Joel Olson's book is a provocative argument for the elimination of white power in the United States. He argues that whiteness is, unlike blackness, not an identity but an illegitimate source of political privilege. Whites have constructed U.S. democracy around conceptions of freedom, equality, and citizenship that shore up their political privilege in a fundamentally bipolar racial system. This racial system admits immigrants and other persons of color only by consistently and ever more surreptitiously subordinating blacks and furthering white empowerment. Olson directs his argument against the assumption that white racism lurks in the application of liberal principles, and not in the principles themselves. He argues that a prejudicial politics is built into U.S. democracy and concludes that ridding the system of racial politics requires altering our basic principles.

The liberal principles of negative freedom, citizenship as standing, and equality as economic opportunity protect a realm of private choice from state interference. Not incidentally, these principles also set in motion a democracy founded in slavery and designed to conceal under the banner of free choice a system of economic, social, and cultural power that is anything but democratic. Negative freedom, understood as freedom from government interference, blocks from political discussion a full understanding of a positive linkage of freedom with responsibility and social obligation. Citizenship as standing turns more viable conceptions of citizenship, such as empowerment and participatory effectiveness in the democratic process, into another form of property or privilege to be exercised primarily in the private realm. Privileged citizens use their rights for the sake of private gain and at the cost of contributing to a democracy based on participation in public decision making. Finally, social equality is reduced to a formal, market-friendly policy that fails to question the rules of an economic game that perpetuates massive inequality. The result is an unreasonable avoidance of any substantial public debate on the principles that sustain democracy as white.

The system of white racial privilege emerged from Bacon's rebellion some hundred years before the American Revolution. The rebellion alarmed wealthy colonists as to the threat of Christian and non-Christian serfs, slaves, and the poor to unite and thereby challenge the system of privileges. The colonists' clever strategy was to introduce what today we understand as the norms of race through a system of unequal rights. This newly racialized system included redistributing property of blacks to poor whites. The emerging cross-class alliance of whites against blacks would preempt strong and effective labor movements, and silence more radical discussions of equality. Scientific racism and Jim Crow continued the process of racial supremacy that had already been set in motion before the Revolution. The Civil Rights movement challenged the Jim Crow system of second-class citizenship, but it left in place the norms of white privilege and the weak conception of democracy deep in the roots of our founding principles. If whiteness once translated into official standing in a formal system of legal privilege, it remains active today in a privatized system of racial norms.

These racialized norms warp principles of fairness, moral worth, and judgments of merit. The contemporary appeal among liberals and conservatives for a racially blind remedy to racism may have had its point in the days of legalized apartheid, but it fails to catch in its net of abstract concepts the concrete matrix of distorted judgments, prejudicial images, and unequal distribution of resources in the private realm. The effect of these heinous racial norms is clear in the rates of incarceration, poverty, and political participation of African Americans compared to whites. Similarly, the multicultural emphasis in education may counter images of white superiority that perpetuated Jim Crow, but liberal multiculturalism does not transform the tracking system in the public schools that set up a large number of black children to fail. Middle-class African Americans with the incomes but not the wealth of whites can be one paycheck away from the ghetto and ghetto schools, thus demonstrating that race underlies and undermines class as a basis for privilege in the United States.

The Abolition of White Democracy presents a clearly written, well-documented, history-based argument for altering the meaning of democracy. The fact that the argument is based in history is no small matter. The liberal definitions of democracy that continually fall short of locating remedies to the deeper racial makeup of our system are doomed to fail unless they can anchor their abstractions in concrete discussions of the nature of freedom in America. The history-blind approach to democratic theory in this country is just one more factor in the construction of our liberal principles through a hubristic racial system that undermines our stability, threatening eventually and tragically to bring us all down. Each chapter offers rich insights regardless of the conclusions one may draw. The book advances beyond other examinations of the impact of racism on liberal political principles by demonstrating more radically the way in which those principles were constructed through the bipolar racial matrix.

The only chapter that falters a bit is the last. This is no doubt as well the most difficult chapter to write. The last chapter promises what it admits can only be a sketch of a vision for a more radical democracy. Olson argues that this more radical vision requires the abolition of whiteness but not of African American, Native American, or Asian identities. The latter identities contain a valid cultural content, whereas the label of whiteness is nothing more than a claim to superiority. Whiteness contains no cultural content. This claim is perhaps the most controversial even among those who otherwise agree to a radical restatement of democracy beyond liberalism's various blindspots. It is also a point left more as a provocation than a full-fledged argument. In part, this is because it is not clear what the abolition of whiteness means. If it means that those who were formerly known as white take on more authentic identities, such as Irish American, Latina American, or Anglo-Protestant, the more simpleminded white–black dichotomy might yield to a more nuanced system of racial or ethnic norms and social expectations. The reclaiming among whites of their formerly obscure mixed-race or ethnically distinct origins has in fact been one of the effects of the liberal multicultural movement of the past couple of decades. But this liberal multiculturalism does not accompany any radical democracy. Quite to the contrary, it seems to leave intact the systems of privilege that neoliberalism proliferates.

Olson seems to mean something more like the elimination of the various economic, cultural, and social sources of white privilege, rather than whiteness per se. This interpretation would challenge not only white privilege but also the relative privileges of Irish American, Italian, and so forth that the mere abolition of a white identity threatens to leave intact. One of Olson's examples is the tracking system in the public school system. The tracking system clearly favors whites over blacks. In the information age, the challenge to unfair white advantage in the educational system would go a long ways toward correcting inequalities. The question is how to alter such a devastating system of privilege. While he clearly asks the right questions, there will be disagreement with his proposed draft of a solution. The rhetoric and policy of leveling whites to the standing of blacks may be a just if tragic revenge, but it is also not likely to take power from whites, and may have disastrous implications for children generally. Wealthier families would be even more likely to educate their children in private schools, leaving the public school system deeper in crisis. More positive programs might focus instead on the need for resources for urban public schools, in part funded through reparations for slavery. Of course, any idea for increased resources for the public realm is not likely to do well in a climate of increased privatization. Privatization itself has become the new code word for white. This returns us to the need to change the basic meaning of freedom in the United States, a task that no doubt requires the kind of racial analysis that Olson goes a long way toward providing. The way out of the tragic hubris of white democracy is sadly not clear.