Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities)

Race and the Politics of Solidarity The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality ...

Author: Juliet Hooker

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Race and the Politics of Solidarity

The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality Rhonda Y. Williams Keepin’ It Real: School Success beyond Black and White Prudence L. Carter Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities, and the Call for a Deep Democracy J. Phillip Thompson III Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought Michael Hanchard

In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era Richard Iton Race and the Politics of Solidarity Juliet Hooker


Juliet Hooker

1 

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright ©  by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.  Madison Avenue, New York, New York  www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hooker, Juliet. Race and the politics of solidarity / by Juliet Hooker. p. cm. — (Transgressing boundaries) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN ---- . Solidarity—Political aspects. . Race relations. . Multiculturalism. . Minorities—Civil rights. I. Title. HM.H  .—dc 

         Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To my grandmother, Lilia, with love and gratitude

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Acknowledgments

W

hen I began writing this book, I took the path from which most assistant professors are actively discouraged (as it could lead to, if not professional disaster, at least heightened anxiety) and chose to write a book that departed substantially from my dissertation. The core arguments of this book have matured from a kernel of an idea in my dissertation to what I hope are now much more persuasive and well-argued claims. That was made possible in large part by the invaluable assistance of the following people and institutions. Whatever flaws remain are solely my responsibility. A number of institutions provided generous financial support that enabled me either to carry out necessary research or to have time off from teaching during which I was able to focus on writing and revising the manuscript. They included a Rockefeller postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin in –, a semester’s dean’s fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts at UT-Austin during spring , a visiting fellowship from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame during fall , a semester’s research leave from the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at UT-Austin during spring ,

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Acknowledgments

a “Junior Scholar in the Study of Democracy in Latin America” grant from the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Ford Foundation in –, and a University Co-operative Society Subvention Grant awarded by UT-Austin. The ideas in this book were fine-tuned through discussions with colleagues in a variety of fields, both at UT-Austin and at other institutions. At UTAustin, I have been especially fortunate to be surrounded by colleagues in the Center for African and American Studies and the Institute of Latin American Studies with significant expertise in racial and ethnic politics in Latin America and elsewhere. I especially wish to thank Jafari Allen, Jossianna Arroyo, Lawrie Balfour, Dan Brinks, Ted Gordon, Ken Greene, Charles Hale, Mike Hanchard, Wendy Hunter, Raúl Madrid, Mark Sawyer, Shannon Speed, and Kurt Weyland. I benefited immensely from their questions and suggestions as I presented parts of this project over the years. Other colleagues in the Department of Government at UT-Austin provided significant support, including Sean Theriault, Gretchen Ritter, and especially Jeff Tulis, who was particularly helpful in guiding a novice through the various stages of the publishing process. I am particularly indebted to the comments and suggestions of the two outside reviewers of the manuscript for Oxford University Press. Their detailed, thoughtful, and constructive criticisms of early versions helped me clarify my ideas and forced me to construct more soundly argued and defensible claims. As a scholar in the initial stages of my career, I have found it especially meaningful to receive such generous and serious engagement with my ideas, even as I sometimes despaired of ever being able to fully satisfy their exacting standards within the constraints of the tenure clock. I would also like to thank the series editors, Cathy Cohen and Fred Harris, for agreeing to include the book in the Transgressing Boundaries series. I am also grateful to Dave McBride for the remarkable efficiency and speed with which he has steered this book through the publication process at OUP. I also wish to thank the Latin American Research Review and the Latin American Studies Association for allowing me to draw heavily on “ ‘Beloved Enemies’: Race and Official Mestizo Nationalism in Nicaragua” () in the final section of chapter . This book could not have been completed without the friendship and intellectual companionship of Frank Guridy, Deborah Paredez, Jemima Pierre, and Stephen Marshall. They have all read either the entire manuscript or various chapters, in some cases multiple drafts. This is a substantially better book thanks to their input. Jemima, Frank, and Deb were part

Acknowledgments

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of the Chapter  Collective writing group; they have been stalwart in their support and encouragement throughout the process of writing this book, and they very generously suffered through reading political theory for my sake, even as I benefited immensely from their insights about race and identity. I owe special thanks to Deb, whose writing and publication schedule lined up uncannily with my own, so that we were fellow travelers throughout the process. Many thanks also to Stephen, who began the journey in the government department at UT-Austin at the same time as I did and has been a wonderful colleague throughout; he also read and commented on the entire manuscript. His insights about African American political thought and political theory in general, helped enrich key arguments in this book in ways that are too numerous to mention. I also need to thank friends in Austin and beyond who suffered through my periodic inattention as I became consumed with the writing process. Thanks to Phillip Alexander, Natalie Arsenault, Caz, Kate Gordy, Tim Kelly, Carla Lopez, and Dalizza Rodriguez. They helped me stay sane and reminded me that there was life beyond and after the book. Much of this book was written in coffee shops around Austin; being in pleasant surroundings (some with a view of the lake) made it somewhat easier to spend seemingly endless hours in front of the computer. I also thank my family for their patience, love, and understanding, even as they could not quite figure out why writing this book seemed to be taking so long and requiring my almost undivided attention. I can finally say it’s done. Special thanks to my sister Thalia Hooker; my aunt and uncle Nelia and Derrick Jones; my grandmother Lilia Hodgson, to whom this book is dedicated; and my parents, Thalia Coe and Ray Hooker. They laid the foundations that eventually made this book possible. Finally, I need to acknowledge the struggles for justice of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños in Nicaragua, which first inspired my interest in questions of cultural accommodation, racial justice, and solidarity.


Contents

Introduction



Chapter 1 Mapping the Contours of Political Solidarity  Chapter 2 Race and Culture in Liberal Theories of Multiculturalism



Chapter 3 Racialized Solidarity, Minority Group Rights, and Public Memory



Chapter 4 Multiculturalism and Solidarity in Nicaragua  Conclusion  Notes  Bibliography Index 






Introduction

A

mere two months apart in , the world watched as Paris burned and disaster followed après le deluge in New Orleans. The fires consuming these two major cities of the developed “West” in such close succession were those of racial injustice, past and present. To many commentators and horrified consumers of the news images depicting the riots in one city and the humanitarian catastrophe in the other, these events revealed the failure of Western liberal democracies to come to terms with racial inequality, multiculturalism, and immigrant integration. Ironically, Europeans—who (like the rest of the world) watched, appalled, the terrible images emanating from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and who could not believe that this was happening in the world’s only remaining superpower—were soon confronted by their own scenes of chaos on European soil.1 Like Katrina before it, the rioting that rocked the suburbs of Paris—inhabited predominantly by North African and West African immigrants and their Frenchborn children and grandchildren—literally and figuratively showed the world the “other” side of Western liberal democracy.2 If what has occurred in the United States is any guide, however, once their images no longer saturate television screens and the front pages of newspapers, such events are




quickly forgotten, and the distressing realities they so indelibly laid bare are quickly suppressed from the collective imaginary of their respective political communities.3 Except, that is, from the minds of those who live with these truths every day, those for whom the reality of racial inequality and injustice is not a passing intrusion on their consciousness but a daily reality, those for whom racism, like Beloved’s ghost, has taken up permanent residence in their homes and lives.4 Ultimately, the riots in Paris and the catastrophe in New Orleans exposed two fundamental—but, for the majority of citizens, unwelcome—truths about the ethical-political landscape of contemporary Western liberal democratic polities. The first is the persistence of systemic racial inequalities and injustices that belie founding ideologies of egalité, liberté, fraternité. The second is the gap in political solidarity that these historic and continuing injustices both reflect and perpetuate. The fires in Paris and the floods in New Orleans momentarily forced all members of these polities to face the fact that the contours of political solidarity continue to be indelibly shaped by race (as are the practice of politics and political theorizing), that they do not automatically reflect shared membership in a political community. It is with this important question—racialized solidarity and its consequences for multicultural politics—that this book is principally concerned. The central problematic of this book is thus the racialized contours of the politics of solidarity—how the social fact of race shapes the practice of solidarity and the challenges this poses to the project of achieving racial justice. Political solidarity refers to the reciprocal relations of trust and obligation established between members of a political community that are necessary in order for long-term egalitarian political projects to flourish. Because democratic polities require consent, citizens must develop solidarity. In order to agree to the creation of institutions that treat all fairly, democratic strangers must recognize that they have an obligation to live with others on terms of fairness, reciprocity, and mutual respect.5 How to generate and sustain solidarity has thus been a key concern for theorists of political association, who have worried especially about whether it is possible to have solidarity in the context of difference.6 This concern reflects the recognition that the development of genuine solidarity is particularly challenging in diverse democracies. Ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity is an elemental—indeed, inescapable— social reality and resulting political conundrum in contemporary Western liberal democratic polities. Aside from a few notable recent exceptions, however, contemporary political theorists have generally not confronted the

Introduction



problem of political solidarity, nor have they acknowledged the continued relevance of notions of racial difference to the practice of solidarity. Indeed, most have assumed that the racialization of solidarity is a problem of the past. In contrast, I suggest that ever since the emergence of the modern concept of race, the contours and reach of political solidarity have been, and continue to be, fundamentally shaped by it. Acknowledging the racialized contours of the politics of solidarity has important implications for how we think about the continuing problem of racial injustice and inequality. It reveals the following seemingly paradoxical dynamic: existing racial injustice and inequality pose a fundamental obstacle to the development of solidarity, while it is also precisely the absence of such solidarity that makes it seem improbable, if not impossible, that racial justice will ever be achieved. The crises in New Orleans and Paris were shocking to many, for example, precisely because they exposed, in dramatic fashion, this dual dynamic of the racialized contours of the politics of solidarity at work. They laid bare both the failure to date of the different strategies for overcoming racial inequality pursued in the United States and France and the lack of solidarity that simultaneously makes possible the reproduction of such inequalities.7 Political solidarity is thus supposed to transcend race, yet solidarity continues to be powerfully delimited by race, as the fires in Paris and the floods in New Orleans demonstrated. Understanding the racialized contours of the politics of solidarity is therefore central to the project of establishing genuine democracy and achieving racial justice. The paradoxical impact of the racialization of solidarity on the possibility of achieving racial justice is a result of the distinct social ontology of race and the way it shapes the ethical-historical perspectives of citizens. Race is eminently embodied and visual. What is characteristic about race as a form of social identity is that it: “operate[s] through visual markers on the body.”8 It is a “visible identity.” To claim that race works through visuality and embodiment is not to presume that it is therefore biological, natural, or immutable, however.9 It is instead to recognize that we have developed racialized modes of seeing and cognitive and perceptual mechanisms that lead us to “see” race and to ascribe meanings to the morphological traits we associate with it. The learned ability to perceive race thus has tremendous consequences for the kinds of relations human beings establish with one another. As Linda Martín Alcoff explains, “racializing perceptual practices are used to produce a visual registry of any given social field. . . . This field is organized differently to distribute the likelihood of intersubjective




trust, the extension of epistemic credence, and empathy.”10 The way race works through the body, in a visual register, thus has the effect of spatially demarcating the boundaries of those whom we see as our political and intellectual equals and those whose unmerited pain and suffering need not concern us. Racial seeing thus has tremendous consequences for political solidarity, as solidarity is crucially dependent on vision and imagination. It is not accidental that solidarity is routinely described in terms of the capacity to envision a shared collective identity. Consider, for instance, Richard Rorty’s claim that “our sense of solidarity is strongest when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as ‘one of us.’ ”11 The embodied character of race, the fact that it operates through visible markers of difference, means that, as Charles Mills maintains, the racial other is not simply “invisible” morally speaking but is conceived specifically as an inferior subperson who is not owed the reciprocal respect due one’s moral equals. In a racialized world, it is thus difficult to “see” the racial other as “one of us.” In Mills’s words: “[I]n a racial polity, empathic feelings will travel weakly, if at all, across the color line; white empathy will refuse to enter black skin. . . . The racial other will be seen as Other, an opaque entity not to be identified with, and the boundaries of full membership in the community will terminate with the boundaries of the white population.”12 As a result of racial seeing, which is an indelible feature of the racialized polity, not only will whites be trained to be less concerned about the pain and suffering of nonwhites, but the fact of that pain and suffering will itself be difficult for them to see. There is thus an ontological dimension to the problem of racialized solidarity. It is how to envision shared political obligations when what we see and experience is radical otherness. Solidarity requires that we care about the pain and suffering of others. But embodied racial difference renders the pain and suffering of nonwhites either invisible or, when visible, less deserving of empathy and redress. Genuine political solidarity would thus require that we find ways to “see” beyond embodied racial difference. For whites in particular, it would require that they learn to see themselves “seeing whitely,” that they recognize how race blinds them to the pain and suffering of nonwhites.13 One of the fundamental features of the racialized politics of solidarity is thus the way embodied racial difference results in differential sympathy. In the United States today, many citizens would like to think that the racialization of solidarity is a thing of the past (in fact, many theorists writing about solidarity make precisely this claim). Unfortunately, this is simply not the case. In the United States, political solidarity continues to be thoroughly mediated by

Introduction



race. Indeed, race, more than almost any other factor, delineates the boundaries of political obligation and empathy. Thus, while much has been said in recent years about growing residential segregation in the United States, the fact that this spatial distance reflects a kind of moral distance is less often noted.14 The fact of the matter is that whites in the United States are not often called upon to directly confront the pain and suffering of blacks. The physical distance between black and white bodies thus mirrors the ethical and affective gap in solidarity. This reality is vividly illustrated by the image below, one of the numerous photographs with which the news media brought home to a horrified nation and a worldwide audience the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It shows an unidentified police officer, an adult white male, carrying a small black female child in his arms to be evacuated via a waiting helicopter. The little girl appears to be about six or seven years old. Her head is resting on the man’s shoulder, she is pressed into his body, and his large hand is cradling her head to cover her ears from the noise of the helicopter.

Unidentified police officer helps load children into a helicopter transporting victims of Hurricane Katrina from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center to the airport, Saturday, September , , in New Orleans, Louisiana. Courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos/Rob Carr.




The photograph is visually arresting precisely because it is a rare moment of public, embodied solidarity. Children are among the most vulnerable and valued members of society, and while it is commonplace to see white children being cared for by black and other nonwhite women, the sight of a black child being held, protected, and cared for by an adult white male is so rare as to be startling. There is no fear, no danger, and no threat in this photograph. The black child feels completely safe in the arms of this stranger, and the adult white male is holding the black child as he might hold one of his own children. The small black child and the adult white male in this photograph appear to belong unproblematically to the same ethical and political community.15 What the aftermath of Katrina exposed, however, was the fact that on a daily basis, these two individuals, like most white and black citizens of the United States, inhabit different ethical and political spaces. The photograph thus serves as an inadvertent reminder of the fact that blacks and whites in the United States rarely find themselves in such close physical and emotional proximity.16 It illustrates, by its very anomalousness, the fact that racial difference continues to shape the contours of political solidarity in this country, that the United States never has been, and continues not to be, a political community of equal citizens, black and white. Yet, despite its pervasiveness, racialized solidarity is rarely recognized as an important problem for politics in the United States.17 This is true even after events that make its existence patently undeniable, such as the Katrina disaster. Consider, for example, Michael Ignatieff ’s claim that the “failures of political imagination” that marked the response to Katrina could not be attributed only to “[r]acial ignorance and contempt. . . . A better explanation is that the people involved in municipal, state and federal government simply did not care enough about their own professional morality to find out the true facts. Public officials simply didn’t bother to cross the social distances that divided them from the truth of the New Orleans population. These social distances between rich and poor, between black and white are stubborn and are likely to endure, but the most basic duty of public leadership is always to know how the other half lives—and dies.”18 What should we make of this claim? At one level, of course, Ignatieff is correct that government officials are supposed to carry out their duties irrespective of any race and class differences between them and the populations they serve. But there is also something deeply curious about the argument that the failure of public officials to cross the social distance that separated them from poor black citizens is somehow separate and disconnected from

Introduction



racism. How else to explain the existence of that social distance in the first place and the failures of empathy and imagination that followed? Ignatieff is thus correct that Katrina constituted a failure of citizenship: “ ‘We are American’: that single sentence was a lesson in political obligation. Black or white, rich or poor, Americans are not supposed to be strangers to one another.”19 The problem is that in reality, black and white U.S. citizens are indeed strangers to one another, a fact that the majority of whites are still loath to admit. Katrina made visible for those who would prefer not to see it the fact that the United States continues to be a deeply racialized polity, as it has been since its inception.20 It was not only a failure of citizenship, but also a telling example of the racialized politics of solidarity at work. In a racialized polity, the social and affective distance that accompanies race also produces different ethical-historical perspectives between whites and nonwhites. Consider, for instance, the seemingly insurmountable gap between the views of whites and nonwhites with respect to the causes of, and appropriate remedies for, racial inequality in the United States. Whites and nonwhites tend to have widely divergent opinions about whether racism continues to exist and about the role of past racial injustice in causing present racial inequality.21 This chasm owes much to the nature of racialized thinking itself, which makes it almost impossible for whites to recognize contemporary racial inequality as rooted in historical black subordination and white advantage. The ontological dimensions of this phenomenon become evident when we consider the relation between thought and experience, how the radically different ways in which whites and nonwhites experience the world—as devoid of racism or rife with it—inevitably shape their thinking about the following questions: Is there racism today? What are the causes of contemporary racial inequalities? What are the obligations of all citizens in this regard? The answers to these questions are extremely contentious for some, painfully clear to others. This divergence makes it clear that the challenge of political solidarity is not simply about the ability to see the other as like us but is also about the inability to see through the other’s eyes. The task of solidarity, as Fanon reminds us, is not to see the other as myself but to see the other through his own eyes: “authentic communication” involves the “quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself.”22 In the case of whites, this would entail taking seriously the claim that equality has not, in fact, been the norm thus far and that genuine relations of trust and political obligation that transcend racial difference have yet to be built.23

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It might be tempting at this point in the argument to object that most U.S. citizens today have rejected a normative belief in racial inequality and that, as a result, the racial gap in solidarity (if it does continue to exist) is not as wide as it was when outright racist beliefs were more common and is no doubt well on its way to being a thing of the past. However, a formal rejection of racial inequality is not the same as a commitment to using society’s shared resources to end black subordination and truly achieve racial justice.24 As two examples from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina illustrate, racialized solidarity continues to be a defining feature of U.S. political life. The first example is hip-hop star Kanye West’s widely discussed remark on a live music telethon for hurricane relief that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”25 The second is former first lady Barbara Bush’s comment upon visiting an evacuee relocation center in Houston that “so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”26 These two comments, which must be read alongside each other, and subsequent public reactions to them illustrate with painful clarity how race operates to set the limits of empathy and a sense of political obligation in the United States. The statements uttered by West and Bush were shocking to many, not because they misrepresented the views of most black and white citizens, respectively, but because they directly articulated the generally silent and unacknowledged “work” of race to construct the boundaries of political obligation in this country. What was for West a clear example of the institutional racism that continues to haunt U.S. society was for Bush a tempest in a teapot, even an opportunity. Their statements were thus emblematic of the persistent racial divide in U.S. public opinion, which reflects the racial gap in political solidarity. The racialized politics of solidarity represents a formidable obstacle to the prospect of ever achieving racial equality in the United States, a fact that was amply illustrated by the radical difference in perspective on the aftermath of Katrina between whites and nonwhites. While it is certainly true that many white U.S. citizens were outraged by the tragedy in New Orleans, it is also the case that most were loath to attribute the various government failures to racism or to sacrifice too many shared resources in order to repair them. Public opinion surveys conducted immediately after the disaster in  confirmed the seemingly incommensurable differences in perception between whites and blacks. For example: “In a Newsweek magazine poll, only % of White Americans, compared to fully % of Blacks, thought the government responded slowly because most of the affected people were

Introduction



African Americans. In an AP poll, % of Whites said it never crossed their mind that the government would have responded faster if the victims had not been mostly poor and Black. In another poll, conducted by CBS, % of Americans said that the race and class of people left behind in New Orleans was not a factor in the speed of the government’s response.”27 These responses reflected a large gap in the degree to which white respondents identified with the mostly black victims of the disaster and in what they were willing to do to help them in its aftermath. Similar surveys, for example, found that  percent of black respondents believed that one of the principal lessons of Katrina was that racial inequality remains a major problem in the United States, compared with only  percent of whites.28 Similarly, when asked if the federal government should spend whatever was necessary to rebuild New Orleans and restore the hurricane victims to their homes,  percent of blacks believed that the government should spend whatever was necessary, compared with  percent of whites.29 Finally, the disparity in the way blacks and whites understood Katrina reflected the profound differences in their views about progress toward racial equality in the United States to date. While  percent of blacks believe that racial equality will not be achieved in their lifetimes or ever,  percent of whites believe that blacks have already achieved or will soon achieve racial equality. These findings reflect the separate worldviews developed by blacks and whites to make sense of the separate geographical spaces and distinct socioeconomic, cultural, political, and ethical terrains they inhabit. As such, they are a testament to the extent to which U.S. citizens remain strangers to one another across the color line. As the example of the United States illustrates, the lack of political will to tackle contemporary racial inequality and continuing racial injustice reflects the diametrically opposed ethical-historical perspectives developed by whites and nonwhites in a racialized polity. For nonwhites, the lack of commitment of the former to remedy historical injustices and present inequalities belies claims of shared citizenship; meanwhile, whites tend not to recognize such inequalities as problems of justice and therefore to perceive the demands of nonwhites for redress as the main threats to solidarity. This, in a nutshell, is the problem of the racialized politics of solidarity. The racialization of solidarity is thus a key aspect of the question of justice in diverse societies, yet political theorists have not grappled with this issue. Theories of multiculturalism, for example, which have become the dominant vehicle for thinking about questions of justice in diverse societies,

