars of past collective deeds (for example, those who once possessed these lands, the descendants of ex-slaves, of forced migrant laborers, and a host of others).

In so many ways, our yearly celebration of Dr. King is a ritual act of disremembrance. It is a memorialization of a particular understanding of him (without his criticisms of white supremacy, poverty, and empire) designed to fortify the illusion of color-blindness in a country with dramatic racial inequality.

There is a particular way race works in this country that is tied to how our people are seen and interpreted. If you have dark skin, no matter where you’re from or what language you speak, you are more than likely treated as a black person. And if your appearance is ambiguous, people will try to figure out how to racially classify you. Now, we know that race is highly problematic—that the concept doesn’t pass scientific muster. But we also know that in the history of this country certain people are seen as black and others are not. As W. E. B. Du Bois noted in his 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, the black person is one “who must ride the Jim Crow car in Georgia.”

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I am not longing for the days of segregated black communities with segregated black institutions. But the fact is that these institutions played vital roles in black communities, and the question of what happened once they disappeared looms large for communities still under siege.

This business with UNCF is a far cry from the pride I felt when I watched as a child the UNCF telethon hosted by the late Lou Rawls. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” he used to say in his sultry baritone. And a soul is a terrible thing to sell. But what are we to do?

The theology and business model of New Birth wasn’t unique to him. It has spread like a virus throughout black Christendom, transforming the role and function of black churches from the prophetic spaces we associate with the civil rights movement, which provided resources for the most vulnerable in our communities and helped challenge white supremacy, to profit centers in the name of God.

church don’t live in the neighborhood or the church has relocated to some sprawling campus like a religious version of Walmart or Home Depot?

This led me to declare that the black church was dead: that the idea of the black church as a progressive institution had given way to a routine invocation of its often imagined past glories and an embrace of a gospel uniquely suited for these times.

But expectations that we had someone in the White House who was truly sensitive to the concerns of black communities were at best misguided or, worse, vestiges of an old way of thinking about black politics—the idea that because Obama is black, he would act in the interest of black people.

By liberal I don’t mean someone on the political left. I simply mean that Obama adheres to a very old political tradition that can be traced back to the sixteenth century and to the likes of John Locke and John Stuart Mill. He is committed to individual rights, to relatively free markets, and to an idea of government that, all things being equal, is minimally intrusive in our individual efforts to maximize our ambitions.

The underlying assumption here is that the American Idea is not inherently bad or in need of revision. It isn’t racist. Rather, we are the racists and are in need of redemption. We simply need to align our practices with our stated principles and values. This view enables us to hold simultaneously that the principles of freedom and liberty are already a part of American life, while we experience, over and over again, habits and practices that suggest otherwise.

In this sense, the black liberal argument is, and always will be, an argument about America on the terms of its stated creed. The different forms of African American politics have been based on the degree to which one accepts the terms of that creed. Black nationalists reject the creed out of hand. Black socialists and Communists see it as a ruse to hide the horrors of racial capitalism. Black liberals, especially President Obama, accept the American Idea “straight, no chaser.

This is the hope of color-blindness. But this state of affairs requires that we leave our “identification as Negroes” at the doorstep. It also demands that we believe that being “American” is not inextricably bound to the idea that white people are valued most in this country. This denial limits the scope of black protest: all we’re left to do is protest that we have failed to live up to our ideals or demand more just laws, while the value gap is left untouched.

For Hamilton, the best way to help black people was to look like you were not trying to help black people. Of course, the underlying assumption of this view is that those politicians who “deracialized” actually were planning to work for progressive policies that would help black communities.

If the concerns of black communities were to get any traction, it would have to be by way of a form of what Harris calls “wink and nod” politics. Black voters would elect black politicians with the understanding that the politicians are constrained by white racism in terms of what they can address explicitly. But black voters are to trust them implicitly—because they are black, we assume that they will act on behalf of the interests of black people. The danger of this trust is obvious. Black voters can easily find themselves saddled with politicians who symbolically represent them, but who have no intention, out of self-interest, of advocating on their behalf in any specific way. In place of any serious attempt to address racial inequality, we get something hollow, little more than symbols and tidy speeches.

