“What’s Past is Prologue…”
(Originally posted on December 7, 2020):
Monday, December 7, 2020
Dr.
Robin D.G. Kelley On The Real Meaning of the 2020 National Presidential
Election and the Profound Intellectual and Political Legacy of Dr.
Cedric Robinson (1940-2016)
DR. CEDRIC J. ROBINSON (1940-2016)
by Robin D. G. Kelley
November 5, 2020
Boston Review
IMAGE: A promotional poster for the film 'Birth of a Nation' (1915)I
wrote the following essay, “Births of a Nation: Surveying Trumpland
with Cedric Robinson,” in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, but it could
have been written today—two days into a still unsettled presidential
election; two days of witnessing frenzied, nail-biting, soul-searching
Democrats wondering what happened to the blue wave and why 68 million
people actually voted for Trump; two days of threats from the White
House that they will fight in the courts and in the streets before
giving up power. And today Cedric Robinson, pioneering scholar of what
he called the “Black Radical Tradition,” would have celebrated his
eightieth birthday.
Today Cedric Robinson would have celebrated
his eightieth birthday. What Robinson identified as “the rewhitening of
America” a century ago is what we’re seeing play out today.
The
lessons I took from Cedric in the aftermath of Trump’s election still
stand: our problem is not polling, or the failure of Democrats to
mobilize the Black and Latinx vote (they came out, often at great risk
to their health and safety), or a botched effort to reach working-class
whites with a strong, colorblind class-based agenda. What Robinson
identified as “the rewhitening of America” a century ago is what we’re
seeing play out today.
But before reviving the tired
race-versus-class debate, pay attention: Robinson was making an argument
about racial regimes as expressions of class power and how racism
undergirds class oppression. As I quoted Robinson before: “White
patrimony deceived some of the majority of Americans, patriotism and
nationalism others, but the more fugitive reality was the theft they
themselves endured and the voracious expropriation of others they
facilitated. The scrap which was their reward was the installation of
Black inferiority into their shared national culture. It was a paltry
dividend, but it still serves.” (The emphasis is mine.)
What
we’ve seen is the consolidation of a racial regime based—as are all
racial regimes—on “fictions” “masquerading as memory and the immutable.”
Trump is saving white suburban women from Black rapists and drug
dealers who want to take their Section 8 vouchers out to gated
communities. He’s protecting our borders from “illegals” who have no
claims whatsoever to this white man’s country. He’s shielding the nation
from wicked critical race theorists and Howard Zinn with “patriotic
education.” He responds to the assault on white supremacist mythologies
by defending Confederate monuments. He dispatches federal military
forces to crush antiracist protests and declares Kyle Rittenhouse a
patriot for killing two unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters. And he
dusts off the tried and true strategy of labeling all challengers to the
regime “communists and socialists.” (When Biden brags “I beat the
socialists!” and “I am the Democratic Party,” he plays right into the
regime’s fictions—he is the neoliberal moderate taking back the country
from rioters, fascists, and socialists.)
We keep telling
ourselves that Trump was elected as a backlash to a Black president, but
really he was elected as a backlash to a Black movement. President
Obama presided during the killing of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Tanisha
Anderson, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, Sandra
Bland—ad infinitum. It was the mass rebellion against the lawlessness of
the state—in Ferguson, in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Dallas, in Baton
Rouge, in New York, in Los Angeles, and elsewhere—that prompted Trumpian
backlash.
We keep telling ourselves that Trump was elected as a
backlash to a Black president, but really he was elected as a backlash
to a Black movement. Fear and racism feed off of insecurity.
The
massive vote for Trump and his fascist law-and-order rhetoric should
also be seen as a backlash to a movement. Some of us believed Black
Spring rebellion in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna
Taylor, and Ahmad Arbery signaled a national reckoning around racial
justice. But rather than reverse the rewhitening of America, our
struggles catalyzed and concretized the racial regime’s explicit embrace
of white power. Once again, an unstable ruling class drapes itself in
white sheets, puts on its badge and brings out its guns. Fear and racism
feed off of insecurity. And in the face of a global pandemic,
joblessness, precarity, and an economy on the verge of collapse, this
paltry dividend still serves.
