Politics by Jamelle Bouie in The 1619 Project, Chapter 7 (2021)

Author: Jamelle Bouie

Bouie, Jamelle,. “Chapter 7: Politics.” The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, ed. Nikole Hannah-Jones. The New York Times Company, New York City, NY, 2021, pp. 195–216.

Early on the morning of November 4, 2020, with millions of votes still outstanding in the states that would determine the election, President Donald Trump declared victory. “I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support,” he began. “Millions and millions of people voted for us tonight. And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it. We will not stand for it.” 1 Over the following weeks and months, Trump’s legal team mounted dozens of lawsuits aimed at throwing out votes that had been cast for his opponent, Joe Biden, and overturning the election in Trump’s favor. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” he said in a White House speech. “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.” 2

Even before the election, the president and his allies had tried to suppress so-called illegal votes. In September, his attorney general, William Barr, falsely alleged that mail-in voting-which for many Americans was a necessity in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic-was “fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion,” incorrectly citing a 2005 commission report on voting from James Baker and former president Jimmy Carter. Robocalls from unidentified groups in Michigan warned residents that mail-in voting could leave their personal information in the hands of the police. In Georgia, voting officials slashed the number of polling places in majority-Black precincts even as the number of voters surged.3 After Trump lost, with the majority of mail-in ballots going to his opponent, his campaign argued that illegal voting had been particularly rampant in a few cities within the states that had determined the election: Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.

No one has ever accused Donald Trump of being subtle, but even for him, this was blatant. Atlanta is 51 percent Black; Detroit, 78 percent. Philadelphia is 42 percent Black, and Milwaukee has a Black population of just under 39 percent. So-called illegal votes were, in actuality, just Black votes. This wasn’t about election integrity; it was about casting Black voters as politically illegitimate. As the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said in its lawsuit representing a group of Michigan voters against the Trump campaign, “Defendants’ tactics repeat the worst abuses in our nation’s history.” 4

The president’s effort to overturn the election culminated in an attack on the United States Capitol as Congress began to certify the Electoral College results. Trump’s allies called the mob to Washington for a rally to “stop the steal,” and then Trump sent the mob after the legislature with the most inflammatory speech of his career. “We want to go back and we want to get this right because we’re going to have somebody in there that should not be in there and our country will be destroyed and we’re not going to stand for that,” he said.5 A multiracial coalition of Black, brown, and white Americans had defeated Trump and put Biden and Kamala Harris, the first woman and first woman of color to become vice president, in the White House, and the president’s supporters, with his direct encouragement, stormed the national legislature to try to nullify the result.

The iconography of the mob was striking. The men and women who invaded the Capitol carried Gadsden flags (“DON’T TREAT ON ME”), “TRUMP 2020” flags, and “BLUE LIVES MATTER” flags. In one frequently reproduced photograph, a rioter was seen holding a Confederate flag while walking through the Capitol Rotunda adjacent to a portrait of South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, chief statesman of the planter class, committed advocate for slavery, and intellectual forefathe of the Confederacy.

That image, more than any other taken that day, captured the meaning of not just the mob but the Trump movement itself. It was never about “populism” or “nationalism” or the interests of working Americans. It was never about restoring the country to any kind of “greatness.” It was always about the contours of our national community: who belongs and who doesn’t; who counts and who shouldn’t; who can wield power and who must be subject to it.

And Trumpism, as the iconography of his movement demonstrates, has race at its core. Trump began his march to the White House as the chief proponent of the “birther” conspiracy, arguing relentlessly that the country’s first Black president was foreign-born and therefore illegitimate. His appeal as a presidential candidate was to white Americans who believed that their racial identity and the country’s national identity were one and the same. Many of those supporters saw a political victory such as Biden’s, propelled by Black votes, as suspect. What began with the “birther” crusade ended with the charge that Barack Obama’s America itself was illegitimate and could not hold power.

None of this was an innovation of the Trump era. Obama’s election reignited a centuries-old fight over democratic legitimacy-about who can claim the country as their own and who

has the right to act as a citizen. Ever since our founding, an exclusive, hierarchical, and racist view of political legitimacy has been a persistent strain in our politics. Adherents of this view— who seek to narrow the scope of participation and wield power through minority rule—are the direct heirs to a tradition of American reactionary belief with its own peculiar history, not just in the ideological battles of the founding but in the institution that shaped and defined the early republic as much as any other.

