The Abolition of White Democracy (review)

A common but often unspoken assumption that Joel Olson confronts is the contradiction between the ideals and the practices of American democracy. Many ask how this nation can celebrate equality in the liberalist tradition and at the same time house such discriminatory practices. The author draws on the theories of W. E. B. Du Bois to offer a reinterpretation of race relations and politics in the United States. Identifying racial oppression and American democracy as mutually constitutive rather than antithetical, Olson writes, "American democracy is a white democracy, a polity ruled in the interests of a white citizenry and characterized by simultaneous relations of equality and privilege: equality among whites, who are privileged in relation to those who are not white" (xv). The history of democracy in this country, Olson argues, is one that privileges the dominant race and tyrannizes the subordinate nonwhites.

Contemporary attempts to subvert racial oppression are products of this history. Ideals like color blindness and multiculturalism are, in Olson's analysis, inevitably doomed to inadequacy because they allow whiteness to persist in a less official, but no less real, standing of privilege. Multiculturalism transforms whiteness from a position of power into a culture among other cultures, which obscures such a position and grants white culture a "place at the multicultural table" (111). Color blindness, Olson claims, renders whiteness as politically neutral and race as publicly insignificant, thereby relocating white privilege to the private sphere where it survives beyond legislation.

The book is not only an analysis of race relations in the United States, but also of class. Olson's Marxist interpretation of history suggests that no class-based alliance exists that can overpower racial cross-class alliances. Loyalty among whites from different socioeconomic classes was forged at the end of Reconstruction, Olson writes, when "the wages of whiteness" afforded white workers certain privileges that were inaccessible to their nonwhite counterparts.

For the modern student of class and race, Olson's reading implies that assimilation is impossible. He notes that many middle-class black families feel as though they have more in common intellectually and culturally with the white world. The white world, however, does not accept them but leaves them in limbo between a race with which they do not identify and a class in which they are unwelcome (24). Historically, social stability between black and white workers was ensured by reproducing racial tension from all directions, from above as well as below. Olson concludes in his Du Boisian history that white workers of the Reconstruction era traded class solidarity for whiteness.

Ultimately, Olson's compelling book packs both a theoretical and a political punch. He calls for a shift in contemporary democratic theory that resists the limitations of liberalism. Such a specifically political theory of race would, he hopes, "expand the American democratic imagination" (127). In practice, Olson recommends a move away from the "politics of inclusion" in favor of an abolitionist democracy, a phrase that he borrows from Du Bois. The abolition of whiteness as a category of social and political privilege will, as Olson tells it, allow for the creation of new identities and a reinvigorated public sphere (123).

Olson's abolitionist-democratic politics relies in part on his discussion of what constitutes whiteness. It is this discussion and its definition of white identity that are somewhat unclear. Olson describes whiteness as an absolute: "you have it or you don't" (29). He also claims that, although no cultural content unifies whites besides a standing of power, "in certain instances their myriad of differences are subordinated in the interest of white solidarity" (29). What specifically are the instances that Olson refers to? Would not the situations in which some white people find themselves be so different from those of other white people as to create completely different experiences? The experience might be a function of class and/or geography, for example. Olson furthermore notes that white standing historically has been a prerequisite for prosperity but not its...