Who Counts?

The Constitution of the United States took a little more than 100 days to develop, yet it has taken 200 years and counting to fully realize. In it, the framework of this nation was established, and the process for building the nation was outlined with both painstaking detail and maddening vagueness.

The Constitution sought to establish a nation where freedom could take root—through the theft of sovereign land, the attempted genocide of the original stewards of that land and the enslavement of what would turn out to be millions of human beings. In an attempt to escape the tyranny of a corrupt monarchy, the so-called founding fathers mimicked much of what they left behind.

The project of building a new nation, while in some ways a departure from the most egregious offenses experienced under monarchical rule, was still predicated on the principles of power over rather than power with. The result was a new nation built on a system that had existed for hundreds of years: one person at the top, now with a series of checks and balances to ensure that no one person could abuse their power. In the end, more people got to be powerful, and rules were designed to make sure those powerful people kept their power.

Power, broadly defined, is the ability to make decisions over your own life and the lives of others. There are different forms of power, and political power—the ability to decide how decisions are made—is what the Constitution sought to establish. The Constitution did not seek to transform power itself, nor did it ever promise to. Instead, it ensured that more people had access to the ultimately corrupt forms of power that some had been denied.

The Constitution was an extraordinarily ambitious project but perhaps one that was doomed to fail from its inception.

I think about the Constitution often these days. I wonder how it came to be that a few dozen dudes with powdered wigs and slaves could come together for a few months and hammer out a whole series of systems that would not only have an undeniable impact on my life many generations later but would also set the terms for the fights of today. Did the dudes in wigs anticipate that 200-plus years later we would have someone leading the country with a wig of much lower caliber?

All insults aside, I’ve heard it said many times that the Constitution was designed for moments like this one, when everything is at stake. I don’t have any way of knowing what its authors’ intentions were—given the fact that people like me were counted as only three fifths of a human being, primarily for the purpose of apportioning power and resources—but I can confidently say this: Who counts, who gets to decide and who shapes the rules that define what the decisions are in the first place—all of this matters. A lot.

Who counts is predicated, at least in the Constitution of this nation, on power—who gets it, who doesn’t. That is why no woman was assured the right to vote until the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920—a century ago this year and 133 years after the Constitution was written. It is why a black person who was enslaved did not count as a whole person until 1868, three years after slavery was formally abolished and more than 80 years after the first draft of the Constitution was written.

Millions of people across the nation show up every four years to make their opinions known. Who makes the rules, and who shapes the terrain on which the rules are made, is arguably more important than our political parties and the ideologies that once defined them. Meanwhile, voter suppression, gerrymandering and redistricting loom over our polling places, along with a host of other pressing issues including climate disaster, police violence, equal pay and health care.

This year brings a new decade as well as what may be one of the most important elections of my lifetime. There is much more at stake than who becomes the commander in chief; this is a fight for who counts and who gets to shape the laws the rest of us are governed by. What happens in the 2020 election will have an undeniable impact on the structure and function of democracy itself.

Over the past decade we saw social movements emerge across the country, from Occupy Wall Street to Idle No More to Black Lives Matter to MeToo to the Women’s March. These movements unearthed what had previously been below the surface: financial instability as a result of the rampant speculation and greed allowed by capitalism; climate devastation and its human impact; state-sanctioned violence and anti-black racism; racialized resentment and antagonism; sexual assault and violence at the hands of the powerful. What was once invisible erupted like geysers, and finally the whole world could witness, examine, contemplate and take a side.

The writers in this Symposium are some of the sharpest thinkers and doers in the country. They are the courageous ones who stand with those who have not had a seat at the table, those the table was deliberately designed not to accommodate. Here, we explore critical questions facing our country today: who matters, how change happens, who is being left behind and what we can do to transform the way power operates—once and for all.

Alicia Garza is co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement and founder of Black Futures Lab, which aims to empower black voters.