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generally have not addressed the racialized politics of solidarity. Analyzing the racialized contours of the politics of solidarity therefore requires bringing together three literatures that generally do not speak to one another: the literature on race in political philosophy, theories of multiculturalism, and the literature on solidarity in political theory. They are all needed to map the contours of the racialized politics of solidarity, which is a key problem for democratic theory. One of the principal contributions of this book is precisely that it places these disparate literatures in conversation with one another. To date, theories of multiculturalism have failed to directly consider the problem of racialized solidarity. While many of the major theorists of multiculturalism have devoted chapters to race or otherwise discussed the situation of subordinated racialized groups (usually African Americans) in their major works, it is also fair to say that when the theories do take race into account, they treat it as epiphenomenal. That is, insofar as they engage with race, theories of multiculturalism generally treat racism as a temporary deviation from a putative norm of racial justice. As a result, they have had little to say about the continuing problem of racialized solidarity. This is true of both branches of the multiculturalism literature, even the one concerned with the justice of remedies for racialized oppression. The contemporary debate about the justice of group rights for minorities in political theory initially emerged in the context of a disagreement between U.S. and Canadian liberal political theorists about whether there was a place for questions of racial justice and cultural membership in ideal theory, that is, about whether such rights should constitute temporary or permanent features of justice in contemporary liberal democratic polities. As a result of these disagreements, a bifurcation emerged in the multiculturalism literature between a strand of the literature concerned with the justice of temporary group rights designed to remedy historical racial injustice and another branch whose aim was to spell out those permanent group rights that would constitute terms of fair coexistence between different cultural groups sharing a single state. In general, U.S. liberals argued that race, as well as ethnicity, language, and culture, had no role to play in ideal theory. Following the assumptions of the theories of justice developed by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, they have tended to argue that so-called group-conscious policies would not be appropriate under circumstances of ideal justice and were only justified in order to overcome historical injustices.30 They acknowledged that, in practice, it would be necessary for states to redress historical wrongs (in the case of the United States,

Introduction



the paradigmatic example being the injustices done to African Americans) and that this might require some temporary group-specific rights, but they emphasized that racially differentiated treatment would be unjustified in the absence of historical injustice. From this perspective, group-differentiated rights are a regrettable—and temporary—deviation from a norm of color blindness.31 The presumption underlying debates about so-called race-conscious policies in the United States is thus that proponents of such policies must provide compelling reasons to deviate from the norm of color blindness.32 To the extent that racial justice is assumed to be the baseline condition of the polity in these debates, racism continues to be portrayed as an aberration, a temporary departure from the norm, requiring temporary remedies, rather than as the central logic governing the formation and reproduction of the political community. As a result, U.S. liberals fail to acknowledge the existence of the racial polity and to address the phenomenon of racialized solidarity. If the response to racial injustice developed by U.S. liberals ultimately proved to be unsatisfactory, however, they had even less to say about issues of cultural membership, a significant oversight from the point of view of Canadian liberal theorists confronted with demands for the accommodation of cultural difference by minority groups (such as aboriginal nations and Quebec nationalists) that seemed to require different kinds of remedies. As a result, Canadian theorists of multiculturalism, notably Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, argued that certain group rights for minorities, far from being seen as temporary compensation for past wrongs, should instead be seen as permanent features of a just society.33 According to these theorists, even if there were no historical wrongs, or even if such injustices had all been effectively redressed, there would still be legitimate grounds for certain group-differentiated rights for minorities. Since contemporary liberal democratic polities unfairly privilege the languages, cultures, and identities of dominant groups and unfairly disadvantage the languages, cultures, and identities of other groups, the terms of fair coexistence require certain permanent group rights for minorities.34 Because liberal multiculturalists have conceived of these rights largely in terms of how such policies might enable minorities to preserve and express their collective cultural identities, however, they appear to underdetermine issues of collective injustice and political solidarity. This is not to say that they ignore the issue altogether. Indeed, they argue that group rights for minorities will foster solidarity by achieving equality between majorities and minorities. Rather, by appearing to be more interested in the preservation of culture per se than in the kinds




of relations that are established across groups, they unwittingly underestimate the obstacle that racialized solidarity poses to the project of establishing multicultural and racial justice. As both branches of the literature on multiculturalism fail to take the racialized politics of solidarity into account, in order to fully conceive the problematic of racialized solidarity it is necessary to incorporate the insights both of those theorists who have written about solidarity and of African American political philosophy. The few contemporary theorists who have addressed the topic of solidarity have been principally concerned with questions about its nature, scope, and basis.35 While many of these theorists have noted the obstacle that race has posed to the development of solidarity, they have generally not developed a systematic account of the racialization of solidarity. The literature on race in political philosophy, however, in particular the field of what is being called African American philosophy, affords important insights into how this might be accomplished. In contrast to the neglect of the topic in the discipline of philosophy more generally, African American philosophy has focused on showing how modern politics and political theorizing have been fundamentally shaped by ideas about race.36 This perspective stands in contrast to much contemporary thinking about race, which has instead been primarily concerned with the philosophical and ethical status of the concept itself.37 The focus has thus been on the ethics rather the politics of race. As a result, many contemporary analyses of race have been held hostage by the fear of reproducing “essentialist” understandings of the concept, to the point where antiracist theorizing itself has in some instances been equated with racist thinking, as in order to discuss the politics of racism, it is necessary to deploy some (however nonessentialist) notion of race.38 The unfortunate consequence of the uncritical equation of the intellectual renunciation of the concept of race with antiracist politics and ethics has been a dearth of theorization about the politics of racism.39 African American philosophy has been an important exception to this trend. African American philosophers have sought to use the analytical tools of philosophy to show how the sociopolitical order would have to be reconceptualized in order for black and other subordinated racialized groups to be able to become members of the polity on terms of equality, reciprocity, and mutual respect.40 A key element of such a reconceptualization involves abandoning the fundamental presupposition of liberal political thought that the state is color-blind and racism is a temporary deviation from the

Introduction



norm. This conceptual move is analogous to the argument of theorists of multiculturalism that the reality of ethnocultural injustice thoroughly disproves the premise that the state is neutral toward culture.41 While theorists of multiculturalism have not extended the same principle to their analysis of race, this is precisely the task undertaken by some of the key texts in African American philosophy. A shift in perspective that sees the polity as thoroughly race-conscious since its foundation is thus crucial to theorizing the problematic of racialized solidarity. This book tries to carry out a small part of the project outlined by African American philosophy of thinking through how the political order would need to be reconceived so that racial justice might be achieved. Specifically, it tries to sketch how theories of multiculturalism would have to be reconceptualized to take account of the racialized politics of solidarity, to show what they might look like if they conceived race as constitutive rather than epiphenomenal to the foundation and organization of modern political communities. One of its principal aims is to show that theories of multiculturalism, which have become the fundamental framework for thinking about problems of justice in diverse polities, need to be reformulated to take account of the racialized contours of solidarity; otherwise, they will prove inadequate to the urgent task of addressing problems of racial injustice and inequality. Generally, when solidarity has been considered in debates about multiculturalism to date, it has been in terms of the potential effect of group rights for minorities on (what is presumed to be) an already extant solidarity. Instead of posing the question of solidarity in this way, however, it might be more fruitful to turn it on its head and consider the obstacle that racialized solidarity represents to the achievement of multicultural, and especially racial, justice. This book is therefore principally concerned with the place of race and political solidarity in theories of multiculturalism, a topic that has not yet received sufficient attention. My approach to analyzing these questions follows a tradition in political theory that grounds the production of normative theory in the historical interpretation and reinterpretation of actual events—a method employed by Aristotle, Montesquieu, Marx, and Arendt. This mode of political theorizing shies away from the exclusive use of abstract deduction or the exegesis of canonical texts and instead combines these with empiricism and historical contextualization in order to ground the critical enterprise that produces ethical arguments. The goal of such historically grounded theorizing is to provide accounts of the world that are useful for understanding contemporary struggles. In

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the words of Arendt: “Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.”42 In keeping with this approach, the normative claims about the problematic of racialized solidarity put forward in this book are grounded (mainly) in analyses of the kinds of political practices with regard to race and culture developed by contemporary polities in the Americas. The virtue of this geographical focus is that it makes possible a certain amount of specificity; it enables me to make implicit and explicit comparisons between the United States and Canada, which have been the main empirical referents of most theories of multiculturalism, and Latin American models of multiculturalism. This strategy has the added advantage of placing Latin America, a region that has been comparatively underanalyzed in the literature on multiculturalism in political theory to date, at the center of debates about the politics of race and multiculturalism. The aim of this book is not to produce a systematic theory of minority group rights, however. I seek, instead, to consider how theories of multiculturalism would need to be reframed in order to incorporate racialized solidarity as a starting point for normative theorization about the continuing problem of racial injustice and inequality. The book explores a number of distinct but interrelated questions: What is political solidarity, and how is it generated? How has race shaped solidarity? What (if anything) have contemporary theorists of multiculturalism had to say about racialized solidarity and the obstacles it poses to the achievement of racial justice? How should we think about racial injustice and inequality in light of racialized solidarity? How do theories of multiculturalism need to be reconceptualized to take account of racialized solidarity? Each chapter represents a building block of the main argument of the book, which is that racialized solidarity is an important, indeed fundamental, element of any theory of multiculturalism concerned with the problem of racial justice. Chapter , “Mapping the Contours of Political Solidarity,” develops the concept of political solidarity used in the book. Contemporary political theorists writing about political solidarity have focused on establishing the nature, scope, and basis of such solidarity. They have questioned whether it is primarily affective (based on fellow feeling) or rational (based on a capacity to will the common good), whether it is best conceived in local or global terms, and whether it springs from shared membership in a political community or nation or from a more universal shared humanity. They have, however, had little to say about the impact of race on solidarity. I argue that

Introduction



it is most useful to conceive of political solidarity in terms of four key elements: as having an important affective dimension but also as an ethical orientation that moves us to action; as multiple and overlapping; as the product of structural conditions that require people to develop contingent solidarities not dependent on common interests or even shared political principles; and as being fundamentally shaped by race in contemporary polities, such that the existence of racialized solidarity poses apparently insurmountable obstacles to the achievement of racial justice. Chapter , “Race and Culture in Liberal Theories of Multiculturalism,” analyzes what existing theories of multiculturalism have had to say about solidarity. I argue that neither of the two branches of the literature on multiculturalism has adequately addressed the problem of racialized solidarity. The chapter provides a brief overview of the development of the contemporary (post-) debate about minority group rights in political theory, tracing the bifurcation of the multiculturalism literature into a branch concerned with the justice of temporary group rights as compensation for historical racial injustice and a subsequent strand focused on permanent group rights for cultural minorities as enduring terms of fair coexistence. Drawing on examples from Latin America—where indigenous peoples suffer from racial discrimination and racialized groups make claims relating to language, culture, and territory—I show why it is necessary to overcome the artificial theoretical division between race and culture in theories of multiculturalism. I further suggest that as a result of the bifurcation in the multiculturalism literature, neither strand has sufficiently considered the potential effects of group rights for minorities on political solidarity. The chapter traces the development of the theoretical division between the two strands of the multiculturalism literature concerned with questions of racial and cultural injustice, analyzes its consequences, and argues that the two branches need to be reintegrated. Chapter , “Racialized Solidarity, Minority Group Rights, and Public Memory,” analyzes how theories of multiculturalism might need to be reconceived in order to begin to address the phenomenon of racialized solidarity. I suggest that taking the problematic of racialized solidarity into account in theories of multiculturalism requires that existing normative justifications of minority group rights be reframed in order to make whiteness visible. This can be done, I argue, and the two branches of the multiculturalism literature can be reintegrated, by focusing arguments for such rights on the need to reverse the past and continuing disadvantages suffered by subordinated groups, whether they are related to culture or race. When minority group




rights are conceived in this way, questions of collective injustice are brought to the forefront, and the differences between the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated groups are confronted. The processes of contestation that accompany the adjudication of minority group rights framed in terms of past and continuing disadvantage resulting from either cultural difference or racial hierarchy (or both) are among the few instances of political discourse about public policy decisions where the content of public memory is challenged. It is thus possible that through such processes of contestation, the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups might be transformed, thereby leading to the development of greater political will to address the seemingly insurmountable problematic of racial justice. Chapter , “Multiculturalism and Solidarity in Nicaragua,” analyzes the concrete implications of the claim that theories of multiculturalism need to be centrally concerned with the phenomenon of racialized solidarity for the institutional design of minority group rights by means of a detailed analysis of the model of multiculturalism adopted in a specific case, Nicaragua, that features the presence of multiple indigenous and Afrodescendant groups requiring remedies to both racialized oppression and the fair accommodation of cultural difference. Despite being a major site of institutional innovation with respect to minority group rights in recent decades, Latin America has generally not received significant attention in the literature on multiculturalism in political theory. As a result, certain key questions raised by Latin American experiences with multiculturalism are underexplored in this literature, namely the simultaneous occurrence of racialized oppression and cultural difference. I use the Nicaraguan example to consider whether group rights for minorities as currently conceived are able to address the problematic of racialized solidarity, as well as to evaluate the forms of such rights that might best enable the fair accommodation of ethnocultural diversity, remedy racialized oppression, and foster political solidarity in contexts where multiple and overlapping groups are present. I conclude that the Nicaraguan case seems to suggest that debates about minority group rights can begin to address the problem of racialized solidarity by ushering in contestation about the content of public memory, but only if and when arguments for such rights reveal the existence of a state organized on the basis of both cultural difference and racial hierarchy. Many of the questions raised in this book are not only of interest to political theorists; they are also fundamental concerns of policymakers and citizens. This is particularly true with respect to the implications of the argu-

Introduction



ments put forward here for decisions about the appropriate institutional design of minority group rights. Specific policy prescriptions are beyond the scope of this book, however. This is also certainly not an exhaustive account of the effect of racialized solidarity on the politics of racial justice, a subject about which much remains to be said. My hope is, rather, that it might serve as a starting point for reflection and debate about the effects of the racialized politics of solidarity on enduring problems of justice that continue to plague many of today’s liberal democracies. Political theory as a mode of inquiry is especially suited to this task. That is because, as Sheldon Wolin explains, political theorizing involves both the depiction of existing reality (what is) and the exercise of political imagination in service of envisioning what might be.43 For the political theorist as well as the citizen, then, envisioning anew is key to both political praxis and theorizing. The capacity to see anew is especially relevant for a book concerned with the effects of racial seeing on the politics of solidarity, as racialized solidarity fundamentally depends on our capacity to see skin color, to live and think in black (bodies) and white (skin). If racial justice is to be achieved, citizens of today’s unavoidably diverse polities must undertake novel acts of political imagination that will make it possible to see the other as radically different and yet as a fellow citizen. This is no easy task, and it is one for which this book does not claim to provide definitive roadmaps. It does, however, suggest a starting point for those creative acts of rethinking with respect to multiculturalism and racial justice that the riots in Paris and the floods in New Orleans vividly reminded us are now more urgent than ever. This book is meant to foster reflection about our conceptions of solidarity, which to date have unfortunately been rife with ideas about race that have made it difficult to “see” those who do not look like us as fellow citizens worthy of empathy and respect. Ultimately, the arguments in this book are aimed at all those who, on the streets of Paris and New Orleans or in front of computers, television screens, and newspapers, tried to make sense of the age-old question of what it means to be someone’s fellow citizen, an inquiry that, like the ghost of Beloved, continues to haunt political theory and practice at the start of the twenty-first century, especially as so many of us, its practitioners, are still unwilling or unable to find ways to see through the other’s eyes.


1 Mapping the Contours of Political Solidarity

O

ne of the principal claims of this book is that addressing questions of multicultural and especially racial justice requires that we engage headon with the problem posed by the racialized politics of solidarity. In order to understand the implications of this claim, however, it is first necessary to explain precisely what is meant by solidarity. The type of solidarity I am concerned with here is political solidarity, which is the solidarity that exists—or should exist—between members of a political community. It is both a normative orientation of citizens and a practice. It refers to the citizenly capacity to act in ways characterized by public-spiritedness or reciprocity. The concept of political solidarity as it is generally understood thus denotes the ability of individuals to engage in relations of trust and obligation with fellow members of a political community whom they may see as inherently “other” in some fundamental way. In contrast to what political theorists tend to assume, however, political solidarity of this type has not existed. Instead, the norm has been racialized solidarity. Ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity are inescapable features of contemporary political communities, and racism and racial injustice continue to shape political life within them. The question of how to deal justly with racial and cultural diversity is, if anything, as pressing




today as it was when W. E. B. DuBois claimed that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line. Political solidarity is the problem of the twenty-first century,1 not because racial justice has been achieved but because the racial injustice and inequality that led DuBois to make his famous pronouncement persist, albeit in different forms. The struggles for justice of historically disadvantaged and excluded groups (including indigenous peoples, cultural minorities, and the descendants of the enslaved) raise important questions for political theory about what it means to be the fellow citizen of persons perceived as radically “other” and about the kinds of political obligations that extend across difference. Most political theorists have had little to say about the phenomenon of racialized solidarity, however. Nevertheless, the struggles for justice of disadvantaged groups challenge political theorists to rethink their categories of analysis, conceptual tools, and founding assumptions so as to take seriously the experiences of these groups. The aim of this chapter is thus to sketch the conception of political solidarity used throughout this book, which tries to do this by incorporating the racialized politics of solidarity as a key feature. Political theorists generally trace the origins of the concept of solidarity to ancient Greek ideas of civic friendship and Christian notions of caritas or brotherly love. In his account of the development of the modern concept of solidarity, for example, Hauke Brunkhorst argues that the more restricted and socially exclusive conception of solidarity found in the ancient Greek polis gives way to the more egalitarian and universal Christian idea that all men are brothers, which requires that one love not only one’s neighbors and friends but also one’s enemies and strangers. The Christian ideal of universal brotherly love is, in turn, later secularized, giving rise to the modern concept of solidarity, which is conceived as a relation extending beyond those with whom one has close personal connections.2 Indeed, as expressed in the French revolutionaries’ credo of egalité, liberté, fraternité, political solidarity is conceived as a bond that exists between persons who have established particular kinds of political relationships, that is, between fellow citizens. The definition of solidarity in the Oxford English Dictionary captures its eminently political character: “The fact or quality, on the part of communities, etc., of being perfectly united or at one in some respect, esp. in interests, sympathies, or aspirations.” One of the earliest examples it provides of the word’s usage, a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits, originally published in , further elucidates the fact that political solidarity is a capacity displayed by citizens: “One secret of their power is their mutual

Mapping Political Solidarity



good understanding. . . . They have solidarity, or responsibleness, and trust in each other.”3 Political solidarity thus refers to the relations of trust and obligation developed between citizens. For many of the central figures in Western political thought, the core problem of political solidarity has been how to generate feelings of mutual obligation between citizens who are radically different from one another. How citizens might be made to think beyond the “I” to the “we,” how they might come to conceive of their self-interest and the public interest as one, has been a central preoccupation for theorists of political association from Aristotle to Rousseau. Aristotle, for example, was famously concerned with the conditions under which citizens would be able to envision one another as political equals and act in terms of reciprocity. He worried that political solidarity would be difficult to generate in states in which large differences in social class existed and in which one social class was politically dominant, because citizens in those states would make decisions in the interest of their own class rather than for the good of all. In political communities such as these, he argued, citizens would find it difficult to trust one another and work together to achieve the common good: “[T]hose who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing to nor able to submit to authority . . . On the other hand, the very poor, who are in the opposite extreme, are too degraded. So that the one class cannot obey, and can only rule despotically; the other knows not how to command and must be ruled like slaves. Thus arises a city, not of freemen, but of masters and slaves, the one despising, the other envying; and nothing can be more fatal to friendship and good fellowship in states than this.”4 Citizens in such states would not establish relations of trust or mutual obligation across social classes; political solidarity would be nonexistent or seriously lacking. In democracies and oligarchies, he argued, “the poor and the rich quarrel with one another, and whichever side gets the better, instead of establishing a just or popular government, regards political supremacy as the prize of victory.”5 In these kinds of political communities, citizens would make decisions based on self-interest narrowly construed. There are moments when Aristotle seems to suggest that the problem of lack of solidarity might be resolved by ensuring as much homogeneity between citizens as possible, such as when he claims that a city “ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars.”6 Homogeneity would presumably make it easier for citizens to establish relations of trust and obligation; it would make them capable of displaying public-spiritedness and




reciprocity. Indeed, Aristotle repeatedly uses the metaphor of friendship to describe the practice of citizenship. “To choose to live together is friendship,” he argues, and “good fellowship springs from friendship.”7 Aristotle’s thinking about political solidarity is thus primarily concerned with the question of how to establish egalitarian political relations in light of social class difference. This concern reflects the fact that egalitarian political projects require solidarity. Political solidarity is necessary for democracy because trust and cooperation between citizens are essential to democratic politics. Because democracies require consent, it is paramount that citizens be able to see beyond narrowly defined self-interest when making public policy decisions. Developing bonds of solidarity between citizens is thus essential to democracy. As Danielle Allen observes, “democracy depends on trustful talk among strangers . . . when citizenly relations are shot through with distrust, efforts to solve collective problems will inevitably founder.”8 Political solidarity is thus a crucial democratic competence for those who wish to live together as political equals. In order for democracy to function effectively, citizens must establish reciprocal relations of trust and obligation with one another. Because political communities are diverse, however, political solidarity is necessarily solidarity between strangers. Democracies are composed of individuals who may have little in common but who must nevertheless be able to acknowledge that they are enmeshed in relations of mutual obligation. Otherwise, democracy cannot function effectively. The challenge for democratic polities, therefore, is to establish reciprocal relations of trust and obligation between members who may see one another as radically different; in other words, the task is how to build solidarity among citizens who are strangers to one another. Developing political solidarity would thus seem to be of central concern to democratic theory. Yet most contemporary political theorists have neglected the topic of political solidarity. In general, they have had little to say about the processes by which such solidarity is generated and sustained. Most contemporary theorists of democracy, for example, have set aside the question of how political solidarity is built and focus instead on delineating procedures by which citizens would be able to reach agreement about the content of rights.9 The problem is that it is precisely how individuals come to see themselves as equal members of a political community in which they are engaged in reciprocal relations of trust and obligation that is the necessary basis of any discussion about how those relations might be most




efficiently or fairly ordered.10 The question “What kinds of obligations do citizens have toward one another and why?” cannot be answered without also asking, “Who are my fellow citizens?” Decisions about who is entitled to equal rights and respect are made on the basis of already existing solidarities, that is, on who is thought of as a fellow citizen, and there have always been some persons who have not been thought of as being part of the “we” of solidarity, who have been conceived as being outside the boundaries of the political community. Contrary to what political theorists have assumed, solidarity has, in fact, rarely transcended the boundaries of difference. Racialized solidarity in particular has been the norm rather than the exception. Yet most contemporary political theorists have not seriously engaged with the problem of racialized solidarity. They have noted a relationship between solidarity and race (generally to point to the experiences of black persons as an example of exclusions from the “we” of solidarity that have since been overcome), but most theorists who have written about solidarity see its racialization as a temporary, restricted problem. Indeed, most assume that the racialization of solidarity is a thing of the past, or when they acknowledge the continued existence of interracial distrust, they view it as symptomatic of a broader failure to develop forms of citizenship that foster trust between citizens.11 In contrast, this book’s analysis of political solidarity engages specifically with the problem of racialized solidarity. In it, racial thinking and seeing, and the social and affective distance they establish between citizens, are seen as constitutive of the challenge of how to build solidarity, one that is not necessarily resolved simply by shared political membership. This chapter tries to show how the concept of political solidarity would need to be reconceptualized in order to take seriously the existence of the racial polity, that is, in light of the fact that modern forms of political association have been thoroughly shaped by race. Its overall aim is to demonstrate that in order to develop genuine political solidarity, it is necessary to move beyond the racialized politics of solidarity that has been the norm to date.

