JULIET HOOKER:
I'm Juliet Hooker.
I'm a professor in the
Department of Political
Science, and it's my
pleasure to welcome you
to Seeing Beyond the Veil--
Race-ing Key Concepts
in Political Theory,
which is an effort of
many people on campus.
It was conceived
in collaboration
with my colleague Melvin
Rogers in political science
and a number of people in
political science in the Center
for the Study of
Race and Ethnicity,
and as well as the Pembroke
Center have provided
immense support in making
this possible, and, of course,
the first day we're
here at the Pembroke
Center for the Study of Women.
And I'll be thanking people
in much more detail later,
but I just want to note
that nothing like this
happens without tons of
effort from lots of folks.
So I just want to
say a little bit
before we begin with our
first panel about what we are
hoping the conference will do.
And we begin with the
following premise,
which is that for political
theorists working on race,
the present moment is
somewhat paradoxical.
On the one hand, we're
witnessing the success
of avowed white supremacist and
xenophobic political projects
in the political arena.
While on the other
hand, scholarship
on race in political theory
is not only thriving,
but is one of the
areas producing
some of the more exciting
critical theoretical
interventions in the field.
So how does work on race push
us to reformulate or abandon
established concepts
in political theory?
And we hope that
the participants
in this conference,
many of whom draw
on the archive of
black political thought
to make powerful
interventions in how we think
about key philosophical
concepts, such as justice,
freedom, democracy,
et cetera, will
help us to think
through that question
because they, in many
ways, challenge us
to think these concepts anew.
And we've brought together
some of the folks who
have been doing this
work for a long time,
some new and exciting voices.
And we think this is a very
exciting group of people
to have convened, along
with the folks here
at Brown who are
also doing this work
to think about how work on
race and political theory
might be reshaping the field.
At dinner last night,
a couple of people
pointed out that they
do not actually consider
themselves political theorists.
We have adopted them
anyway, but, obviously, this
is not a conversation
that's happening
only in political theory, but
also in many other fields.
And in many ways, I want to note
that this question corresponds
to a provocation
that was actually
prompted by Charles Mills' own
reflections in his recent book
Black Rights/White Wrongs on the
impact of his ongoing project,
to borrow the felicitous
phrasing of his that
prompted the title of the
panel, to occupy liberalism.
In evaluating the impact
of this project in terms
of the success of
his bestselling
The Racial Contract,
which appeared in 1997,
Mills has a rather
pessimistic assessment
of the success of the
project, observing
that the effect of the
racial contract on quote,
"mainstream political philosophy
in general and social contract
theory in particular has been
close to zero," end quote.
While we can debate whether
Mills' assessment is accurate,
it raises questions
about the relationship
between black political
thought and political theory.
Are we using black
political thought
to speak to political theory,
or are fundamental concepts
in political theory being
transformed by the greater
attention thinkers and texts in
that tradition are receiving?
Should this be one of the
aims of our collective work,
or is this formulation
of the question
itself a philosophical
and political trap?
So these are some of
the background questions
that we hope we can think
about over the next two days
as we listen to fascinating work
by the brilliant folks we're
delighted to have been able to
convene to think collectively
in this event.
Thank you for coming.
[APPLAUSE]
SHARON KRAUSE: Welcome
again, everybody.
I'm Sharon Krause from the
political science department.
I'm delighted to be
chairing our first panel--
Can We Occupy Liberalism?
I'm going to introduce
our two speakers.
They'll each go for
about 20 minutes,
and then we'll have time
for lots of conversation.
Charles Mills is distinguished
professor of philosophy
at CUNY Grad Center.
He's the author of
many books as you
know, including The Racial
Contract, Blackness Visible,
From Class to Race,
Contract and Domination,
and most recently, Black
Rights/White Wrongs.
His paper is called "Blackening
Blackened-Up White Liberalism."
And Chip Turner is
associate professor
of political science at the
University of Washington.
Among other things, he's the
author of Awakening to Race--
Individualism and Social
Consciousness in America,
is co-editing with Melvin the
soon to be in print African
American Political Thought--
A Collected History, and now
is working on a book called
Existential Democracy--
Death and Politics
in Walt Whitman.
We'll start with Charles.
CHARLES MILLS: OK,
so just with respect
to that last comment
that Juliet made,
I'm happy to report
to this audience
that recently I was invited
to the 50th anniversary
of A Theory of Justice in 2021.
So if that's not respectability,
I don't know what is.
So as I approach my retirement--
oh, that guy Mills--
[INAUDIBLE] make
a token appearance
before he exits into the sunset.
OK, no, I mean, I was
actually serious about that.
That's actually true.
I was not making that up.
So let me begin by
thanking the organizers
in general and Juliet
Hooker and Melvin Rogers
in particular for inviting me
to this important conference.
