My argument is that the United States, or its forerunner colonies, was never a democracy nor can it become one for this reason: if democracy is a “government by the people,” where sovereign power is vested in “the people” who exercise power directly or by elected official,” that system of governance requires rational people and most of the 330 million people in the United States are irrational, including their elected officials. By rational, I mean a person or people able to think clearly, sensibly, and logically. The implication is that it doesn’t matter who becomes the president, nor which party is in power, for there’s a feedback loop where incoming regimes usually do their best to eviscerate the body of work belonging to the previous administration, regardless if that some of that work benefits “the people.”
enslavement
The Research Process
Essays2 CommentsToward the end of the nineteenth century, Mohammed Ali Ben Said settled in Alabama, where his narrative and the paper trail for his life ends, but where the research for my Transatlantic Africa book began. Transatlantic Africa: 1440-1888 retold the story of transatlantic slaving through the lived experiences and intellectual history of Africans who lived through it. In that way, uncovering Mohammed’s story was fortuitous because Mohammed was an African, a Muslim, and an enslaved or indentured person for most of his remarkable life. For all these insights Mohammed’s extraordinary story provided, it left an equal amount of questions. These questions became the legs of my research, conveying it along an exploratory journey.
https://www.google.com/_/chrome/newtab?rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS754US754&espv=2&ie=UTF-8
The Fate of Black People in White Societies
EssaysCommentThough I am aware of Coates’s new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, released today, what follows is a condensed version of my views, stirred principally by BWM but also by the repurposed essays and anecdotes that form the contents of Eight Years in Power. More importantly, there has been insufficient consideration of what BWM’s argument portends for the fate of “black” people—a race identifier used grudgingly but in no way do I subscribe to it. My concern is the defective premise, a story if you will, anchoring Coates’s argument and its dead-end implication if we were to follow that argument to its logical conclusion. I offer another way to think about the fate of black people in the United States and in white societies more broadly.