The plantations that dotted the landscape of the antebellum South produced the commodities that fueled the nation’s early growth.6 But plantations didn’t just produce goods; they produced ideas, too. Enslaved laborers developed an understanding of the society in which they lived. The people who enslaved them, likewise, constructed elaborate sets of beliefs, customs, and ideologies meant to justify their positions in this economic and social hierarchy. Those ideas permeated the entire South, taking deepest root in places where slavery was most entrenched.

In many respects, South Carolina was a paradigmatic slave state. Although the largest enslavers resided in the Lowcountry region, with its large rice and cotton plantations, nearly the entire state participated in plantation agriculture and the economy built on slavery. By 1820 most South Carolinians were enslaved Africans. By midcentury, the historian Manisha Sinha notes in The Counterrevolution of Slavery, it was the first Southern state where a majority of the white population held enslaved people.7

Not surprisingly, enslavers dominated the state’s political class. “Carolinian rice aristocrats and the cotton planters from the hinterland,” Sinha writes, “formed an intersectional ruling class, bound together by kinship, economic, political and cultural ties.” 8 The government they built was the most undemocratic in the Union. The coastal districts, with their large numbers of enslaved people, enjoyed nearly as much representation in the legislature as more populous regions in the interior of the state. Statewide office was restricted to wealthy property owners. To even qualify for the governorship, you needed a large, debt-free estate. Rich enslavers were essentially the only people who could participate in the highest levels of government. To the extent that there were popular elections, they were for the lowest levels of government, because the state legislature tended to appoint most high-level offices.

But immense power at home could not compensate for declining power in national politics. Despite the Three-Fifths Clause in Article I of the Constitution, which gave enslavers an almost uninterrupted hold on the presidency from 1789 to 1850, there were clear signs in the first decades of the nineteenth century that the South’s influence was coming to an end. Immigration to the North and the growth of the North’s white population in general, as well as the growth of the free Northwest, threatened Southern dominance in Congress. Major rebellions of enslaved people in Louisiana and Virginia, as well as the rise of Haiti as an independent Black nation, left the owners of enslaved people paranoid to the point of hysteria. A steady stream of escaped enslaved men and women threatened the defense of chattel slavery, as the formerly enslaved unsettled the ideological foundations of the South with their own lives and testimony. And the movement to end slavery, once a small fringe, had gained strength and numbers, as well as new arguments and new advocates. By the 1840s, political abolition had come into its own as a movement with real weight on the stage of American politics.

Out of this atmosphere of fear and insecurity came a number of thinkers and politicians who set their minds to defending the slavery-dependent South from a North they perceived as hostile. Arguably the most prominent and accomplished of these planter-politicians was Calhoun, who in addition to his career in the Senate was vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson and secretary of state under John Tyler and James Polk. The son of Scots-Irish Presbyterian transplants to Great Britain’s North America colonies, John Caldwell Calhoun had been born in 1782 in the backcountry of South Carolina to Patrick Calhoun, a successful enslaver with thousands of acres and dozens of enslaved people to his name. Educated in New England, Calhoun was elected to the House of Representatives in 1810; he arrived there the following year as a pro-war nationalist, a modernizer who wanted to extend America’s influence across the entire continent.

In Calhoun’s view, there was no moral difference between slavery and other forms of labor in the modern world. “Let those who are interested remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created,” he would later write in a congressional committee report. He continued:

Let them also reflect how little volition or agency the operatives in any country have in the question of its distribution—as little, with a few exceptions, as the African of the slaveholding States… Nor is it the less oppressive, that, in one case, it is effected by the stern and powerful will of the Government, and in the other by the more feeble and flexible will of a master. If one be an evil, so is the other.9

It was because of this commitment to slavery that Calhoun feared outsized federal power over commerce, taxation, and trade. At a time when Northern manufacturers sought to protect their industries from foreign competition with tariffs and other restrictions on free trade, Calhoun worried that a growing and assertive federal government would extend that authority to slavery and the trade in enslaved people. This, in turn, led him to “nullification”: the theory that any state subject to federal law was entitled to invalidate it. He first advanced the idea in an anonymous letter, written when he was Jackson’s vice president, protesting the Tariff of 1828, which sought to protect Northern industry and agriculture from outside competitors. Passed under the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution, the tariff, for its opponents, raised the specter of an overly powerful federal government. If Congress had the authority to pass tariffs for the “general welfare,” what was there to stop it from limiting or even abolishing slavery? “Let us say distinctly to Congress, ‘HANDS OFF, ” wrote one South Carolina polemicist.10