As I don't need to tell
anyone in this room,
events of the past
few years should
have definitively dispelled the
widespread delusion at least
among white Americans
that Barack Obama's 2008
election signaled that
we had at last become
a post-racial society.
Race and white supremacy
remain enduringly
central to the nation as, of
course, they have always been.
And any successful
political project
to bring about a more
egalitarian society, a more
perfect union, must begin by
acknowledging, rather than
evading, this reality.
This has, of course, been the
mission of the Afro Modern
political tradition
from the beginning,
both in the United
States and elsewhere,
unsurprisingly so,
since there could hardly
be a greater gulf between
Western modernity's pretensions
and Western modernity's
actuality than that
manifest in racial
chattel slavery.
From [INAUDIBLE] to
Black Lives Matter,
we find an overriding concern
with the key questions
of how best to erase
racial subordination,
and the obvious
related question,
how best to overcome it.
As the opening program
statement well summarizes,
this has inevitably required
an engagement with the master's
tools, whether through
direct adoption,
modified adaptation,
or outright rejection,
whether in Black Abolitionism,
Black Nationalism
and Pan-Africanism,
Black Anti-Colonialism
and Anti-Imperialism,
Black Liberalism
and Black Marxism,
Black Feminism
and Black Conservatism.
So my title, "Blackening
Blackened-Up White Liberalism,"
indicates my own
line of argument,
that we can and should
try to occupy liberalism,
bring into bear on this task
key theoretical insights
and resources of the
Afro Modern tradition.
Though it is increasingly
coming under challenge,
Liberalism is
generally recognized
to be the most successful
political ideology
of modernity.
And it has, of course, been
the dominant political ideology
in the United States.
So as I point out in
one of the two essays
I am submitted for
people to skim over,
the [INAUDIBLE] in Occupy
Liberalism, and as we all know,
it has been a very
illiberal Liberal theory,
a liberalism of exclusion
and particularism
rather than inclusion
and universalism.
This has been true, not just for
race, but for gender and class
also.
Liberal democracy, a term
we now take for granted,
would have been seen
as close to oxymoronic
for the classic
Liberal theorists,
for whom the need for
restrictions on the franchise
was obvious.
Even white women
don't get the vote
until the 20th century for the
most part, hundreds of years
after what is
normally taken to be
the birth of the modern epoch.
So Liberalism has been both
Bourgeois and patriarchal,
a liberalism of class
and gender privilege.
So the obvious question
is, why has this been so?
So for those of you
who had the time
to skim over Occupy
Liberalism, you'll
have seen that I
suggest there are
two main kinds of
explanation-- sorry, two
main kinds of answer, an
internalist explanation
or an externalist explanation.
Then internalist
explanation attributes
this exclusionary dynamic
to intrinsic features
of Liberalism itself
as an ideology.
the grounding
assumptions, key concepts,
and crucial frameworks
are so constructed,
it is claimed, that
oppression of some subset
of the human population,
perhaps even the majority
of the human population,
is inevitable.
Liberalism as an ideology
would then itself
be the classic exemplar of
what Audre Lorde indicted
as the master's tools.
And no reclamation, no positive
engagement is possible.
And emancipatory
politics will have
to set up its theoretical house
elsewhere and be anti-liberal
in its guiding assumptions.
By contrast, the
externalist explanation,
which is the one
I favor, locates
the problem in what we could
think of as "material factors."
I did my dissertation
on Marxism,
but I am trying to keep quiet.
So every now and then,
it sort of resurfaces.
So the particular
social groups who
were coming to dominance at the
time of Liberalism's formation
in the 18th Century
in Western Europe
and who have continued
to be dominant today,
their particular group
interests and their success
in carrying out their
group political projects--
from this perspective,
Liberalism
should be seen as
plural rather than
singular, as diverse
rather than monolithic,
and above all as all, as
open rather than closed,
lending itself to
different possibilities.
So the claim of externalist
folks, such as myself,
would be that we find it hard
to recognize these alternatives
because our cognitive
horizons have
been so shaped by the
existing dominant forms
of Liberal theory.
But this constriction
of the social imaginary
is not due to an objective
apprehension of Liberalism's
supposedly insufferable
limitations,
but as a consequence of the
hegemonic conceptual grip
the ruling group's
power exercises over us.
Different liberalisms
are possible.
So within the academy, given
its overwhelming whiteness,
the best known examples of
this revisionist exercise
are Left Social
Democratic Liberalism
and Feminist Liberalism.
Social Democratic
Liberalism, inspired in part
by the Marxist
critique, argues that
unconstrained capitalist
class domination
is inconsistent with
Liberalism's pretensions
to safeguard an
individual freedom
and that curbs on
the power of capital
are necessary with material
realization of this promise.
Feminist Liberalism
argues that the continuing
caste inferiority
of white women is
inconsistent with Liberalism's
pretensions of rejecting
descriptive hierarchies of
the pre-modern social order,
and that achievement
of genuine equality
requires elimination
of male domination.
