A bold explanation of how reactionary political movements appeal to racism to reconcile American democracy with antidemocratic practices.
“All power to the people!” So goes the familiar slogan of 1960s racial justice politics. The message is clear: the fight against racism is a fight for greater democracy—for the rule of “the people.” And yet, across American history, movements of racial backlash have also framed themselves as aiming to deliver greater democracy and redeem the rule of “the people.” Examples abound, ranging from the Southern Redeemers who overthrew Reconstruction, to the “populist” backlash to the civil rights movement, and the white revanchism of our own time. How is it that we find claims to greater democracy on both sides of these struggles? What does this reveal about modern democracy, popular sovereignty, and the peculiar politics of race in America?
The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People provides a novel account of the relationship between race and democratic politics in the United States. Across five chapters, Michael Gorup turns to the life and work of key figures in the history of American political thought—including Thomas Jefferson, Hosea Easton, David Walker, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Huey P. Newton—to argue that racial politics in the United States has always been a politics of peoplehood. Racism is what Gorup calls a politics of “popular enclosure”: it limits the scope of democratic power by circumscribing who is said to belong to "the people.” In so doing, it contains democratization from within. Neither strictly antidemocratic, nor a necessary entailment of modern democracy as such, Gorup argues that racism is best understood as a political construct developed to manage, if never fully reconcile, the contradictions that beset settler democracy.
Racism is, in short, American democracy’s “counterrevolutionary shadow”—a technology for rendering despotic practices like enslavement, exploitation, and dispossession tolerable within a society where the people are said to rule.
