The Abolition of White Democracy

Extract

The Abolition of White Democracy. By Joel Olson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 248p. $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Joel Olson's book is a provocative argument for the elimination of white power in the United States. He argues that whiteness is, unlike blackness, not an identity but an illegitimate source of political privilege. Whites have constructed U.S. democracy around conceptions of freedom, equality, and citizenship that shore up their political privilege in a fundamentally bipolar racial system. This racial system admits immigrants and other persons of color only by consistently and ever more surreptitiously subordinating blacks and furthering white empowerment. Olson directs his argument against the assumption that white racism lurks in the application of liberal principles, and not in the principles themselves. He argues that a prejudicial politics is built into U.S. democracy and concludes that ridding the system of racial politics requires altering our basic principles.