Dr. James Peterson: The Grammar of American Democracy

The Grammar of American Democracy

By Dr. James Peterson

We need you to vote. We need you to tell everyone you know to register and to vote. “We” is a first-person plural pronoun. I am speaking to Black people. We need you to vote your interests. I know how this sounds. I know that voting does not seem (has not seemed) to matter. But it does. It matters right now to everyone reading this and everyone who won’t. 

American democracy is failing. It is not representative. It is poised to mark 250 years of its existence, its semiquincentennial, in a moment when its viability is clearly in question. It is failing because you feel like your vote won’t matter, and that feeling is a direct result of a deliberate design. It is failing because the white supremacists want to restore the electoral maps of the Confederacy and Jim Crow. Your vote matters now more than ever. And the reason you know that your vote matters is because the gerrymanderers are coming for it. They are doing everything they can to silence you. Your silence – Black folks without vote or voice – is the grammar of American Democracy.

First, the gerrymanderers came for Texas, the state that kept its enslaved, enslaved the longest—the state where Juneteenth was born out of our jubilant struggle for liberation in this so-called democracy. Then the gerrymanderers came for Louisiana – the state where Angola prison was constructed, reminding every Black (person) of the dirty little secret of the so-called 13th Amendment. That amendment said, Black people, you are now “free,” unless and until we arrest you, convict you, cage you. And their – (‘their’ is a third-person possessive determiner referring to white America)  – their criminal justice system does just that. But Louisiana also gave us Jazz; it came to life in Congo Square. It gave us gumbo – my God, I love gumbo. The word ‘gumbo’ derives from the West African Bantu word for okra – ngombo.  I hate okra, unless it’s in gumbo. These days, I hate America; unless/until there can be more Blackness in it, more freedom in it.

The small “d” democratic gerrymanderers (still hard g) fought back – through democratic means, if that matters to anybody. California and then Virginia, through a ballot initiative/referendum, redrew maps to generate additional House seats for the Democrats – the party formerly known as the Dixiecrats. Yes – that Dixie – they were the diehard death-dealing enslavers, until they weren’t. This is the eternal aporia of America’s democratic experiment. It is an unsolvable puzzle. And all of the doubts in democracy, the critical and logical impasses, the central hypocrisy that a nation predicated on the “inalienable rights” of human beings simply doesn’t see Black people as human beings. A nation designed to be free from colonization has remained utterly committed to bondage, colonization, and dehumanization for all of its citizens who happen to be darker than white.

It came as no surprise then that Virginia’s Supreme Court, in its best imitation of the US White Supremacy Court, reversed the small “d” responsible (and responsive) gerrymandering on a technicality. According to State Supreme Court Justice D. Arthur Kelsey: “The Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement.” The anti-democratic supremacists love their technicalities. Remember that Virginia is our point of origin here – our 1619 arrival came about at a place called “Point Comfort.” Enslaved Africans arrived at Point Comfort in 1619 at the dawn of centuries of brutal bondage, erasure and unmitigated rape and racial violence. The irony is too pure to point out.

A grammar is a system, governed by sets of rules that determine a language’s structure and meaning. Saidiya Hartman defines the “grammar of violence” as the “underlying structural and quotidian forces of racial slavery that persist into the present, defining the limits of Black life . . .” Professor Hartman transformed our understanding of the “afterlife of slavery” through her astute theorizations in 1997’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. 

The Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Movement’s most valiant effort to make American democracy behave as an actual democracy, has been under attack since its infancy in the late 1960s.  White supremacist Supreme Court Justices have dedicated their entire legal and judicial careers to this one goal. John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas have done so. And yes, Black men can be quite good at executing the grammar of violence against Black people. First, the Roberts Court removed “preclearance” in 2013, an essential federal oversight mechanism designed to prevent voting districts from discriminating against Black voters. Congress could have enacted a remedy over the last 13 years. No one can hold their breath that long. 

Much more recently, Trump’s Supreme Court reversed the meaning of Section 2 in Louisiana v. Callais. On the SCOTUS Blog, Edward Foley makes it plain. This decision: “destroys the central meaning of the section, converting it into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for it to do. The one thing that is unambiguous about Section 2 is that the 1982 amendment to the section’s text creates a “results” test for determining whether there is liability under the section, replacing the “intent” test that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section 2 claims. As the text states, no “standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed … which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.” Yet Callais defiantly converts Section 2 back to an intent inquiry rather than a results analysis.” This is just another technicality deployed to dismantle this democracy by silencing Black people.

Hartman’s insights are absolutely relevant to the present moment, where the movements designed to enact anti-Black racist policy and to systematically diminish Black voices in American democracy have jettisoned all facades of fairness or equity in favor of a feigned racial “neutrality” that will very likely spell the end of this democratic experiment. That end is spelled, f-a-s-c-i-sm. It is spelled: a-u-t-o-c-r-a-c-y. It is phrased as the “triumph of white supremacy” or the ”rule of the billionaire class.”

We are left with very few rules or remedies for what ails us and this democracy. Voting en masse is one of those remedies. We have to voice our political resistance to American democracy’s return to form. Remember that it was never about our freedom. It was always about how white men defined their freedom by denying and delimiting ours.  As Civil Rights warrior, Sherrilyn Ifill has intimated “White Supremacy Is an Antidemocracy Movement.” We must meet this moment with some hopeful and aspirational sense of what will be possible when we make this democracy our own.