THE PLAYBOY SYMPOSIUM On Voting & Democracy

Our Symposium guest editor is a Black Lives Matter co-founder and voting-rights activist; her insights into the myth of American power could not be more urgent

Who Counts?

BY ALICIA GARZA

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.