Against American Ethnic Democracy: White Rule and Black Rebellion

Since the inception of the United States, religion has long permeated its politics, so much so that racial construction cannot be fully understood without first dissecting America’s cosmological underpinnings. This article maps the founding of ethnic democracy within European modernity and its centrality to the development of the American nation-state. I contend that American ethnic democracy emerges when ethno-racial tyranny expresses itself as white supremacy that is built and sustained through a cosmological justification for its political existence. The political ramifications reveal an unfolding of transhistorical racial terror against the Black as a precondition for ethno-democratic continuity. Nevertheless, contestations against the US ethno-democratic state emerge via the heretical praxis of Black rebels who, through a commitment to subversive belief systems, struggle for Black freedom as a recovery of abolition–democracy.