Calhoun agreed. The tariff went beyond the power of the federal government, and its passage was a sign that the South was under threat by an overbearing North. “To the reflecting mind,” he wrote to Virginia senator Littleton Waller Tazewell a year before the tariff was passed, “[the tariff issuel clearly indicates the weak part of our system… The freedom of debate, the freedom of the press, the division of power into three branches…afford, in the main, efficient security to the constituents against rulers, but in an extensive country with diversified and opposing interests, another and not less important remedy is required, the protection of one portion of the people against another.” 11

There was one specific portion with whose protection Calhoun was chiefly concerned. “Our geographical position, our industry, pursuits and institutions are all peculiar,” he later wrote, referring to the slavery-dependent South.12 Against a domineering North, he argued, “representation affords not the slightest protection.” 13

Calhoun was driven by a sense of approaching doom. “It is, indeed, high time for the people of the South to be roused to a sense of impending calamities—on an early and full knowledge of which their safety depends,” he wrote in an 1831 report to the South Carolina legislature. “It is time that they should see and feel that…they are in a permanent and hopeless minority on the great and vital connected questions.” 14

On this defense of the prerogatives of the Southern section of the nation, Calhoun built an entire theory of government. Seeing the threat democracy posed to slavery, he set out to limit democracy. To do so he employed a novel conception of the Constitution. For Calhoun there was no “Union” per se. Instead, the United States was simply a compact among sovereigns with distinct, and often competing, sectional interests. This compact could survive only if all sides had equal say about the meaning of the Constitution and the shape and structure of the law. Individual states, Calhoun thought, should be able to veto federal laws if they believed the federal government had favored one state or section over another. The Union could act only with the assent of the entire whole-what Calhoun called “the concurrent majority.” This was in opposition to the Madisonian idea of rule by numerical majority, albeit mediated by compromise and consensus.

Calhoun initially lost the tariff fight, which pitted him against an obstinate Andrew Jackson, but he did not give up on nullification. He expanded on the theory at the end of his life, proposing an alternative system of government that gave political minorities a final say over majority action. In this “concurrent government,” each “interest or portion of the community” would have an equal say in approving the actions of the state. Full agreement would be necessary to “put the government in motion.” This was the only way, Calhoun argued, that the “different interests, orders, classes, or portions, into which the community may be divided, can be protected.” 15

To Calhoun, this wasn’t just compatible with the Constitution, it was the realization of the founding vision for the American republic. In his view, and against the arguments of James Madison and other key framers, the Constitution did not establish the principle of majority rule. Instead, as the historian Robert Elder noted in the biography Calhoun: American Heretic, Calhoun believed that it established a system in which power was vested in “the whole—the entire people—to make it in truth and reality the Government of the people, instead of a Government of a dominant over a subject part.” Each elected branch-the House, the Senate, the executive-had its part to play in creating this consensus. “Each [department of government] may be imperfect of itself, but if the construction be good, and all the keys skillfully touched, there will be given out in one blended and harmonious whole, the true and perfect voice of the people.” 16

The problem, in Calhoun’s eyes, was that the will of the majority, as expressed in the House of Representatives and the election of the president, had too much power. It had to be curbed, lest it overrun this “true and perfect voice of the people.” And those “people” whose voices must be heard, of course, were those like him. Those with power. Those with property. Those who enslaved others.

Calhoun would grow more confident and forthright as a defender of slavery. In early 1837, in response to abolitionist calls to end slavery in the District of Columbia, Calhoun gave his signature (and infamous) defense of the institution.

But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding States is an evil:-far otherwise; I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be to both, and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition. I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.

In the meantime, the white or European race, has not degenerated. It has kept pace with its brethren in other sections of the Union where slavery does not exist. It is odious to make comparison; but I appeal to all sides whether the South is not equal in virtue, intelligence, patriotism, courage, disinterestedness, and all the high qualities which adorn our nature.