So in both cases, the project
of retrieving Liberalism
requires a remapping of the
topography of the polity,
a revisioning of official
social epistemology,
and a rethinking of
the social ontology.
Above all, the central
normative issue
is shifted from the question
of our political obligation
to the state to the
question of social justice,
whether in its more restricted
incarnation as class justice
or as including gender justice.
So what I'm now
suggesting, that we
need to see Afro
Modern political
thought, in at least
some of its strains,
as raising a parallel challenge.
I am not of course
claiming that everybody
under this broad umbrella can
be categorized as a Liberal,
and certainly not
that they necessarily
thought of themselves as such.
As the British political
theorist Duncan Bell has
pointed out in an important
recent art in political theory,
Liberal has very much
become a term of art,
used retrospectively, and in
a sense anachronistically,
to characterize people by virtue
of their location in what we
are now after the fact
constructing as a coherent
several-hundred-years'-old
political tradition.
So I am in effect invoking
these relaxed norms,
and saying that,
by these criteria,
we can reconstruct a long
tradition of Afro Modern
Liberalism, Black
Liberalism that is radically
different from the
mainstream one,
and which is in fact oriented
in significant measure
by the imperative of critiquing.
From this perspective, the
problem with Liberalism
has never been its
putative abstractness
or its concrete shaping by
white racial domination.
It is not at all
that what we are now
calling Classical
Liberalism ignored race,
but that for the most part it
took white racial superiority
for granted,
thereby being what I
have been calling in my
work a Racial Liberalism,
or what the political
theorist Jennifer Pitts calls
an Imperial Liberalism.
So that the metaphor I've
used of blackening up
from the racist American
tradition of the Minstrel show
serves as a metaphor here,
in that White Liberalism is
predicated on racist
representations of Blacks,
and more generally,
people of color,
so it is already racialized.
And the Black Liberal
critique is not
trying to introduce race
into a non-racial discourse,
but urging that we recognize
in multiple ways in which
that discourse is
already a racial one,
and prescribing accordingly a
reconstruction of Liberalism
on a foundation
of racial equality
rather than racial hierarchy.
So [? blackening ?] means
rejection of blackened up,
i.e., the purging of racist
frameworks and assumptions
from existing dominant
Liberal theory, whether overt
or covert, and the re-imagining
of Liberalism's mapping
of the polity, its
social epistemology,
and its social ontology.
So what would this
come to in practice?
Well, to begin with,
I am suggesting
it would require the
acknowledgement of the White
supremacist nature of
the polities created
by Western modernity, not
just in the United States,
but far more broadly.
Liberal Democracy,
to the extent that it
has been promoted as a
description in these countries,
is, at best, aspirational.
The reality has been, in
the phrase of Pierre van den
Berghe, Herrenvolk democracy.
As David Theo Goldberg argued
in more than a decade ago
in his book The Racial State,
the modern state in general
is a racial state.
And in fact, Michael's
presentation later on
and recent interesting
work in classical studies,
in medieval studies,
is making a case
that the racial state
goes back to antiquity.
There is a book I
haven't read yet
that I have ordered on
Amazon by Geraldine Heng.
Argues that the
first racial state--
she thinks it's really
in the Medieval period,
in the Classical period.
But she argues for the British
State in the 11th, 12th Century
as being a racial state
vis-a-vis the Jewish population
there.
So it means that
part of what you'd
be doing in this reconstructed
Afro Modern tradition,
and sort of Liberally
in a section of it,
is to say, societies
calling themselves
Liberal Democrat in
the Modern period
have really been racial states.
And as such, it
means that there has
been a huge gap between
their self-conception
and their actual
sort of reality,
in terms of all the
things I mentioned before.
So the example I use,
not in the two papers
that I sort of sent to you
guys, but in a recent long essay
I did for the University
of Kentucky Press Political
Companion Series-- so
this year, it was one,
appeared both on WEB Du Bois.
And Neil here edited one
on Frederick Douglass.
And I made a case in my essay
in the Du Bois collection,
though this might
seem outrageous,
for Du Bois as a
Black radical Liberal.
So that's a term
I have been using,
that you can have a
liberalism that incorporates
the crucial radical insights
of the Black tradition,
whether from the Black
Nationalist and Pan-Africanist
traditions, Black Feminist
traditions, appropriation
of Marxism by the
Black tradition,
and you can nonetheless
do that within a radically
modified Liberal framework.
In the case of Du Bois, I make
a case for his intervention
in four crucial areas.
First of all is social
ontology of Liberalism,
standardly we sort of
had it represented to us,
is an ontology of abstract,
atomic individuals.
And that's quite false,
because to begin with,
even within the
mainstream tradition,
if you think of Locke,
Locke's individuals
are actually already social.