If we’d paid attention, we wouldn’t
have expected a Biden landslide or a blue wave ripping the Senate from
Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell grip. It is not a coincidence that Louisville
is on fire over the murder of Breonna Taylor and countless others who
died at the hands of police in McConnell’s state. Kentucky has always
been a battleground. California is too, and we’re not necessarily
winning. Voters just defeated affirmative action, rent control, and the
labor rights of gig workers. And despite some important victories,
California delivered a lot of votes to Trump. We need to face the fact
that our entire country, and the world, is a battleground. Trump and
McConnell have succeeded in packing the Supreme Court with
reactionaries. Trump’s backers still run the Senate. Gun-toting men and
women in red hats stand outside vote-tabulating centers, threatening to
do whatever is needed to secure a Trump victory. They yell “stop the
count.”
Even with a Biden victory, the failure of the blue wave
will be attributed in part to a certain kind of identity politics—Black
and Latinx voter turnout less than what was expected—or to the militancy
of antiracist protests, or to left-leaning candidates who scared off
white moderates by pushing for single-payer healthcare and a Green New
Deal. We should not see these as problems for legitimate Democrats.
We’ve been witnessing authentic small-d democracy in action. In the
streets we’ve seen a movement embrace Black, Brown, and Indigenous
people, queer feminism, and a horizontal leadership model that
emphasizes deliberative, participatory democracy.
We have an
electoral college, battleground states, and voter suppression because
the U.S. political order was built on anti-democracy.
This is the
democracy Cedric Robinson insisted we embrace. He reminded us that the
U.S. political order was built on anti-democracy, a theory of so-called
enlightened governance that excludes the popular classes. This is why we
have an electoral college, why we have battleground states, and why
voter suppression was built into our country’s DNA. As I wrote three
years ago, “today’s organized protests in the streets and other places
of public assembly portend the rise of a police state in the United
States. For the past five years, the insurgencies of the Movement for
Black Lives and its dozens of allied organizations have warned the
country that unless we end racist state-sanctioned violence and the mass
caging of black and brown people, we are headed for a fascist state.”
We’re
already here. And there is no guarantee that a Biden-Harris White House
will succeed in completely reversing this trend. Nor should we expect
presidents and their cabinets to do this work. That would put us back
where we started—with tacit acceptance of the principles of
anti-democracy.
Cedric’s words from exactly twenty years ago
still haunt: “For the moment . . . an unelected government has seized
illegal powers. That must be opposed with every democratic weapon in our
arsenal.”
Happy Birthday, Dr. Robinson.
March 6, 2017
Cedric
Robinson was fond of quoting his friend and colleague Otis Madison:
“The purpose of racism is to control the behavior of white people, not
Black people. For Blacks, guns and tanks are sufficient.” Robinson used
the quote as an epigraph for a chapter in Forgeries of Memory and
Meaning (2007), titled, “In the Year 1915: D. W. Griffith and the
Rewhitening of America.” When people ask what I think Robinson would
have said about the election of Donald Trump, I point to these texts as
evidence that he had already given us a framework to make sense of this
moment and its antecedents.
Robinson’s work—especially his
lesser-known essays on democracy, identity, fascism, film, and racial
regimes—has a great deal to teach us about Trumpism’s foundations, about
democracy’s endemic crises, about the racial formation of the white
working class, and about the significance of resistance in determining
the future.
"Through the intervention of film, a new American social order was naturalized."
—Cedric J. Robinson
In
1915 William Joseph Simmons, an ex-preacher who made his income selling
memberships in fraternal organizations, led a group of his friends atop
Stone Mountain, just outside of Atlanta, burned a giant cross, and
launched the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. His inspiration: seeing The
Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s three-hour paean to the original
Klan. Simmons believed the new Klan could make America great again by
purging it of un-American influences: Negroes, immigrants (except for
those of Anglo and Scandinavian stock), Catholics, and Jews. Under the
slogan “100 percent Americanism,” the Klan pursued a program of severe
immigration restriction, allegiance to the American flag,
anti-communism, protecting white womanhood (and “correcting” wayward
women who transgressed gender conformity, Protestant values, and the
color line), better government, and law and order, while also engaging
in lynching and open acts of terrorism against black people. The second
Klan appears to be a ball of contradictions—antagonistic to both big
business and industrial unions, contemptuous of both elites and a huge
swath of the working class (the non-white and foreign-born). But as
historian Sarah Haley recently argued, the Klan—whose membership rolls
swelled to four million by 1924—mobilized a precarious middle class of
small entrepreneurs, white-collar workers, and farmers facing the
prospect of downward mobility and seeking hope in the elimination of the
most marginalized segments of society.