But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.17

The government Calhoun envisioned would protect this system by defending “liberty”: not of the citizen but of the master, the liberty of those who claimed a right to property and a position at the top of a racial and economic hierarchy. This liberty, Calhoun stated, was “a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike-a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving— and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it.” 18

Calhoun died in 1850. Ten years later, Abraham Lincoln won the White House without a single Southern state and, following the idea of nullification and the concurrent majority to its conclusion, the South seceded from the Union. War came a few months later, and four years of fighting destroyed the system of slavery Calhoun had fought to protect. But parts of his legacy survived. His deep suspicion of majoritarian democracy-his view that government must protect interests, defined by their unique geographic and economic characteristics, more than people-would inform the sectional politics of the South in the twentieth century, as solid blocs of Southern lawmakers would work collectively to stifle any attempt to regulate the region.

Despite insurgencies at home-the Populist Party, for example, swept through Georgia and North Carolina in the 1890s, demanding aid for farmers and a reduction in debts-Southern lawmakers were able to maintain an iron grip on federal offices until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In their legislative fights the spirit of nullification lived on. Anti-lynching laws and some pro-labor legislation died at the hands of lawmakers from the “Solid South” who took advantage of Senate rules like the filibuster-under which lawmakers could speak indefinitely, tying up the chamber’s business—to effectively enact Calhoun’s idea of a concurrent majority against legislation that threatened the Southern racial status quo.

Calhoun’s idea that states could veto federal laws would return again following the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, as segregationists announced “massive resistance” to federal desegregation mandates and sympathizers defended white Southern actions with ideas and arguments that cribbed from Calhoun and recapitulated enslaver ideology for modern American politics.

“The central question that emerges,” the National Review’s founding editor, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote in 1957, amid congressional debate over the first Civil Rights Act of the modern era, “is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is yes-the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.” He continued: “It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” 19

It was a strikingly blunt defense of Jim Crow and affirmation of white supremacy from the father of the conservative movement. Later, when key civil rights questions had been settled by law, Buckley would essentially renounce these views, praising the movement and criticizing race-baiting demagogues like George C. Wallace. Still, his initial impulse— to give white political minorities a veto not just over policy but over democracy itself—reflected a tendency that would express itself again and again in the conservative politics he ushered into the mainstream, emerging when political, cultural, and demographic change threatened a narrow, exclusionary vision of American democracy.

In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, an opponent of the Civil Rights Act, won the Republican Party’s nomination for president. Goldwater allowed that there were “some rights that are clearly protected by valid laws and are therefore ‘civil rights.” But he lamented that “states’ rights” were “disappearing under the piling sands of absolutism” and called Brown v. Board of Education an “unconstitutional trespass into the legislative sphere of government.” “I therefore support all efforts by the States, excluding violence, of course,” Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of a Conservative, “to preserve their rightful powers over education.” 20 Though he lost the general election in a landslide, Goldwater won the Deep South (except for Florida), where white people flocked to the candidate who stood against the constitutional demands of the Black freedom movement.

Writing in the 1980s and ’90s, Samuel Francis—a polemicist who would eventually migrate to the very far right of American conservatism-identified this same rejection of democratic processes in the context of David Duke’s campaign for governor of Louisiana: “Reagan conservatism, in its innermost meaning, had little to do with supply-side economics and spreading democracy. It had to do with the awakening of a people who face political, cultural and economic dispossession, who are slowly beginning to glimpse the fact of dispossession and what dispossession will mean for them and their descendants, and who also are starting to think about reversing the processes and powers responsible for their dispossession.” 21

There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery. And while that ideology no longer carries the explicit racism of the past, the basic framework remains: fear of rival political majorities; of demographic “replacement”; of a government that threatens privilege and hierarchy.

The last decade of Republican extremism is emblematic. In 2008, Barack Obama was elected president. Within months of taking office, he faced a wave of backlash from grassroots conservative activists calling themselves the Tea Party. On paper, and channeling the group’s American Revolution-era namesake, this backlash was a revolt against the spending priorities of the new administration and the prospect of higher taxes. Tea Party politicians, like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, would come to Washington in 2011 with demands for spending cuts and balanced budgets. But a close examination of the beliefs of Tea Party activists shows a movement consumed with resentment toward an ascendant majority of Black people, Latinos, Asian Americans, and liberal white people. In Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, their survey-based study of the movement, for example, the political scientists Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto show that Tea Party Republicans were motivated “by the fear and anxiety associated with the perception that ‘real’ Americans are losing their country.” 22