So before you have the
creation of the state in Locke,
you have individuals
as in social relations,
so extensive in fact
that you have money.
You have trade.
You have all kinds of stuff.
So even in Locke,
mainstream guy like Locke,
in the tradition of
liberalism inspired
by Hegel, TH Green,
the British Hegelians,
this is made even more explicit.
And the liberalism you have
is one in which individuals
are very much shaped by
social memberships, community,
and so forth.
So Liberalism's sort of atomic
individualist representation
really represents just
one strand of Liberalism.
And there is no
inconsistency, as we've
seen in a more 20th century
reference, American reference,
John Dewey, there is no
inconsistency in talking
about a Liberalism that is
social which sort of realizes
the extent to it sort of
shape their social forces.
So the specifically
Black input into this,
as I say, using Du Bois as a
sort of key representative,
is to argue that the social
ontology of modernity
is very much shaped by race.
And you can see Du Bois's sort
of taking up this theme, decade
after decade over his
career working out
a social ontology of race,
from the sort of original 1897
essay, The Conservation of
Races, where it's somewhat
ambiguous and there is both
sort of social construction
and biological factors,
and then his later
famous aphorism, a black man
is a person sort of forced
[INAUDIBLE] Jim Crow and his
more sort of constructor's
analysis, but the crucial point
being that we need to recognize
races as crucial constituents
of the sort of ontology
of the modern world,
which then means that we also
need to take into account how
this group membership shapes
us from a psychological point
of view and how it constitutes
an obstacle historically
to whites signing on to
a racial justice agenda.
And then his second
point sort of coming out
of that is that the social
ontology is not merely
an ontology of differential
positioning from a material
point of view as you find in
Marxism, where, of course,
the Marxist critique
is that we need
to recognize the class ontology
in the White working class.
Even though they're nominally
equal in terms of morality
and legal system,
they are materially
subordinated by the
forces of the class order.
And the Du Boisian critique,
the Afro Modern critique is,
I'm suggesting, a deeper
critique than that,
because the Afro Modern
critique is saying,
not merely is it
the case that Blacks
and other people of color
are materially subordinated,
but that they have a
lower moral status.
So Marx emphasized the
White working class
are normatively equal.
How then are they exploited?
Well, of course,
Volume I of Kapital
is trying to explain
that, that you
can have exploitation
even though you have
a seemingly exchange of equals.
The crucial point of Du Bois
and the Black radical tradition
is that people of color
are not normatively
equal in the first place.
So in terms of
social recognition,
in terms of how they're
sort of seen in the society,
they represent a
morally degraded group.
And the point then is that,
in narrative of modernity
that we tell, I mean, we
tell our students when we're
being careless and sloppy, that
modernity brings into existence
the equalization
of the population
by comparison with sort
of pre-modern inequalities
of the ancient or
the medieval world.
That narrative is
radically false.
It really only
works for White men.
White women do not become equal.
And people of color
do not become equal.
And what that means,
if you think about it,
the majority of
the population are
unequal in Liberal modernity.
And it then means that,
any serious attempt
to sort of bring into
realization Liberal ideals
is going to have to take
this inequality into account.
OK, I also argue
that in Du Bois,
you also find a concept
of exploitation that's
different from the Marxist
concept, that does not
rely on the labor theory
of value, which as you know
has become very
contested, and that most
Marxists, in fact, have stopped
endorsing it, and of course
was dismissed in mainstream
economic theory from way
back in the 19th
Century, but that you
can make a case within
a Liberal framework
for racial exploitation
that does not
rely on such dubious
Marxist assumptions.
You can just use the
respectable Liberal concept
of unjust enrichment.
And once you do that, and once
you sort of broaden the scope
of your theoretical lenses,
you can then see that racial
exploitation has been central
to Western modernity from
the start, not merely the
obvious cases of chattel
slavery, and colonial forced
labor, and indigenous--
oh my god, two minutes--
expropriation, but
continued exploitation
in terms of the ghetto,
and the fact that people
don't get an equal
education, don't
get a chance to sort find
out where the jobs are,
et cetera, et cetera.
So that huge body of work which
mainstream philosophers have
utterly ignored which you can
find in sociology, in terms
of the gap in wealth between
White and Black households
and how it's getting larger
rather than small, all of that
then needs to be seen.
This is what a racialized
Liberal polity,
a White supremacist polity,
this is what it rests on.
So what we're calling
White privilege,
focus tends to be
on things that are
sort of less significant in
terms of everyday interaction,
and so forth.
There is a huge
material basis for it
in terms of racial exploitation.
And then finally, Du
Bois also argues that one
of the manifestations of
a racial polity will be
the violation of the Liberal
norm of transparency,
because you cannot admit,
if you're basically adhering
to nominally Liberal
Democratic norms,
you cannot admit that the
polity is based on the systemic
subordination and exploitation
of this population of color.
