Antiblackness and Its Ethics, The Redux

The Tennessee Three and American Democracy

When two black Tennessee state lawmakers - Justin Jones and Justin Pearson - were expelled from the legislature last Thursday for participating in a gun control protest that disrupted legislative proceedings, the immediate and overwhelming public response was that America was now losing its democracy. Following the March 27 mass shooting at The Covenant School, killing three nine-year olds and three adults, the lawmakers joined their constituents outside the chamber on March 30 to demand that the legislature pass stronger gun control laws and were subsequently punished. With their expulsion, Tennessee Republicans not only exacted retribution against their political opponents, but did so in a decidedly racist fashion - declining to expel Gloria Johnson, the third lawmaker who joined the protest, but is a white woman. What most have failed to mention thus far is that The Tennessee Three, as Jones, Pearson, and Johnson have been named, faced such swift and decisive retaliation because, in addition to “breaking decorum,” unrestricted gun rights are critical to a white nationalist agenda.

Following the expulsions, the Associated Press pronounced that Tennessee is the new front in the battle for American democracy, and a slew of current and former Democratic elected officials identified the event as a uniquely harmful assault on democracy. But what is democracy and why did that instance signal its erosion? The uproar occurred in the context of both Tyre Nichols’ murder by police officers in Memphis following a traffic stop which no one knows the basis of to this day, and news of Clarence Thomas waging war on oppressed people from the highest court in the land as he’s being subsidized by white supremacists. Yet, while these things are considered racist and unethical, there is a consensus that they, somehow, do not rise to the level of threatening democracy.

On Friday, Vox News selected Tennessee as the country’s least democratic state. Not because of the racist violence that still attends it as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, but because of “its egregious partisan gerrymanders at both the state and federal level.” As compared to partisanship, the article oscillates between whether race does or doesn’t matter. First, it says that Tennessee is part of a “general trend” where democracy has degraded in Republican-controlled states, but it can’t figure out why such control is particularly anti-democratic. Then, it rules out the relevance of race because research hasn’t found a link between anti-democratic shifts in states and recent increases in a state’s non-white population. But, it doubles back to say that, while race might not matter at the state-level, it does matter nationally because a sense of racial threat “generally” drives Republicans to engage in increasingly undemocratic behavior. It says this as if authoritarianism is a response to numerical odds rather than an ideological commitment to a vision of society and the world. As if the fact of slaves outnumbering white people in places like Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina in the nineteenth-century was the reason for slavery’s persistence rather than the investment in and desire for slaves as commodities. It says this as if antiblackness as a material force that predates and transcends political parties, especially as they’re constituted today, isn’t empirically evident. The article haphazardly concludes that, “when it comes to state governmental choices over democratic institutions, the key question is not about racial politics within a state but whether the state government is part of the national Republican party.”

Analytically suspect articles in the mainstream press notwithstanding, it’s clear that it was Jones and Pearson’s blackness that led to their being targeted and expelled. In fact, Tennessee Republican Representative Justin Lafferty—who once valorized the three-fifths compromise—reportedly assaulted Jones on the floor of the statehouse just last Monday as House Republicans filed their resolutions to have the members expelled. But, in the immediate aftermath of the expulsion, what took place was a virtually unanimous rush to frame the act simply as an antidemocratic rejection of bipartisanship. The antiblackness executed against the two men was made subservient to the Democratic Party’s quasi-righteous appeal to the universal ideals of civility and democratic norms, even though it was the antiblackness that provided the opportunity for the Democratic Party to make any sort of appeal at all. As I argued in the first installment of Antiblackness and Its Ethics, the ethics of deference and decorum is an antiblack substitute for a real system of values. A recognition of the persistence of slavery as a governing principle and the ways in which that principle itself is literally facilitating the mass deaths of people in general and children in particular is not why the public sounded the alarm about the assault on democracy. It is, instead, the disregard for bipartisanship as a normative democratic value that got everyone up in arms. With the expulsion of Jones and Pearson, the Tennessee legislature stood firm in its decision to sanction the right to kill people in the name of freedom. Antiblackness has always been the preeminent death-dealing tool.

Liberals routinely clutch their pearls when confronted with how serious conservatives are about their principles. Instead of getting serious themselves, they complain about how incredibly not nice conservatives are. Jones and Pearson’s willingness to be deemed irredeemable by an authoritarian state is an indispensable kind of conviction that has been decidedly absent in the Democratic Party. But convictions can’t rise and fall with particularly courageous elected officials. After all, if and when Jones and Pearson are reinstated to their districts and return to the state legislature, who knows what effect this kind of political lynching will have. Our convictions can only be firmly guided by a commitment to the eradication of all death-dealing tools, the spectacular and the ordinary alike.