The scholars Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson came to a similar conclusion in their contemporaneous book about the movement, based on an ethnographic study of Tea Party activists across the country. “Tea Party resistance to giving more to categories of people deemed undeserving is more than just an argument about taxes and spending,” they note in The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism; “it is a heartfelt cry about where they fear ‘their country’ may be headed.” And Tea Party adherents’ “worries about racial and ethnic minorities and overly entitled young people,” Skocpol and Williamson write, “signal a larger fear about generational social change in America.” 23

Convinced of their imminent minority status in American politics, right-wing conservatives embarked on a project to nullify opponents and restrict the scope of democracy. In 2011, Tea Party lawmakers in Congress pushed the entire Republican Party to repeal the Affordable Care Act and make other sharp cuts to the social safety net. Since Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House at the time, and polling showed that the public, overall, was opposed to cutting benefits, there was, however, a limit to what Republicans could accomplish. So they held the government hostage to their demands, using the “debt limit” — a legislative mechanism that sets out the amount of debt the country can take on—to extract concessions. Rather than work within the constraints of ordinary politics, Republicans threatened to throw a wrench into the gears.

“I’m asking you to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us,” said the incoming majority leader, Eric Cantor, at a closed-door retreat days after the 2011 session began, according to The Washington Post. Either the White House would agree to harsh austerity measures or Republicans would force the United States to default on its debt obligations, precipitating an economic crisis just as the country, and the world, was climbing out of the Great Recession.24 This stand was emblematic of how the Republican Party would approach the rest of Obama’s time in office. Either Republicans would succeed in stopping Obama’s agenda or they would wreck the system itself. To this end, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, embraced and expanded use of the filibuster to nullify the president’s ability to nominate federal judges and fill vacancies in the executive branch. And after Republicans took the Senate majority in 2014, he led an extraordinary blockade of the Supreme Court, thereby robbing Obama of a Supreme Court nomination.

But while McConnell’s hyper-obstructionist rule in the Senate is arguably the most high-profile example of the nullification strategy, it’s far from the most egregious. In state legislatures across the country, Republicans have embraced a view that holds voting majorities—as well as entire constituencies-illegitimate if they don’t support Republican candidates for office. In 2012, North Carolina Republicans won legislative and executive power for the first time in more than a century. They used it to gerrymander the electoral map and impose new restrictions on voting, specifically aimed at African Americans. One such restriction, a strict voter-identification law, was designed to target Black North Carolinians with “almost surgical precision,” according to the federal judges who struck the law down. When, in 2016, Democrats overcame these obstacles to take back the governor’s mansion, the Republican-controlled legislature successfully stripped some power from the office, to prevent Democrats from reversing their efforts to rig the game.25

The same happened in Wisconsin. Under Scott Walker, the governor at the time, Wisconsin Republicans gave themselves a structural advantage in the state legislature through aggressive gerrymandering. They redrew the state’s maps with such precision that they could continue to win a near supermajority of seats in the legislature even with a minority of the overall vote.

After the Democratic candidate toppled Walker in the 2018 governor’s race, the Republican majority in the legislature rapidly moved to limit the new governor’s power and weaken other statewide offices won by Democrats. They restricted the governor’s ability to run public-benefit programs and set rules on the implementation of state laws. And they robbed the governor and the attorney general of the power to either continue or end legal action against the Affordable Care Act.

Michigan Republicans took an almost identical course of action after Democrats in that state managed to win executive office, using their gerrymandered legislative majority to weaken the new Democratic governor and attorney general. One bill shifted oversight of campaign-finance law from the secretary of state to a six-person commission with members nominated by the state Republican and Democratic parties, a move designed to produce deadlock and keep elected Democrats from reversing previous decisions.26

The Republican rationale for tilting the field in their permanent favor, or, failing that, nullifying the results and limiting Democrats’ power as much as possible, has a familiar ring to it. “Citizens from every corner of Wisconsin deserve a strong legislative branch that stands on equal footing with an incoming administration that is based almost solely in Madison,” one Wisconsin Republican said following the party’s lame-duck power grab. The speaker of the state assembly, Robin Vos, made his point more explicitly: “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority—we would have all five constitutional officers, and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature.” The argument is straightforward: Their mostly white voters should count. Other voters-Black people and other people of color who live in cities-shouldn’t.27

