White Defiance to Compliance Demands Force
Democrats shouldn’t be content with contempt
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With the White House telling Democrats to eat dirt, the familiar face of white defiance is on display. Administrations defy orders, but this administration exhibits a gross and stark white identity unlike America has seen in years.
Trump isn’t the first racist president. But Ta-Nehisi Coates has called him The First White President. Unlike his predecessors, Trump’s qualification for the presidency was a rich-male-whiteness alone. The essence of the Trump administration is white in the worst way and defiant. Taken together, it’s white defiance in the White House.
White defiance undermines justice and lawful orders with alternative measures. Throughout history, it circumvents laws or shuts down what it has the power to control. Its moves and stunts are recognizable.
You remember what it did with voting rights. White defiance is knowing Black people have a right to vote and then instituting poll taxes, literacy tests, and the latest techniques to block the ballot.
You remember what it did with housing. White defiance understands residential segregation by skin color is illegal. So, since white racism locked Black people in apartments, it zoned new areas in the city for white people by prohibiting apartments.
To avoid compliance, another move by white defiance is to shut down whatever is at stake. You remember what it did with integration. Rather than integrating schools and public parks, white defiance shut them down.
And you remember what it did to the federal government, and what it wants to do to the Southern border too.
Here’s the lesson — If fragile white people get in its way, or other forms of white supremacy won’t let it have its way, white defiance will run them down or run around them.
Here’s the strategy — White defiance requires a constant show of force. It needs a legion of troops in its face with no end in sight. It needs a crushing and punishing foot pressed hard that won’t lift. That’s the response to white defiance.
It’s not thinking Reconstruction is over and withdrawing the troops. It’s not blinking and winking at “legal” maneuvers to get around legislation and court orders.
It’s not gutting the Voting Rights Act so that states with a history of racist voter suppression can now change their voting practices at will.
And it’s certainly not saying we should leave presidential misconduct by a white-supremacist president to a mostly white electorate. Force is the call and the response.
How did we get here? We’ve always been here. From my station and estimation, a racist America still suffers from the old compromises it made to racist politicians in the South. Today, the war is the same in a different time.
For it to end, the systems that strengthen the potency of white-identity politics have to end. The Electoral College has to go, and the Senate has to change.
As Democrats gain control of governorships and state legislatures, the child of white racism called the Electoral College has to die. Right now, there’s an effort to get states to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact which is a legally-binding agreement to let the popular vote win without a constitutional amendment.
Currently, the compact has 189 electoral votes from several states. To go into effect, the compact needs to reach 270. Eighty-one votes remain, and the bills are in several state legislatures. Once it starts, the legal battles will ensue. But it’s a start. The popular vote is a solution to pursue.
Then when Democrats control the House and the Senate, the rule that every state gets two senators has to die. Democrats have to take that shot if they get it, even if it means taking one for the team. The current rule favors smaller states with white majorities and favoring white majorities is white racism — that leads to more white racism.
Avoiding those changes to the political system is complicity, and white defiance succeeds with white complicity. It knows white complicity will do whatever it takes to keep the Union together.
Contempt alone isn’t impressive. Contempt alone, when you can do more, is nothing but a cranky form of complicity. To stop white defiance, Democrats need to do more than kick and scream.
The pundits already warn, even if the Democrats win in the courts, the Trump administration may continue its white defiance, anyway. It’s likely because history knows and shows — white defiance won’t go out without force.
Since the House can detain and arrest people who don’t cooperate with its subpoenas, the House needs to put the sergeant at arms and the Capitol Police to work by grabbing and dragging people from their offices. Here’s a list: Bill Barr, Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s officials at the IRS, and anyone else who defies an order.
It’s time to exercise the right to perform an exorcism on the executive branch. Congress has done it before, and it should do it again.
But it won’t. Like the white elites of the past, the white mob of voters scares the Democrats. The white mob works to maintain white supremacy. That’s why American politics is in this dance with the devil.
Typically, white defiance wins because white complicity allows it to win. There’s no power in asserting you’re coequal or quoting the law if you don’t put up an equal show of force. At some point, gridlock becomes lockstep.
The ancient adage has some truth — “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” America has a man-baby in power who arrived spoiled. The rod has to hit harder now. What’s worse: There aren’t enough adults in the room.