A Sketch of Political Solidarity The few contemporary political theorists who have written about political solidarity have focused on questions about the nature, scope, and basis of such solidarity. They have disagreed about whether solidarity is primarily affective (based on fellow feeling) or rational (based on a capacity to will the




common good), whether it is properly conceived in local or global terms, and whether it springs from shared membership in a political community or nation or from a more universal shared humanity. These are important questions that any conception of solidarity must address, and I consider each of them in turn. I suggest that we should think about political solidarity in four key ways: as having an important affective dimension, as multiple and overlapping, as the product of structural conditions, and as fundamentally shaped by race. Solidarity, I argue, is more than just an emotion; it is also an ethical orientation that moves us to action. It is multiple and overlapping: we develop different kinds of solidarities with different kinds of persons with whom we are engaged in different kinds of relations. It emerges out of structural conditions that require individuals to develop contingent solidarities (however momentarily) that are not dependent on mutual identification. And finally, as the persistence of the racialized politics of solidarity attests, it continues to be thoroughly mediated by ideas of racial difference. The question of whether solidarity is based on fellow feeling or on a shared capacity to will the common good has been of particular concern to political theorists writing about the subject. This juxtaposition is misleading, however. It suggests that solidarity is either affective or rational, that people display solidarity either as a result of emotion or as a result of rational commitment to certain ethical principles. The problem is that in practice, people are rarely moved to act in solidaristic ways solely on the basis of the idea of a shared human capacity to will the common good. The question itself thus reflects an underlying, and possibly inescapable, tension at the core of the idea of solidarity: the tension between how solidarity ought to function and the way it actually works in practice. This mode of framing the question is not useful for understanding the affective dimension of solidarity, because when we consider how solidarity actually works, we see that it always involves affect or fellow feeling in some form. In practice, solidarity is about who is seen as entitled to mutual respect and about who is conceived as being able to make claims on our sympathies, and such boundaries are not determined by a shared capacity to will the common good. Richard Rorty clearly identifies the problem with the juxtaposition of solidarity as either affective or rational in his sketch of what he calls “liberal ethnocentrism.” In keeping with his desire to provide a nonmetaphysical (i.e., nonrationalist and nonuniversalist) account of liberal democracy, Rorty argues that we should set aside the question of whether solidarity is




based on some shared human capacity as both irrelevant and unanswerable. Instead of viewing solidarity as grounded in some universal human capacity, he thinks we should conceive of it “not [as] a matter of sharing a common truth or a common goal but of sharing a common selfish hope, the hope that one’s world . . . will not be destroyed.”12 What matters for solidarity in his view is not why we care about the suffering of others but only that we do so. What binds people together is a shared interest in avoiding emotional and physical pain. While the latter is something that other animals also experience, the former is distinct to human beings who have undergone certain processes of socialization. Human beings, Rorty argues, “can all be given a special kind of pain: They can all be humiliated by the forcible tearing down of the particular structures of language and belief in which they were socialized.”13 What human beings share is an interest in avoiding this particular kind of pain; liberals, moreover, are concerned with avoiding this kind of pain not only for themselves but also for others. He believes that the most that can be said about the nature of solidarity is that at this point in time and in this culture, a certain “we” believes that we should be concerned with the suffering of others. For Rorty, moreover, the claim that solidarity is based on a shared human capacity fundamentally misunderstands the nature of solidarity; it simply does not capture the way solidarity actually works. He argues that in practice, solidarity is always “affective,” in the sense that “feelings of solidarity are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient.”14 Solidarity, in his view, is based on fellow feeling. The issue, therefore, is who is encompassed by these feelings of solidarity. Extending the boundaries of the “we” toward whom we have feelings of solidarity is thus the relevant question in Rorty’s view. He claims that this crucial goal can only be achieved by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, “They do not feel it as we would,” or “There must always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?” This matter of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like.15

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As Rorty effectively demonstrates, there is a tension inherent in the idea of political solidarity: in practice, solidarity is affective (i.e., we tend to feel it toward those we think of as being “one of us”), but insofar as it is something that we are supposed to develop with other members of a shared political community (or even the human race), it will encompass people with whom we are not closely connected and with whom we may not identify. It is, however, unlikely that solidarity toward strangers will be motivated by affect. The problem with the juxtaposition of solidarity as either affective or rational, therefore, is that the tension between the way solidarity actually works and how it ought to be is not resolved by claiming that solidarity is based on a shared capacity to will the common good. As Rorty observes, the challenge is to make most persons recognize that they have obligations toward others whom they perceive as radically different, a task for which the idea of shared humanity in and of itself has proven inadequate to date. Recognizing that there is an important affective dimension to solidarity raises the important question of whether this means that solidarity must depend on close or profound emotional connections, however. Indeed, the issue of whether solidarity is primarily affective or rational is often raised in order to suggest that there may be good reasons to see the pursuit of the common good as in one’s interest without having any feeling of fellowship with one’s neighbors. To recognize the affective dimensions of solidarity is not to presume intimate connection or liking as a precondition of such solidarity, however. Most political theorists writing about political solidarity, for example, including those who reject the claim that solidarity is based on some shared human characteristic that creates bonds between strangers and who recognize the affective dimensions of solidarity, also claim that feelings of solidarity can be developed with strangers. Solidarity may be affective, but that does not mean that ethical obligations are felt only when close emotional connections to an individual or a group exist; they can also arise from a sense of solidarity with strangers. Consider, for example, the heated debates about illegal immigration that are currently taking place in the United States. While it is true that many hard-liners on immigration policy have little sympathy for the plight of illegal immigrants and are violently opposed to what they consider “amnesty,” there are also many moderates who believe that law-abiding illegal immigrants who have become productive members of U.S. society deserve a path to citizenship. The point is that while many of the former may object to the legalization of the status of illegal immigrants because they see them as radically other (i.e., they fear the “browning” of the


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United States by an influx of Latino or Hispanic immigrants in general and Mexicans in particular), many of the latter probably developed their views in the absence of close emotional connections with illegal immigrants and despite disapproving of the act of illegal immigration itself. The solidarities developed between strangers thus do not always have to be based on liking, nor do individuals need to possess common, much less identical, interests in order to display solidarity toward one another. To say that solidarity is based on fellow feeling, therefore, is not to suggest that it is thereby reducible to certain emotions, that is, feelings of liking, love, or friendship. It is perfectly consistent to claim that political solidarity has an affective dimension but nevertheless does not require close bonds of affection or even liking. At the outset of her argument that political friendship can serve as a model for solidarity between democratic citizens, for example, Allen observes that hers “is not an argument that we should all just be friends . . . friendship is not an emotion, but a practice, a set of hard-won, complicated habits that are used to bridge . . . differences. . . . Friendship is not easy, nor is democracy.”16 At first glance, it would appear that friendship requires very different kinds of relations between citizens from those required by solidarity, however. Friendship would appear to entail greater bonds of affection, and the existence of shared interests or similarities of opinion and disposition, than would seem strictly necessary for solidarity. Yet Allen contends that “it is not the emotions of friendship that are relevant to politics but rather its core practices.”17 In her view, democratic politics is characterized by loss. Citizens have divergent and conflicting interests, and public policy decisions will therefore inevitably generate winners and losers. The central problem for democracies is therefore how to manage this experience of loss, how to reconcile citizens with the reality that they will sometimes, if not often, lose public policy debates. Friendship, she argues, provides a model for how to do this, because it shows citizens how to cultivate the habits of attention that will render them “attuned to the balances and imbalances in what citizens are giving up for each other.”18 It provides a model of the kind of equitable, nondominating, nonacquiescent relationship that is central to the experience of democratic citizenship. Allen’s account of the role of political friendship in democratic citizenship (which is akin to what I have been calling political solidarity) is focused on the kinds of normative orientations associated with the practice of friendship, therefore, not the emotions it produces. What I wish to argue with respect to the affective dimension of solidarity is thus twofold: on the one hand, solidarity is based on fellow feeling,

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but on the other hand, it is also more than just an emotion; it is also a normative orientation that moves us to action on behalf of others. Allen expresses a similar idea when she claims that friendship entails ethical reciprocity. Friends must believe that the relationship benefits them both equally and that the agency and autonomy of both are equally preserved and respected within it. She argues that citizens can behave toward one another as if they were friends without the emotions of love or goodwill: “Political friendship is not mainly (or not only) a sentiment of fellow-feeling for other citizens. It is more a way of acting in respect of them: friendship, known to all, defines the normative aspirations. One doesn’t even have to like one’s fellow citizens in order to act toward them as a political friend.”19 Because political solidarity is also a normative orientation of citizens, it can encompass people with whom one does not have close emotional connections. The core of this normative orientation (as Allen observes) is ethical reciprocity.20 The ethical reciprocity central to political solidarity refers to the quality of understanding that in some vital respects, one’s interests and those of other members of the same political community are aligned insofar as one inhabits shared political and geographical spaces with them. It is this recognition of a shared fate at some level, no matter how segregated citizens are from one another in practice, that is the basis for forging solidarity with strangers with whom one might not share a close emotional connection. Citizens need not be friends in order to display political solidarity toward one another, but they must recognize one another as fellow members of a political community. Political solidarity thus has an affective dimension, as it does involve feelings of identification with others, but it is also a normative orientation of citizens that entails a commitment to act on behalf of others. Solidarity, therefore, should not be equated only with the emotion of sympathy. As Tommie Shelby observes in his philosophical defense of Black Nationalism (which is a more particular form of group solidarity that he defines as the solidarity of black persons living in the United States), solidarity “is certainly a type of feeling or sentiment. Yet it is one that entails normative constraints. It is because I feel solidarity with group X that I ought to do this or that for or on behalf of fellow members of group X.”21 Solidarity, Shelby argues, involves more than just pity or sympathy; it also requires a disposition to aid and comfort those with whom one identifies. Solidarity should thus be distinguished from sympathy, as sympathy could be nothing more than an involuntary emotional reaction to the misfortunes of others; it need not be accompanied by a disposition to take action to help remedy


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those misfortunes. Solidarity, in contrast, involves emotion, but it is an emotion that translates into a normative orientation that impels us to collective action on behalf of others with whom we have established certain kinds of relations. But who are these others? In other words, who is the relevant “we” of solidarity? A second key concern of any conception of solidarity, therefore, is the question of its scope. While political theorists writing about solidarity have provided very different answers to this question, they have generally coincided in framing the issue in similar terms, as if it were a question of how to rank universal versus particular ethical obligations. I suggest that this mode of framing the issue of the proper scope of solidarity obscures the fact that we develop different kinds of solidarities with different kinds of persons with whom we are enmeshed in different kinds of relations, and these various solidarities are not mutually exclusive. The type of solidarity we establish with fellow citizens, for example, will be different from the solidarities we develop with smaller groups of people, such as family or kin groups, and with larger groups, such as human beings in general. The problem for political theorists is that solidarity toward those with whom we have close emotional connections appears to be more acutely or deeply felt. But this problem is not avoided by claiming that universal ethical commitments trump (or are somehow more binding or laudable than) particularistic ones. Solidarity does not function in this way. Instead, we need to recognize that individuals experience multiple and overlapping solidarities, and in practice, they always find themselves negotiating how to balance the competing obligations derived from these allegiances. There is significant disagreement among political theorists regarding the proper scope of solidarity, however. Some maintain that solidarity is best conceived in global terms. Brunkhorst, for example, wants to defend a fairly expansive conception of solidarity. He argues that a global legal order is emerging that lacks “politically inclusive, democratic solidarity.” In his view, the global protest movements that have manifested themselves in recent years are beginning to address this deficiency by articulating a more universal form of solidarity using “the language of a new human rights patriotism.”22 This is not an unusual view by any means; indeed, the idea that solidarity should be universal because it is grounded in a shared humanity is a fairly common perspective. Rorty, however, argues forcefully against this view of the proper scope of solidarity, not because he disagrees with its aim but because he rejects the philosophical arguments that underpin it

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and because he thinks it misidentifies the way solidarity actually works. He claims that “our sense of solidarity is strongest when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as ‘one of us,’ where ‘us’ means something smaller and more local than the human race.”23 While Rorty’s claim that the “we” of solidarity is usually not universal but particular seems accurate empirically, it also raises important questions about whether this is all that can be said about the appropriate scope of solidarity. That is because the challenge of solidarity in many instances is precisely how to see “the other” as entitled to the same rights and respect as oneself. Consider, for example, the U.S. evangelical Christian attitude toward homosexuality expressed as “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” The problem here is precisely that solidarity conceived in terms of “What do I owe those who are like myself?” has little to say about what we owe those who are not “like us.” Rorty’s answer to this problematic is that we should always be trying to enlarge the “we” of solidarity. He believes that all that can be said in this regard is that an individual can have multiple and sometimes competing solidarities with different communities of which he or she is a member, and there is no universally valid solution for how to resolve such conflicts. In order to elucidate what is meant by the claim that solidarity is best thought of as multiple and overlapping, it is useful to return to Shelby’s account of black solidarity and the five normative requirements of robust solidarity he identifies. Shelby’s central aim is to defend the continued usefulness for black persons living in the United States of a conception of black solidarity whose primary concern is a “joint commitment to defeating racism, to eliminating unjust racial inequalities, and to improving the material life prospects of those racialized as ‘black,’ especially the most disadvantaged.”24 Responding to those who would claim that a specific black solidarity is hardly necessary to the pursuit of such aims and that blacks would be better served by embracing interracial, antiracist solidarity instead, he argues that “the two forms of solidarity are not mutually exclusive. There is room for nested and overlapping forms of antiracist solidarity.”25 This is true not only of antiracist solidarity but also of solidarity in general. If solidarities are, in fact, nested and overlapping, it stands to reason that not all of Shelby’s five normative requirements of robust solidarity would be equally applicable to all types of solidarity, however. Recall that those normative requirements were mutual identification, special concern or partiality, shared values or goals, loyalty, and mutual trust. Consider the requirements of mutual identification and shared values or goals. Shelby


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argues that “one of the most salient features of group solidarity is the tendency of group members to identify, both subjectively and publicly, with each other or with the group as a whole.”26 This characterization of group solidarity echoes Rorty’s description of the way solidarity works: it is because we identify others as members of a community to which we also belong that we feel that we have obligations toward them. But in communities that include people whom we think of as being “not like us” in some fundamental way, there obviously has to be some other basis of solidarity. The same is true of shared interests or goals. Blacks in the United States, because they all suffer from antiblack racism (albeit to differing degrees depending on variables such as skin color, class, gender, and nationality) could plausibly be said to possess a shared goal of achieving racial justice, but the same might not be true of all whites, for instance, some of whom might believe that their interests are directly threatened by the policies needed to achieve such equality. This is not to say that interracial, antiracist solidarity is impossible but instead to suggest that the issue of the proper scope of solidarity is most usefully analyzed in terms of the different kinds of solidarities we establish with different groups or communities of people, not all of which will have the same features. Framing the question of the proper scope of solidarity in terms of the difficulty of balancing universal versus particular ethical commitments thus constitutes an implicit acknowledgment that solidarities are multiple. Nevertheless, focusing on how such competing obligations should be ranked in order of importance actually obscures the fact that we establish different kinds of solidarities with different types of groups, those that include only persons whom we think of as being like us and those that do not. There might be certain groups or communities to which we belong that include persons whom we see as radically different from ourselves, for instance, but toward whom we are nevertheless forced to recognize that we have certain obligations. This kind of solidarity, the kind that must be developed by members of a political community, which I refer to as political solidarity, might thus involve different kinds of affective relations from the kind of solidarity we feel with persons whom we think of as being like us, but it will still entail important ethical obligations nevertheless. Political solidarity need not be thought of as the most important of the various solidarities that will matter to individual citizens, therefore. Political solidarity might be essential to democratic politics, but it is only one of many kinds of solidarity of import to individual citizens. To suggest that it is possible to determine a priori

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which kinds of solidarities will matter to individual persons and the order in which they will do so does not reflect how solidarity actually works. Instead, the most fruitful way of thinking about the issue of the proper scope of solidarity is to think about solidarity as multiple and overlapping. As a result, I do not think that a definitive answer is possible to the question “What is the proper scope of solidarity?” Instead, the most that can be said in this regard is that we have multiple and sometimes overlapping solidarities with different communities and groups of which we are members, and we are always in the process of balancing these competing obligations. Nor is there an easy answer to the problem that obligations toward persons whom we think of as being like us in some fundamental way might be more immediately or deeply felt than those we have toward strangers. We might have the same kinds of ethical obligations toward different groups, but we likely think about the basis of those obligations quite differently. For communities or groups composed of diverse persons, the basis of such obligations certainly cannot be that they think of one another as alike in some fundamental way. Nevertheless, if there are persons with whom we must develop solidarity even if we do not think of them as being like us, what would be the basis of such solidarity? A third important element of any conception of solidarity, therefore, is the question of the basis of such solidarity. In other words, from where does solidarity spring? On what bases do individuals develop solidarity with one another? Aside from the idea of universal human solidarity (that we owe others solidarity because of a shared humanity), on what basis can solidarity rest when communities are not homogeneous, when their members do not necessarily have shared interests? When considering this question for solidarities that operate at a level smaller than the human, most contemporary political theorists have simply taken for granted that political solidarity is grounded in shared nationality, although this presupposition has not always been made explicit. Margaret Canovan, for example, argues that most contemporary political theory tacitly presumes the existence of the nationstate.27 She observes that nation and polity are routinely conflated in most contemporary political theory, so that one is often considered an attribute of the other. That is, most theorists of nationalism consider political sovereignty an attribute of nations, and political theorists routinely assume that political communities are nation-states.28 All major strands of contemporary political theory thus presuppose that the political community is a nation-state, including democratic theory, theories of social justice, and liberalism.29


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Political theorists have implicitly assumed that political solidarity is grounded in shared nationality, that this is how individuals come to see themselves as having shared political identities that enmesh them in reciprocal relations of obligation that require trust and cooperation. Some contemporary liberal nationalists, such as David Miller, explicitly claim that the basis of political solidarity in modern political communities is shared nationality. He argues that nationality is the most potent available source of collective identity and social cohesion in modern polities. Participatory democratic politics requires solidarity in order to make possible the search for common ground, he argues, and only shared nationality can serve as the basis of solidarity among large groups of people, because common nationality promotes trust and cooperation.30 He writes: “To the extent that we aspire to form a democracy in which all citizens are at some level involved in discussion of public issues, we must look to the conditions under which citizens can respect one another’s good faith in searching for grounds of agreement. Among large aggregates of people, only a common nationality can provide the sense of solidarity that makes this possible. Sharing a national identity does not, of course, mean holding similar political views; but it does mean being committed to finding terms under which fellow-nationals can agree to live together.”31 In Miller’s view, it is therefore nationality alone that can serve as the basis for solidarity in large political communities composed of strangers. For example, he claims that nationality enables far greater redistribution of social goods than would be dictated solely by the rational self-interest of individuals.32 The existence of trust is particularly crucial to gaining individual support for the implementation of schemes of social justice, he argues, particularly those involving redistribution to those unable to provide for their needs through market transactions. As a result, states that aim to be welfare states in this sense and at the same time win democratic legitimacy must be rooted in communities whose members recognize such obligations of justice to one another, such as national communities.33 He concludes that redistributive social justice schemes are thus more viable in single-nation states than in multinational federations, where it would be more difficult to persuade the citizens of the various constituent nationalities to accept such policies toward one another. Single-nation states are also likely to function more efficiently than multi-nation states in his view, because many state activities require the voluntary cooperation of citizens, and this cooperation is likely to occur only when citizens trust the state and

