The efforts to eliminate the history of African Americans from books and classrooms are so fierce because that history is crucial to understanding the history of the United States and the current retreats from attempts at a multiracial democracy.
That history goes back centuries.
In addition to providing answers about the origins and workings of society and government, classical social contract theory purported to explain the justifications of socioeconomic structures and political institutions. However, the philosopher Charles Mills showed this theory to be defective in that it ignores the centrality of the Racial Contract and the role of White supremacy.
He explained how the modern world was expressly created as a racially hierarchical polity, globally dominated by Europeans. Thus, he says, “We live in a world which has been foundationally shaped for the past 500 years by the realities of European domination and the gradual consolidation of global white supremacy.”
No single act corresponded to drawing up and signing a contract. Instead, there were many acts through the centuries, including papal bulls (edicts by a Pope). A primary example is the Doctrine of Discovery, which established spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization.
These actions also included theological pronouncements, European discussions about colonialism and international law, pacts, treaties, and legal decisions, academic and popular debates about the humanity (or lack thereof) of nonwhites, the establishment of formalized legal structures of differential treatment, and much more. This was the Racial Contract–an agreement between Europeans about white supremacy.
White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. The Contract is not between everybody. It is just between the people who count, “we the white people.” All Whites are beneficiaries of the Racial Contract, though some whites-e.g., poor whites-are not signatories to it.
The founding fathers of America created a system to protect themselves, privileged minority-white male landowners. The result was a flawed system, establishing minority rule, where the president is not elected directly by the people but by the Electoral College, where the person winning the presidency is not the one getting the most votes from the people.
The election of senators also violates the one-person, one-vote principle, which is when small states get two senators just like large states. Nowadays, this means that smaller, primarily white states have more power in the Senate than larger and more diverse states.
As Ari Berman explains in his book Minority Rules, “To entrench and hold on to power, a shrinking white conservative minority is relentlessly exploiting the undemocratic features of America’s political institutions while doubling down on a wide variety of antidemocratic tactics, such as voter suppression, election subversion, dark money, legislative power grabs, immigration restrictions, census manipulation, and the whitewashing of history.” The book goes a long way toward explaining some horrors of the modern American political system.
This country began moving toward a multi-democracy in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, but the forces against such a movement increased their resistance. Taking advantage of minority rule, they eventually gained control of the Supreme Court, which ended this multiracial experiment in 2013 with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which had enabled black participation in political processes.
Five of the current six Right-wing Supreme Court Justices were appointed by Presidents Bush and Trump each of whom won the antidemocratic Electoral College vote but lost the popular vote. These partisan Justices are doing the bidding of antidemocratic and white supremacy forces in the country.
The first step toward halting the Supreme Court and the rest of the judiciary is for us to vote against this anti-democratic tide–while we can.