So you are then going
to have a set of norms,
a set of overarching
concepts, and set
of practices in which
what is entrenched
is going to be social opacity.
So the central Liberal
value of social transparency
is going to be
systematically violated.
And this has been, of course,
a central theme of Africana
tradition in terms
of trying to expose
to the public view what the real
conditions of the polity are.
And you have in Du Bois'
numerous works, in a book
he reads-- sorry, in the book
that my former colleague, Aldon
Morris in sociology
at Northwestern
did in terms of
pointing that Du Bois is
the real father of
American sociology,
this huge body of work,
what you're trying to do
is sort of bring into
the public sphere
the reality that the
society is a racialized one.
So I'll stop there.
But the idea is, this is how
you can sort of bring the Afro
Modern critique
into Liberal theory,
and sort of take these
norms, and then show how the
are systematically violated.
So Black Liberalism is
start from that point,
and then say, how
can we realize them
once you take the
actuality into account?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
SHARON KRAUSE: And
now Chip Turner.
Chip's paper is called--
let's see-- "African-American
Individualism:
From the Heroic to
the Relational."
JACK TURNER: Is it on?
OK, my voice is pretty--
I tend to project, so I
think we'll be all right.
First, I want to thank Julia
and Melvin for having me here.
It's a real honor
to be in this room
with so many scholars who--
I've read and admired
for a long time.
I especially want to
acknowledge what a thrill it
is for me to be on a panel
with Charles Mills and Sharon
Krause.
I was reading them in graduate
school with great admiration.
And--
CHARLES MILLS: These are not
things one wants to hear.
[LAUGHTER]
Just say vaguely, I was
reading them some years ago.
JACK TURNER: And to be
on a panel with them
is something of a
dream come true.
So Melvin, could you
take a picture of me
with Charles and Sharon,
because I think my career
goes downhill from here.
So the question
before this panel is,
can advocates of Black
liberation and racial justice
occupy Liberalism?
My answer will be a
partial yes, but it's
the partial nature of this yes
that'll prove most interesting.
The basis of this answer
will be an analysis
of what I am calling
African-American Individualism,
a tradition of ethical
and moral individualism
extending from Frederick
Douglass, to Ralph Ellison,
to James Baldwin, a tradition
specifically addressed
to the struggle for racial
justice in the United States.
Over time, this tradition
moved from being
Liberal to post-Liberal.
And I should have said,
from Frederick Douglass,
to Ralph Ellison, to James
Baldwin, to Audre Lorde.
Over time, this tradition
moved from being
Liberal to post-Liberal.
Baldwin and Lorde
especially turned the energy
behind Liberal commitments
to life and liberty
against the Liberal
commitment to property.
And in so doing, they moved
the spirit of Liberalism
into a more Democratic
Socialist direction.
Though based on previous
work, my paper today
extends and revises that
work in substantial ways.
Let me begin by summarizing
the previous work
and then internet the
extensions, the revisions,
and their implications.
In 2012, I published a book
entitled Awakening to Race:
Individualism and Social
Consciousness in America.
That book argued that there
are two main traditions
of individuals in the United
States, an atomistic tradition
and a democratic tradition.
The atomistic tradition
insists that success in life
is mostly the result
of individual exertion.
It opposes mass collective
action and government
interference in the market.
This is a privatized
individualism criticized
by Tocqueville in
Democracy in America,
the laissez-faire individualism
espoused by conservatives,
ranging from William
Graham Sumner
to Ronald Reagan, the
individualism that underwrote
William Bennett's statement
on Election Night 2008,
that, after the election of
the first Black president,
there are no more excuses.
This is the individualism that
says that racial inequality is
the result of unequal
exertion and that the solution
to that inequality is not social
and economic reconstruction,
but rather Black and Brown
Americans pulling themselves
up by their bootstraps.
The second tradition is
democratic individualism.
As opposed to atomistic
individualism,
democratic
individualism is keenly
sensitive to the
social preconditions
of its own realization.
Political theorists George
Kateb and Nancy Rosenblum
identified its presence in the
work of Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau.
And in Awakening to Race,
I extend their account
by focusing more intensely
on the relationship
between Emerson's and Thoreau's
theories of individuality
and their contributions to
the antislavery movement.
Furthermore, I examine
the individuals
of three major African-American
political thinkers, Frederick
Douglass, Ralph Ellison,
and James Baldwin.
On the basis of the historical
and textual analysis,
I conclude that
democratic individualism
entails two civic
obligations that
both resist racial injustice.
The first is a
non-exploitation obligation,
requiring that democratic
individuals ensure
that their pursuit
of self-reliance
does not directly or indirectly
abridge that of others.
On the basis of this
obligation, Emerson and Thoreau
determined that they were bound
by self-reliance to contribute
to the anti-slavery struggle.