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one another, and shared nationality provides a basis for the development of such trust.34 The problem with arguments like Miller’s is that the kind of oneto-one correspondence between nationality and solidarity that they presuppose does not, in fact, exist. To the extent that it is capable of functioning as the source of social cohesion in modern polities, shared nationality can only do so in what are always incomplete, contested, and contingent ways. That is because shared nationality does not routinely trump differences resulting from other kinds of collective identities. Consider Miller’s claim that shared nationality makes possible higher levels of redistribution of social goods. For this to be true, the same degree of political obligation would have to be felt toward all conationals irrespective of any differences between them that would mitigate or detract from said feelings of (nationally based) solidarity. Yet the opposite is often true. When racial difference is present, for example, common nationality does not unproblematically result in feelings of political obligation. This is clearly illustrated by debates about welfare reform in the United States, where racist views of minorities, particularly African American women, as lazy, sexually promiscuous, lacking individual initiative, and so on, played a key role in generating support for the reduction of social services to the poor (nonwhite and white alike). African Americans are U.S. nationals, despite having been treated as second-class citizens throughout most of U.S. history. It was their racial otherness, therefore, and particularly the racist views of them held by the white majority, that made them appear undeserving of certain redistributive policies by the state.35 In other words, race trumped nationality in determining conceptions of political obligation. It is thus simply not the case that nationality always transcends other forms of collective identity in determining the scope of the community in which solidarity is felt to exist. Instead, in some cases (as in the example above), the historic racialization of national identity limits the scope of solidarity. In debates about welfare reform in the United States, for instance, the fact that African Americans were born within the same national territory was irrelevant in light of the perception of many white U.S. citizens that the former did not display national values such as thriftiness and hard work and were therefore insufficiently national and undeserving of redistributive policies from the state. Nationality is thus both exclusive and inclusive, which means that it can serve as the basis of solidarity only partially and imperfectly.36 As a result, it is simply not possible to assume that shared


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nationality automatically leads to political solidarity. Once the veil of shared nationality is removed, the question of how political solidarity is produced in the context of difference remains. If shared nationality cannot serve as the basis of political solidarity in diverse polities, however, on what basis can it develop? A more useful way to think about the basis of such solidarity is as the product of structural conditions that require people to develop contingent solidarities, however momentarily, every day, that are not dependent on mutual identification (i.e., thinking of others as being “like us”) or shared nationality. Iris Young’s concept of “differentiated solidarity” is useful for delineating the meaning of this claim. She argues that “differentiated solidarity does not presume mutual identification and affinity as an explicit or implicit condition for attitudes of respect and inclusion.”37 Such a conception of solidarity is necessary in diverse polities, in her view, because such communities require “a concept of mutual respect and caring that presumes distance: that norms of solidarity hold among strangers and those who in many ways remain strange to one another.”38 The ethical basis of this kind of solidarity obviously cannot be fellow feeling. Instead, Young suggests that in such circumstances, the basis of solidarity “is that people live together. They are together in a locale or region whether they like it or not. Because they are together, they are affected by and relate to the geographical and atmospheric environment. . . . Strangers in modern societies also live together in a stronger sense. Their daily activities assume dense networks of institutional relations which usually relate them in the sense that the actions of some here pursuing these ends potentially affect many others whom they do not and may not have thought about.”39 To the extent, then, that individuals are members of the same political community, that they live in a community where their actions have unavoidable consequences on the lives of all those who share it with them, they are enmeshed in relations of mutual obligation. The common (geographical, social, political) spaces shared by members of a political community are thus the basis of political solidarity as it is being conceived here. It is important to specify that such a political community need not be conceived in strictly national terms, however. While the focus of this book is political solidarity, the kind of solidarity that must be developed by members of a political community in order for it to function effectively, I nevertheless wish to avoid the conflation of nation and polity endemic to much contemporary political theory. Insofar as the political community is not

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necessarily coextensive with the nation, political solidarity is not defined by shared nationality. Rather, such solidarity can be derived from the spaces individuals inhabit together and the kinds of structural relations in which such shared membership enmeshes them. It is precisely for this reason that when considering the boundaries of the political community within which such solidarity may arise, it is not possible to think about it to the exclusion of noncitizens, for example. While it might be natural to conclude that this is the case, it is important to note that there are many individuals who are productive members of the political communities in which they reside, or have the potential to be such, who do not technically hold the status of citizens, such as long-term “guest workers,” permanent residents in the United States (who pay taxes and are eligible to be drafted into the armed forces but cannot vote), illegal immigrants, rehabilitated convicted felons, and so on. The point is that while I am concerned with the kinds of solidarity developed between members of a political community, political membership need not be thought of as defined solely by citizenship status or nationality. When I refer to the kind of solidarity that arises from shared political membership, therefore, I use the term membership advisedly, as the common structural conditions that lead members of a political community to develop solidarity do not encompass only conationals or citizens. To claim that political solidarity can arise on the basis of shared structural conditions is to say that such conditions force individuals to see their fates as inextricably linked in important ways. Political solidarity can therefore be thought of as arising in at least two distinct ways: as the expression of agreement on shared political principles or mutual interests by individuals who may or may not conceive of one another as different and as the result of the recognition by individuals that despite disagreements about political principles, they have been brought together by membership in a shared political community with persons whom they view as radically different from themselves. In multicultural and multiracial polities, where individuals cannot be presumed to have common or identical interests, political solidarity cannot be expected to arise in the first way. That is, agreement on shared political principles or mutual interests may be difficult to come by in such circumstances. In a political community where racism has been the norm, for example, the interests of dominant and subordinated racial groups will likely diverge, as the former are likely to resist the end of racial privilege, while the latter will likely push for racial justice. In such polities, moreover, it is even difficult to assume that agreement on shared political


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principles will be easily arrived at, as it is quite likely that the very meaning of the principles themselves will be highly contested. Consider, for example, the idea of racial equality, a principle on which blacks and whites in the United States might now be said to agree (at least in theory). Yet in a recent Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of desegregation measures utilized by U.S. public schools, the opinions of justices in both the majority and the minority invoked Brown v. Board of Education to claim that racial equality means completely different things. For the justices in the majority, racial justice is color blindness (i.e., the use of race in public policy is unconstitutional in all instances), while their dissenting colleagues in the minority claim the opposite, that it, in fact, requires the adoption of “raceconscious” policies.40 At the same time as such profound differences about the very meaning of racial equality persist in the United States, however, it is also undeniable that blacks and whites are bound together by shared membership in a political community that renders their fates inextricably linked, as much as both groups might sometimes (or even often) wish it to be otherwise. In such instances, the best that can be hoped for is that despite disagreements about political principles, individuals will recognize that they have been brought together by membership in a shared political community with persons whom they view as radically different from themselves and with whom they must perforce develop solidarity if the polity is to function. The basis of political solidarity in diverse polities is thus not shared nationality but the structural relations in which members of a political community are unavoidably enmeshed that force them to find ways of working together, however reluctantly. Thus far, I have suggested that it is most useful to think about political solidarity as both an emotion and an ethical orientation that moves us to action, as multiple and overlapping in terms of its scope, and as the product of structural conditions that require individuals to develop contingent solidarities, however momentarily, every day. There is a fourth dimension of solidarity that also needs to be incorporated into this account of political solidarity, however, and that is the fact that, to date, solidarity has been fundamentally shaped by race and racial thinking. Most theorists writing about solidarity have not sufficiently considered the effect of race on solidarity. That is not to say that they have ignored the issue. Indeed, the starting point of Allen’s defense of political friendship is the problem of interracial distrust, Shelby is specifically concerned with the philosophical underpinnings of black solidarity, Jodi Dean deals with how to think about the relationship

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between identity politics and solidarity, and Rorty repeatedly cites race as an example of the kind of difference between individuals that has placed limits on solidarity in the past.41 Yet in all of these theories (with the notable exception of Shelby’s), race is conceived as symptomatic of a broader problem of how to foster trust between democratic citizens who are strangers to one another, how to develop solidarity in the context of difference, how to enlarge the “we” of solidarity continually to include those who are not “like us”—whereas in my view, racial seeing and racial thinking need to be confronted directly as fundamental, and in many ways unique, challenges to the development of genuine political solidarity. In the following section, I therefore flesh out what is meant by the concept of racialized solidarity and discuss what it would mean to take it seriously as an important feature of the way political solidarity actually functions today.

On Racialized Solidarity One of the central claims of this book is that theories of multiculturalism must take the racialization of solidarity into account in order to conceive the problem of racial injustice adequately. A fourth important element of the conception of political solidarity developed here is thus the acknowledgment that racial difference continues to shape its contours in important ways. As noted in the introduction, by racialized solidarity, I mean the way racial seeing and thinking trains whites not to see the pain and suffering of nonwhites and to be less concerned about it when they do see it. Embodied racial difference works against one of the fundamental features of solidarity: that we care about the pain and suffering of others. As a result of racialization, the pain and suffering of nonwhites are either rendered invisible or, when visible, are seen as less deserving of empathy and redress than those of whites. In a nutshell, racialized solidarity refers to the way embodied racial difference results in differential sympathy toward whites and nonwhites. In the rest of this chapter, I sketch what it would mean for a conception of political solidarity to take the effects of racialization into account. In order to do so it is necessary to abandon the assumption that the baseline in modern political communities is neutrality toward race, instead taking as our starting point the existence of what Charles Mills calls “the racial polity” and the racialized ethics it produces. This shift in perspective would make clear why approaches to racial justice that attempt to bypass the problem of racialized solidarity are ultimately inadequate. On the contrary, the only


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way to deal with the political and philosophical dilemmas raised by racialized solidarity is to confront it directly as a continuing problem. In other words, confronting the problematic of racialized solidarity means trying to transform the ethical-historical perspectives of dominant racial groups. One way to approach this rather daunting task is through changes in the public memory and self-understanding of the political community as a whole. Despite repeatedly citing race as the paradigmatic example of lack of solidarity, most political theorists writing about solidarity or race have not specifically addressed the issue of racialized solidarity. One could speculate that this is because, for those concerned with solidarity, its racialization is seen either as a relic of the past that is no longer a serious difficulty or as part of a broader problem with political solidarity in liberal democratic polities. Allen, for example, sees interracial distrust as emblematic of a larger problem of lack of trust among citizens of the U.S. polity. She views “the problem of interracial distrust in the United States as a symptom of a more general problem of citizenship. This democracy has repeatedly failed to develop forms of citizenship that help break down distrust and generate trust.”42 Similarly, political theorists writing about race have not had much to say about solidarity per se, except to suggest that the cause of the racial gap in solidarity is the idea of race itself. Many of them thus appear to assume that the answer to the problem of the racial gap in solidarity is to abandon the concept of race itself.43 Nevertheless, the fact that race is the archetypal example of the absence of solidarity is not simply coincidental; it illustrates the prevalence of racialized solidarity. Before elucidating what is meant by the notion of racialized solidarity, however, it is first necessary to specify the ways in which the concept of race is being utilized here, given its highly contested status. Biological understandings of race, which held that “races” were distinct human groups with immutable, inherited physical characteristics, only some of which were capable of civilization, have given way to the view that race is a social, not a biological, construct. It is now widely accepted in the scientific community that there is no biological basis for distinguishing among human groups along the lines of race, that the genetic variations that account for the phenotypical differences that we associate with race are so minuscule as to render race biologically meaningless.44 Instead, race, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant suggest, is best viewed as “a concept that represents social conflicts and interests in terms of different types of human bodies,” one that is “a matter of both social structure and social representation.”45

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To claim that race is socially constructed, that the meanings we assign to the phenotypical differences we associate with race lack foundation in biology, should not be understood to mean that the category of race is meaningless, however, or that it is of no explanatory or analytical value.46 As one of the central axes around which social life is organized in modern societies, race and racial logic are everywhere, and they have important material effects. Racial difference is one of the principal sources of the deep lack of solidarity with those seen as racial “others,” for example. Racial categorization also determines access to education, employment, housing, and other public and private goods, as well as the design of social programs and the distribution of local, state, and federal funds and the organization of elections. In sum, race has a direct impact on the life chances of individuals and groups defined in racial terms, as the pervasiveness of racial inequality in contemporary liberal democracies demonstrates.47 Race has also determined unequal access to citizenship for nonwhites. Racial systems of domination and oppression affect the political standing of nonwhites by making them appear less than fully national and undeserving of full and equal citizenship. The denial of political equality to nonwhites has taken different forms historically, ranging from the idea that racial difference made certain groups fit for extermination or enslavement, to specific legal prohibitions barring persons of African descent from full inclusion in the political, social, and economic life of their societies in the segregated southern United States and in South Africa, to the reality of persistent inequality between whites and nonwhites in many contemporary polities despite the end of legal discrimination and the official abandonment of ideas of racial inferiority. Overall, modern political relations have been fundamentally structured by race. While race continues to shape modern political communities in critical ways, as it has since their inception, this fact has not been fully incorporated into discussions of race in political theory. When political theorists writing about solidarity have confronted the issue of race, for example, they have done so within prevailing assumptions about the origins and character of contemporary forms of political association. That is, while acknowledging the existence of racism, they have viewed it as a temporary aberration that does not require that the assumption that the political community is race-neutral be seriously interrogated. As Mills observes, when “racism is addressed at all within mainstream moral and political philosophy, it is usually treated in a footnote as a regrettable deviation from the ideal. But treating it this way makes it seem contingent, accidental, residual, removes it


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from our understanding. Race is made to seem marginal when in fact race has been central.”48 In order to understand the relationship between race and solidarity, therefore, it is necessary to adopt a thoroughly different perspective, one that begins from the premise that modern political communities have been thoroughly informed by, and indeed designed on the basis of, racial hierarchy since their inception. That is, the idea of a color-blind political community needs to be replaced with the notion of a racial polity. I follow Mills here in arguing that rather than abstracting race out of philosophical models of the polity, it is instead necessary to recognize how, ever since the invention of the modern concept of race, political communities have been organized on the basis of white supremacy. In a racial polity, he argues: Race, then, becomes the most important thing about the citizens of such a polity, for it is because of race that one does or does not count as a full person, as someone entitled to settle, to expropriate, to be free, or as someone destined to be removed, to be expropriated, to be enslaved. As white, one is a citizen; as nonwhite, an anticitizen. The two are interdefined. . . . The racial polity is by definition exploitative. Whiteness is not merely full personhood, membership in the recognized culture; it is also material benefit, entitlement to differential moral/legal/social treatment, and differential rational expectations of economic success. . . . The racial contract between whites is in effect an agreement to divide among themselves (as common white property) the proceeds of nonwhite subordination.49

This perspective reveals, not only the thoroughly race-conscious character of modern political communities, but also the fact that the norm for political relations has never been equality, which has not existed for racially subordinated groups, or indeed even for dominant groups, who have come to expect unequally distributed material advantage and political power as both natural and morally legitimate.50 Instead of being seen as a temporary deviation from a presumed norm of equality, therefore, racial hierarchy is revealed as the institutionalized logic upon which existing state institutions have been built.51 One of the defining features of the racial polity is the development of what Mills calls a “Herrenvolk ethics” among whites. As the racial polity is constructed on the basis of racial hierarchy, the subordination of nonwhites must be justified (particularly after the abandonment of scientific claims of nonwhite inferiority), and this leads to the development of an

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ethical universe in which norms of morality and rules of fairness apply fully only to the subset of whites. Racial hierarchy permeates not only political structures, therefore, but also the moral outlook of dominant racial groups. In the racial polity, “differential white racial entitlement and non-white racial subordination” will also “inevitably mold white moral psychology and moral theorizing.”52 As Mills explains, the racial polity “creates a racialized moral psychology. Whites will then act in racist ways while thinking of themselves as acting morally. In other words, they will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior patterns as racist, so that quite apart from questions of motivation and bad faith they will be morally handicapped simply from the conceptual point of view in seeing and doing the right thing.”53 In a racial polity, dominant and subordinated racial groups thus develop different ethical-political perspectives (a phenomenon I call racialized solidarity). Indeed, they will disagree about what appear to be basic facts. They will tend to have starkly divergent accounts of the history and character of the political community shaped by the different places they occupy in the racial hierarchy that defines the contours of said polity. As a consequence, a distinct difference in ethical-political orientations and historical perspectives will emerge. For subordinated racial groups, the defining aspect of the political community they inhabit is its status as a racial polity; that is, their historical exclusion from the moral and political categories of human and citizen leads nonwhites to experience the legitimating discourses of contemporary liberal democracies as both false and hypocritical. In contrast, members of dominant racial groups, who have not experienced racial injustice, will tend to view racism as contingent to political life, as an aberration within an otherwise fundamentally sound political order.54 A clear example of the immense ethical distance such differences in historical perceptions and political orientations create between whites and nonwhites is the use of the language of moral offense by contemporary opponents of affirmative action and other so-called race-conscious policies in the United States.55 The very fact that opponents of policies designed to overcome racial discrimination reject such measures on the grounds that any use of race in public policy is morally repugnant is, for racially subordinated groups, a slap in the face. Besides the obvious point that the majority of those who make such claims do not appear to reserve the same kind of moral outrage for the visible effects of racial discrimination, there is the unstated assumption—ironic and tragic by turns—that the victims of past


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(and continuing) racial injustice lack an appreciation for the fine points of morality involved in the use of race to dehumanize and otherwise injure human persons. As this example illustrates, the ethical-political distance between whites and nonwhites in the racial polity is often immense. It is thus clear that the phenomenon of racialized solidarity raises significant philosophical and political problems. The difference between the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated racial groups is not merely an empirical question about whose version of history is more accurate, for example. It is a philosophical problem that goes beyond questions of cultural relativism or positional ethics. What is at stake is not merely the epistemological issue of whether objective standards of truth exist by which divergent historical narratives can be judged. Philosophically, the question of whether racial injustice is contingent to, or constitutive of, the development of the polity speaks to fundamental assumptions in political theory about the nature of relations between citizens. Moreover, insofar as official narratives about the character of the political community reflect the perspective of dominant groups, the point of view of subordinated racial groups is implicitly and explicitly deemed irrelevant to the ethical selfunderstanding of the polity of which they are ostensibly equal members. This precludes the development of genuine political solidarity and of theories that actually speak to the problems that plague social and political life in the racial polity. Politically, the problem of the divergent ethical-historical perspectives developed by dominant and subordinated racial groups manifests itself when decisions have to be made about what constitutes racial justice and how it might be achieved. Whites and nonwhites will bring their divergent ethicalhistorical perspectives to bear on their assessments of such questions; they will approach them as either the beneficiaries or the victims of particular racial orders. Most whites, for example, even those who support racial equality in the abstract, will likely resent and resist the dismantling or diminution of the historical privileges they have accumulated simply as a matter of self- or group-interest. But even in the absence of such problems of material interests and bad faith, whites will have difficulty seeing policies designed to overcome racial discrimination as fair or even necessary, as they are blind to the realities of the racial polity.56 Meanwhile, most nonwhites will tend to view white resistance to such measures as another example of the unwillingness of the historic beneficiaries of white privilege to give up unearned benefits in order to level the playing field and ensure equal opportunities for all.

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The differences in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated racial groups thus constitute an enormous political problem, as they suggest that in order to achieve racial justice, it is necessary to overcome racialized solidarity. But are there ways to avoid or resolve the political problems posed by racialized solidarity? One approach to the problem suggested by legal scholar Derrick Bell is to set aside altogether the expectation that racialized solidarity can be overcome. He argues that we should focus instead on moments of interest convergence between whites and nonwhites as the means of making progress toward racial justice. Danielle Allen favors a different approach to the problem of racialized solidarity. She believes that changes in the individual practice of citizenship modeled on friendship can serve as an antidote to interracial distrust. Both of these approaches suggest important means by which it might be possible to avoid or mitigate the effects of racialized solidarity. Nevertheless, they are both also subject to certain important limitations. Given the political conundrums that racialized solidarity poses to the struggle for racial justice, one potential approach to the problem would be to eschew the pursuit of genuine political solidarity altogether and conclude instead, as Bell suggests, that the most pragmatic option is to pursue areas of “interest convergence” between blacks and whites as the only way to achieve progress toward racial justice. He persuasively argues that the history of U.S. civil rights jurisprudence suggests that [t]he interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites. However, the [equal protection guarantee of the] Fourteenth Amendment, standing alone, will not authorize a judicial remedy providing effective racial equality for blacks where the remedy sought threatens the superior societal status of middle- and upper-class whites. . . . [Equal] protection in racial cases may not be actually determined by the character of the harms suffered by blacks. . . . Racial remedies may instead be the outward and perhaps unconscious judicial conclusions that the remedies, if granted, will secure, advance, or at least not harm societal interests deemed important by middle- and upper-class whites. Racial justice—or its appearance— may, from time to time, be counted among the[se] interests.57

Bell’s point is that while U.S. whites may embrace the idea of racial justice in the abstract, they will reject measures designed to ensure black equality insofar as these require any diminution in their own privileged status, and U.S. jurisprudence about race reflects this principle of interest convergence:


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progress toward black equality occurs only when it is also in the interest of (some) whites. In many ways, Bell’s argument reflects a recurrent debate in African American political thought concerning whether whites can be moved to support racial justice by means of moral persuasion. Some thinkers in this tradition have concluded that such attempts are futile, because self-interest alone will inevitably lead whites to be hostile to the cause of racial justice. Bell comes down decidedly on the side of the latter, more materialist position that white support for racial equality (or, rather, lack thereof) is unlikely to be determined by ethical beliefs. His view is essentially that while a minority of whites might be motivated solely by ideals of racial justice to support policies designed to achieve black equality at any given moment, the majority of whites will oppose such policies as a result of self- and group-interest. It would thus be a mistake to read his argument as a claim that moments of interest convergence between whites and blacks will somehow result in full racial justice.58 Instead, he views this as a more pragmatic approach to the political impasse created by racialized solidarity in the short term. Bell’s interest-convergence strategy does not entirely avoid the problems posed by racialized solidarity, however, because whites will experience cognitive difficulties in recognizing such instances of interest convergence and will perceive their interests as different from those of blacks even when they are not. As Bell himself acknowledges, the objective material interests of whites and nonwhites will most often diverge when it comes to measures designed to achieve racial justice. He believes that there are exceptions, however. As a case in point, he cites the issue of public education in the United States, in which the interests of poor whites and blacks are actually aligned, as they would both be the primary beneficiaries of efforts to improve the quality of public schooling. Nevertheless, the interest-convergence argument depends on the assumption that whites will be able to recognize that their interests and those of nonwhites are aligned in certain circumstances. Yet this is precisely what the Herrenvolk ethics characteristic of the racial polity prevents whites from doing. That is, whites will literally have trouble seeing that they have common interests with blacks. As Mills observes, part of the problem is that whites’ perception of their own self-interest is often not related to objective economic or political conditions. Because white advantage has been the norm, any diminution of it is experienced existentially as a threat by some whites. This is especially true of poor whites, whose sense of well-being has historically been measured in relation to their social distance