Cedric Robinson has a great deal to teach us about Trumpism and the significance of resistance in determining the future.
In
Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Robinson explains why Griffith’s film
catalyzed this movement. This was no ordinary film. Based on Thomas
Dixon’s novel The Clansman (1905), it consolidated and circulated old
racial fabulations and new fictions in the service of capitalist
expansion and modern white supremacy—in the United States and abroad.
The Birth of a Nation was historical alchemy, turning terrorists into
saviors, rapists into chivalrous protectors of white women and racial
purity, and courageous and visionary blacks into idle, irresponsible
ignoramuses, rapists, and jezebels. Black people were not only unfit for
democracy but they threatened social order. President Woodrow Wilson
(who screened Griffith’s film at the White House) praised it as American
history written with lightning—and like lightning, its historical
reworking had an obliterating effect on truth. Robinson identified it as
a “rewhitening of America,” a gallant effort to obliterate all vestiges
of the black struggle for social democracy during Reconstruction.
For Robinson, 1915 marked the formation of a new “racial regime.” With the term, Robinson meant:
"Constructed
social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the
relations of power. . . . [T]he covering conceit of a racial regime is a
makeshift patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable.
Nevertheless, racial regimes do possess history, that is, discernible
origins and mechanisms of assembly. But racial regimes are unrelentingly
hostile to their exhibition. This antipathy exists because a
discoverable history is incompatible with a racial regime . . . [and
its] claims of naturalism.”
Racial regimes, in other words, are
fictions. As such, they are unstable, fragile, and contested. The
scramble to prove black inferiority and buttress white racial democracy
in the era of Jim Crow was no cakewalk. The previous era had unleashed
the possibility of radical change in the United States, and that
struggle continued well into the twentieth century, when armed
insurrection, political assassination, lynching, disfranchisement,
imperialism, and federal complicity in the triumph of white supremacy
destroyed the last sigh of black-led biracial democratic, populist, and
radical movements.
Robinson lays out in great detail all the
sites of contestation in 1915, and all the operations the new racial
regime masked in the process. He reminds us that Griffith’s champion,
Wilson, had opened the far Western Front of World War I when the United
States invaded Haiti in 1915, long before the declaration of war on
Germany. That intervention and long occupation (until 1934)—driven by
U.S. finance capital—also required historical alchemy. The United
States, the cause of much of Haiti’s political and economic instability,
had to see itself as the country’s rescuing white knight. In the white
American imagination, Haitians—like those blackface brutes in The Birth
of a Nation—were seen as coons, niggers, and malevolent witchdoctors
incapable of self-governance.
That May, W. E. B. Du Bois
published “The African Roots of War” in Atlantic Monthly, a brilliant,
prescient essay overshadowed by his folly three years later when he
exhorted blacks to “close ranks” behind America’s official entry into
World War I. The essay not only reveals a global racial regime in which
“the white workingman has been asked to share the spoil of exploiting
‘chinks and niggers,’” but argues that we will never rid the world of
war nor achieve democracy until we eradicate racism and colonialism. And
who could lead the struggle to topple this rapacious system? None other
than the descendants of “the European slave trade . . . the ten million
black folk of the United States, now a problem, then a world
salvation.”
The stage was set: D. W. Griffith’s New Nation versus
the New Negroes. The latter resisted with pickets and boycotts,
speeches and editorials, scholarship and art, and outright rebellion.
They exposed the racial regime for what it was, the tyranny of white
supremacy masquerading as enlightened democracy. The former, backed by
finance capital and the academy, manufactured the Negro as Problem, a
campaign accelerated through newer technologies of mass media.
Film—whether newsreel footage of U.S. Marines entering Port-au-Prince or
Griffith’s robed Klansmen saving the virginal Elsie Stoneman from the
clutches of a rapacious mulatto—can mask and reorder social reality,
turning victims into perpetrators and transforming imperialism into a
rescue operation.
