[Biden seeks counsel from a group of scholars who aren’t deeply
versed in the racial threat to our democracy ]
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WHITE-OUT AT THE WHITE HOUSE  
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Jason Stanley
August 15, 2022
Forum Magazine
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_ Biden seeks counsel from a group of scholars who aren’t deeply
versed in the racial threat to our democracy _

, Illustration by The Forum

 

Democracy in America, already partial and imperfect, is in a moment of
existential crisis. One of our two main political parties, the
Republicans, has been taken over by a fascist social and political
movement. The GOP in its current incarnation is a cult of the leader,
former President Donald Trump, who has risen to power on the basis of
his initial reaction to the first Black president, and the fears that
white Christian Americans would be displaced culturally, politically,
and numerically by Black equality and immigration. This movement is
made up of a set of disparate but related factions—QAnon conspiracy
theorists, white nationalists, Christian nationalists, evangelicals,
fascist militia movements, fossil fuel companies, and billionaires who
see an opportune moment to destroy the fabric of civil society that
keeps their actions constrained.

On the national level, GOP leaders are attacking public education.
They have focused particularly on teaching that squarely addresses
America’s history of disenfranchising Black voters at the polls,
robbing them of wealth, and using prisons and police to enforce a
system of majority white rule in the interests of the wealthy.

When Americans do not learn of this history, our leaders will be free
to repeat it. When Americans do not learn of the causes of structural
racism, they will be befuddled by mass protest movements to address
it. GOP leaders are also attacking women’s and LGBTQ+  rights,
instituting strict bans on abortions
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bringing a version of Russia’s 2013 “gay propaganda law”
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the United States, forbidding the normalization of same-sex
relationships to minors and criminalizing trans identity. It is a
moment of emergency, and the future of American democracy requires our
leaders to understand this.

This is the broad backdrop to a recent meeting
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convened historians and social thinkers at the White House, to advise
President Joe Biden on the democracy crisis facing the country, and on
the best measures for the Democratic party—the default protector of
our multiracial democracy—to face down the authoritarian menace on
the right. This convocation suffered from a glaring omission, however:
none of the people who met to consult with President Biden were Black
American journalists, activists, or intellectuals. Black Americans
have been on the forefront of America’s anti-fascist struggle. To
exclude everyone from this group as thinkers who are essentially
less-than worthy of advising on the topic is a breathtakingly
unacceptable misunderstanding of the threat.

Black Americans have relentlessly warned of the ways in which an
American version of fascism may one day prevail—as today’s
white-nationalist right has itself recognized in stoking moral panics
and book and curricular bans targeting critical race theory (CRT). The
intellectual framework of CRT, mainly developed by Kimberlé Williams
Crenshaw and Derrick Bell, focuses on why, after the gains won by the
civil rights movement, legal and institutional barriers to achieving
multi-racial democracy remained. CRT centrally includes Derrick
Bell’s concept of _interest convergence_—the dynamic whereby
parties with distinct interests join together, not because of natural
affinity, but because as a conjoined group they have a better
opportunity of realizing their diverse interests together. Interest
convergence helps to lay bare the structure of the fascist social and
political movement we see in the United States today. It explains why
Christian nationalists, white nationalists, patriarchal forces, and
the billionaire class would come together in a social and political
movement against democracy.

Liberal democracy is based on two values, freedom and equality. These
values give minorities of whatever stripe—racial, religious, and
sexual—the right to live in a society that recognizes their ways of
living and their history as legitimate parts of the total body
politic, including an education that reflects this diverse plurality.
Liberal democracy ensures that workers can stand up for their
interests against business owners. Any group that is threatened by a
less powerful group exercising their rights is threatened by liberal
democracy’s values, which are designed to preserve the capacity to
“speak truth to power.” Liberal democracy gives minorities
protections against domination by the powerful—be they the
numerically dominant or the wealthy elite. It is a system that
imperils, in the United States, full domination by groups such as the
billionaire class, white Americans, Christian Americans, men, and
heterosexual patriarchy.

As Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project—another intellectual
endeavor under unceasing attack from the forces of the Trumpian
right—has made clear to all, in the face of these obstacles, Black
Americans have been at the forefront of America’s pursuit of the
realization of our democratic ideals. Hannah-Jones ably lays out the
centrality of white supremacy as an obstacle to the realization of
American democracy. Her work also clearly delineates the central role
of Black political protest in fighting America’s native brand of
fascism. Hannah-Jones’s groundbreaking project overlapped with the
Black Lives Matter Movement, the largest movement for Black equality
in recent decades. As a result, the American right has ferociously
targeted it. The 1619 Project book is perhaps the first book in our
nation’s history to be subject to multiple state laws that ban it
specifically from curricula.

The racial limitations of Biden’s handpicked group of White House
advisers become clearer still when we consider the thinkers who did
make the cut: Jon Meacham, Anne Applebaum, Sean Wilentz, Allida Black,
and Michael Beschloss. The choice of this particular group to advise
Biden is an indication that this administration is not up to the task
of facing the antidemocratic crisis at hand.

Here are two things that stand out about this contingent of thinkers.
First, with the exception of Applebaum, none of them was in the
initial group of academics, scholars, and activists who raised the
alarm, as Trumpism was gaining traction, that the United States
potentially faced a fascist social and political movement.

Worse still, Sean Wilentz’s most salient recent foray into political
debate has been to lead a very public campaign against
Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project. Wilentz’s intervention bore little
academic fruit. It did, however, lend unwarranted credence to the
right’s attack on Hannah-Jones and her work.

The fact that these scholars are, for the most part, such late-comers
to the threat is a worrying sign about their vision and understanding
of social and political reality. But the white-centered scholarship of
this all-white panel is nothing less than a red flag, given the deeply
racial character of the right-wing assault on our democracy.

This is more than just an academic complaint. Fascist political
tactics inevitably borrow from a nation’s particular history—as we
see in the case of fascist Russia, Putin’s regime is reviving its
past practices in its brutality towards Ukrainians,
including detainee camps reminiscent of the Gulag
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A Ukrainian perspective is essential to understanding Russian history
toward Ukraine. The same is true of our own fascist history of Jim
Crow—and, more recently, the criminal legal system responsible for
the world’s largest prison population, which would also be
responsible for enforcing a U.S. authoritarian takeover.

Lest one think that these scholars are simply better than any Black
American intellectuals who might consult the president on the current
situation, let me provide two examples of Black American
intellectuals, _just from the institution where I teach_, who would
be furnish indispensable knowledge of these topics—at a level almost
certainly not reached by the group tapped to advise Biden.

In her latest book, _America on Fire_
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Hinton discusses “The Cycle”—namely,  a structure of white
backlash aimed at discrediting and disempowering Black political
protest. Hinton documents that the cycle repeats itself on the local
and national level countless times. Her work makes it clear that the
strength of the fascist social and political movement we face is based
on white reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement.

One particularly powerful and toxic rallying point of today’s white
backlash politics is what’s known as the Great Replacement Theory.
Indeed, the fear that a majority will be replaced culturally,
politically, or physically, is at the very heart of the logic of
fascism
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Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale, has done extensive
research on this topic. In 2014, Richeson, along with Maureen
Craig, showed
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priming white Americans with the claim that in 2042 America will be a
“majority minority” country made them much more right wing, along
many dimensions. In other words, already in 2014, Richeson understood
the fascist political tactic that has come to dominate the Republican
party.

If the members of the Biden White House are serious about addressing
the challenges we face, they must engage with more considered and
in-depth work that centers the racial crisis at the very foundation of
the democracy crisis. And this means drawing on the deep wealth of
knowledge and insight about American fascism at the heart of the Black
American intellectual tradition.

_Jason Stanley is Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. His
latest book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them._

_The Forum [[link removed]] is a source of daily news
and commentary deploying the insights of critical race theory, and
supplying the materials and organizing strategies to re-envision
American democracy from the ground up._

_We need The Forum to fill in the gaping blindspots of a broken
media ecosystem—to center the urgent demands of racial justice and
democracy in the public discourse that shapes the most fundamental
perceptions of what our government is for and who it serves._

_The Forum will meet this need with daily content stressing the
grassroots mandates of democratic reform in our multiracial society;
it will not treat politics as the sport of elite insiders or as fodder
for culture-war clickbait, but rather as the urgent business before us
all as Americans seeking to redeem the battered promise of expansive,
truly democratic self-rule and solidarity in an age of racialized
resentment and neoliberal division._

* Biden Administration
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* History
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* U.S. history
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* 1619 Project
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* democracy
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* Fascism
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* slavery
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* Critical Race Theory
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