Why our Nation Needs to Build a New Democracy and Dismantle White Supremacy

The old framers of our Constitution understood that this new America was not a “perfect union.” But their hypocrisy in forging the Constitution and the Republic on the institution of slavery would be a sin so grave that it would delay this country 400 years from achieving its true greatness.

The foundation of white supremacy set forth by the framers has led to every attempt in this nation’s history to rectify the issue of race and exclusion of Black and Indigenous people of color being met with white violence.

Despite the odds, the majority of BIPOC communities continued to believe in this nation’s promise, and in 2008, with the election of Barack Obama as President many Americans thought at long last, we have become a post-racial nation.

What we saw was a renewed wave of violence that led to Colin Kaepernick kneeling protest to the white violence during National Football League games. Kaepernick’s kneeling and Black people’s rebellions in the streets were too much for many whites and made Donald Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” too appealing.

Trump’s rise along with recent events such as the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, COVID-19, children being locked in cages, a racist insurrection at the Capitol to overthrow an election, and now the growing racist attacks on Asian Americans ripped away the façade that we live under a rule of law and revealed the glaring disparities of our society.  These disparities caused by the legacy of white supremacy signaled the need to build a new Democracy and dismantle systemic racism to transform our politics.

This new Democracy is being led by marginalized communities that aim to explicitly challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has arisen from a growing community of leaders of all backgrounds who have been affected by discriminatory policies.

We have witnessed allies marching and kneeling with BIPOC communities who now comprehend that all rights “intersect at the ballot box” and Dr. King’s prescient words still ring true: “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men (people) are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be…This is the inter-relatedness of reality.”

These NEW FRAMERS awakened by the inhumane policies and practices that white supremacists long sought to use to keep us divided now recognize if change is to happen representation must be derive from  all aspects of society to bring about a new democracy.

Written by Reuben D. Eckels. Reuben Eckels is the Policy Advocate for U.S. Hunger, Poverty, and Racial Justice at Church World Service’s Office for Public Policy and Advocacy in Washington D.C.