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from blacks, irrespective of the actual similarities in their economic positions.59 As a result, even an interest-convergence strategy is not immune from the effects of racialized solidarity. Another way to approach the problematic of racialized solidarity is to focus on the individual practices of citizens as a way to overcome distrust, particularly interracial distrust. This is the approach suggested by Allen, who claims that democratic citizenship always involves loss, and hence sacrifices, on the part of citizens. Democracies are therefore unavoidably confronted with the task of managing loss, and citizens are confronted with the prospect of sacrifice. She suggests that the practices of reciprocity central to friendship offer important resources for how democratic citizens should manage the problems of sacrifice and loss. “Democracy is . . . a political practice by which the diverse negative effects of collective political action, and even of just decisions, can be distributed equally, and constantly redistributed over time, on the basis of consensual interactions. The hard truth of democracy is that some citizens are always giving things up for others.”60 In the context of white supremacy, however, the burden of democratic sacrifice is unequally distributed, and this breeds distrust rather than solidarity. She observes that “for a long time in this country, the solution to this paradoxical fact that most democratic citizens are, at the end of the day, relatively powerless sovereigns was the two-pronged citizenship of domination and acquiescence. These old habits dealt with the inevitable fact of loss in political life by assigning to one group [whites] all the work of being sovereign, and to another group [blacks] most of the work of accepting the significant losses that kept the polity stable.”61 A key test of the legitimacy of citizens’ sacrifices in democracy is thus that they be voluntary, are honored by other citizens, and are equally distributed.62 The problem, of course, is that such conditions are not met for subordinated racial groups in a racial polity. The problems posed by racialized solidarity are also not avoided by focusing on the individual practices of citizens, however, as these, and particularly the normative orientations that guide them, will continue to be shaped by Herrenvolk ethics in a racial polity. The key question for Allen’s argument is thus whether a majority of whites have embraced the idea of equally distributed loss, in other words, whether the United States remains a racial polity. As Bell observes, whites continue to resist sacrifice and refuse to surrender unearned privilege and power. Equally (or perhaps more) important, most whites continue to have cognitive difficulties in recognizing the heroic sacrifices African Americans have made (and continue to make) for


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the sake of the stability of the U.S. polity.63 These problems manifest themselves most clearly in terms of how obligations that flow from past and current sacrifices are viewed. The problem of interracial distrust in a political community such as the United States, which has been constituted as a racial polity, are unlikely to be resolved by transformations in the practice of citizenship at the individual level alone. Allen contends that democratic citizenship demands of racially subordinated groups that instead of pursuing a politics of grievance, they renounce notions of retaliation or revenge and pursue political projects aimed at making the whole political community more just and free. Yet often, even such acts of altruism run the risk of alienating their fellow citizens, who may resent these projects for different reasons. She observes that “[c]itizens who give often and generously to other citizens may be distrusted. . . . Precisely because they are in a position to give more to other citizens than others give to them, they also often have the power to avoid making themselves vulnerable before strangers. They may be willing to give money or recognition to other citizens, and may do so frequently, but without giving them real power. They may have laid claim to a moral high ground, on account of their gifts, and to immunity from criticism that in itself provokes distrust.”64 This passage points to the limits of using friendship as a model for political solidarity, particularly in political communities where injustice was built into the fabric of the polity. Mutual vulnerability might be a requirement of friendship, for example, but it seems unhelpful in dealing with the issue of how a racial polity might right past wrongs, which requires the acknowledgment and honoring of the past and continuing sacrifices of subordinated groups. By Allen’s own account, however, sacrifice (whether on the part of dominant or subordinated groups) can itself provoke distrust.65 In a racial polity, therefore, even sacrifice can prove incapable of fostering interracial trust. Allen recognizes this, but her proposed solution to the problem—changing the way individuals practice citizenship—fails to take into account the silent reproduction of precisely those normative orientations among dominant groups that need to be overcome in order for reciprocity, which is the basis of trust and solidarity, to flourish. The approaches proposed by Bell and Allen might thus provide ways to mitigate the effects of racialized solidarity, but they do not directly address the continuing effects of the Herrenvolk ethics produced by the racial polity on the normative orientations of dominant racial groups. Once we recognize the existence of the phenomenon of racialized solidarity, we are

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confronted with the following question: Is it possible to bring about changes in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups in a racial polity? In other words, is it, in fact, possible to overcome racialized solidarity? This is a perplexing question, because racialized solidarity is a product of the existence of the racial polity. In order to overcome racialized solidarity, then, is it not first necessary to move beyond the racial polity? But how can the racial polity be dismantled when dominant groups are blind to its existence in the first place and, as a result, tend to resist attempts to achieve racial justice? The ethical and political dilemmas posed by racialized solidarity may well be intractable, as Bell suggests. Indeed, there is no magic formula or quick fix that will instantaneously resolve the problem of racialized solidarity. That is because it confronts us with a problem of the “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” variety: because racialized solidarity is a product of the racial polity, dismantling the racial polity (at least, by nonviolent or democratic means) would seem to require first that racialized solidarity be overcome, but this itself appears impossible as long as the racial polity continues to exist. Short of a violent restructuring of the racial polity in order to create a political community not organized on the basis of racial hierarchy, the question is thus: What means are available within the confines of liberal democratic politics to begin to address the problem of racialized solidarity? An important (though hardly sufficient) first step in such a process would be to focus on making “whiteness,” with all of its associated meanings and effects, visible to whites. In other words, one way to try to confront the problem of racialized solidarity directly is to attempt to make the existence of the racial polity visible to dominant groups. This is not the same as suggesting that what is needed is the inclusion of nonwhites in dominant moral and political categories such as human and citizen. Persuading whites that nonwhites also properly belong within these categories without a radical reevaluation of the meaning of the categories themselves, that is, without seeing them as the instruments of a thoroughly racialized moral and political order, will achieve little. When underlying assumptions about the nature of the political community are not questioned or rejected, for example, the results are rather limited conceptions of what constitutes racial justice.66 Instead, the starting point of debates about racial justice needs to be the attempt to show how the underlying political categories by which ethical judgments and public policy decisions about such questions are made are morally biased and need to be discarded. In order to try to counteract the effects of the Herrenvolk ethics produced by the racial polity on the moral


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orientations of dominant racial groups and on their perception of their material interests, whites must be able to see themselves seeing whitely, in Mills’s words.67 Rather than trying to resolve the problem of the veil a Herrenvolk ethics casts over white moral operations by the use of a second veil (as Rawls arguably sought to do), it is instead necessary to lift the initial veil altogether. Tackling the problem of racialized solidarity thus requires challenging the supremacy of the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups within the political community’s account of itself, as well as its historical accuracy. What, then, does making whiteness visible to whites entail? In a racial polity, the collective identity and the public memory of the political community reflect the ethical-historical perspectives of dominant groups. To make whiteness visible is thus to transform the ethical self-understanding of the political community such that its character as a racial polity is acknowledged. Political solidarity involves seeing through the eyes of the other, seeing as the other sees. Having whites see themselves seeing through white eyes means that they must accept the fact that, far from being a liberal democratic polity in which everyone is treated equally, their political community is, in fact, a racial polity. In the United States, for example, the civil rights movement of the s was a moment when whiteness was made visible; it forced whites to see their political community as it appeared from the point of view of their separate-and-less-than-fully-equal black fellow citizens. The courageous actions of civil rights activists made it impossible for white citizens to avoid acknowledging the white supremacist character of the U.S. polity. The problem, however, was that as a result of the focus on segregation in the South, where white supremacy was at its most visible, the reality of the United States as a racial polity was revealed—for the majority of whites, at least—only in a partial and truncated fashion, both spatially and temporally, confined to a moment in time (the past) and a specific geographic location (the Jim Crow South). The temporary and incomplete recognition of the United States as a racial polity by its white citizens has had an enormous impact on subsequent struggles for black equality. To the extent that most whites in the United States believe that racism was a temporary aberration from a norm of racial justice that has since been corrected, for example, they tend to view remedies for racialized oppression today as “special,” unwarranted rights for African Americans. Racial politics in the post–civil rights era thus illustrate the close connection between changes in the ethical-political perspectives

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of dominant groups (i.e., whether and to what extent they recognize the political community to be a racial polity) and the success of struggles for racial justice. In order to begin to confront the problem of racialized solidarity directly, it is necessary to attempt to transform the ethical self-understanding of the political community as a whole (which in a racial polity reflects the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups), because such notions of collective identity determine the process of adjudication of rights. Decisions about how a political community should respond to demands by subordinated groups necessarily involve questions of history and public memory. Political decisions about the rights entailed by citizenship are indelibly shaped by the way in which the political principles on which the polity is organized are understood, in other words, by the content of the political community’s public memory. It is on the basis of narratives of collective selfhood that decisions about mutual obligations between citizens are made. Some of the most fundamental questions of justice facing any society, such as “To whom do I owe what, and why?” are decided not only (or even mostly) in light of abstract notions of universal human rights, as Rorty reminds us, but on the basis of notions of collective identity. In order to begin to address the problem of racialized solidarity, then, it is necessary to challenge the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups in order to transform the way the past is remembered, as this determines how the present is conceived and understood. Making whiteness visible means, above all, recognizing that the political community is a racial polity. This is a difficult task, however, because such an acknowledgment runs counter to the ethical self-understanding of most contemporary liberal democracies. Since the advent of modern liberalism, political communities have been understood to derive their legitimacy from the fact that they are voluntary associations in which all citizens are, at least in principle, committed to equal, reciprocal relationships. Dominant groups in contemporary Western liberal democracies view their political communities as the product of voluntary agreements between citizens around political principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, despite the fact that the very shape, literally and metaphorically, of these polities (with respect to both territorial state boundaries and the actual embodied citizens who inhabit them) reflects imperial histories of conquest and colonization in some cases, sustained exclusion and discrimination of racial and ethnic minorities in others, and many other kinds of violence and injustice.


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To acknowledge these violent and less than consensual processes of political founding and organization would be to admit, in Hannah Arendt’s words, that “whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origins in crime.”68 Any notion of foundational injustice or pervasive racial hierarchy thus tends to be absent from the ethical self-understanding of dominant groups in contemporary liberal democracies. In other words, the existence of the racial polity is actively denied or obscured. Yet the specters of Romulus and Remus, of Cain and Abel, continue to haunt modern political communities composed of the descendants of both masters and slaves, of colonizers and colonized, despite the attempt of dominant groups to silence them under the clamor of egalité, liberté, fraternité. Accepting the existence of the racial polity will not necessarily lead to the dissolution of the bonds that hold citizens together, to the destruction of political solidarity, as some might fear, but rather to their reconstitution on more equitable grounds. As long as the public memory of the political community as a whole reflects only the ethical self-understanding of dominant groups, racialized solidarity will continue to reproduce itself. Until dominant groups in a racial polity are able to see themselves seeing through white eyes—until they realize that their understandings of the polity are partial, incomplete, and morally biased—genuine political solidarity will not exist. The idea that racism is constitutive of modern political communities is a controversial one for dominant groups. Yet denial of the fact that political life has been organized on the basis of racial hierarchy has led to the development of conceptions of political obligation that are anything but universal in most contemporary Western liberal democracies. In order to generate genuine political solidarity, it is necessary to give an account of collective identity that is faithful to the ethical-political orientations of all citizens, to take the perspective of subordinated groups into account in order to reconcile them to a shared collective enterprise. In order to begin to tackle the problem of racialized solidarity, dominant groups must confront the fact that the political community is a racial polity that produces a Herrenvolk ethics that distorts their basic moral operations and ethical orientations. I have argued here that it is most useful to conceive of political solidarity as having an important affective dimension but also as an ethical orientation that moves us to action; as multiple and overlapping; as the product of structural conditions that require people to develop contingent solidarities not dependent on common interests or even shared political principles; and

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as being fundamentally shaped by race in contemporary polities, such that the existence of racialized solidarity poses apparently insurmountable obstacles to the achievement of racial justice. It would seem, therefore, that the problematic of racialized solidarity, and indeed of how political solidarity is generated and sustained more generally, would be a fundamental concern of theories of multiculturalism, which have become the dominant lens for thinking about questions of justice in diverse polities. Yet, as I show in chapter , the two main branches of the multiculturalism literature have been less concerned with political solidarity, especially racialized solidarity, than one might expect. Before addressing the question of how theories of multiculturalism might need to be reconceived in order to take the problematic of racialized solidarity into account, then, I first discuss the reasons for this surprising omission and point to some of its more important consequences for the way questions of multicultural and racial justice have been framed.

2 Race and Culture in Liberal Theories of Multiculturalism

A

ccording to one of the leading participants in debates about multiculturalism in political theory, a turning point has been reached in the debate. The initial focus of such debates was on assessing whether special collective rights for disadvantaged groups were inherently unjust. In Will Kymlicka’s view, this stage of the debate is now over, as “defenders of minority rights have won the day.” He believes that debates about multiculturalism have been successfully redefined such that it is now widely accepted that justice in diverse political communities requires more than differenceblind rules, and as a result, the burden of proof has shifted, and it is not only defenders of group rights for minorities who must show that such rights will not create injustices but also opponents of these rights who must now demonstrate that difference-blind institutions will not create injustices for disadvantaged minority groups.1 Further, he claims that there is now an emerging consensus—what he calls “liberal culturalism”—around which theorists of multiculturalism have converged. This is the view that liberal democratic states should adopt (in addition to common civil and political rights for all individuals) various group-specific rights intended to recognize and accommodate the distinctive identities and needs of minority

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cultural groups. Liberal culturalists thus support policies that enable members of cultural groups to express and promote their culture and identity. They can be divided into two types: liberal nationalists and liberal multiculturalists. The former are mainly concerned with the protection and promotion of the national cultures of all nations encompassed within a state, while the latter claim that nonnational cultural groups, such as immigrants, refugees, religious minorities, and even nonethnic cultural groups (such as gays and the disabled), are also entitled to recognition and accommodation from the state.2 This chronology is instructive, because it points to important theoretical developments that have significantly affected the conceptualization of minority group rights in political theory, particularly with regard to the different treatment of race and culture within the multiculturalism literature and the place political solidarity has (or rather has not) been accorded within it. The main aim of this chapter is thus to analyze the consequences of the particular conceptual apparatus employed by liberal theories of multiculturalism on dominant modes of thinking about questions of cultural accommodation and racial justice. In order to understand how and why liberal culturalism has become the dominant position among theorists of multiculturalism and to grasp the consequences of this development, it is necessary to understand the context in which debates about multiculturalism emerged. Initially, questions about the normative justification of minority group rights emerged in the context of a debate between U.S. and Canadian liberal political theorists about whether there was a place for questions of racial difference and cultural membership in ideal theories of justice. Liberal theorists in the U.S. and Canada, confronted with disadvantaged minority groups suffering from different forms of injustice in their respective societies, developed markedly different perspectives regarding whether collective rights for such groups should be seen as temporary or permanent features of justice in contemporary liberal democratic polities. The position developed by U.S. liberals was largely that questions of race (as well as culture) had no role to play in “ideal theory.” This view, most notably articulated in the work of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, posited that racially differentiated treatment would not be appropriate under circumstances of ideal justice and was only justified in order to overcome historic injustices.3 Faced with the patent inequities suffered by African Americans, they acknowledged that given such historic injustices,

Race and Culture in Liberal Multiculturalism

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it would be necessary in practice for states to redress past wrongs, which might require certain temporary group-specific rights. But, they emphasized that such group-differentiated rights should be seen as temporary deviations from an ideal of color blindness. The presumption underlying debates about multiculturalism in the United States, therefore, is that advocates of so-called race-conscious policies need to provide compelling reasons to deviate from the (presumed) norm of color blindness. This perspective proved troubling to Canadian liberal theorists for a number of reasons, most notably because the main problem of multicultural justice in Canada was the situation of aboriginal nations, for whom remedies derived from African American experiences with segregation seemed to miss the mark. Indeed, U.S. liberals had little to say about the situation of Native Americans (as well as other national minorities such as Puerto Ricans), and where they did, it was to try to apply the lessons of segregation to problems of cultural diversity, which raised different questions and seemed to require different solutions. In contrast, Canadian theorists of multiculturalism, notably Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, argue that certain group rights for minorities, far from being seen as temporary compensations for past wrongs, should instead be viewed as permanent features of a just society.4 Questions of cultural membership have a place in ideal theory, they argue, because cultural membership is a central feature of individual identity. Since an individual’s national culture is necessary to his or her ability to exercise fundamental liberal values such as freedom and autonomy, the recognition of collective cultural identity is central to individual human flourishing. And as contemporary liberal democratic polities unfairly privilege the languages, cultures, and identities of some groups (majority or dominant ones) and unfairly disadvantage the languages, cultures, and identities of other groups (minority or subordinated ones), the terms of fair coexistence require certain permanent group rights that will enable cultural minorities to preserve and express their collective cultural identities. As a result of these disagreements between U.S. and Canadian liberal political theorists regarding the appropriate role of race and culture in the ideal of a just society, a split developed in the multiculturalism literature between a strand concerned with the justice of temporary group rights designed to remedy historical racial injustice and another branch whose aim was to spell out those permanent group rights that would constitute terms of fair coexistence between different cultural groups. This disparate trajectory has had a number of important consequences for the

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way minority group rights have been conceptualized. One of the most significant effects of the developmental path of the minority group rights debate has been the bifurcation in the multiculturalism literature between questions of racial and cultural justice. This dichotomy between race and culture in theories of multiculturalism has had important consequences. Not only has it impeded the adequate conceptualization of racial justice, but it has also made it easier for the aims of the branch of the literature concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference to be misunderstood. Most significant, however, at least with respect to the impact of minority group rights on solidarity, is that because racial and cultural groups have been conceived as entirely distinct, neither branch has considered what would constitute effective remedies in cases where the two kinds of disadvantage overlap. This chapter traces the development of the artificial theoretical division between the two strands of the multiculturalism literature concerned with racial and cultural injustice, analyzes its negative consequences, and suggests that the two branches need to be reintegrated. I first provide an overview of the rise of the contemporary (post-) minority group rights debate in political theory,5 tracing its bifurcation into a branch concerned with the justice of temporary group rights as compensation for historical racial injustice and another strand focused on permanent group rights for cultural minorities as enduring terms of fair coexistence. I then analyze the resulting division in the treatment of questions of race and culture within the multiculturalism literature as a whole and identify two problematic consequences resulting from this artificial theoretical division. The first problem is empirical, as the theoretical division between minority group rights designed to address racial and cultural injustices that has developed in the multiculturalism literature does not correspond to the reality on the ground in many cases. Drawing on examples from Latin America—where indigenous peoples suffer from racial discrimination and racialized groups make claims relating to language, culture, and territory—I show why it is necessary to rethink the analytical separation between the two types of injustice and therefore to reconceive the kinds of rights used to redress racial discrimination and to accommodate cultural diversity. The second problem is conceptual. I argue that as a result of the artificial theoretical division between race and culture in theories of multiculturalism, neither strand of the literature has sufficiently considered the potential impact of minority group rights adjudicated on the basis


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of this presumption on the development (or lack thereof) of solidarity between disadvantaged minority groups.