Senate Republicans played with similar ideas just before the 2016 election, openly announcing their plans to block Hillary Clinton from nominating anyone to the Supreme Court, should she become president. “I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up,” declared Senator John McCain of Arizona just weeks before the voting began.28 And President Trump, of course, has repeatedly and falsely denounced Clinton’s popular-vote victory as illegitimate, the product of fraud and illegal voting. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” he declared on Twitter weeks after the election, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

The larger implication is clear enough: a majority made up of liberals and nonwhites isn’t a real majority. And the solution is clear, too: to write those people out of the polity, to use every available tool to weaken their influence on American politics-whether that means raising barriers to voting and registration or slashing access to the ballot box itself or anything in between. The Trump administration’s failed attempt to place a citizenship question on the census was an important part of this effort. By requiring this information, the administration hoped to suppress the number of immigrant respondents, worsening their representation in the House and the Electoral College, reweighting power to the white rural areas that backed Trump and the Republican Party.

Donald Trump’s false claims of electoral fraud in the wake of the 2020 presidential election were an expression of the idea that only certain majorities are real majorities, that only some Americans deserve to hold power. And while Trump lost and left office, the idea persists. Rather than mobilize new voters or persuade existing ones, Republicans throughout the country have set about restricting access to the forms of voting that helped Democrats win in traditionally Republican states like Georgia and Arizona. In Michigan, likewise, Republican lawmakers want to change the way the state distributes its Electoral College votes to nullify the influence of Detroit on the final result.

You could make the case that none of this has anything to do with slavery and enslavers’ ideology. You could argue that it has nothing to do with race at all, that it’s simply an aggressive effort to secure conservative victories. But the tenor of an argument, the shape and nature of an opposition movement-these things matter. Republicans stepped onto this path after America elected its first Black president, and they thereafter embraced a racist demagogue and his attacks on the legitimacy of the nation’s multiracial character; these actions speak to how the threads of history tie past and present together.

While neutral on their face, these methods-the assaults on the legitimacy of nonwhite political actors, the casting of rival political majorities as unrepresentative, the drive to nullify democratically elected governing coalitions-are downstream of ideas and ideologies that came to fruition in the defense of human bondage and racial segregation. And as long as there are enough Americans who do not trust democracy to protect their privileges-as long as there are those who see in political equality a threat to their power and standing- these ideas and ideologies will have a path to power.

In which case, the price of equality, or at least of the promise of an equal society, is vigilance against those who would make government the tool of hierarchy. And, in turn, we must recognize that this struggle-to secure democracy against privilege on the one hand, and to secure privilege against democracy on the other—is the unresolvable conflict of American life. It is the push and pull that will last for as long as the republic stands.

September 20, 1830

Black leaders convene in Philadelphia at Bishop Richard Allen’s Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church for the first gathering of what will come to be known as the Colored Conventions movement, a series of formal meetings of Black Americans dedicated to advancing racial justice and securing Black citizenship. The first convention is called in response to an outbreak of white violence against Black people in Ohio, where a series of laws had been passed to discourage Black settlement. Over the next seven decades, more than two hundred state and national conventions will be held.

We as People

Cornelius Eady

In Ohio,
Black folk can walk free,

But you still have
The rights
Of a mule,
A chicken,
A bloodhound—

Ever see a bloodhound
Cast a vote?
Ever see a piglet
Try to write some law?

We as people
Have to stop waiting,
While the mobs sweep
The Cincinnati streets
Of Black skins, Black thought,

Black laughter, Black prayers,
Black homes, Black children,
Black song, packing our bags

With bruises, skinning our
Breath with knuckles, the tar
Dipped, lit, and torch tossed

On the front porch of your
Consideration. Some of us
Took that hint and flew,

Exit, exile, Exodus.
Others wonder why Jesus
Let the cops chase their fancy
Unpunished,

But we as people have to stop asking
A flood to stop being a flood,
Expecting a hurricane to grow
Some manners.

We’ve come to Philly to find out
What happens
When we stop running,
And we start talking
Among ourselves.
What better selves
Do we knit?

When you open the doors
To a shelter,
After a bad storm has passed,

Ain’t that air sweet? Even if the
Town is in splinters? Ain’t
You happy that storm tried its level best
But couldn’t stop your heart?