Robinson demonstrates that the
post-Reconstruction order was not a return to the antebellum but a new
racial and economic order that deployed a reinvention of the past in the
service of a new regime. If new media played a key role, print was also
crucial to this campaign. In 1916 The Passing of the Great Race,
eugenicist Madison Grant’s chilling case for racial cleansing, became a
national bestseller. Adolf Hitler praised the book as foundational to
his own thinking. Grant’s book had plenty of company in the decade,
including Robert W. Shufeldt’s America’s Greatest Problem: The Negro
(1915) and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White
World Supremacy (1920). White supremacy traverses the ideological
spectrum, even now. Many foundational texts of the Progressive Era’s
racial regime were penned by liberal social scientists obsessed with the
challenges of race and empire for American democracy. Many shared the
eugenicists’ presumption that democracy’s survival depends on the
suppression of difference.
Racial regimes are fictions, unstable, fragile, and contested.
Franklin
H. Giddings, in his 1901 book Democracy and Empire, coined the phrase
“democratic empire” to suggest that imperial expansion was itself a
democratizing project. It was more than just the introduction of modern
infrastructure, Western education, and civilization. It was the creation
of social cohesion through the rapid assimilation of subject peoples.
Giddings insisted that social cohesion or some sense of solidarity is a
precondition of democracy, and racial difference renders such solidarity
improbable if not impossible. Sociologist John Moffatt Mecklin, a
self-proclaimed Progressive liberal, published Democracy and Race
Friction: A Study in Social Ethics the year before the release of The
Birth of a Nation. He argues that racism and discrimination undermine
democracy, but at the same time puts much of the blame on the cultural
differences and “hereditary instincts” of non-whites (e.g., weak powers
of inhibition, criminality, inability to control sexual impulses). Thus,
while recognizing racism as a fetter on democracy, he nonetheless
apologizes for white supremacy, arguing that blacks and whites have very
different value systems. White supremacy is therefore a “form of
self-preservation.” (He is silent on whether lynching and rape were
“moral” elements of self-preservation.) The solution? Mecklin believed
“industrial competition” will allow the laws of natural selection to
determine the fate of non-whites, producing the “ethnic homogeneity”
necessary for “an efficient democracy.”
While these texts were
influential, Griffith’s masterwork and films that followed in its wake
proved indispensable for installing the modern racial regime. The
consequences, however fragile, were devastating—not just for African
Americans but for working-class whites. As Robinson writes, Griffith and
this emergent film industry constituted the social and cultural
platform for a robust economic and political agenda; an agenda in the
process of seizing domestic and international labor, land, and capital. .
. . White patrimony deceived some of the majority of Americans,
patriotism and nationalism others, but the more fugitive reality was the
theft they themselves endured and the voracious expropriation of others
they facilitated. The scrap which was their reward was the installation
of Black inferiority into their shared national culture. It was a
paltry dividend, but it still serves.
• • •
"I love the poorly educated."
—Donald J. Trump
The
dividend still serves. Many who voted for him, including those of the
alt-right, flocked to Trump because he villainized immigrants, black
people, and anti-patriotic business moguls who sent jobs overseas. Most
pundits insist that Trump appeals not to white racism but to
working-class populism driven by class anger. If this were true, why
didn’t Trump win over droves of black and brown voters, since they make
up the lowest rungs of the working class and suffered disproportionately
more than whites during the financial crisis of 2008? Instead Trump’s
victory inspired a wave of racist attacks and emboldened white
nationalists to flaunt their allegiance to the president-elect.
The
response on the part of high-profile liberals and leftists has been to
blame “identity politics” for undermining the potential for
working-class solidarity. Mark Lilla’s New York Times screed, “The End
of Identity Liberalism,” is a case in point. “In recent years,” writes
Lilla, “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about
racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s
message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of
governing.” The result is a “generation of liberals and progressives
narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined
groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in
every walk of life.” In other words, people of color, queer folks,
feminist-minded women, and liberal Democrats alienated the white working
class, driving it into the arms of Trump.
Movements associated
with “identity liberalism” are not exclusionary, they are serious
efforts to interrogate the sources and structures of inequality.