Liberalism and Race: Rawls and Dworkin on Temporary Group-Differentiated Rights One of the striking features of contemporary debates about multiculturalism is the way the parameters of the discussion have in large part been shaped by the work of U.S. and Canadian liberal political theorists, many of whom developed theories of justice whose reach was supposed to be universal but whose thinking about such questions was indelibly influenced by the dominant problems of justice confronting their particular societies.6 This is especially true of Rawls and Dworkin, whose work was enormously influential in shaping subsequent debates about the justice of minority group rights, much of which was developed explicitly in reaction to their arguments about the appropriate role of race and culture in ideal theory. As we shall see, neither considered the question of cultural diversity in the formulation of his arguments about justice. They had somewhat more to say about race, which is not surprising, given the visibility of problems of racial injustice in the U.S. context. Even when they did not address the question explicitly, however, as was the case with Rawls, much of the subsequent debate in the United States about the justice of so-called race-conscious policies designed to overcome the effects of historic discrimination on the present situations of subordinated racial groups has been shaped by the arguments of these theorists about what constitutes ideal justice. As various commentators have noted, the place of race in Rawls’s theory of justice is highly ambiguous, if not paradoxical, “central in some respects, but importantly peripheral in others.”7 On the one hand, Rawls actually had very little to say about racial justice. Race is barely mentioned in any of his major works.8 This omission is puzzling insofar as, in Anita Allen’s words, “[r]ace was a major theme in the public policy of the United States during John Rawls’s adult life. [Yet] Rawls chose [not] to make extensive studies of . . . race. . . . That Rawls had so little to say about race law, policy, and values is especially remarkable given the overall preoccupation of his work with equal opportunity, the least advantaged members of society, and political conceptions of just institutions and practices.”9 At the same time, however, it is also the case that Rawls’s ideas about justice were fundamentally shaped by the United States’ history of racial injustice and that he

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was deeply concerned about the racial inequality it produced.10 This leads Tommie Shelby to conclude that while “race has something of a strange presence in Rawls’s theory—both central and peripheral—there can be no doubt that the role it plays has a significant influence on the content of the two principles [of justice]: the conviction that racial discrimination is unjust helps to shape Rawls’s sense of what is morally relevant and what is morally arbitrary from the standpoint of social justice.”11 Rawls did not deal explicitly with race, because he was concerned with what he called “ideal theory,” that is, with what would constitute a just society and why. In such a society, it is assumed that all individuals act to uphold the principles of justice that they have voluntarily chosen to live by. Questions having to do with how to respond fairly to an unjust society and rectify past injustices, what he calls “partial compliance theory,” thus fall outside the purview of his theory. The problem with this argument, however, as subsequent commentators on Rawls’s treatment of race have noted, is that “many of the most vexing and urgent questions of racial justice fall within the domain of partial compliance theory.”12 This omission in Rawls’s theory of justice has led to a lively debate about how he would have felt about policies designed to compensate for past racial injustices in the United States, such as affirmative action. Some have argued that Rawls would have found policies such as affirmative action to be a just response to an unjust past but that he would have viewed them as having no rightful place in an ideal society.13 Others have suggested that his theory of justice needs to be retooled to include an explicit antidiscrimination principle at the level of ideal theory,14 while still others contend that there are sufficient resources within Rawls’s theory of justice as it stands to deal with problems of racial injustice beyond compensatory policies for past racial wrongs to encompass further questions of racial justice, such as how to address institutional racism and the persistence of individual racist attitudes in civil society.15 Finally, some find Rawls’s theory of justice simply not useful for thinking about questions of racial injustice at all. Critical race theorists, for example, are skeptical of Rawls’s baseline assumptions, which render racism epiphenomenal, whereas they see it as fundamental and constitutive of both modern political orders and moral theorizing.16 In their view, Rawls’s decision to exclude questions of racial injustice from the realm of ideal theory is an insurmountable stumbling block, because, as Charles Mills explains, “one does not confront a history of domination by ignoring it, since to ignore it is just to incorporate it, through silence, into


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the conceptual apparatus, whose genealogy will typically ensure that it is structured so as to take the white experience as normative.”17 These disagreements about whether problems of racial injustice can be adequately addressed from within Rawls’s theory of justice point to the importance of seriously considering the consequences of this omission for how racial justice is subsequently conceptualized. While it might be possible to use his theory of justice to justify compensatory policies designed to overcome the effects of past racial discrimination, by making race marginal at the level of ideal theory, Rawls ultimately endorses the view that justice requires color blindness or uniformity in rights and that racism is indeed epiphenomenal. This obviously has important consequences for how racial justice is envisioned, since (as Mills observes) Rawls’s arguments render the effects of white supremacy on white moral psychology and the design and application of political institutions theoretically invisible. Even though it can be inferred that Rawls would have supported some temporary group rights designed to overcome historical injustices in nonideal circumstances, nevertheless the presumption in his theory is that problems of racial injustice are contingent rather than constitutive and that justice is best served by uniformity of rights. Unlike Rawls, Dworkin has written fairly extensively about the justice and constitutionality of so-called race-conscious policies in the United States, particularly affirmative action. He has defended their legitimacy, arguing that such policies are justified in order to overcome the effects of past racial discrimination. He has explicitly recognized the salience of racism in U.S. social, economic, and political life: “One of the gravest problems of American society is the de facto racial stratification that has largely excluded blacks and other minorities from the highest ranks of power, wealth, and prestige; and past racial discrimination, as well as the vicious circle that robs black children of successful black leaders to emulate, has contributed substantially to that stratification.”18 Dworkin is thus quite clear about the problem that racism constitutes for the U.S. polity. Despite his clear support for affirmative action in particular and for the idea that group-differentiated rights constitute appropriate remedies for past wrongs, however, there is significant disagreement (as was the case with regards to Rawls) about the extent to which Dworkin’s own theoretical apparatus can sustain such a position.19 Dworkin casts such policies as regrettable but necessary means to overcome the legacy of racism. Like Rawls’s, therefore, his view is ultimately

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that there would be no need for group-differentiated rights absent a history of past racial injustice. He claims that such rights are only necessary because individuals have been harmed by being treated as members of an inferior group, and this has resulted both in their identifying as members of said groups rather than as individuals and in a distinct lack of solidarity between different racial groups. Dworkin believes that both of these consequences are problematic and that affirmative-action policies are justified precisely because their ultimate aim is to reverse these unfortunate developments. It is worth citing him at length on this point: It is often claimed that affirmative action programs aim to achieve a racially conscious society divided into racial and ethnic groups, each entitled as a group to some proportionable share of resources, careers, or opportunities. That is a perverse description. American society is currently a racially conscious society; this is the inevitable and evident consequence of a history of slavery, repression, and prejudice. . . . Affirmative action programs use racially explicit criteria because their immediate goal is to increase the numbers of certain races in [certain elite] professions. But their long-term goal is to reduce the degree to which American society is overall a racially conscious society. The programs rest on two judgments. . . . The first is . . . that the United States will continue to be pervaded by racial divisions as long as the most lucrative, satisfying, and important careers remain mainly the prerogative of members of the white race. . . . The second is . . . that increasing the number of blacks who are at work in the professions will, in the long run, reduce the sense of frustration and injustice and racial self-consciousness in the black community to the point at which blacks may begin to think of themselves as individuals.20

One of the most interesting aspects of Dworkin’s defense of affirmative action and other so-called race-conscious policies designed to overcome the effects of past discrimination is thus the extent to which he shares the premises of opponents of such policies. His defense of affirmative action, for example, relies almost exclusively on arguments about solidarity; he claims that affirmative action will increase solidarity between groups rather than detract from it. But note how this claim implicitly concedes the point that allegiance to a racial or ethnic group detracts from overall solidarity in the political community and casts such identifications solely as the product of unjust histories that will be overcome when past wrongs are rectified. Dworkin’s defense of affirmative


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action fails to envision any positive role played by membership in a racial or ethnic group, hence the observation that the goal of temporary groupdifferentiated rights is to reduce the salience of racial or ethnic identity. Ultimately, their aim is to enable African Americans to stop seeing themselves as members of a racial group (i.e., to reduce “racial self-consciousness”) and to enable them to begin seeing themselves as individuals. As we shall see, this is precisely the view that liberal multiculturalists set out to challenge, at least in the case of minority cultural groups. Dworkin’s defense of temporary group-differentiated rights designed to rectify the effects of past racial discrimination likewise is not an argument in favor of a more radical restructuring of the U.S. polity in order to dismantle white supremacy. This omission is curious, as Andrew Altman observes, because Dworkin recognizes that racism also involves structural discrimination that functions independently of individual racist attitudes and intent, and this is why he rejects the view that all that is needed for equal citizenship is formal equality under the law. Dworkin views undoing the racism that has been an indelible feature of U.S. political life as an important policy goal, but he eschews the conclusion, which would seem to follow logically from his recognition of the existence of structural discrimination, that the U.S. government has a constitutional obligation to take action to undo such discrimination and that racial minorities have a right to compel the government to adopt such policies.21 Some of this might be the result of his views about U.S. constitutional law, but as Altman observes, Dworkin’s argument reduces problems of racial justice to matters of policy rather than principle. In the end, Dworkin’s defense of certain so-called race-conscious policies is quite narrow in scope, therefore, as he seems to avoid endorsing the view that broader, more comprehensive group-differentiated rights might be needed to overcome racial injustice in the United States. Ultimately, despite his clear-cut defense of the legitimacy and legality of affirmative action, Dworkin’s arguments about race reflect the reluctance of most U.S. liberals to embrace in full the consequences that follow from the recognition that the United States is and always has been a racial polity, that is, the idea that there is a comprehensive responsibility for past injustice and a resulting moral and political requirement to rectify the effects of such wrongs.22 Despite their clear commitment to racial justice and deep moral distaste for, and repudiation of, the racism that has haunted U.S. political life, Rawls and Dworkin in their accounts of justice provide what ultimately

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prove to be weak defenses of temporary group-differentiated rights designed to overcome racial injustice.23 Their arguments shaped subsequent liberal thinking about minority group rights, which, as a result, was disposed to accept the legitimacy of temporary rights needed to overcome the historical oppression to which subordinated racial groups had been subjected, while rejecting (or at the very least not considering) the need for permanent group rights to accommodate cultural difference.24 Canadian liberal theorists of multiculturalism, confronted with different empirical realities in terms of questions of multicultural justice from their U.S. counterparts, set out to challenge the latter view.

Liberalism and Culture: Kymlicka and Taylor on Permanent Minority Group Rights Against Rawls and Dworkin, Canadian liberal theorists of multiculturalism claim that cultural membership should be an important feature of any account of what constitutes a just society. Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, in particular, argue that liberal theories of justice can accommodate not only temporary group-differentiated rights designed to overcome historical injustice but also permanent group rights that would enable minority groups in culturally diverse polities to preserve and express their cultures. The arguments of these liberal multiculturalists have taken various forms, ranging from Kymlicka’s claim that an individual’s national culture is central to his or her ability to exercise fundamental liberal values such as freedom and autonomy to Taylor’s argument that the psychic harms suffered by individual members of minority nations as a result of the lack of recognition of the value of their national cultures require rights that ensure the cultural survival of minority nations. Liberal multiculturalists share a belief in the value of culture, therefore. They see it as essential to individual freedom and autonomy and therefore to liberalism itself. As Kymlicka explains, cultures are goods that liberals wish to preserve.25 These arguments by liberal multiculturalists owe much to the fact that they were formulated as a corrective to the view of U.S. liberals that group-differentiated rights were only justified in order to remedy historical wrongs and should thus be seen only as temporary deviations from an ideal of color-blind justice. This position was untenable for Canadian liberals, for whom the claims of indigenous peoples and minority nationalities (such as the Quebecois) represented equally pressing problems of justice that liberal societies needed to confront.


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The challenge liberal multiculturalists faced was to show why cultural membership needed to be considered at the level of ideal theory. They argued that belonging to a particular national culture is a central feature of individual identity, because national cultures provide the necessary context for the development of autonomy and are thus central to individual agency. Some liberal multiculturalists justify permanent group rights for minorities on the basis of liberalism’s commitment to the equal human dignity of all persons. Taylor, for example, famously claimed that in modern societies, individual as well as collective identities are shaped by recognition, with the result that individuals can suffer real harms as a consequence of the misrecognition or nonrecognition of their cultures. In order to ensure the equal human dignity of individual members of minority cultures, therefore, it is necessary to ensure the survival of such groups.26 In order to argue that group rights for minorities should be thought of as permanent terms of fair coexistence between different cultural groups within the same state, not just as short-term remedies for past wrongs, liberal multiculturalists had to find a normative justification for this claim that fit within the tenets of liberalism, but the normative justification they adopted resulted in certain tensions. The argument for permanent rights designed to ensure the survival of minority cultures is framed in terms of the liberal principle of ensuring individual freedom and agency, for instance. Yet the survival of minority cultures might sometimes require policies that appear to restrict the individual agency of some of their members. Taylor claims that a liberal political order that is hospitable to difference can weigh the respective claims of policies designed to ensure the cultural survival of minority groups with the individual rights of their members in cases where they are competing and in certain cases endorse the former. Liberal polities, he argues, perform this kind of balancing as a matter of course with regard to other, sometimes competing, fundamental interests, such as prosperity and justice, freedom and equality, and so on. A liberal polity could thus permit the restriction of certain individual rights (albeit not fundamental ones, such as the right to life, due process, and free speech) in order to ensure the survival of endangered cultural communities.27 One of the dilemmas confronting liberal advocates of multiculturalism, therefore, is how to balance the dual interests of protecting the individual rights of members of disadvantaged minority groups with the collective rights they believe are necessary to ensure the cultural survival of such groups as a whole. This dilemma becomes particularly fraught when some

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of the practices or values of the minority cultures in question are illiberal.28 That is because it seems contradictory for liberal multiculturalists to defend minority group rights on the basis that national cultures provide the necessary context for the exercise of individual agency when the societal cultures of some minority groups might, in fact, restrict the individual rights of some of their members.29 At the same time, however, for some, the requirement that minority cultural groups adhere to liberal values is itself ethnocentric and illustrates the inability of most versions of liberalism to theorize cultural difference absent hierarchical evaluations of the relative worth of different cultural beliefs and practices.30 There is thus an important tension in the arguments of Canadian liberal multiculturalists between normative justifications of minority group rights grounded in instrumental arguments about the relationship between culture and individual agency and dignity on the one hand and the idea of cultural survival on the other. Taylor, for example, argues that the version of liberal multiculturalism he endorses recognizes the right to cultural survival as a legitimate goal but rejects claims for the recognition of the equal worth of all cultures.31 In his view, the argument that ensuring cultural survival is a legitimate goal within liberal polities need not depend on claims about the equal value of such cultures. Yet these tensions are a direct result of the way in which liberal multiculturalists construct their normative justification of permanent group rights for cultural minorities.32 Kymlicka’s liberal theory of minority rights, for example, presents a critique of “justice as color-blindness” grounded in a decidedly instrumental argument about the value of culture to individual identity, not in claims about the value of culture per se. He argues that the ability to exercise individual autonomy (which is the kind of freedom liberals care about) is tied in important ways to cultural membership. As states cannot be neutral among cultures, group rights for minorities are necessary in order to guarantee equality between individual members of the majority culture and those of minority cultural groups. His liberal theory of minority group rights rests on two fundamental premises: that what he calls a “societal culture” is necessary to ensure individual autonomy and that the state cannot be neutral among cultures.33 Cultures, he argues, perform the dual tasks of giving individuals a sense of identity and offering them ways of relating critically to the world. As a result, he claims that the protection of societal cultures is necessary to ensure individual autonomy: “freedom involves making choices amongst various options, and our societal culture not only provides these


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options, but also makes them meaningful to us.”34 It is not sufficient to say that individuals must have access to a societal culture, however; what matters to most people, according to Kymlicka, is access to their own societal or national culture. Human beings do not tend to give up their societal culture voluntarily, he argues, and as a result, members of minority groups should not have to renounce theirs in favor of the majority’s societal culture. Because national cultures are valuable and necessary, unless individuals freely choose to renounce them, it would be unjust to expect national minorities to renounce their societal cultures when the same is not required of majorities. He writes: “Put another way, the liberal ideal is a society of free and equal individuals. But what is the relevant ‘society’? For most people it seems to be their nation. The sort of freedom and equality they most value, and can make the most use of, is freedom and equality within their own societal culture. . . . And most theorists in the liberal tradition have implicitly agreed with this. . . . They have generally accepted—indeed simply taken for granted—that the sort of freedom and equality which matters most to people is freedom and equality within one’s societal culture.”35 From his perspective, then, liberals concerned with the preservation of individual rights must also care deeply about the preservation of societal cultures.36 The second key premise of Kymlicka’s liberal theory of minority rights is that the state cannot be neutral among cultures. He claims that all states engage in nation building, as a result of which the cultures, languages, and identities of minorities are automatically disadvantaged in a culturally diverse polity. Justice and fairness therefore demand that cultural minorities also be able to engage in those kinds of nation-building activities that are compatible with liberal principles.37 He concludes that permanent group rights to accommodate and protect the cultures, languages, and identities of cultural minorities are necessary in order to guarantee the agency and autonomy of all individual citizens and to promote equality between the members of majority and minority groups within diverse political communities. Canadian liberal multiculturalists such as Taylor and Kymlicka formulated their theories in direct response to the way debates about minority group rights among U.S. liberals were being framed almost exclusively in terms of the experience of African Americans and the problem of racial injustice in the United States. Indeed, racial segregation and exclusion became the paradigmatic case against which what constituted justice for disadvantaged minority groups came to be judged.38 Canadian liberal multiculturalists’ claim that the lessons derived from the experience of

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subordinated racial groups were unhelpful when thinking about problems of justice relating to culture were thus entirely accurate, as was the argument that the experience of indigenous peoples and minority nationalities should occupy an equally central role in debates about multicultural justice. Ultimately, however, the need to recenter culture in debates about the justice of minority group rights had the unintended effect of rendering race anomalous in the theories of Canadian liberal multiculturalists, just as culture had been systematically ignored by U.S. liberals. In fact, what we see subsequently is an almost complete bifurcation between race and culture in the multiculturalism literature, as if the questions of justice they raise never overlap. Indeed, the problems of justice faced by subordinated racial groups, which are assumed to be quite distinct from those of cultural groups, have largely been absent from the major categories of analysis of liberal multiculturalists, as have the problems of justice confronted by cultural groups likewise been missing from the work of U.S. liberals.39 This is not to suggest that liberal multiculturalists have had nothing to say about race. In fact, many liberal multiculturalists have devoted chapters to race or otherwise discussed the situation of racial groups in their major works. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that race has remained marginal to their theories, as the bulk of the conceptual apparatus they have developed has been shaped by the question of what constitutes terms of fair accommodation for cultural groups in diverse political communities.40 Kymlicka’s account of multicultural justice is a case in point, despite the fact that he has formulated the most systematic theory of minority group rights to date. He distinguishes between two types of cultural minority groups: national minorities and ethnic groups. National minorities are “distinct and potentially self-governing societies incorporated into a larger state”—in other words, nations—while ethnic groups are “immigrants who have left their national community to enter another society.”41 In his view, these two kinds of cultural groups are entitled to different kinds of minority rights. He identifies three types of collective rights generally sought by minority groups: self-government rights (the delegation of political power to national minorities, usually under some form of federalism), polyethnic rights (financial support and legal protection for certain practices associated with particular ethnic or religious groups), and group-representation rights (guaranteed seats for ethnic or national groups within the institutions of the central state). National minorities, he argues, deserve full protection from the state, because they possess full-fledged societal cultures and were


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generally incorporated into multination states against their will, through conquest or colonization, and thus cannot be said to have chosen to become members of the multinational states in which they now find themselves. Immigrant ethnic groups, in contrast, are entitled to certain polyethnic rights but not to other collective rights, because in most cases, they voluntarily decided to leave their homelands as individuals or family groups to become part of another state and therefore cannot in all fairness expect to re-create their original societal culture in a different society.42 He concludes that immigrant ethnic groups cannot expect to re-create their societal cultures in their new country, because the decision to leave and join another culture implies acceptance of the expectation of integration, which is not unjust as long as the option to remain in their original culture exists. At the same time, however, immigrants can expect to maintain some of their cultural heritage, though not to the full extent of national minorities.43 In keeping with the clear-cut distinction between race and culture prevalent in most of the multiculturalism literature, racial groups do not fit easily into either of Kymlicka’s categories (although, as we shall see, he does discuss the situation of African Americans and blacks in Canada in some of his works). African Americans, for example, could not be classified as voluntary immigrants, having been brought to the Americas as slaves and having been prevented from integrating into the dominant culture by segregation and racial discrimination, nor are they seen as national minorities, as they do not possess a homeland or a common culture or speak a common language.44 He argues that the situation of African Americans is so unusual that one could not expect remedies designed for voluntary immigrants or national minorities to be appropriate in their case. He claims that the fact that they do not fit into his categories is therefore not a significant problem for his theory of minority group rights.45 He also suggests, no doubt correctly, that remedies designed to ensure terms of fair accommodation for immigrant ethnic groups and national minorities might not address persistent structural inequalities that fall along racial lines, which would make them less effective remedies for groups whose exclusion is also racialized.46 Kymlicka acknowledges that one of the potential problems with his theory is that there are many “hard cases and grey areas” that do not fit easily within the typology of minority groups that he develops.47 He maintains, however, that no magic formula exists that will fit all cases. What is crucial, he argues, is being “clear about what the relevant interests are,” and for liberals who value cultural membership, it is ensuring that all individuals

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have access to a societal culture that provides them with meaningful choices.48 This is true, as far as it goes. For liberal multiculturalists, the aim of minority group rights is the preservation of the social context that makes it possible for individuals to exercise freedom and autonomy, that is, societal or national cultures. In this respect, Canadian liberal multiculturalists replicated the same mistake for which they criticized U.S. liberals: they developed a conceptual apparatus that reflected the particular injustices and dilemmas faced by those groups that were at the center of their theory of minority group rights. Yet some theorists of multiculturalism, such as Jeff Spinner and Iris Young, have written about the situation of both subordinated racialized groups and cultural minorities. These attempts to address race and culture simultaneously are an exception to the norm, however. Spinner, for example, discusses the situation of subordinated racialized groups, ethnic groups, and national minorities and argues that the situation of groups defined primarily in racial terms is so distinct from that of ethnic groups and national minorities that the remedies appropriate for the latter cannot be presumed to be suitable for the former.49 His analysis still proceeds as if each type of group is completely separate, however. Young’s approach is somewhat different. She includes both subordinated racial groups and cultural groups within a “disadvantaged social group” category that encompasses different kinds of groups suffering from social oppression and political exclusion whose voices need to be included in democratic deliberation processes in order for these to be considered truly legitimate.50 Despite including both subordinated racial and cultural groups in the same overarching category, however, Young, like Spinner, also writes as if the two groups were completely separate. While their analysis of the situation of both racial and cultural groups within the same theory is an important exception to the overall trend in the multiculturalism literature, then, Spinner and Young nevertheless seem to continue to view these two types of groups as entirely distinct. In fact, the overall trend in the multiculturalism literature has been bifurcation. Liberals in the U.S. and Canada, confronted with different problems of justice, developed theories centered around one of two questions that were treated as if they were entirely separate: the justice of temporary group rights designed to remedy the historical injustices suffered by disadvantaged racial groups on the one hand and the need for permanent group rights that would constitute terms of fair coexistence for cultural minorities within culturally diverse polities on the other. The problem with this


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bifurcation is that both strands of the multiculturalism literature fail to consider questions of justice related to both race and culture simultaneously. The debates about the justice of group rights for minorities in the literature as a whole proceed as if two entirely separate types of disadvantaged groups existed: subordinated racialized groups subject to historical oppression who are entitled to temporary group rights as a result of historical injustice and ethnocultural groups seeking terms of fair coexistence who are entitled to permanent group rights. There is little, if any, acknowledgment in either strand of the literature that these two kinds of disadvantaged groups might overlap in practice. As a result, existing theories of multiculturalism can tell us little about the kinds of group rights to which subordinated minority groups subject to overlapping forms of disadvantage might legitimately be entitled.