September 18, 1850

Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act, which requires that fugitives from slavery residing in free states be forcibly returned to their enslavers. This leads to the kidnapping of many Black people in Northern states, regardless of their status, driving some to migrate farther north, into Canada. The new law is resisted by many abolitionists, including Harriet Hayden, herself a fugitive from slavery, who operates the Underground Railroad in Boston and helps hundreds of enslaved people escape.

A Letter to Harriet Hayden

Lynn Nottage

Restless, a woman gazes out a window coated with winter frost. She absently runs her fingers across the condensation on the glass, then turns to address a young reverend seated at a creaky writing desk.

WOMAN:

I know it’s much to ask, Reverend Potter, still, I’a like you to write down what I say, just as I say it, but more proper-like. I got the words, but not the learning to place ’em on paper.

A breath.

To My Dear Friend…you may wonder what has become of me. I’m living in a state of disquiet and precarity. I find myself in a land of brutal beauty. This cold invites a cough that my lungs are unfit to battle, yet it’s warmer company than the dread of being discovered. Please forgive me for leaving with some haste, I neglected to say goodbye in a manner respectful of our friendship and your kindness. But I daren’t stay for fear of bringing more trouble to your door, and I daren’t tell you that I was leaving, ‘cuz I knew you’d want me to stay, fight this devil’s law, but I haven’t your courage or…maybe I should say…conviction.

I hold tight to the day you welcomed me into your home, my body still brittle and near broken from travel. You fed me chicken broth that was coal hot to the tongue, yet I drank it down ‘cuz it was an act of graciousness I couldn’t refuse. My throat burned, and I thought maybe freedom hurts just a little bit. I often think back to the excitement of sitting round your table, surrounded by much laughter and meals of embarrassing heartiness. I boast to all about your stewed mutton, corn bread, buttered cabbage, milk pudding, and that blackberry pie that tasted like…what’s the word?…bliss. The goodness of your home provided a safety unknown to me, and even now the memory fends off despair. Often, I worried that the burden of my heavy spirit would weigh you down, ‘cuz I never knew colored people to live so easy.

By now, you must know that there’s a warrant that lays claim to the part of me I no longer recognize. My old master seeks to reunite me with…

She turns her gaze to the reverend.

Why’d you stop writing? I’ll be all right, Reverend, no harm’ll come from recollecting. Keep going.

Another breath.

My old master seeks to reunite me with the intricacies of his cruelty, and I have thus chosen to seek liberty beyond his expanding reach. I passed my life for some twenty-seven years in a state suspended between life and death, wading through the netherworld of bondage. I used to be scolded for carrying too much want and curiosity, ‘cuz I dare ask what lie past the knotty swampland. I got switch burns up and down my legs from climbing, mind you without permission, the tallest oak to see if there was a world beyond my mother’s fears. And when I found it, I didn’t understand that my life would become a collection of goodbyes.

Give my respects to Joseph, Elizabeth, and your dear husband, Lewis. Tell Nelson that I did not take his attention for granted, and think of him with affection…. No, best not say that, don’t want to give ’em the wrong notion, do I? Put— Think of him with fondness. Yes, fondness. I tucked four dollars beneath the flour jar, I hope you will have found it. I know you wanted a new dress for church. You always say I kept a tidy room, and you’ll be pleased to learn that I have found a good situation with the Reverend Potter and his aged mother. They are sympathetic to the anti-slavery movement, and willingly shelter this fugitive.

Know, my sweet friend, that I have not abandoned you or the cause of liberty. My hands, my arms, my feet, my legs, my eyes, my ears, and my heart are all unwitting weapons of resistance.

For now, I’m beyond reach, but cannot say where I reside… Most Truly Yours.

A breath.

And…Reverend Potter, just sign it… A Free Colored Woman…she’ll know who it is.

Notes

Chapter 7: Politics

1. “Donald Trump 2020 Election Night Speech Transcript,” November 4, 2020, www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/ donald-trump-2020-election-night-speech-transcript.

2. “Donald Trump White House Press Conference as Election Counts Continue,” November 5, 2020,
www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-white-house-press-conference-as-election-counts-continue-transcript-november-5.

3. Salvador Rizzo, “Attorney General Barr’s False Claims About Voting by Mail,” Washington Post, September 4, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/04/attorney-general-barrs-false-claims-about-voting-by-mail/; James Rainey, “‘There Is a Voter-Suppression Wing’: An Ugly American Tradition Clouds the 2020 Presidential Race,” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2020, www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-10-24/voter-suppression-clouds-2020-vote.

