Basic citizenship privileges
One section of an interview on Fresh Air on Monday:
LEVISKY: The creed to which Daniel refers and the initial establishment of strong democratic norms in this country was founded in a homogeneous society, a racially and culturally homogeneous society. It was founded in an era of racial exclusion. And the challenge is that we have now become a much more ethnically, culturally diverse society, taken major steps towards racial equality, and the challenge is making those norms stick in this new context.
DAVIES: And you do note in the book that the resolution of the conflicts around the Civil War and a restoration of kind of normal democratic institutions was accompanied by denial of voting rights and basic citizenship privileges to African-Americans in the South. So this hasn’t exactly been a laudable course all the time.
ZIBLATT: Yeah, so this is this great paradox – tragic paradox, really – that we recount in the book, which is that the consolidation of these norms, which we think are so important to democratic life of mutual toleration and forbearance, were re-established, really, at the price of racial exclusion. I mean, there was a way in which the end of Reconstruction – when Reconstruction was a great democratic effort and experiment – and it was a moment of democratic breakthrough for the United States where voting rights were extended to African-Americans. At the end of Reconstruction throughout the U.S. South, states implemented a variety of reforms to reduce the right to vote – essentially, to eliminate the right to vote for African-Americans.
There’s a major howler in that passage. It’s an interview and it’s easy to make howlers in interviews and they probably would have caught it if it had been written…but still.
That “moment of democratic breakthrough for the United States where voting rights were extended to African-Americans” during Reconstruction? Voting rights were not extended to African-Americans during Reconstruction; they were extended to African-American men. They were not extended to African-American women, nor were they extended to white women. It’s odd how women are just not considered part of the population even now, even by academics talking about democracy and norms. It’s odd how easily women are simply forgotten. It’s odd how easily the exclusion of women remains just invisible to so many people even now.
“they were extended to African-American men. They were not extended to African-American women, nor were they extended to white women.”
Women being forgotten is only odd if you’re female. Somehow, I have no idea where we got the idea, we think we’re human.
Quixote, that odd idea was imparted to me by my (virulently anti-feminist) mother and my suffragette grandmother. Both of them were ignored more often than not, and they didn’t like it, either. Even the most “women belong in the home” women (such as my mother, but not my grandmother) hate it when men treat them like children, like non-citizens, or like sex toy/cook/diaper washer.
But men? My father really does think I am a person, I suppose, but I think it is a different classification in that case. I am a woman-person, while my brothers are just persons. No hyphenation, no qualifier, necessary. Women are people (sort of) with brains (sort of) and rights (sort of), but we are not supposed to interfere with the superior male people with superior male brains and superior male rights, nor claim such superior male rights as our own. When we do, then we are radical, we’ve gone too far, we’re unreasonable. Oh, and we hate men.
The second sex, in short.