The
argument is both inept and confused. The movements associated with
“identity liberalism” have not been obsessed with narrow group
identities but with forms of oppression, exclusion, and marginalization.
And these movements are not exclusionary—not Black Lives Matter, not
prison abolitionists, not movements for LGBTQ, immigrant, Muslim, and
reproductive rights. They are serious efforts to interrogate the sources
of persistent inequality, the barriers to equal opportunity, and the
structures and policies that do harm to some groups at the expense of
others.
Of course, Lilla’s arguments are hardly new. At the
height of the culture wars, conservatives such as Gertrude Himmelfarb,
William Bennett, and Lynne Cheney; liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger
and Allan Bloom; and self-styled leftists such as Todd Gitlin and
Michael Tomasky argued that identity politics had undermined a unified
America founded on Enlightenment principles of individualism, liberty,
and secularism. A number of pundits have called Richard Rorty’s
Achieving Our Country (1998) prophetic because it warns that continued
downward mobility of the white working class and growing income
inequality would lead to the rise of a strongman with authoritarian
tendencies. Rorty’s thesis was not a critique of neoliberal policies,
however, but a critique of the academic left and its love affair with
identity politics. “Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed
studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies,” Rorty laments,
“because the unemployed, the homeless, and the residents of trailer
parks are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense.” Anyone who works on these
issues at the university—then and now—will find Rorty’s assertion
laughable.
Rorty, a brilliant philosopher with genuine concern
for working people, nevertheless mistook ideology—a categorical
opposition to racism, sexism, homophobia, institutional oppression, and
marginalization based on difference—for “identity politics,” while
presuming that the white working class is operating purely out of race-
and gender-neutral economic interests.
More conservative critics
of identity politics sought to rescue Western culture from its
anti-racist, feminist, and post-colonial critics. In his famous attack
on multiculturalism, Arthur Schlesinger writes, “it was the West, not
the non-Western cultures, that launched the crusade to abolish slavery. .
. . Those many brave and humane Africans who are struggling these days
for decent societies are animated by Western, not by African, ideals.
White guilt can be pushed too far.” So far, in fact, that “political
correctness” has been perceived as an attack on intellectual freedom and
American virtues.
Robinson likened such antinomies to Christian
attacks on heresy during the Middle Ages. In a short essay titled
“Multiculturalism and Manichaeism,” he acknowledges what many critics of
so-called “political correctness” understood: that the Schlesingers and
Blooms and their compatriots across the ideological spectrum are
holding on to “an imaginary transcendent universal culture—the West,” a
nostalgia for a university that never was, and a mythic American
identity presumably forged through an enlightened process of
deracination. But Robinson knew there was more at stake. “They wish to
erase the exposed seam,” he writes, “the nexus between power and regimes
of knowledge so forcefully articulated by Michel Foucault. How else can
one defend their specious histories of knowledge, which invoke some
pristine mythical moment in the life of the American academy?”
This
is not to say that Robinson’s defense of multiculturalist discourse was
uncritical. He pointed to the dangers of an essentialism that reduces
complex, historical experiences to fixed, discrete racial, ethnic, and
gender identities. And to the left’s claim that Marxism is our way out
of the Manichean world of fixed difference versus false universalism,
Robinson politely demurred, citing arguments he made in Black Marxism a
decade earlier. What he proposes instead is that a radical impulse in
multiculturalism constitutes both a critique of the absences and an
appropriation of the positive contributions of Marxism. We are not the
subjects or the subject formations of the capitalist world-system. It is
merely one condition of our being. . . . Multiculturalism, then, is a
site of discursive resistance, and emblem of articulation of several
trajectories of ‘objective’ opposition (religious, nationalist,
feminist, etc.) mounted by our peoples in the everyday world.
• • •
"Democratic
philosophy was subverted by plutocracy . . . whose rulers depended on
the preservation of a slave economy, the exploitation of ‘white’
laborers (male and female), the severe restriction of women’s political
rights, and the expropriation of Native Americans."
—Cedric J. Robinson
Opponents
of Trumpism—and what it portends for the future of our democratic
system—are scrambling to find both “the seed of opposition” and the
roots of the crisis. Locating the elusive seed of opposition is a
daunting task, but it seems that most people agree that repairing our
broken democracy ought to be our priority.