The second is a democratic
egalitarian obligation,
requiring democratic
individuals to help ensure
that all of society's
members have self-reliance
as material prerequisites.
On the basis of this
principle, Frederick Douglass
concluded after the Civil War
that the federal government
was obligated to provide
educational and economic
assistance to freed slaves,
though for a variety
of reasons, Douglass' support
for this principle came slowly.
And even when it came,
it was far too inhibited.
In addition, Awakening
to Race claimed
that, within the democratic
individual's tradition,
there was a distinct
African-American configuration,
one distinguishable from
of atomistic individualism
and White democratic
individualism of Emerson
and Thoreau.
Based on my reading of
Douglass, Ellison, and Baldwin,
African-American
individualism or--
Afro-American democratic
individualism,
or African-American
individualism for short,
had four distinguishing
characteristics.
First was socioeconomic
realism, that sensitivity
to the social
material prerequisites
of self-development, of belief
in a communal obligation
to guarantee them.
The second was
sensitivity to dialectics
of identity and difference,
deep awareness of the ways
personal identities are
forward through articulations
of difference and the dangers
of converting difference
into otherness.
The third is historical
consciousness,
emphasis on the ways of
historical self-understanding
as a precondition of both
self-awareness and effective
action--
and fourth, appreciation
of relinquishment
as a virtuous act, a
belief that giving up
unjustifiable advantage is not
only a moral duty, but also
a personal excellence, one
that performs commitments
to the universalization of
democratic individualist
capacities.
For the most part, I am still
committed to the argument
of Awakening to Race.
At the same time, there
are elements of it
that dissatisfied me even
at the time of publication.
And my dissatisfaction
has only grown since then.
I won't enumerate all these
points of dissatisfaction.
Instead, I will focus
on perhaps the most
major, the all-male
cast of characters.
The all-male cast have been
pointed out to me several times
since I wrote the book.
I resisted the
inference made by many
that this implied that
democratic individualism was
intrinsically masculinist,
though it struck me
that a variety of
feminist intellectuals,
from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to
Pauli Murray, to Audre Lorde,
expressed democratic
individualist sensibilities
and ideals.
The tenure clock did not allow
me to spend one to two more
years researching
and writing a chapter
on one of these figures.
I, through [INAUDIBLE],,
wrote an apologetic end note
and published the
book as is, yet
I came away from the
process determined
to make good on a
claim that there
could be a feminist
democratic individualism.
I spent the next
several years writing
the chapter on
Audre Lorde that I
wish I could have included
in Awakening to Race.
It turns out I was right.
There is no way I could
have completed the chapter
by the end of my tenure clock.
It took three years of research,
writing, and rewriting,
including a week in
Audre Lorde's papers
at Spelman, to produce
an account of Lorde
I could stand behind.
This chapter is now forthcoming
in the African-American
Political Thought of
Collected History Anthology
that Melvin and I are
editing and submitting
this month to the
University of Chicago Press.
In the course of
doing this research,
I discovered that the
only responsible way
to approach a question
of individuality in Lorde
was through a
comprehensive analysis
of the key-word difference
in our political thought.
The difference is the
Lorde's conceptual lodestar.
And she uses the word in
four distinct senses--
first, difference as a pretext
for division and domination,
second, difference
as differentiation
in group experience
and perspective,
third, difference as a site
a personal and political
growth, and fourth, difference
as a marker of individuality.
So I'm going to spend some
time talking about the four
senses of difference,
but I really
want to emphasize in my
analysis of the fourth sense
of difference is nested within
my analysis of the first three
senses of difference.
If you would like me to
talk about the first three
senses of difference, I'm happy
to do so within the Q and A.
The fourth sense of difference
appears in several texts
where Lorde emphasizes a
need for political and social
movements to respect
members' individuality.
You do not have
to be me in order
us to fight alongside
each other,"
Lorde reflects in
Learning from the 60s.
"I do not have to
be you to recognize
that our wars are the same.
What we must do is
commit ourselves
to some future that
can include each other
and to work toward that future
with the particular strengths
of our individual identities.
And in order to do this,
we must allow each other
our differences at the same time
as we recognize our sameness."
"Difference," in
the final sentence,
refers unmistakably to
individual-level variety.
Distinctions
between individuals,
Lorde argues, are
ethically salient
and require careful
attention and acknowledgment.
Lorde frames individuality, not
as an obstacle to coalition,
but rather as a source
of creative power.
She calls on her audience
to commit themselves
to a shared future of
egalitarian inclusiveness
that treats a plurality
of individual identities
as a political resource.
Lorde's fourth
sense of difference
also comes through in
an on-camera interview
and a documentary film,
A Litany for Survival:
The Life and Work
of Audre Lorde.
"One of the lessons that I
think the '60s needs to teach us
is that liberation is not the
private province of any one
particular group.
We are individuals.
We are particular people.
