16 The New York Review
sabotages his own Brexit withdrawal
agreement with the EU of last January
and therefore breaks international law
(Jonathan Jones, the UK’s chief legal
civil servant, resigned in protest, and
several ministers are also threatening
to do so).
In both their cases, it feels as if the
ability to flout the law, while claiming
to defend or in Trump’s case personify
it—“law and order” being the man-
tra of his campaign—is the sole true
measure of prowess. In both cases, the
sexual storm that always threatens our
“civilized” social arrangements lurks
barely concealed behind their pos-
tures, paraded and denied more or less
in the same breath. By his own admis-
sion, Trump is a sexual predator. True
to form, he could only announce that
his nominee for the Supreme Court
after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
would be a woman by making the shape
of a woman’s body with his hands—no
woman can pass without first entering
his own anatomical space. Johnson
most famously is unable or unwilling to
say how many children he has fathered,
as if he were a naughty boy all the more
lovable for his “peccadilloes.” Doing
whatever they want plus complete de-
nial of responsibility for their sexual
acts seems to be the shared subtext, the
subliminal message, of masculinity for
both of them.
We are witnessing a new sexualiza-
tion of politics, something quite other
from “repressive desublimation,” the
ter m made famous by Herbert Marcuse
in the 1960s to describe the way an ad-
vanced industrial culture uses a mix of
technology and partially satiated con-
sumer desires to neutralize any poten-
tial working- class revolt. We might call
it promiscuity in its psychotic mode.
Brazenly, it displays itself without apol-
ogy to a world excited and repelled in
equal measure by unconscious forces—
lust, greed, hatred, and rage—that no
one readily admits to and that are
being harnessed on behalf of everyone.
No point, therefore, asking how bad
it can get, how far they are willing to
go, or how on earth they can get away
with it all. Going too far is the point.
The transgression is the draw and the
appeal—transgression always carries a
sexual tremor even when it is not mani-
festly about sex. And nowhere more so
than in the shape of the supreme moral-
ism, the violence- provoking, racialized
commitment to “law and order” that is
Trump’s calling card in this election, a
moralism that is the very foundation of
his evangelical base (no surprise, then,
over this past year to watch Jerry Fal-
well Jr.’s spectacular sexual fall from
grace). It is a truism of psychoanalysis
that the law always nurtures the pos-
sibility, indeed the likelihood, of its
own demise, because the super- ego,
the agent of the law inside the head, is
too tyrannical to be obeyed with any
consistency.
If Trump wins, if Johnson hangs on
in defiance of those who are predict-
ing that he will be out of his job within
months, the long- term consequences of
this sinister allegiance between the two
men will be dire, first in the symbolic
permission it will have granted to the
worst of masculinity without restraint,
and then more practically in the prom-
ised trade deal, vaunted by Johnson,
that will bring chlorinated chickens
from the US to UK tables after they
have been cleansed of the sewage on
which they nest; in the likely sell- off
of the UK’s National Health Service,
which, in the teeth of reckless govern-
ment incompetence, has been the only
savior during Covid- 19; not to speak
of the vicious anti- migrant policies in
both countries, and, more generally,
the exacerbation of inequality, the ac-
celerating climate catastrophe, and
the continuous police harassing and
killing of black citizens on the streets.
All the detritus of racial capitalism,
trailing without inhibition its paltry,
intimidating boast while the world
burns. Faced with this, the only thing
to do is to carry on campaigning and
struggling for something better, while
keeping in our sights the ugly forms of
pleasure and enticement that are help-
ing to make the most dreaded outcome
still seem possible. QAnna Deavere Smith
On May 4, 1969, James Forman, the
former executive secretary of SNCC,
stormed the pulpit at Riverside Church
in New York City in the middle of Sun-
day morning communion service and,
with six aides at his side, started read-
ing a list of demands for reparations
from white churches and synagogues
for their part in exploiting Black Amer-
icans for centuries. The organist loudly
played the hymn “May Jesus Christ Be
Praised” to drown out his words. The
preaching minister, flanked by five
other clergy, led the choir down the
middle aisle and out of the sanctuary.
Forman soon received a restraining
order, and then burned it on the steps
of the chancery of the Roman Catholic
Archdiocese on Madison Avenue.
Forman’s demands were drawn from
the “Black Manifesto,” which was orig-
inally prepared for the National Black
Economic Development Conference in
Detroit that April, and called for $
million to be used for the establishment
of a Southern land bank, four publish-
ing industries, four futuristic television
networks, a research center focused on
the problems of Black people, a train-
ing center for the teaching of skills in
community organization, television,
radio, film, and photography, the or-
ganization of welfare recipients, a na-
tional Black labor strike and defense
fund, a Black anti- defamation league,
a Black university in the South, and
cooperative businesses in the United
States and Africa. The manifesto (first
published in this magazine) listed
twenty- four nominees to the steering
committee: twenty- three men and one
woman, Fannie Lou Hamer.
Forman’s intrusion into Sunday ser-
vice was not unique, and the manifesto
became a source of debate in particu-
lar in the Detroit church community,
where an allied white radical group
took over the main offices of the Pres-
byterian church, a Black group took
over another church, and eight white
housewives sat in at the office of the
Bishop of the Episcopal church. But
the church, at least on the left, is no
longer a hotbed of activism and protest.