Some might cry that what has transpired between 2010 and 2014 has little to do with the failure of black leaders to hold President Obama accountable for black social misery or with black liberal theatrics. The real problem has been and continues to be Republican obstructionism. The argument implies that if it were not for the shenanigans of the right wing, President Obama and black leaders would have substantively addressed the crisis engulfing black America. But this claim is a red herring. I am not denying that Republicans have stood in the way of much of the president’s agenda. The issue isn’t President Obama and his policies or his failures. The real issue is the implication of this form of black leadership.

A revolution of value upends the belief that white people are more valued than others.

Remaking American democracy is going to require a revolution of value to transform our habits. This isn’t a call, as President Obama made during the press conference after the George Zimmerman trial, “to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our communities.” Something more expansive has to happen. It has to occur at many levels: in government, in communities, among individuals. Besides, calls to “widen circles of compassion and understanding” only reinforce the belief that durable racial inequality is, at its root, a problem of racial reconciliation: that if we could all just get along, our racial problems would disappear. This is one dimension of the illusion that protects American innocence. “Getting along” does not measure up to a more fundamental concern about racial justice or get at how we are all complicit in racial injustice. The illusion hides the rot.

A revolution of value would seek to uproot those ways of seeing and living that allow Americans to support racial equality and yet live in ways that suggest they believe otherwise. It is a revolution to close, once and for all, the value gap—to finally rid the country of niggers. It involves three basic components: (1) a change in how we view government; (2) a change in how we view black people; and (3) a change in how we view what ultimately matters to us as Americans.

But Goldwater failed to realize that governmental indifference can harden hearts, and government action can create conditions that soften them. People’s attitudes aren’t static or untouchable. They are molded by the quality of interactions with others, and one of the great powers of government involves shaping those interactions—not determining them in any concrete sense, but defining the parameters within which people come to know each other and live together.

The truth is this: much of the hell black people catch in this country today is rooted in the enduring legacy of racist practices in every domain of American life—legacies that we ritually deny or acknowledge only in stories about “perfecting the Union.” But if we’re honest, we see the pervasive effects of those practices in education, in housing, in the labor market, in disparities in health, and in the rate of poverty. In each instance, the practices and habits of white supremacy—practices that shaped the lives of my parents—ensured that white people would benefit and black people would struggle.

If we are going to change how we see black people, white people—and only white people can do this—will have to kill the idea of white people. It is the precondition of America’s release into a different, democratic future. If we don’t do this, we condemn ourselves to whatever tragedy awaits at the end of our current path.

The protests in the streets of Ferguson disrupted the status quo and dramatically affected the lives of the people who live there. Some condemned the sporadic violence and challenged the effectiveness of constant demonstrations. They urged the protesters to channel their rage and turn to the ballot box. But the protests had a measurable effect. These young people exposed the predatory practices of the municipal government. The city manager and the chief of police have resigned. Police tickets have decreased. The Missouri Supreme Court called for the immediate transfer of all Ferguson municipal cases to St. Louis County. This didn’t happen because of an election; it wasn’t the result of aligning the demonstrations with the Democratic Party. Nor did it happen because of traditional black leadership. As one of the organizers said, “It started because regular people came outside and said enough was enough.

Think about it this way: José Saramago’s novel Seeing opens with the presiding officer of a polling station fretting over the weather. Torrential rains threaten to dampen voter turnout during a national election. No one seems to be coming to the polls. Then voters begin to show up in record numbers. But something dramatic happens. When the ballots are counted, three-quarters of them are blank.

Some might say what I’m recommending amounts to electoral nihilism. We would end up giving the presidency over to Republicans and their extremist base. The Supreme Court would turn Red for the next thirty years. We would see the undoing of the health care law and the further erosion of the social safety net. And the country would be left in the hands of libertarians and corporatists, a remarkably high price to pay for all Americans. But these same people who shout gloom and doom fail to advocate for dramatic change to take back the country from these folks. This is the scare tactic that clouds our imaginations: that no matter the circumstances, choosing the lesser of two evils is always better. By this logic, we are imprisoned in a political cage—to accept matters as they are. I refuse to do so, because the political terrain as it is currently laid out has left black and other vulnerable communities throughout this country in shambles. I want to choose another path. I want to remake American democracy, because whatever this is, it ain’t democracy.