In theory, James Madison’s argument that federalism could prevent a majority from dominating a minority while taking advantage of local management and national diversity appears attractive for the kind of situation existing in Guyana. However, this positive result will only materialise if the system does generally, as Madison suggested it would, throw up an enlightened pluralist national leadership able to contain parochial local excesses. This is precisely the kind of leadership that Guyana, locked in the prism of ethnic leadership, requires. I indicated last week that this Madisonian result, which is still presented as the advantage of federalism, was not conceived in connection with race relations, and if a recent study to which I will now turn is correct, federalism in the US has been something of an obstacle in relation to this issue.
“Katrina’s Political Roots and Divisions: Race, Class, and Federalism in American Politics;” by Dara Strolovitch, Dorian Warren and Paul Frymer (2006) provides something of a bird’s eye view of how, in spite of the theory, under political pressure from racist state authorities, national governments have on many occasions had to establish policies that have adversely affected the socio-economic conditions of African Americans.
In considering the devastations caused by hurricane Katrina, which occurred in New Orleans USA in 2005 and caused disproportionate harm to African Americans, Strolovitch et al. argued that although in public perception natural disasters do not discriminate, disasters do not occur in historical, political, social, or economic vacuums. “Instead, the consequences of such catastrophes replicate and exacerbate the effects of extant inequalities, and often bring into stark relief the importance of political institutions, processes, ideologies, and norms.”
The authors claimed that in relation to race and labour relations, from the very beginning of the federation, the Southern political elites strove to keep the federal government away from the governance of local institutions and culture, which Southerners claimed were constitutionally protected by the 10th Amendment. Pointing to the constitutional guarantee of “states’ rights,” southern states resisted the abolition of slavery, which in 1860 resulted in the secession of eleven states. The South lost the civil war but this did not end their resistance to policies of equality.
At the end of that war the national government established the Freedman’s Bureau to expand the rights of African Americans, which was tasked with improving the educational, employment and political opportunities of the newly freed slaves and those whites who were dislocated by the war. With the help of the Bureau and the presence of federal troops, African Americans acquired land, found employment, voted in large numbers and became local elected officials. The majority of southerners did not support and continued to struggle against the efforts of the Bureau. Thus, in 1866, President Andrew Johnson vetoed congressional renewal of the Bureau and restored the distributed lands to the former white owners. Congress further curtailed the power of the agency and in 1872, the Freedman’s Bureau ceased operations.
Five years later, federal troops were withdrawn by way of the Hayes-Tilden compromise and this effectively ended all Reconstruction efforts in the South: “…sealing the fate of the vast majority of African Americans for generations and ushering in a new era of racial and class inequality. Southern states, with little federal resistance, enacted “Jim Crow” laws that segregated public spaces, curtailed voting rights, and reestablished white political, economic, and social supremacy.”
During the Great Depression of 1929/30 and the introduction of the New Deal programme, the federal government won certain powers which allowed it to interfere with interstate commerce to mould social policy. But in order to win these powers, the federal government had to agree not to threaten southern institutions.
“To obtain the necessary support of southern Democrats in Congress for his legislative agenda, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and northern Democrats agreed to a series of measures that codified racial inequities into policy. So, while black Americans benefited in some ways from the New Deal, the policies were severely limited in reach and, in many instances, served to systematically create racial segregation and poverty in communities such as New Orleans.”
I began last week by indicating that my scepticism about the capacity of federalism to help ethnic relations has its roots in the 1960s at a time when federal interventions were being used to attempt to improve the conditions of African Americans in the so-called “new south.” But here again, as writers Strolovitch et al have noted, reaction soon raised its head and plans to use federal funds to combat poverty and racial inequality were curtailed.
“The legacies of racial and economic inequality, from slavery and segregation to the exclusionary nature of federal aid, remain evident in every Southern state. Racial disparities in Louisiana and New Orleans are certainly more extreme than they are in other states, but racial inequality prevails in the former Confederacy, in no small part because of the ongoing invocation of states’ rights to justify unequal treatment and to resist federal attempts to intervene.”
The quarrel about political racism in Guyana is focused on the national level largely because most political power is thought to reside there and that this power is based on race. In the US, independent states came to a federation with their different institutions and culture. Racial inequality was very much a part of Southern culture and as such the struggle for and resistance against equality was focused at the level of the states. What the above at least indicates is that US state authorities have been willing and able to utilise their constitutional and political leverage to wrench policy concessions from the national government, many of which were inimical to the interest of African Americans.
What this also shows is that in a federalist state, national and local power can be more interrelated than the theory suggests. Dispersing significant power to the local level in a racial context such as Guyana will most likely lead to the entrenchment and expansion of local racial bases in order to seek and/or maintain local and national hegemony. Against this backdrop, next week I will consider the specific proposal suggested by Mr. Ravi Dev ((“Political Devolution:” Kaieteur News. 28/04/2013).
