Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America by Jack Turner

Author:Jack Turner [Turner, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Philosophy, American, Democracy, Political Ideologies, Social Science, African American & Black Studies, Political Science, Political, General
ISBN: 9780226817125
Google: kaFKmcimUAgC
Goodreads: 13593246
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 15. An individual protesting government inaction on unemployment, Los Angeles, California, August 13, 2010. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images.

6

A New Individualism

“No more excuses.” This book began by reflecting on this refrain which arose in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election. The refrain expressed the sense that African Americans (and Latinos) had complained too much for too long about racial injustice, and that it was time for them to stop blaming society and to start taking responsibility. This book has suggested that this claim is misdirected. “No more excuses” more aptly applies to racially privileged citizens who pretend that white ancestry and white skin do not confer social and material advantages. These citizens fail to know themselves—for they fail to scrutinize their privileged position within American social structure. They fail to be responsible—for they fail to acknowledge how they benefit from racial injustice.

This argument turns on a new understanding of personal responsibility. The idea of personal responsibility that still prevails in the United States entails (1) economic self-help and (2) respecting the freedom of others. Democratic individualism takes these duties seriously, yet in contrast to atomistic individualism, it attends carefully to self-help’s background conditions, and it interprets the duty of respecting others’ freedom in light of them: respecting others’ freedom requires working to ensure that they have freedom’s educational and material prerequisites. Because this is a social duty, it implicates each of society’s members. In modern societies, this duty is shared among millions, making the problem of free riding loom large. Democratic individuals can address this problem by empowering democratic government to execute this duty on their behalf. But because democratic government always acts in its constituents’ name, civic vigilance is vital if citizens are to avoid complicity.1

In the modern American context, democratic individualism also demands attending to the ways race structures the distribution of goods needed to practice freedom (e.g., nutritious food, decent housing, affordable health care, effective education, and opportunities for work at a living wage). Responsible democratic individuals must awaken to the history of slavery and Jim Crow and to how that history still lives in contemporary inequalities of opportunity. One must ask oneself where one sits within this structure of inequality, and if one is on the better end of it, make the personal sacrifices needed to release oneself and one’s fellow citizens from it. In other words, if one benefits from structural racial inequality, one must contribute a greater-than-equal share to realizing substantive equality of opportunity.

Given the background of racial innocence and denial, how might advocates for racial justice provoke more of their fellow citizens to awaken to race? I propose that they do so through rhetorical jujitsu—using the force of individualist rhetoric against those enlisting it on behalf of color-blind, atomistic individualism.2 Instead of mourning the predominance of (atomistic) individualist rhetoric in American political culture, advocates for racial justice should instead publicly reconstitute that rhetoric in ways that further more substantively democratic, racially just outcomes.

Rhetorical Jujitsu

Democratic individualist rhetorical jujitsu involves several argumentative moves. First, though advocates

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