Latin America and the Race/Culture Dichotomy in Theories of Multiculturalism The artificial analytical separation in the multiculturalism literature between racial and cultural groups and between temporary group rights to redress racial discrimination and permanent group rights to accommodate cultural diversity has resulted in a number of problematic consequences. I identify two issues of particular concern. First, the assumption in both branches of the multiculturalism literature that two entirely separate types of disadvantaged minority groups exist does not fit the facts on the ground, as the two kinds of groups sometimes overlap. Second, as a result of the way the theoretical debate about minority group rights has developed, neither branch of the literature has devoted sufficient attention to the effect of the kinds of multicultural policies it favors on political solidarity between disadvantaged minority groups. I focus here on the first problem, using the example of Latin America—where indigenous peoples suffer from racial discrimination, and racialized Afro-descendant groups also make claims to language, culture, and territory—to show that the two types of groups sometimes overlap. Despite the existence of such cases, however, as a result of the bifurcation between race and culture in the multiculturalism literature, to date, theories of minority group rights have provided little guidance about how to think through the conceptual dilemmas posed by disadvantaged minority groups that simultaneously require rights designed to redress racial discrimination and to accommodate ethnocultural diversity.

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In general, Latin America has not received much attention in the literature on multiculturalism in political theory, despite the region’s considerable experience with the implementation of minority group rights in recent decades. One of the unfortunate effects of this oversight has been that theorists of multiculturalism have written as if national minorities, ethnic groups, and subordinated racial groups are easily distinguished and separate and never overlap. As noted earlier, U.S. and Canadian liberals formulated accounts of what would constitute justice in racially and culturally diverse polities that reflected the dominant problem of justice confronting their respective societies, be it a history of racial exclusion and discrimination or the need to accommodate ethnocultural diversity. It is instructive, therefore, to consider what a theory of multiculturalism might look like whose starting point was the empirical context in Latin America. Close engagement with Latin American social and political realities reveals that the region’s minority groups do not fit neatly into the dominant classificatory schemes of the multiculturalism literature, which envision national minorities, ethnic groups, and subordinated racialized groups as entirely separate and distinct. The fact that these groups sometimes overlap creates important conceptual dilemmas with respect to the configuration of minority group rights that have not been addressed in either branch of the multiculturalism literature so far. The principal racially and culturally subordinated groups that demanded and gained collective rights in Latin America during the wave of multicultural reform that swept the region in the s and s were indigenous people and Afro-descendants. Immigrants have largely been absent from debates about multiculturalism in the region.51 Most Latin American countries now recognize some, if not all, of the following collective rights for indigenous peoples and, in some cases, Afro-descendants: (a) formal recognition of the multicultural nature of national societies and of the existence of specific ethnic/racial subgroups; (b) recognition of indigenous customary law as official public law; (c) collective property rights, especially to land; (d) official status for minority languages in predominantly minority regions; (e) guarantees of bilingual education; (f) autonomy or self-government; and (g) collective rights to redress racial discrimination, such as affirmative action in education and employment.52 Neither of these disadvantaged “minority” groups fits neatly into the national minority, ethnic group, racial group typology prevalent in the multiculturalism literature, however.


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To begin with, while it is unquestionable that both indigenous people and Afro-descendants suffer from significant disadvantages compared with dominant groups in Latin America, they are not technically minorities in many countries in the region. This is a significant issue, because one of the principal arguments of opponents of special collective rights for indigenous and Afro-descendant groups is that such rights are inappropriate in countries where these groups constitute a majority of the population. Even supporters of indigenous rights have sometimes argued that it would be a mistake to create special regions where indigenous people have political autonomy or self-government in countries with large indigenous populations, for example, since as the majority, they should dominate national politics, not have their political power restricted to particular regions. It is difficult to compile definitive statistics on the size of the indigenous and Afro-descendant population in Latin America, however, because many countries in the region do not include questions about race and ethnicity in their national censuses.53 In addition, the question of how to classify mixed-race populations complicates the issue of how to determine the relative size of the Afro-descendant and indigenous population in Latin America. In some countries, for example, indigenous people are considered mestizos (racially and culturally mixed persons) simply by virtue of having ceased to speak an indigenous language or wear traditional dress or living in an urban area, while many mixed-race persons of African descent do not necessarily identify with a black racial group identity.54 Nevertheless, it is undeniable that in certain countries in the region, such as Guatemala and Bolivia, indigenous people constitute a majority of the population or that in others, such as Brazil, people of African descent are a majority of the population.55 Setting aside the issue of whether indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in Latin America are in fact minorities, empirical conditions in Latin America contradict other key assumptions of the multiculturalism literature in political theory, namely the idea that national minorities, ethnic groups, and racial groups are radically distinct types of minority groups that are easily distinguishable in practice. The situation of indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in Latin America poses the following puzzles, then: Are these groups national minorities, ethnic groups, or racial groups? Are these categories radically distinct, as most theories of multiculturalism assume, or do they actually overlap? What would the consequences be if they did overlap? At first glance, the answers to these questions appear completely straightforward in the case of indigenous people, since they are the region’s

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original inhabitants, so their status as national minorities seems unquestionable. As a result, indigenous people hardly appear to present any difficulties with regard to categorization. Yet, even in their case, the situation is more complicated than it initially appears to be. And, here appearance is literally the correct term, since, while there may not be much controversy regarding their status as national minorities, there is significant dispute about who is indigenous. That is because indigenous peoples’ status as national minorities rests on very specific and limited notions of what constitutes indigenous identity. Latin American states and national publics, for instance, have been much less likely to accept the legitimacy of claims to collective rights made by indigenous communities that have “lost” or are missing generally accepted markers of indigenous identity—such as language, traditional dress, and residence in rural areas—because their identity as such is not recognized.56 Thus, while it might be clear in the abstract what types of collective rights are owed to indigenous people because it is evident that they constitute a particular kind of group (i.e., that they are national minorities), in practice, only indigenous people who meet certain criteria are considered legitimate recipients of such rights. The ability of indigenous groups in Latin America to claim the status of national minorities rests in large part on the reification of (in some cases) ahistorical and limited notions of what constitutes indigenous collective identity, therefore.57 In addition, despite the fact that indigenous people are viewed first and foremost as cultural groups, in Latin America, they are also racialized. National ideologies of mestizaje that have obscured or actively denied the existence of racism have simultaneously served to justify the political and social exclusion of indigenous people. It is true that indigenous politics in Latin America is generally portrayed as paradigmatically concerned with “cultural rights” and that the contemporary indigenous movement in Latin America does tend to portray racism and racial discrimination against indigenous people as occurring mostly in terms of cultural exclusion or the denial of the right to cultural survival. Yet indigenous people in Latin America also suffer from more traditional forms of racial discrimination. For instance, while rural indigenous people perceive racism against them as primarily taking the form of the denial of cultural rights, indigenous people in urban settings face similar kinds of racism as Afro-descendants, such as denial of access to public establishments, labor discrimination, and so on.58 In contrast to the situation of indigenous groups, the task of classifying Latin American Afro-descendants as either national minorities or ethnic or


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racial groups appears fraught with much more difficulty from the start. It seems fairly self-evident at first glance that most Afro-Latin Americans are the descendants of slaves brought against their will to the region and thus cannot be considered an immigrant ethnic group, as they did not migrate voluntarily. But, does this mean that they are instead national minorities, racial groups, ethnic groups, or all three? For Latin American Afro-descendants, even more clearly than for the region’s indigenous groups, classification within a single category would be quite simply implausible. Consider, for instance, the history of Afro-descendants in Central America. Central American Afro-descendants can be roughly divided into three types, each with different relationships to national states and divergent histories with regard to struggles for collective rights. The first group, whom we might call Afro-mestizos, comprises people of African descent whose ancestors were originally brought as slaves to the region during the Spanish colonial period. Over time, they and their descendants were integrated into the lower socioeconomic levels of colonial society and to a large part into the dominant mestizo (Indo-Hispanic) cultures and national identities of most Central American countries. Today, Afro-mestizos live mostly in the Pacific and central portions of Central America and are to a large extent integrated into the dominant culture and economy of their respective countries. Their difference from the national population consists mostly of phenotypical characteristics that mark them as being of African descent, which, given the close association between social class and skin color in Latin America, undoubtedly have consequences for their life prospects in these societies. Afro-mestizos, who can be either urban or rural, have not developed a collective racial/cultural group identity or made demands for collective rights. The situation of Afro-mestizos is not untypical of that of many Afro-descendants elsewhere in Latin America.59 A second group of people of African descent in Central America is made up of the offspring of West Indian immigrants who arrived as laborers in the enclave economies that existed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries along the Caribbean coast of the isthmus. The descendants of these immigrants established themselves in communities within these enclaves along the Caribbean coasts of Central American nations. Living in economic enclave areas, West Indian immigrants were not effectively integrated into the national mestizo (Indo-Hispanic) cultures of the countries in the region and were only brought fully under the auspices of the various Central American states in the second half of the twentieth century.

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The descendants of West Indian immigrants to Central America have organized as a racial/cultural group and struggled for equal civil rights, antiracial discrimination measures, and special collective rights, such as rights to bilingual education and political representation. This second group of Afrodescendants in Central America is in general culturally distinct from the mestizo majority of the nations of which they are now a part, yet they arrived as voluntary migrants, so they could be said to occupy a status similar to that of immigrant ethnic groups, although, as is the case with African Americans, they are also “racial” groups in the sense that the disadvantages they face are the result not simply of cultural difference but also of racial discrimination.60 The situation of West Indian immigrants to Central America begins to hint at some of the quandaries of classification evident in Latin America with regard to the collective identities of disadvantaged groups, which, in turn, suggests that the assumption in the multiculturalism literature that immigrant ethnic groups, national minorities, and subordinated racial groups are radically distinct types of minority groups is of little help in determining the kinds of collective rights that groups that fit into multiple categories may justly demand. A third group of Afro-descendants in Central America consists of the descendants of “maroon” communities whose ancestors managed to escape from (or otherwise avoid) slavery to establish communities outside colonial society. Maroon communities were established in the spatial peripheries of these countries, and these spaces or territories are now often identified by the majority society with the Afro-descendant groups that inhabit them. These Afro-descendant groups developed separate racial/cultural collective identities distinct from those of the dominant mestizo majority and forged a relationship to land or territory in the colonial period before the establishment of state sovereignty over these areas. They are thus culturally distinct from the mestizo majorities of the countries they inhabit and are marginal to those nations.61 As a means of maintaining their independence from the national state, they have historically struggled for collective rights, particularly in defense of collective lands or territory. Afro-descendant groups in Central America with these characteristics meet the criteria generally associated with national minorities, therefore: they constitute cultural groups distinct from the majority national culture and identity, their national cultures are both authentic and autochthonous and organically related to the space or territory they occupy, they inhabit a national territory or homeland, and their presence in that homeland predates the establishment of


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the current national state and its effective assertion of sovereignty over the area as well as the arrival of other cultural groups, particularly that of the dominant national racial/cultural group (in this case, mestizos). This third group of Central American Afro-descendants not only possesses all of the characteristics associated with national minorities, but they also occupy a position akin to that of indigenous groups.62 Even such a brief analysis of how difficult it is to fit Latin America’s indigenous and Afro-descendant populations into the national minority, ethnic group, and racial group typologies prevalent in the multiculturalism literature reveals how problematic it is to conceive different kinds of disadvantaged minority groups as radically distinct and separable. Not only would it be incorrect to treat Latin America’s indigenous and Afro-descendant groups as if they were only a single kind of minority group, but not viewing the categories themselves as overlapping would also be mistaken. The classificatory quandaries evident in Latin America raise important questions for theories of multiculturalism, moreover, not the least of which is whether clear-cut distinctions between different types of minority groups not only are untenable in practice but also give rise to important conceptual problems. What if the distinctions between these groups are fuzzier than theorists assume? What if the categories actually overlap? Empirical conditions in Latin America thus contradict a key assumption of the multiculturalism literature in political theory, namely the idea that national minorities, ethnic groups, and racial groups are distinct categories that can easily and consistently determine the kinds of collective rights to which different types of minority groups are entitled. The situation of Latin America’s indigenous and Afro-descendant groups suggests instead that far from being radically distinct and separable, these categories are multiple and overlapping. Neither indigenous nor Afro-descendant groups can be neatly encapsulated solely within either the national minority or the racial group category, for example. Some Afro-descendants possess characteristics associated with national minorities, while indigenous people also suffer from racial discrimination. As a result of the artificial theoretical division in the multiculturalism literature between questions of justice associated with race and culture, however, the consequences of the fact that the various national minority, ethnic group, and racial group categories overlap in practice have not been sufficiently explored to date. Indeed, theories of multiculturalism have said little about the potential consequences for political solidarity of overlapping struggles for rights designed to redress racial

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discrimination and to accommodate ethnocultural diversity by multiple disadvantaged minority groups.

The Race/Culture Bifurcation in Theories of Multiculturalism and Political Solidarity Both branches of the multiculturalism literature have so far failed to consider that in many cases, struggles for the accommodation of ethnocultural diversity and for remedies to racialized oppression might be intertwined. This oversight has a number of important consequences. One is that theories of multiculturalism fail to provide much guidance about how to resolve the kinds of conflict that might arise from such overlaps. Another is that theorists of multiculturalism do not pay sufficient attention to the potential effects of minority group rights designed or apportioned on the basis of such distinctions on political solidarity, including whether instead of promoting solidarity between different disadvantaged groups, they could, in fact, detract from it.63 These difficulties become apparent when one considers the potential impact on solidarity of the fact that minority group categories overlap in practice, but national minorities, ethnic groups, and subordinated racial groups are thought to be entitled to different kinds of collective rights. As a result, the impact on solidarity of disagreements about who is entitled to what rights between and within groups is potentially quite significant, yet this issue is left unexplored in most theories of multiculturalism. Potential problems for solidarity are particularly acute for the many groups that constitute “hard cases” or “gray areas” because they do not fit within a single category. Such cases are not only to be found in Latin America. One example in the United States is the case of Hispanics or Latinos. Some theorists of multiculturalism have acknowledged the difficulties of classification posed by Hispanics or Latinos. Kymlicka, for instance, argues that it would be a mistake to treat Hispanics or Latinos in the United States as a single group, given that the category encompasses national minorities, immigrants, and exiles. Puerto Ricans and Chicanos, for example, would constitute national minorities according to his typology, while Spanishspeaking immigrants from other Latin American countries would constitute ethnic groups, and Cubans who left the island in the s would fit into neither category because they see themselves as exiles, not immigrants. The situation of Mexican Americans, or Chicanos, is especially complex. According to Kymlicka’s definition, Chicanos from the southwestern United


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States would constitute a national minority because they were incorporated into the state against their will as a result of the acquisition of that region by force from Mexico. At the same time, however, voluntary immigrants from Mexico since the Spanish American War would appear to fall into a different category. In the case of Mexican Americans, it would seem that some Chicanos, those whose ancestors historically resided in the Southwest, might be entitled to greater terms of accommodation of their original culture, whereas more recent, voluntary immigrants would more properly be considered an ethnic group entitled to certain polyethnic rights but not full accommodation. Setting aside the question of whether the two groups could even be easily distinguished, such an outcome, however unlikely in practice, would clearly lead to significant problems with regard to solidarity. The issue is not simply whether Latinos should be thought of as a single group or as multiple groups and of what kind but, rather, how to conceive Latino identity itself.64 More significant (at least for our purposes), is that it is not clear how existing theories of multiculturalism—with their clear-cut distinctions between different types of minority groups—would resolve the difficulties associated with the Latino or Chicano category.65 The implementation of minority group rights in Latin America raises similar potential problems with regard to solidarity. In many important respects, the models of multiculturalism adopted in Latin America reflect the bifurcation between remedies to racialized oppression and to the accommodation of cultural difference present in the literature on multiculturalism in political theory. Based on this dichotomy, we would expect not only that national minorities, ethnic groups, and racial groups would have been awarded different kinds of collective rights but also that multicultural policies for national minorities and ethnic groups on the one hand and subordinated racial groups on the other hand would have developed relatively independently of each other. This has in fact been the case in the region to a large extent. In general, Afro-descendants have gained fewer collective rights to the preservation of land and culture than indigenous people in Latin America.66 At the same time, however, certain countries in the region have adopted separate collective rights to redress racial discrimination for Afro-descendants.67 Indeed, it is this bifurcation between race and culture that accounts in large part for the different models of multiculturalism adopted throughout the region and for the generally separate implementation of collective rights to land and culture and to redress racial discrimination in Latin America.

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In fact, what we find in Latin America is the development of three distinct patterns of rights distribution between Afro-descendants and indigenous groups. In the first set of cases, Afro-descendants and indigenous groups are both considered national minorities, and as a result, they have gained the same kinds of collective rights to land and culture. This is the pattern that has emerged in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In a second set of countries, indigenous groups have been considered national minorities, while Afro-descendants are not recognized as either national minorities or racial groups. In these cases, indigenous groups have gained collective rights to land and culture but Afro-descendants have not, and Afro-descendants also have not achieved specific rights to overcome racial discrimination. This is the situation in Venezuela and Mexico. Finally, in a third set of cases, indigenous groups have been considered national minorities, while Afrodescendants have been seen as such but to a far lesser extent; meanwhile, Afro-descendants have also been considered disadvantaged racial groups. In these countries, indigenous groups have gained greater collective rights to land and culture than Afro-descendants, but Afro-descendants have also achieved special collective rights to redress racial discrimination. This has been the case in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. These differences in the levels and types of collective rights obtained by the two groups in Latin America’s various multicultural models are generally attributed to differences in Afro-descendant and indigenous political mobilization, namely that Afro-descendants see themselves primarily as racial groups and struggle for equality and rights to redress racial discrimination, while indigenous groups see themselves as ethnic groups and national minorities and demand collective rights to land and culture. Yet, as we have seen, Afro-descendants (who are subject to racial discrimination) also make claims to the fair accommodation of their cultural identities in some cases, while indigenous people (who seek the fair accommodation of their cultures and languages) also suffer from racial discrimination. The reasons Afro-descendants have not been nearly as successful in gaining collective rights to land and culture in Latin America as indigenous people have less to do with the character of Afro-descendant and indigenous political mobilization, therefore, and more to do with the kinds of groups that indigenous people and Afro-descendants are thought to be. Reflecting the conceptual divide in theories of multiculturalism, Latin American states have been slow to recognize the fact that indigenous and Afro-descendant groups in Latin America do not fit neatly into the national


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minority, ethnic group, and racial group categories. That is because indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in Latin America have historically been seen as different kinds of political subjects by national elites. Afrodescendants have been positioned as “racial” subjects without an ethnic identity distinct from the larger mestizo culture, while indigenous people have been seen as “ethnic groups” with separate cultures and ways of life.68 The problem is that this characterization does not fully capture the experiences of either group. Indigenous people, for example, began to be seen in predominantly ethnic terms in the twentieth century and now understand their identities in primarily cultural rather than racial terms. In response to ideologies of mestizaje that construed them as cultural artifacts of the historical past, the contemporary self-making of indigenous people in Latin America includes the following elements: a repudiation of the racism manifested in the assessment of their cultures as backward and inferior; a refusal of the notion of race altogether as an anti-Indian construct symptomatic of racist Western thinking; and an embracing of notions of their own cultural difference, which then becomes the basis of their demand for collective rights. Yet it is also the case that indigenous people have been racialized since the colonial period in Latin America and are subject to racial discrimination based on phenotype even absent cultural markers of indigenous identity, as noted earlier. Viewing them solely as “ethnic” groups, rather than as “racial” groups as well, then, does not wholly encompass the processes of exclusion and discrimination to which they have been subjected. Afro-descendants likewise stand in an ambiguous position vis-à-vis the intersection of race and ethnicity. As we have seen, some Afro-descendants occupy a position very similar to that of indigenous groups and possess distinct cultural identities, while others are viewed primarily as racial subjects (i.e., they are racialized on the basis of phenotype but have similar cultural identities as members of dominant groups), and still others conceive of their collective identities in both ethnic and racial terms. As a result of these kinds of overlapping identities, it is clear that the differences in the types and levels of minority group rights gained by indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in Latin America could have negative effects on relations between and within groups. What would be the consequences for solidarity, for example, if, as in the case of Afro-descendants, a subset of the group is in a position to make claims to collective rights based on the need to protect a distinct cultural identity (much like indigenous people), but another subset, which is seen as culturally similar to the

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national population, is not? The varying ability of differently situated Afrodescendant communities to make claims to collective rights could have potentially divisive consequences for Afro-descendants in Latin America. Moreover, what would be the effect on relations between indigenous and Afro-descendant groups with similar sociohistorical situations that inhabit the same region, for example, if the latter were granted collective rights to ensure the preservation of their collective lands and cultures, while the latter were not? As a matter of fact, the process of implementation of minority group rights in Latin America clearly illustrates how in practice, the method of deciding who constitutes what kind of group—and therefore who is entitled to what rights—is embedded in preexisting power relations that can lead to outcomes that do not appear legitimate in the eyes of all minority groups, thereby detracting from, rather than contributing to, solidarity. In Latin America, for example, national elites have tended to perceive indigenous people as distinct cultural groups in a way that has not been true for Afro-descendants. As a result, Afro-descendants, who tend to be seen solely as “racial groups,” find it more difficult to have their claims to the fair accommodation of their distinct cultural identities recognized. Latin American Afro-descendants have not gained the same collective rights to land and culture as indigenous groups, then, not because they do not have just claims to such rights or because they have not mobilized in favor of such rights as indigenous people have but as a result of the strict demarcation that is presumed to exist between “racial” and “cultural” groups. The collective rights gained by the two groups under the region’s new multicultural citizenship regimes thus correspond to certain long-held assumptions by majorities about the kinds of political subjects and national citizens that Afro-descendant and indigenous people constitute. Given the influence of the strict distinctions that are assumed to exist between different types of minority groups on the process of adjudication of rights, it is important to consider the potential consequences for solidarity of the presence of multiple minority groups able to make claims to both the fair accommodation of their cultures and to remedies for racialized oppression. In Latin America, it is possible that differences in access to collective rights might lead to division and conflict between Afro-descendants and indigenous people (both of whom constitute disadvantaged minority groups in the region), for example, rather than fostering solidarity between them. One of the key limitations of existing theories of multiculturalism, therefore, is