And we have
differences that we can
use that we need to
recognize, identify,
and use in our common goals,
in our common struggles."
On the one hand, the primary
subject of the statement
is liberation, which
we should understand
as a coalitional project among
multiple overlapping groups--
women, Black people, gays and
lesbians, the poor, the ill,
the disabled.
In this respect, the statement's
emphasis is trans-individual.
On the other hand,
Lorde's language
of individuals, in particular
people, is emphatic.
So when Lorde says, we have
differences we can use,
we may confidently infer that
she means not only differences
between identity groups,
but also differences
between individuals.
The two in fact are
mutually constitutive.
And one way identity
groups emerge
is when individuals who
share a common oppression
come together, communicate
about that oppression,
and forge a language
expressing their identity
as an oppressed group.
In an address entitled Survival,
delivered at a Black writers'
conference at Howard
University in 1976,
Lorde defined peoplehood in
these individualistic terms.
She said, quote, "a people
is a group of individuals
who share some part of their
mutual self-definition," end
quote.
Individuals of course draw
on inherited traditions
and surrounding
cultures to forge
new articulations
of group identity,
but though these
new articulations
are indebted to
the old, they still
reflect the agency of
the individuals who
transform the old into the new.
So analyzing and identifying
Lorde's individualism
augmented my
argument in Awakening
to Race that there is an
authentically democratic
tradition of individualism in
American and African-American
thought.
At the same time, identifying
that individualism
forced me to revise
my previous conception
of democratic individualism in
important and even surprising
ways.
What is most striking
about Lorde's defenses
of individuality is
that they preponderantly
occur in her discussions
of the ethics
and politics of coalition.
It is a commonplace that
Lorde never fit comfortably
into any of the social movements
in which she participated.
She was too womanish for
the Civil Rights movement,
too Black for second-wave
feminism and gay rights,
too old for the Combahee
River Collective.
She embodied the problem
of intersectional isolation
before intersectionality
was even a word.
She used a large repertoire
of rhetoric weapons
to combat this isolation,
but one of these
was individualist discourse.
Employing that
discourse to carve out
space for nonconformity
within identity-based social
movements, she brought
into sharp relief
the relational
dependencies that attend
the struggle for not just
individuality, but integrity
and survival.
Coming to terms with
the way that Lorde's
relational individualism
exceeded my previous conception
of democratic individualism
also dovetailed
with a criticism of my
interpretation of Baldwin
offered by Black feminist,
pragmatist, and critical race
theorist Denise James
at a 2013 roundtable
on Awakening to Race at the
Annual Meeting of the Eastern
Division of the American
Political Philosophical
Association.
Though generally
favorable toward the book,
James argued that Baldwin's
emphasis on a relationality
bursts the frame of
democratic individualism.
Quote-- this is Denise James--
"the relationship of
self to others in Baldwin
has a level of importance.
And I am not convinced Turner's
democratic individualism can
permit Baldwin's work signals
a form of humanism that
centers relational life at the
core of human fulfillment," end
quote.
Reflecting on Lorde's
distinctive individualism
together with James' criticism
of my reading of Baldwin,
it occurred to me that
African-American individualist
tradition contained
two different strands,
a heroic individualist strand
and a relational individualist
strand.
It'd be tempting to say that
Douglass and Ellison represent
the heroic and that Baldwin and
Lorde represent the relational,
but that would be an
oversimplification.
Though predominantly
heroic individualists,
Douglass and Ellison
have relational moments.
And though predominantly
relational individualists,
Baldwin and Lorde
have heroic moments.
All four thinkers contain
mixtures of the heroic
and the relational, though
in different ratios.
So roughly, if we
can say that Douglass
is six parts heroic and
two parts relational
and Ellison five parts heroic
and three parts relational,
then Baldwin is five parts
relational three parts heroic
and Lorde is six parts
relational, two parts heroic.
That's a vast
oversimplification,
but I want to just give
you the general idea.
And though ethical commitments
can't be, of course,
quantified, it's
still helpful to think
of heroic and
relational strains of
African-American individualism
as inversely related.
And so if he were to try--
this is the first time
I've ever used a graph.
But in this instant,
it seemed appropriate,
just so it could
demonstrate or show
the inverse relation
between the heroic
and the relational element.
And one thing I think is
also interesting about this,
it helps us see the way
in which individualism
within the
African-American tradition
moves from a Liberal
configuration in Douglass
and Ellison to a post-Liberal
configuration in Baldwin
and Lorde.
So the question is, does the
textual evidence bear out
is new conceptualization of
African-American individualism
as a two-stranded tradition?
In the paper, I offer
a brief comparison
of some passages from
Douglass to Lorde in order
to show that the textual
evidence does largely--
although, indeed
it's going to require
a much longer paper for me
to fully bear out that claim.
