On “Contradictions” & Little White Lies
In the U.S., the little white lie about the “contradictions” and “tensions” within democracy is meant to hide something. That something is white supremacy.
One of the things we’re often told is that democracy is riddled with “contradictions,” “tensions,” and “paradoxes” that we can’t resolve democratically. I have to admit, I hadn’t thought too much about this because the claim is so pervasive. Instead, I focused my writing on systems of oppression embedded in American democracy and efforts to overcome them, figuring that this work would clarify the “contradictions” on its own. What I am starting to better understand, however, is that the language of “contradiction” is a means of hiding how things actually work.
As I was doing background reading for a larger project recently, I came across hundreds of versions of the claim. “Contradictions” between slavery and freedom, between property and equality, between “law and order” and the rule of law, between the “better angels of our nature” and the constant and ongoing attempts by white conservatives to create a system based on mass subordination and plunder. Somehow, these “contradictions” always seem to ask the same thing of us: to treat white conservative lawlessness as a legitimate and inevitable element of democracy.
What struck me in the literature is that the assertion that democracy necessarily involves “contradictions,” “tensions,” and “paradoxes” represents a key (hegemonic) ideological claim. It encourages us to accept pervasive violence and inequality as part of the same systems as rights and equality while delegitimizing attempts to end right wing plunder and oppression schemes.
The “contradictions” lie grants legitimacy to bad actors working to undermine and destroy systems of rights, participation, and inclusion. In the U.S., that means shrouding white supremacy in a language of democratic freedoms. Those working to block access to voting or to suppress protests against police brutality and mass incarceration become—behind the veil of “tensions”—simply concerned with voter “integrity” and “civility.” Those keeping millions of people from healthcare become, under the grotesque power of the “paradox,” providers. Such bullshit!
As I consider the ways that I have erred in ignoring the “contradictions” lie about democracy, what I am realizing is that the term always hides a mischaracterization. No one would say, for instance, that someone who seems kind at times but also frequently abuses people is defined by “contradictions.” We would rightly call the person fucking evil. Likewise, when democracy appears to be laden with these “contradictions” between equality and oppression, we should ask ourselves what the language of “contradictions” is meant to hide.
In the U.S., the things that are “contradictory” within democracy are fundamental to the state and its relationship to white supremacy. For example, although Black American demands for reparations are often dismissed as a fringe claim or, worse still, “playing the race card,” the demands are in fact grounded in the actual history of the state and its relationship to Black Americans. Even if we look only after the end of slavery, the U.S. spent roughly a century, from the 1862 Homestead Act through the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, subsidizing the wealth of white America at the expense of Black Americans. The state gave subsidized opportunities to white Americans that it denied to Black America. Those systems of maldistribution (the racist hoarding and diversion of resources) remain ongoing, and don’t only involve housing, but jobs, education, policing, etc. But this is a newsletter, so we’ll use our imaginations and promise to read When Affirmative Action Was White or The Color of Law as needed. The point is 1) the state operated a system of racial plunder and thus 2) only the state is capable of redressing it.
Anyway, the coexistence of demands for reparations with the disproportionately white American pearl-clutching about the sanctity of property are not “contradictions.” They are a product of a racial system of plunder, one that remains in operation under the guise of overwhelmingly white opposition to taxes, public resources, and necessary forms of wealth redistribution.
In the U.S., the little white lie about the “contradictions” and “tensions” within democracy is meant to hide something. That something is white supremacy.