For February 14, 2022
Interlude
July 27, 1816. US troops attack the “Negro Fort” in Spanish Florida, where free Black people and fugitives lives; this is the onset of the Seminole Wars and the conquest of Florida for the US.
“Fort Mose,” Tyehimba Jess. Describes the people who were at this fort and why they were there, and offers reflections on the double meaning of words like “maroon / marooned” and “stealing/steeling oneself.”
July 2, 1822. Denmark Vesey Rebellion ends with the execution of Vesey, a free Black man, and five others.
“Before His Execution” by Tim Seibles. From the point of view of Denmark Vesey just before he is being executed, reflecting on how much better off he is than the traitors who ratted him out.
Chapter 7: Politics, by Jamelle Bouie
This is a fairly short chapter that ties the current attempts at claiming voter fraud that barely conceal the racist impetus against cities and districts that are largely black to a long-standing tradition of not counting, discounting and challenging Black political power that comes directly out of pro-slavery arguments about giving an “important minority” more weight than the majority. The January 6 uprising, the birther conspiracy against President Obama, and the attempts at the voter suppression all point back to this: “Ever since our founding, an exclusive, hierarchical, and racist view of political legitimacy has been a persistent strain in our politics.”
He begins with John C Calhoun, the South Carolina senator and sometime Vice President (1782-1850), and his background–coming from the state that was “paradigmatic” in terms of slavery because there were so many white slaveholders, and they “dominated the state’s political class.” As the Southern system came under threat through increasing immigration, attempts at rebellion after Haiti, and the rise of the abolitionist movement, the “planter-politician” James Calhoun, born in S.C. in 1782, congressman by 1810, became a major proponent of “minority rule” ideas, specifically the idea of “nullification,” by which states could invalidate federal law. He saw no difference between slavery and paid labor, and he didn’t want the feds messing with the slave states. He built “an entire theory of government” on this that did not really admit the idea of a union, just a loose compact, and was based on the idea of giving “minorities a final say over majority action,” firmly believing that the Constitution did not really establish majority rule. He vociferously defended slavery in the 1830s, basically saying that it was the best thing that ever happened to Black people. Bouie points out that this defends the liberty “not of the citizen but of the master, the liberty of those who claimed the right to property and a position at the top of a racial and economic hierarchy” based on protecting interests that are “defined by their unique geographic and economic characteristics.
This idea led to the kind of veto power for the South that would allow the South “to maintain an iron grip on federal offices” until the VRA of 1965 and squash all attempts at anti-lynching laws and labor laws, and also in the fight against implementing Brown v. Board. In 1957, William F. Buckley still completely endorsed this: “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.” He did revise his stance later, but the idea (“to give white political minorities a veto not just over policy but over democracy itself”) keeps being a mainstay of conservative politics: under Goldwater in the 1960s, in Samuel Francis (with whom I am not familiar) in the 1980s and 1990s, and in the backlash against Obama that came from the Tea Party Republicans, motivated “by the fear and anxiety associated with the perception that ‘real’ Americans are losing their country” (qutd. Parker and Barreto on the TP). These right-wing conservatives (including in their current version) “embarked on a project to nullify opponents and restrict the scope of democracy” that goes basically back to Calhoun’s ideas. Obstructionism in the way that Mitch McConnell explicitly pursued under Obama is part of that, as are the attempts to gerrymander districts and push for voter ID laws, no mail ballots etc–directed very specifically at Blacks and/or minorities. Examples: North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan. “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.” They are not *really* a majority in their thinking, and that is what is behind Trump’s claim about election fraud, and the continuing voter suppression legislation that often targets “the forms of voting that helped Democrats win in traditionally Republican states.” They seem race-neutral, but they are not; they are “downstream of ideas and ideologies that came to fruition in the defense of human bondage and racial segregation.”
NB: Since I learned about this last semester in my Black politics class, I just want to make clear that the actual “doctrine of nullification,” which would actually establish that states’ rights should trump federal oversight and that states can/should be able to refuse to subscribe to federal legislation, has not ever been upheld by a federal court. The supremacy clause, by which federal law takes precedent, has so far always been upheld. I wish Bouie had included a bit more of a historical primer on the role nullification played in the secession of the Southern States, because I do not have enough background in that and really thought that “nullification” was tainted by secession and the civil war and not used in positive contexts after that time.