Abstract

The central question of this dissertation is how to expand popular participation in politics in a society that has been historically marked by racial discrimination. Challenging the common assumption that racial discrimination contradicts American democratic ideals, it argues that democracy and racism are actually intimately connected in American history. This connection is sealed through citizenship. American citizenship is valuable not only for the rights it grants but the standing it confers. Given the dialectical relationship between citizenship and slavery in the United States, such standing is racialized. White citizenship, then, is a position of racial standing in a democratic polity. It is simultaneously a category of equality and privilege: equal to all citizens, superior to everyone else. The democratic problem of the white citizen is that the tension between the desire for equality and the desire to maintain one's racial status results in a narrow political imagination that exhibits little incentive to expand democratic participation because it construes citizenship as an identity to possess rather than a power to employ. This problem continues even after the civil rights movement, as whiteness becomes less a form of standing and more a norm that sediments accrued white advantages into the ordinary operations of society. The expansion of democratic participation, then, implies subverting the connection between racial standing and citizenship. Since whiteness is not a biological or cultural category but a form of power, this amounts to the abolition of the white citizen as a social category, much like capitalism abolished the aristocracy and the Civil War abolished the slaveholders. Just as these events paved the way for new political regimes such as representative democracy and Radical Reconstruction, abolishing the white citizen through policies and programs that eradicate whites' social, political, and economic advantages paves the way for new democratic possibilities and new forms of self-identity. An "abolitionist-democratic" politics, the dissertation concludes, holds greater potential for expanding democratic participation than colorblindness or multiculturalism