Cedric Robinson had a
lot to say about democracy—as a theory, an aspiration, and a fiction. As
a child of World War II who came of age with the Cold War and the civil
rights movement, he encountered the word “democracy” at every turn.
Democracy was bandied about as an explanation for America’s frequent
military excursions abroad, while at home it was an elusive dream for
which black people were arrested, beaten, even killed.
Critics of so-called political correctness are holding on to an imaginary transcendent universal culture—the West.
Robinson
studied democracy at the University of California, Berkeley, and fought
for it as a leader of the campus naacp and as an activist in slate, a
forerunner of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. In the summer of 1962,
he witnessed firsthand a struggle to create a multiethnic democracy in
Southern Rhodesia crushed by the state. He was there under the auspices
of Operation Crossroads—a precursor to the Peace Corps that sent student
volunteers to Africa to help build libraries, schools, and community
centers.
Founded by Harlem Presbyterian minister James H.
Robinson and backed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Operation
Crossroads was also a Cold War project designed to combat communism and
spread American democracy to the continent. During his month-long stay,
Cedric watched the U.S.-backed regime led by the fascist Rhodesian Front
violently repress and ultimately outlaw the Zimbabwe African People’s
Union (zapu). Upon his return to Berkeley, Robinson enrolled in three
political science courses, including one on African politics, in his
quest to comprehend democracy, and he would go on to do graduate work in
political science at San Francisco State University and at Stanford.
In
an essay titled “African Politics: Progression or Regression?” written
for a Stanford graduate seminar taught by David Abernethy (then a young
scholar who wrote on popular education in Africa), Robinson argued that
the newly “decolonized” territories in Africa were not yet nations. For
him the “birth” of decolonialized African states required shedding
Western political structures and creating their own political
institutions. More provocatively, he suggests that the modern
nation-state is, in fact, “a regression or step backward from the
stateless societies of some earlier African history.” Here he begins to
reveal the seeds of his argument in Black Marxism (1983) that the black
petit bourgeoisie was disconnected from the political and cultural
traditions that sustained anti-colonial movements in the past. He writes
that those living in exile or European educated “have betrayed the
heritage of their predecessors in the 19th and early 20th centuries,”
indigenous leaders “who were committed through their own particular
missions to the recovery of life with integrity for the mass of African
people.” The alternative path he imagines is not based on modernization
theory or industrialization but something different:
Perhaps what
is needed are new political organisations without single or even
multiple leaders, but with no leaders at all. . . . That is a
sophisticated social organization; a primitive organization is one where
the courts are filled with defendants bound and gagged or where its
citizens must be shot down in the streets and terrorized in to fitful
conformity.
Robinson never abandoned this radical utopian vision
of democracy, although as the promise of the 1960s and ’70s faded into
the revanchism of the 1980s and ’90s, he turned to the genesis of the
“primitive organization” that became the U.S. political system. He
traced the ideological roots of U.S. democracy back to the profoundly
anti-democratic strain in Plato and Aristotle. For Robinson the “crisis”
of democracy was not simply the result of the corrosive forces of
neoliberalism but endemic from its very inception. His provocative essay
“Slavery and the Platonic Origins of Anti-Democracy” (1995) locates the
genesis of anti-democracy in The Republic, which accepts slavery and
proposes a theory of enlightened governance that excludes the popular
classes. Slavery in Plato’s politics was an immutable fact, the slave an
inferior being bereft of reason and thus incapable of participating in
democracy, let alone governing. “Plato’s political theory,” writes
Robinson, “thus repressed the history of popular rebellion and with it
the recognition that social agency might have its genesis from the
general populace. Even in his ‘treatment’ of the degeneracy of democracy
to tyranny, the demos is denied true agency through the selection of a
demagogue.” Robinson wryly concludes, “In its antidemocratic plutocratic
prejudice, the Republic provides an authority rich in intellectual
strategems a propos to the political discourse embedded in the American
political order. Plato survives because if he had not existed, he would
have to be invented.”