After the worldwide taking to the
streets following the murder of George
Floyd, the rapper Ice Cube started
suggesting that Black folks should not
cast a vote without asking “what’s in it
for us.” This summer he put together a
Contract with Black America, which
calls for a much broader spectrum of
reforms than the 1969 manifesto. Itsthirteen demands include the adoption
of a plan for “Neo- Reconstruction”
to right past wrongs, the creation of
baby bonds (originally proposed by
Senator Cory Booker), bank lending
reform, prison reform, and police re-
form. It also demands that the FCC re-
quire broadcast networks to devote 20
percent of aired content to Black pro-
ducers, and it ends with a section that
outlines Black responsibility:As we begin to gain social and
economic equality it is our duty
to clean up ourselves and our
community. This contract is a 2-
way street. As we gain social and
economic equality, we must begin
to dissolve any bitterness in our
hearts for past wrongs.Yet he remains cautious about voting,
and expresses reluctance about who
will get his vote:Both sides have contacted us, and
what I see is, both sides understand
that something big needs to be
done. What I think the Biden cam-
paign should really be scared of is,
you know, Trump can actually do
it, like—he can try to implement it
before the elections.On September 25, Trump unveiled
his “Platinum Plan” for Black Ameri-
cans at a live event in Atlanta. I say “live
event,” but as I watched, it sounded
to me that the applause, whoops, and
hollers of the assembled were canned.
He referred to his Platinum Plan as “a
Contract with Black Americans.” Is he
alluding to Ice Cube’s document? He
called for making the KKK a terrorist
group, and said he will make lynching
a national hate crime. Kamala Har-
ris, Tim Scott, and Cory Booker have
already written an anti- lynching bill
that still has not been passed by the
Senate—this being one of many failed
attempts at such legislation since 1901.
It was stalled most recently by Rand
Paul, who suggested revisions on the
day of George Floyd’s first memorial
service.
I don’t see anything posted at the
time of this writing from Ice Cube in
response to the Platinum Plan. But
the economist Darrick Hamilton, who
wrote the preface to the Contract with
Black America, has Ice Cube’s ear. He
needs to reiterate what he recently told
Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.
Invoking FDR’s famous instruction to
progressive activists, “Make me do it,”
Hamilton said about the need to ad-
dress the wealth gap and other issues,
“We will make Biden do it, but first and
foremost, Donald Trump needs to get
removed.”
The robust activism of 2020 will not
stop after the election. In fact it mustbecome stronger, regardless of who is
in office. But first we have to storm the
polls with the vigor of the 1969 dissent-
ers, now heroes. Recently, I contacted
James Forman’s son, James Forman
Jr., the Pulitzer Prize–winning legal
scholar, and asked if Mr. Forman Sr.
voted. His response:And yes, he did very much so. He
was the first in line at the polls
most election days.Voting was still a radical act then. Q
David Treuer
C om i ng of age, a s I d id , a s a n O jibwe on
the Leech Lake Reservation in north-
ern Minnesota, I thought a lot about life
in the “real world,” off the reservation.
Out there, I thought, is where Amer-
ica happens. America was on my mind
even though America didn’t think a
whole lot about me or my tribe. At least
the country and I had that in common:
we both thought of Indian communi-
ties as in America but not of it; as little
islands of suffering in a vast democratic
sea. It took decades for me to see that
I was wrong—that Indian communities
were not merely victims of democracy,
and America wasn’t merely something
that happened elsewhere. Its ideals and
depredations are born and reborn, end-
lessly, in our homelands. This strange
relationship is nowhere more obvious
than in the question of the vote.
Native peoples, en masse, didn’t se-
cure the right to vote until the Indian
Citizenship Act of 1924, which passed,
partially, in recognition of the vast
number of Natives who volunteered
to serve during World War I. Even the
passage of the Citizenship Act did not
guarantee full suffrage, which had to
be fought for state by state for the next
forty years. Utah became the last state
to grant its Native population the right
to vote, in 1962.
In the beginning, the Constitution
counted enslaved black people as three
fifths of a vote, while Native folk “not
taxed” were written out entirely. The
Dred Scott decision of 1857, while re-
affirming the noncitizenship of black
Americans, stated that Natives were
not to be counted unless we were nat-
uralized like foreign-born immigrants.
We were excluded again with the pas-
sage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and
the 14th Amendment two years later.
In 1870 the Senate Judiciary Commit-
tee affirmed that “the 14th amend-
ment to the Constitution has no effect
whatever upon the status of the Indian
tribes within the limits of the United
States.” Yet we were subject to Amer-
ican law and endured some of the most
punitive policies this country has ever
carried out, including expulsion from
lands east of the Mississippi, compul-
sory attendance at Indian boarding
schools, the unlawful divvying up of
Indian lands to “encourage” private
ownership, forced conversion to Chris-
tianity, and regular punishment—like
the withholding of food, clothing, and
shelter despite treaty-guaranteed ac-
cess to all of it—if anyone was found
practicing Native religions.
The Citizenship Act was a big step
forward in ensuring that we could par-
ticipate in our own future—and, more
surprisingly, that we could continue to
shape, if not control, America’s future.