The Abolition of White Democracy

The Abolition of White Democracy. By Joel Olson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004; pp ix + 248. $19.95 paper.

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 ofW. 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...