4. Juana Summers, “Trump Push to Invalidate Votes in Heavily Black Cities Alarms Civil Rights Groups,” All Things Considered, November 24, 2020, www.npr.org/2020/11/24/938187233/trump-push-to-invalidate-votes-in-heavily-black-cities-alarms-civil-rights-group.

5. “Transcript of Trump’s Speech at Rally Before US Capital Riot,” January 13, 2021, www.usnews.com/news/ politics/articles/2021-01-13/transcript-of-trumps-speech-at-rally-before-us-capitol-riot.

6. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), xxi.

7. Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 12.

8. Ibid., 20-21.

9. Richard Elder, Calhoun: American Heretic (New York: Basic Books, 2021), 335-36.

10 Robert James Turnbull, The Crisis: Or, Essays on the Usurpations of the Federal Government (Charleston, S.C.: A. E. Miller, 1827), 137, www.google.com/books/edition/The_Crisis/GIZgAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.

11. Letter from John C. Calhoun to Littleton Waller Tazewell, August 25, 1827, civilwarcause.com/calhoun/
caltaz.html; emphasis added.

12. John Caldwell Calhoun, William Edwin Hemphill, Clyde Norman Wilson, and Robert Lee Meriwether, The Papers of John C. Calhoun (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959), 15:357.

13. Quote taken from Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 22.

14. Richard Kenner Crallé, ed., The Works of John C. Calhoun: Reports and Public Letters (New York, Appleton, 1855), 110, www.google.com/books/edition/Reports_and_public_letters/BoxLAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0.

15. Richard Kenner Crallé, ed., The Works of John C. Calhoun, Vol. 4 (Wentworth Press, 2016), 46.

16. Elder, Calhoun, 388-89.

17. John C. Calhoun, “Slavery a Positive Good,” February 6, 1837, Teaching American History, teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/8.

18. John C. Calhoun, Disquisition on Government, 1840, Teaching American History, teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/disquisition-on-government/.

19. William F. Buckley, Jr., “Why the South Must Prevail,” National Review, August 24, 1957, 148-49. Also see Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: Norton, 2007), 102-3.

20. Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, Ky.: Victor, 1960), 25,33, 36. On Goldwater’s appeal to white Southern voters, see Angie Maxwell, “What We Get Wrong About the Southern Strategy,” Washington Post, July 29, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/26/what-we-get-wrong-about-southern-strategy/.

21. Samuel Francis, “The Education of David Duke,” Chronicles, February 1992, www.chroniclesmagazine.org/the-education-of-david-duke/.

22. Matt A. Barreto and Christopher S. Parker, Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), 35.

23. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 74.

24. Brady Dennis, Alec MacGillis, and Lori Montgomery, “Origins of the Debt Showdown,” Washington Post, August 3, 2011, www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/ origins-of-the-debt-showdown/2011/08/03/gIQA9uqIzI_story.html.

25. Michael Wines and Alan Blinder, “Federal Appeals Court Strikes Down North Carolina Voter ID Requirement,” New York Times, July 29, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/ 30/us/federal-appeals-court-strikes-down-north-carolina-voter-id-provision.html.

26. Michael Li, “Gerrymandering Meets the Coronavirus in Wisconsin,” April 8, 2020, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/gerrymandering-meets-coronavirus-wisconsin; “Michigan Republicans Vote to Strip Power from Incoming Democrat,” December 6, 2018, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/06/ republicans-michigan-wisconsin-strip-power-incoming-democrats.

27. “Sen. Fitzgerald: Statement on Extraordinary Session,” Wisconsin Politics, www.wispolitics.com/2018/sen-fitzgerald-statement-on-extraordinary-
session/; Molly Beck, “A Blue Wave Hit Statewide Races, but Did Wisconsin GOP Gerrymandering Limit Dem Legislative Inroads?” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/11/08/wisconsin-election-did-redistricting-limit-dem-inroads-legislature/1919288002/.

28. Nina Totenberg, “Sen. McCain Says Republicans Will Block All Court Nominations If Clinton Wins,” October 17, 2016, NPR Politics, www.npr.org/2016/10/17/
498328520/sen-mccain-says-republicans-will-block-all-court-nominations-if-clinton-wins.

DMU Timestamp: March 13, 2024 02:38