It should come as no surprise that the
founding fathers were avid readers of Plato and Aristotle, who
were—along with Homer—the pillars of classical philosophy in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Distrust of democracy was
widespread. James Madison even positively described the new state as an
“oligarchy.” Landholding, Madison insisted, had to be a requirement for
participation in the body politic “as to protect the minority of the
opulent against the majority.” The result, besides property requirements
for voting, was the Electoral College. For some proponents, the
Electoral College would be the enlightened check against the threat of
an ignorant populace backing a demagogue as president. But it also
guaranteed a pro-slavery White House. Basic to the college’s
architecture was the Three-Fifths Compromise, the rule that
congressional representation in the slave states would be apportioned by
counting the white population along with 60 percent of enslaved people.
The number of electors was to be equal to the number of representatives
and senators from each state. This gave the slaveholding South an edge
in presidential elections compared to other states, and that advantage
lasted well after slavery ended, since the vast majority of black
southerners were disfranchised after Reconstruction.
Ironically,
critics of the Electoral College who believe Hillary Clinton should be
president based on the popular vote are now invoking Alexander
Hamilton’s idea of the “conscientious” elector who will buck party
affiliation in order to make the enlightened choice. Hence, an
anti-democratic institution is invoked as both the problem and solution,
fueling the myth of American democracy’s singular genius while
remaining “openly hostile to the periodic outbreaks of what it
redundantly terms ‘participatory’ or ‘direct’ democracy.”
• • •
"When
the performance of charismatic leadership stands in for building
movements and relationships, for grassroots political education, and for
a practiced commitment to disassembling social hierarchies, the promise
of social justice and political empowerment is endangered by a
formation of authority that limits our capacities to remake the world."
—Erica R. Edwards
In
2016, on the heels of the centennial celebration of D. W. Griffith’s
The Birth of a Nation, the Sundance Film Festival screened a new film
bearing the same title. Nate Parker, the young African American actor
who wrote, directed, and starred in the film appropriated the title from
Griffith as a deliberate provocation. His historical epic is about Nat
Turner, the Virginia slave-turned-minister who led the bloodiest slave
revolt in U.S. history. Like Griffith, Parker simultaneously revised
history while reflecting and refracting current political realities. It
is impossible to watch Parker’s The Birth of a Nation without recalling
the recent wave of police killings and rage and resistance it has
generated. Yet whereas Griffith’s racist epic made history, Parker’s
film flopped. Revelations of Parker’s involvement in a sexual assault
twenty years earlier dampened ticket sales, and cinematic
representations of black rebellion tend to do poorly at the box office.
But neither adequately explains the film’s epic failure.
In
both Births, women are territory to be fought over, attacked, and
defended. Whereas the Klan avenged the nation and their manhood by
rooting out alleged black rapists, Turner and his men avenged their
nation and their manhood for the rape of their women by white masters
and overseers. As critic and historian Salamishah Tillett observed,
Parker’s film thus silences black women, turning them into mute victims.
“In denying these women their revolutionary gestures, Mr. Parker risks
making them objects that he, and only he, can freely move around the
screen.” Noting the film’s appearance during the height of black
resistance to police violence, she adds that its emphasis on the male
charismatic leader is “out of step” with the Movement for Black Lives
and its largely black female leadership. I would add that the movement’s
embrace of black queer feminism, its horizontal leadership model, and
emphasis on deliberative, participatory democracy counter the film’s
central vision.
For the past five years Black Lives Matter
warned the country that unless we end racist state-sanctioned violence,
we are headed for a fascist state.
Robinson understood the
charismatic figure in insurgent movements as “the expression of a people
focused onto one of their members . . . the responsive instrument of a
people,” rather than the force or agent directing the people forward.
This is certainly not how Parker portrayed Turner, which suggests that
Robinson may have been sympathetic to Tillet’s reading of the film. But
he would have also insisted that the female-led, horizontal formations
resisting state violence today are not aberrations but consistent with
the black radical tradition. H. L. T. Quan reminds us of the centrality
women in Robinson’s historical archeology of black revolt. “Indeed,”
Quan writes, “the women who people Robinson’s imagination are not the
anorexic two-dimensional (mainstream) feminist heroines whom we often
encounter in gender-related texts, but the plotters of history. They are
women of substance, of imagination, of formidable social force, women
who would kill and wage revolutions against the state and the world
economy.”