And so one of the
things I do in the paper
is I analyze a few
passages from Douglass
that I analyzed in
Awakening To Race,
but one of the things
that comes into clearer
view through this prism is the
Liberal capitalist aesthetics
of Douglass' configuration
of self-making
as making productive value.
And then I then contrast it
with Lorde's essay, Man Child:
A Black Lesbian
Feminist's Response,
which is discussing about
her relationship with her son
Jonathan and the way in which
Jonathan's self-formation,
how it comes into focus
through opposition,
through a productive opposition
to her own maternal practices.
And so it focuses on
the relational setting
of individual self-formation.
So I am going to conclude
with this so-what question.
Even if there is an
African-American individualist
tradition, and even
if it is comprised
of competing heroic
and relational strands,
why is this politically
interesting?
First, identifying
African-American individualism
as a two-strand
tradition interweaving
the heroic and the
relational helps
clarify that tradition's vexed
relationship to Liberalism.
Though Douglass and Ellison
are widely and justifiably
seen as Liberal thinkers,
Baldwin and Lorde
are widely and justifiably
seen as critics
or even enemies of Liberalism.
It may be that the different
ratios of the heroic
and the relational
in their thought
helps explain why the
first two are unmistakably
Liberal and the latter
two post-Liberal.
It may be that the
different ratios generate
different orientations
toward property rights,
as well as toward the spirit
of possessiveness and exchange
relations that property
rights generate.
Douglass was a fervent
defender of the natural right
to property.
Ellison was a
Cold-War Liberal who
accepted both provisions
for and limits
on property set by Roosevelt's
New Deal and Johnson's Great
Society.
Baldwin is a critic
of property, not just
as an economic
institution, but as
a form of political
relationship.
He attacked the legally,
violently, enforced exclusion
at the conceptual
heart of property,
writing that, "freedom
is not a matter
of keeping everyone else out
of your backyard," and quote.
Lorde was an ambivalent
Marxist, who,
though she valued hard
work as a sign of virtue,
endorsed revolutionary
socialist politics.
If the holy triumvirate
of Liberalism
is life, liberty, and property,
Douglass, Ellison, and Baldwin
are united in life and liberty,
but divided on property.
Could it be that there
are elective affinities
between heroic
figurations of the self
and Liberal property
relations on the one hand
and between relational
figurations nations of the self
and democratic
socialism on the other?
Second, clarifying the existence
of relational individualist
tradition may help answer
a question that has long
vexed democratic
individualism-- what
are democratic
individualist politics?
It has been held by many that
democratic individualism may
be fine as ethics but that it
is insufficient for articulating
a politics adequate
to the problems
of late-modern democracy,
largely because it
is so inhibited about
mass democratic action
and political solidarity.
Lorde provides
democratic individualism
a way out of this impasse.
Whereas Emerson, Thoreau,
Ellison, and Baldwin all
practice literary
forms of citizenship
and engage in various forms
of consciousness raising
in public exemplarity,
none forthrightly
answer the question of what
a positive mass democratic
politics looks like.
Lorde, however, does, in her
essay "Learning from the '60s."
She writes, "Militancy no
longer means guns at high noon,
if it ever did.
It means actively working
for change, sometimes
in the absence of any surety
that change is coming.
It means doing the
unromantic and tedious work
necessary to forge
meaningful coalitions.
It means recognizing which
coalitions are possible
and which are not.
It means knowing the
coalition, like unity,
means a coming together of
whole, self-actualized human
beings, focused and believing,
not fragmented automatons
marching to prescribed step."
The mass politics
of individuality
is a politics of coalition,
forging political solidarity
across individual and
group differences,
but doing so in ways
respectful of the autonomy
of individual members.
Lorde's ethics and
politics of coalition
provides a bridge between
claims of individuality
and the demands of mass
democratic politics.
Finally, African-American
Individualism offers a window
into both the virtues and the
limits of Liberalism itself.
Douglass, Ellison,
Baldwin, and Lorde
are all committed to
ideals of self-development
and nonconformity central
to the Liberal tradition,
yet they part ways on
questions of property,
as well as on
questions of what is
necessary to form a free self.
As we move from the
heroic to the relational
in African-American
thought, love and care
take on increasing
political significance.
It may be that the
balance of the heroic
and the relational elements
in Douglass's Ellison's,
Baldwin's, and Lorde's
respective individualisms
play a decisive role in
orienting them toward property,
care, and love, and that
decides whether they
are Liberal or
something more radical,
something post-Liberal.
In so far as Baldwin
and Lorde however
are models of the more
radical, more relational, more
socialist politics
that Americans need,
we must at the same time observe
how much this politics is still
grounded in the traditional
Liberal commitment
to freedom and equal dignity
of individual selves.
Post-Liberal relationally
individualist politics
only achieved its identity
by occupying Liberalism.
The question is, where does
the occupation go from here?
How will it take Liberalism
further beyond itself?
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
