White Supremacy Is an Antidemocracy Movement

By Sherrilyn Ifill

If You Want Democracy in this Country You Have to Fight White Supremacy

We are experiencing nothing less than an insurrection against our constitutional order.

The engine that fuels the project – the appeal that has been the pathway to Trump’s rise and Republican hegemony – is the never vanquished hold that white supremacist ideology still holds on much of this country’s white electorate.

When Trump decided to name his movement “Make America Great Again,” many of us immediately understood the nature of the appeal. White supremacy in this country has always been a nostalgic ideology built on the premise of a great past when Black people knew their place, when white people were assured the guarantee of prominence in public life, and could count on being the beneficiaries of the spoils of government policies and programs.

What white supremacy promises its adherents is a life without challenge - the right to be free of competition and judgment, the right to be shielded from new ways of thinking, to be insulated from diverse cultural practices that challenge their hegemony. White supremacy offers the false narrative of superiority. You see it in every facial tick, every desperate boast and sad outburst of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose fast-talking insults and tirades are designed to distract from his incompetence. His purge of Black and women leaders in the military is a textbook white supremacy move. The field of competition must be artificially restricted to keep competition narrow and culturally constrained, so that whiteness itself can become proof of competence.

The myth of white supremacy can only flourish when Black achievement is out of sight and out of mind.

But the deal offered by white supremacy has always been at the cost of democracy in this country. The white supremacist destruction of Reconstruction and hijacking of the promise of democracy after the passage of the post-Civil War amendments to our Constitution - the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments – ensured that the U.S. remained a republic without democracy for the first half of the 20th century. Instead the U.S. became a quasi-apartheid state cosplaying as a democracy.

The Supreme Court played a central role in this tragedy. Beginning in 1873 the Court issued a a series of decisions that stripped the 14^th Amendment of its power and potential, leaving it as a mere shell of its former self by the turn of the 20^th century. At the same time, the Court was careful to manufacture protections for corporations under the 14^th Amendment, even as it betrayed its framers central focus on ensuring the full, first-class citizenship of Black people.

Klan violence and congressional inaction did the rest. The result was that most Black people were stripped of voting rights, economic rights, mobility, and the right to live as free and equal citizens. The labor of Black people was again exploited through sharecropping and domestic work. Black people who had elected members to Congress, and who had registered to vote in exponential numbers during Reconstruction were barred from political participation and left without political voice or power. Black people went from the pinnacle of hope during Reconstruction to the “nadir” of oppression and disenfranchisement in the early 20^th century.

It was the demand and sacrifice of ordinary people – civil rights lawyers and activists who forced change – many at the cost of their livelihood and their lives whose demands and sacrifices ushered in democracy our country. Once you understand this truth, then you can also understand that the decades-long resistance to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement has always been an anti-democracy movement.

That is why the effort by Trump and Republican state leadership to gerrymander Black representation out of Congress must be understood as not only an attack on Black people, but on democracy itself. If the Republican racial gerrymandering effort is successful, the U.S. will lose any claim to democracy for a generation or more.

And the forces that stand today against citizenship and political representation for Black people won’t stop there. They will not tolerate meaningful political representation for any group that opposes their oligarchical Christian nationalist ideology. They seek a one-party political system in a country ruled by authoritarians. The political oppression of Black people is not the end. It is the conduit.

We must work together to dismantle that conduit. We know the formula that is necessary to put rampant, lawless white supremacy and its democracy-destroying force back on the leash. It is the same formula that briefly brought us back from the abyss during Reconstruction and again during the Civil Rights Movement. We need to build a strong, determined, even radical Congress to recreate an infrastructure of laws and protections that cannot be easily undone. And we need a Supreme Court that is prepared to uphold a structure of laws that protect democracy in our country, and that has the integrity and vision to do what is needed to hold democracy in 21^st century America.

That reformed Court will need to be expanded in size, constrained in power, adherent to ethics, and populated with justices who have the legal, intellectual, moral, and experiential skills, combined with the integrity, courage and sophistication to fairly adjudicate the complex array questions and controversies that emerge from a multiracial democracy of three hundred and forty million people in the 21^st century.

At the same time we also need a cultural reset – not a look backwards, but a new cultural vision that invites all of us to imagine and strive for who we might become as a nation.

But we can’t get any of those things without power. And our opponents are moving faster than we imagined. We need to accelerate our work. That means that every American who believes in democracy, who believes in equality and humanity must decide now what they can do and what they must do.

Democrats in Congress and state houses must decide what they are prepared to do. We are facing an insurrection and an attack on our Constitution. What is required of you as leaders at this moment? We did not create the insurrectionist movement that attacks this country, but we are faced with it nonetheless. Do Democrats have the courage and fortitude to truly meet the moment? Or will your fastidiousness, your claim to higher ground, and your fealty to one-sided rules of engagement stand in the way of protecting our country?

Where are American business leaders? Have they so abandoned any commitment to protecting democracy in this country that will be bystanders while the Black population is stripped of congressional representation? Is it really enough that you are obtaining “maximum dividents” for your shareholders? And what of clergy leaders - white clergy leaders. So much of what has been done to us in this country has been done in the name of your faith. How long will you allow this perversion to continue without standing front and center in opposition?

No democracy can survive if tens of millions of its citizens refuse to fight to protect it because they “don’t do politics.”

If you think that the Republican plan to strip Black voters in the South of congressional representation is not your problem because you are white, or because you don’t live in the South, then you have accepted the end of democracy in this country. Are you really prepared to watch as your fellow citizens are disenfranchised in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama?

Will you be in Selma this coming weekend to participate in the national mobilization for voting rights? Perhaps you plan to do an action in your city or county. Perhaps you are already calling your red state reps every day demanding that they withdraw from the process of silencing the voice of Black voters and showing up at their district offices to voice your complaints. Maybe you are calling your blue state reps to insist that they use all available tools to fight back against this national take-over. And be sure to call and encourage them when you see them taking bold action.

Whatever (non-violent) actions you can undertake, now is the time to engage. This is not happening to someone else, to some other community, to some other Americans. This is happening ot all of us. They have made their goals clear. Now it’s time for us to be as clear and unequivocal about ours while we still can.