Just as Nat Turner’s rebellion portended chattel
slavery’s violent demise, today’s organized protests in the streets and
other places of public assembly portend the rise of a police state in
the United States. For the past five years, the insurgencies of the
Movement for Black Lives and its dozens of allied organizations have
warned the country that unless we end racist state-sanctioned violence
and the mass caging of black and brown people, we are headed for a
fascist state.
Others argue that fascism is already here.
Refusing to play politics, they criticize both Democrats and
Republicans. They have angered cops by insisting that no law officer is
above reproach. Skeptical of courtroom justice, they have taken to the
streets, social media, the press, and even the United Nations, placing
the moral, ethical, and legal question about the value of black lives
before the world court of opinion. The movement has also proposed a plan
to divest from a society of punishment, inequality, environmental
degradation, and white supremacy and invest in a future built on free
education, healthcare, housing, living-wage jobs, decriminalization,
restorative justice in lieu of caging, food justice, and green energy.
We need to remember this before more angry liberals—forgetting the
misogynist strain in white identity politics—blame the Movement for
Black Lives for Clinton’s defeat and for mau-mauing white folks into the
arms of Trump.
Those of us who lived through the Reagan era
have seen these dynamics before, though on a smaller scale. Ronald
Reagan’s election not only owed much to white working-class resentment
and middle-class white homeowners seeking tax relief, but his ascent to
office coincided with heightened police and vigilante violence. In 1979
in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Ku Klux Klan assassinated five
members of the Communist Workers Party in broad daylight. In Mississippi
in 1980, at least twelve African Americans were lynched. The same year
at least forty racially motivated murders occurred in cities as diverse
as Buffalo, Atlanta, and Mobile. Across the country, police killings and
non-lethal acts of brutality generated protests, notably a massive
urban rebellion in Liberty City, Florida. And during Reagan’s eight
years in office, the number of hate crimes reported annually in the
United States grew threefold. Faced with a dramatic rise in racism,
unemployment, and homelessness, followed by deep cuts in social programs
and increases in military spending, black resistance ramped up. The
late historian and activist Manning Marable had even referred to 1980 as
“The Red Year,” a revolutionary moment similar to 1919.
Robinson
shared some of Marable’s optimism. It was, after all, the period in
which he wrote Black Marxism, which compelled him to undertake a
substantive study of fascism since the book’s three main subjects—W. E.
B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright—were all radicalized
during the 1930s. The dark times under Reagan resonated with his reading
of the history of America’s support of fascism. For example, the
American capitalist class was sympathetic to Benito Mussolini’s fascist
regime. J. P. Morgan loaned Italy in excess of $100 million in 1926, and
Fortune Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, Business Weekly, and the
New Republic all ran admiring spreads on Italian fascism up until the
mid-1930s. Robinson’s central point was that the black masses not only
anticipated the rise of fascism, they resisted before it was considered a
crisis. Robinson called them “premature antifascists,” noting that they
had stood in stark opposition to those elites enamored with fascism,
“which gave primacy to the interests of the State as an instrument of
racial ‘destiny.’”
Trump’s election does not signal the
strengthening and consolidation of U.S. power but its decline.
Contemporary resistance movements did not ensure Clinton’s defeat, but
they did reveal the regime’s fragility. The Movement for Black Lives,
Black Lives Mater, the Dream Defenders, Black Youth Project 100, We
Charge Genocide, Million Hoodies, the Moral Mondays Movement, the
uprisings in Baltimore and Ferguson—not to mention the immigrant rights
movement, and the ongoing struggle in Standing Rock in defense of Native
sovereignty and against the war on the planet—all presaged and
accelerated the current crisis of the state.
Robinson teaches
us that racial regimes are unstable. They can be disassembled, though
that is easier said than done. In the meantime, we need to be prepared
to fight for our collective lives. I can hear Cedric’s timely counsel in
the aftermath of George W. Bush’s “fraudulent” defeat of Al Gore in
2000: “For the moment . . . an unelected government has seized illegal
powers. That must be opposed with every democratic weapon in our
arsenal.”
Robin D. G. Kelley
ABOUT THR AUTHOR:
Robin
D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA, is
author many books including Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz
in Revolutionary Times and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination.
TAGS: Politics Race Capitalism Justice Trump
IMAGE: A promotional poster for the film 'Birth of a Nation' (1915)