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that they do not pay sufficient attention to the consequences of the strict distinctions they assume exist between different types of minority groups on the process of adjudication of rights, which, in turn, has consequences for solidarity. Yet these are precisely the kinds of quandaries that opponents of multiculturalism point to when they criticize the idea of “special” rights for minorities and argue in favor of uniformity of rights instead. This is not the only conclusion to which consideration of such dilemmas can or should lead, however. It could also point to the need to question the artificial theoretical divisions between different types of minority groups that have been the norm in the multiculturalism literature to date. The problem illustrated by disadvantaged groups that defy easy classification, such as Chicanos or Latinos in the United States and Afro-descendants and indigenous people in Latin America, is not so much the existence of hard cases or gray areas. It is, rather, the fact that theorists of multiculturalism have so far left uninterrogated the issue of the consequences for solidarity of the strict distinctions they assume exist between different types of minority groups. To date, the multiculturalism literature in political theory has considered such questions only fitfully and tangentially, mostly in terms of how the respective concerns of U.S. and Canadian liberal political theorists have skewed debates about what constitutes justice in the context of racial and cultural diversity. That is, to the extent that the impact of the way minority group categories are conceived has been considered, it has been in terms of how theorizing questions of multicultural justice based on the experiences of a particular type of minority group can limit or misconstrue both the kinds of collective rights that are, in turn, considered legitimate remedies for the disadvantages suffered by other kinds of minority groups and the nature of those harms themselves. Specifically, Canadian liberal multiculturalists who felt that the kinds of rights to which national minorities and indigenous peoples were legitimately entitled were misunderstood as a result of conceptions of multiculturalism based on the experience of immigrant ethnic groups and subordinated racial groups developed in the United States (who in the case of the former are not entitled to the same level of protection of their cultures and languages as national minorities and in the case of the latter are instead entitled to temporary group rights) have made this kind of critique.69 While the criticism was certainly justified, in their understandable desire to formulate theories of multiculturalism that could speak to the problems of justice confronted by national minorities and indigenous peoples, Canadian liberal multiculturalists ended up doing something very

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similar to what U.S. liberals had done: they wrote about culture as if it were completely distinct from race. In the Latin American context, however, the situation of the disadvantaged minority groups demanding collective rights makes questions of overlapping categories impossible to ignore. This is not to suggest that what is needed is therefore the development of a third strand in the multiculturalism literature focused on cases in which race and culture overlap but rather that the consequences of assuming that such strict distinctions exist between different types of minority groups need to be analyzed carefully. Even more fundamentally, the two branches of the multiculturalism literature—one focused on the accommodation of ethnocultural diversity and the other on remedies for racialized oppression—need to be reintegrated. The debate between U.S. and Canadian liberals about the justice of group rights for subordinated racial groups and cultural minorities that emerged in the last three decades of the twentieth century successfully established that racial and cultural diversity and the injustices that almost always accompany them need to be central concerns of both liberal political thought and the praxis of contemporary liberal democratic polities. These are important achievements. Yet it is also necessary to recognize the limitations that have followed from the developmental path taken by this phase of the debate about group rights for minorities in political theory. As this chapter has shown, one of the problematic consequences of the artificial theoretical separation between questions of how to overcome racialized oppression and fairly accommodate cultural diversity in the multiculturalism literature has been a lack of attention to the issue of what would constitute effective remedies in cases where the two kinds of disadvantage overlap. One of the central claims of this book, therefore, is that the bifurcation between race and culture in theories of multiculturalism needs to be overcome. Such a reintegration is necessary not only because of the potential consequences for solidarity between subordinated groups facing overlapping forms of disadvantage of dichotomously conceived minority group rights (as I have argued throughout this chapter) but also because the bifurcation between race and culture paradoxically impedes adequate conceptualization of the aims of both branches of the multiculturalism literature. One way in which this occurs is that the kind of normative justification of permanent group rights put forward by the branch concerned with the fair accommodation of ethnocultural diversity has the unfortunate effect of making it appear that the sole aim of such rights is the preservation of culture.


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The result is that the historical disparities between majorities and minorities that are the impetus for such rights are obscured or ignored. Similarly, the bifurcation between race and culture in theories of multiculturalism has also resulted in the harms of racism sometimes being misconstrued as being analogous to the nonrecognition of cultural difference, which, in turn, has significant impact on what are considered to be appropriate remedies for racialized oppression. In the following chapter, I suggest how normative justifications of minority group rights might need to be reconceived in order to reintegrate the two branches of the multiculturalism literature.


3 Racialized Solidarity, Minority Group Rights, and Public Memory

“I

f a dog is born in a stable, does that make it a horse?”1 This was the response of Tom Holmes, the leader of the British National Front (a right-wing political party that opposes nonwhite immigration to Britain and the enactment of multicultural policies for minorities), to a reporter’s question about why he did not consider black members of the British national soccer team to be Britons, even though, like him, they had been born and raised in Britain. It would be a mistake simply to dismiss Holmes’s query as the ignorant view of a committed racist. Instead, his question reveals the continued existence of racialized solidarity. It illustrates the fact that in racialized societies, members of dominant groups resist seeing and treating nonwhites as their political and social equals, despite the abandonment of legally sanctioned racism. This no longer occurs by means of the denial of the humanity of nonwhites or through claims about their racial inferiority, however. Rather, it occurs by recourse to conceptions of political membership that are thoroughly racialized. In this case, what Holmes is arguing is not that the black members of the British soccer team are not fully human but that they are not rightful members of the same political community. His claim is that what makes persons British is the possession of a distinct racial identity, not shared

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residence in the space of the stable or even common birth within it. Because of the persistence of racialized solidarity in contemporary polities that are culturally and racially diverse, then, theories of multiculturalism concerned with both the fair accommodation of cultural difference and racial justice face the following challenge: that conceptions of political obligation toward fellow citizens, and, indeed, the very basis on which individuals are recognized as such, are thoroughly mediated by racial and cultural difference. Returning to Holmes’s analogy, the problem is that shared occupancy does not necessarily render dogs legitimate inhabitants of the stable in the eyes of horses. In racialized societies, in other words, dominant groups will resist minority group rights that seek to either reshape the racial polity in fundamental ways or dismantle it.2 This is a conundrum that theories of multiculturalism must confront head-on. In this chapter, I begin to consider how these theories would need to be reconceived in order to take into account the constraints on racial (and multicultural) justice posed by racialized solidarity. Forging genuine political solidarity in political communities in which racial and cultural diversity are the norm is a profound and pressing problematic. Racialized solidarity refers to the diametrically opposed ethicalhistorical perspectives developed by dominant (white) and subordinated (nonwhite) groups in a racialized polity. For nonwhites, the lack of commitment of the former to remedy historical injustices and present inequalities belies claims of shared citizenship; meanwhile, whites tend not to recognize such inequalities as problems of justice and therefore tend to perceive the demands of nonwhites for redress as the main threats to solidarity. The gap in solidarity between fellow citizens who see each other as radically different is thus one of the key aspects of the challenge of multicultural justice in today’s diverse liberal democratic polities. Contemporary political communities face the daunting challenge of establishing collective identities that will lead persons not united by prepolitical affinities to see themselves as political equals. Racial and cultural diversity magnify this challenge, as they raise the key question of how the disadvantages suffered by cultural minorities and subordinated racial groups can be successfully remedied such that it would be possible to establish genuine relations of trust and obligation between dominant and subordinated groups. Yet theorists of multiculturalism have had little to say about the problematic of racialized solidarity. That is in large part a result of the fact that they have been less concerned with how such rights are adopted in the first place (i.e., with why dominant groups in racialized states would

Racialized Solidarity, Minority Rights, and Memory

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agree to implement multicultural policies) than with evaluating the justice of minority group rights themselves. Indeed, to the extent that the issue of solidarity has been dealt with in the multiculturalism literature, it has been in light of the claim, commonly expressed by opponents of minority group rights, that such rights will detract from solidarity between dominant and subordinated groups. In response, theorists of multiculturalism have argued that these rights are, in fact, more likely to be conducive to solidarity, because they tend to reconcile minorities to shared membership in the political community to a greater degree than would be the case in their absence.3 Given that this has been how the question of solidarity has generally been posed in debates about minority group rights, it is to a certain extent understandable that theorists of multiculturalism have not paid much attention to the phenomenon of racialized solidarity. Nevertheless, as a result of this omission, they have failed to consider whether the normative justifications of minority group rights that they have put forward do or do not contend with the obstacle that the racialized politics of solidarity poses to the long-term project of trying to achieve racial, as well as multicultural, justice. Of course, it is still possible to question why racialized solidarity is an issue that theories of multiculturalism need to be concerned with at all. One could suggest, for example, that the question of how to confront the problems posed by racialized solidarity is beyond the scope of such theories, that it suffices that they consider under which conditions, and in what forms, minority group rights are just and necessary. Yet the ultimate aim of theories of multiculturalism is to find ways in which minorities and majorities can live together under conditions that both perceive as just. As a result, these theories have to be concerned with the politics of solidarity, because the deep and abiding gaps in solidarity that exist at present in most contemporary liberal democratic polities constrain struggles for the fair accommodation of cultural difference and racial justice. Indeed, one of the central arguments of this book is that because the differences in the ethical-political perspectives of members of dominant and subordinated groups in racialized societies tend to lead the former to resist attempts to reshape or dismantle the racial polity, racialized solidarity poses a fundamental obstacle to the achievement of justice in political communities that are culturally and racially diverse. That is why it is important that theories of multiculturalism begin to grapple directly with the existence of racialized solidarity.

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In this chapter, I consider how theories of multiculturalism might need to be reconceived in order to address the phenomenon of racialized solidarity. I suggested in chapter  that directly confronting the problematic of racialized solidarity entails making whiteness visible, that is, challenging the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups so that they acknowledge the existence of the racial polity. As currently formulated, however, the two strands of the multiculturalism literature, one focused on the fair accommodation of ethnocultural diversity and the other on remedies for racialized oppression, both fail to do this, albeit for different reasons. In the case of liberal multiculturalists, this is because the normative justifications of permanent group rights for cultural minorities that they have put forward unwittingly make it appear that the sole aim of rights designed to ensure ethnocultural justice is the preservation of culture. As a result, the historical disparities between majorities and minorities that are the impetus for such rights are often sidelined in debates about the justice of multicultural policies. Meanwhile, the branch of the multiculturalism literature ostensibly concerned with racial justice has also failed to bring the issue of the existence of the racial polity to the forefront. This is in part because it treats racism as epiphenomenal but also, to a lesser extent, because (as a result of the bifurcation of the multiculturalism literature) the harms of racism are sometimes misunderstood to be analogous to the nonrecognition of cultural difference. Taking the problematic of racialized solidarity into account in theories of multiculturalism thus requires that existing normative justifications of minority group rights be reframed in order to make whiteness visible. The impetus for such rights most often comes from the struggles for justice of subordinated groups, while the immediate reasons dominant groups might agree to consider these demands will vary and may include concerns about the stability of the political community, international pressure, and so on. When debates about the justice of minority group rights framed in this way do occur, however, they can act as a site through which the public memory of the political community might be reshaped, where the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups can be challenged and confronted. In order to begin to address the problem of racialized solidarity, the racial polity needs to be made visible. Debates about multiculturalism can play a role in this process if normative justifications of minority group rights are reconceptualized such that they serve to reveal rather than obscure the existence of the racial


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polity—in other words, when they expose the deeply racialized character of the political community. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first two show how and why each branch of the multiculturalism literature (one concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference and the other with remedies for racialized oppression) has thus far failed to address the racialized character of the polity. The third section then explains why reshaping the public memory of the political community such that the existence of the racial polity is recognized constitutes an important first step toward addressing the problem of racialized solidarity. Finally, the fourth section considers how theories of multiculturalism might need to be reconceived in order to make whiteness visible. I suggest that the two branches of the multiculturalism literature can be reintegrated by focusing arguments for minority group rights on the need to reverse the past and continuing disadvantages suffered by subordinated groups, whether they are related to culture or to race. I argue that when minority group rights are conceived in this way, which brings questions of collective injustice to the forefront, they serve to highlight the differences in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated groups. This, in turn, makes it possible, although by no means certain, that the processes of contestation that accompany the adjudication of such rights could lead to transformations in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups. At the very least, however, it would bring the problem of racialized solidarity to the forefront of debates about multiculturalism.

Liberal Multiculturalism and the Preservation of Culture Opponents of minority group rights often claim that theorists of multiculturalism are engaged in the celebration of difference for difference’s sake, that their aim is to make members of disadvantaged groups “feel good” by recognizing their collective identities.4 While such characterizations are somewhat exaggerated, it must be admitted that the criticism is not entirely unfounded. It is partly a result of the way in which arguments in favor of permanent group rights to the fair accommodation of cultural difference for national minorities, indigenous peoples, and immigrant ethnic groups have been framed. As noted in chapter , the developmental path followed by the contemporary debate about minority group rights in political theory resulted in the bifurcation of the multiculturalism literature into two strands, one focused on permanent rights for the accommodation of ethnocultural diversity and the

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other on temporary remedies for racialized oppression. Unfortunately, the arguments put forward by liberal multiculturalists for the rightful place of cultural membership in ideal theory have made it appear that the primary concern of theories of multiculturalism is the preservation of culture rather than overcoming the real and concrete disadvantages faced by both subordinated cultural and racial groups. As a result, the arguments of the strand of the multiculturalism literature concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference tend not to make visible the existence of the racial polity. Most liberal multiculturalists make a variant of the argument that in order for a human being to live a fully human life under modern political and social conditions, all aspects of the individual’s identity must be recognized, including those elements related to membership in a variety of collective entities, of which the political community is neither the sole nor even the most important exemplar.5 Theorists of multiculturalism preoccupied with the effects of misrecognition point to the central role that membership in certain cultural, religious, gender, sexual, or racial communities plays in the individual identities fashioned by most persons. This mode of justifying minority group rights—which can be read as placing undue stress on the psychic harms to individuals caused by lack of state recognition of their collective identities—unfortunately serves as ammunition for the critique that such rights are, in fact, about little more than shoring up the fragile psyches of members of subordinated groups. As a result, even theorists sympathetic to the aims of multiculturalism have criticized the literature on minority group rights in political theory for inadequately conceptualizing the harms suffered by disadvantaged groups. Nancy Fraser, for example, has criticized theorists of multiculturalism for focusing on injustices resulting from cultural difference rather than other, more structural disadvantages faced by subordinated groups. She argues that cultural domination has supplanted economic exploitation as the fundamental form of injustice in theories of multiculturalism and that cultural recognition has displaced socioeconomic redistribution as the main remedy for injustice. In her view, most of the participants in debates about how to achieve justice in diverse societies fail to see that “justice today requires both redistribution and recognition.”6 Fraser claims that there are two poles of justice in contemporary political life (cultural recognition and economic redistribution), two kinds of remedies formulated to redress different forms of injustice (recognition and redistribution policies), and two types of approaches to remedying injustice


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(affirmative and transformative).7 Redistributive remedies tend to erase differences between groups, she argues, while recognition remedies tend to reinscribe them, making it difficult to pursue recognition and redistribution simultaneously. According to her, the solution is to embrace transformative, rather than affirmative, approaches to remedying injustice. Affirmative remedies seek to remedy the inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that produces them. In the case of socioeconomic inequalities and multiculturalism, respectively, the welfare state and recognition-seeking identity politics are examples of affirmative remedies. Transformative remedies, in contrast, seek to remedy inequitable outcomes by restructuring the underlying frameworks that generate them. For the injustices cited above, Fraser identifies socialism and approaches to cultural politics that seek to deconstruct the fixity of identity as examples of transformative remedies. She concludes that transformative remedies (a combination of socialism and deconstruction) constitute the best means of achieving justice for a broad range of disadvantaged groups.8 Fraser’s critique of the multiculturalism literature is indicative of a concern shared by critics of identity politics, that the normative justification of minority group rights put forward by liberal multiculturalists has the unfortunate effect of placing the focus of disadvantaged-group politics overwhelmingly on demonstrating the possession of a particular kind of identity. Critics of “the politics of recognition” from this perspective worry that as a result of the focus on the preservation of culture in liberal multiculturalism, the most important question in the politics of subordinated groups becomes who is what, rather than how have we been constituted, how should we constitute ourselves in the present, and how do we preserve the aspects of our identity that do good work for us even though they were developed in the struggle with dominant groups? In other words, they worry that as a result of the preservation of culture becoming the basis for collective rights in theories of multiculturalism, disadvantaged groups will focus overwhelmingly on “who are we” and “what are we,” rather than “what we need” and “what we want.” The crux of this critique is that as a result of the way liberal theories of multiculturalism have conceived the basis for minority group rights in terms of the need to preserve minority cultures and identities, the focus of the politics of minority groups shifts from empowerment to authenticity.9 One of the most interesting aspects of this type of critique of the multiculturalism literature is the way it seems to reflect prior disagreements between U.S. and Canadian liberals regarding the aim of minority group

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rights. Should it be to preserve culture for time immemorial or to provide temporary remedies for racial inequality that will eventually lead to the dissolution of minority group identities? Critiques of the multiculturalism literature for being too concerned with the preservation of culture or collective identity, which seem to be directed mainly at the arguments of liberal multiculturalists, thus appear to reflect the U.S. liberal view that the aim of so-called group-conscious policies should be the dissolution of the collective identities of minority groups that detract from more properly political concerns. Fraser, for example, briefly acknowledges in a footnote that one of the difficulties with her prescriptions for how to overcome the recognitionredistribution dilemma is that in practice, the deconstruction of collective identities might actually make it more difficult for disadvantaged groups to struggle for justice. She also recognizes the important problem for her argument that most disadvantaged minority groups are not seeking to set aside or transcend the collective identities on whose behalf they are making rights claims.10 She does not explain how this fact might lead her to reconsider her preferred solution to the recognition-redistribution dilemma, however. Fraser’s critique illustrates how the bifurcation of the multiculturalism literature has made it possible for the entire literature to be characterized as concerned only with the preservation of culture (or collective identity, more generally), because critics tend to focus only on the normative justifications of permanent group rights put forward by the branch of the literature concerned with the accommodation of ethnocultural diversity. The way liberal multiculturalists formulated their case for permanent rights to accommodate cultural membership (i.e., that culture is a central feature of individual identity) has resulted in an incomplete understanding of the harms that such rights seek to overcome, a mischaracterization that is reflected in Fraser’s charge that the multiculturalism literature is only or mainly concerned with issues of cultural preservation or the recognition of collective identity for its own sake. The problem is that to the extent that liberal multiculturalists claim that the mere fact of lack of state recognition of one’s cultural identity constitutes a harm in and of itself, they can be seen as claiming that the desire for recognition of cultural group identity—and the harms effected by the nonrecognition of a group’s culture—function independently of any other form of injustice or oppression. This mode of justifying minority group rights thus has the unfortunate effect of shifting attention away from the principal aim behind demands for collective rights by minority groups—overcoming problems of injustice or marginalization—to the importance of preserving culture itself.11


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Liberal multiculturalists developed persuasive accounts of the importance of cultural membership to individual identity whose effect, nevertheless, has been to shift perceptions of the aim of minority group rights away from the need to overcome the historical and present disadvantages faced by subordinated racial and cultural groups in contemporary liberal democracies and onto the desire of minority groups to preserve their cultures and other kinds of collective identities instead. Clearly, one of the reasons disadvantaged groups have sought (and continue to seek) group rights is in order to preserve and express cultural identities that are marginalized in the political communities of which they are members. Yet this is not the only normative justification for minority group rights. Nor should arguments about the need to equalize state recognition of culture in a way that is fair to minorities be read as claims that what is being sought is merely the preservation or unfettered expression of culture for culture’s sake or the positive self-assessment, individual and collective, of members of disadvantaged minority groups. However important these tasks may be to achieve justice in racially and culturally diverse polities, this is not the sole or, indeed, even the main reason minority group rights are normatively justified. One of the principal causes of this misunderstanding of the aim and basis of minority group rights is the bifurcation of the multiculturalism literature. As noted in chapter , questions about the justice of group rights for disadvantaged racial and cultural minorities (and the forms of such rights that were legitimate) initially emerged in the context of a disagreement between U.S. and Canadian liberal political theorists about whether there was a place for questions of race and culture in ideal theory. Liberals in the United States argued that racially differentiated treatment would not be appropriate under circumstances of ideal justice but that temporary group rights needed to overcome historical injustices (such as the racial discrimination suffered by African Americans) were justified on a short-term basis. In contrast, Canadian theorists of multiculturalism argued that certain minority group rights, far from being seen as temporary compensations for past wrongs, should instead be viewed as permanent features of a just society seeking to provide fair terms for the accommodation of cultural diversity. They claimed that an individual’s national culture is necessary to his or her ability to exercise fundamental liberal values such as freedom and autonomy, and as political communities routinely privilege the languages, cultures, and identities of dominant groups, the terms of fair coexistence require that cultural minorities be able to preserve and express their cultures. There is thus

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a split between the two branches of the multiculturalism literature on the question of collective identity. For liberal multiculturalists, the aim of minority group rights is the preservation of such identities, while for U.S. liberals, it is their dissolution. While there are important problems (which are discussed in the following section) with the way defenses of group rights to remedy racial oppression have been crafted it is therefore simply not the case that the multiculturalism literature is uniformly or solely concerned with the preservation of culture or other kinds of collective identities. As a result of this bifurcation in the multiculturalism literature, however, critics of minority group rights have misconstrued the harms that such rights are designed to overcome. Thus, when the psychic wounds arising from the nonrecognition of cultural identity are emphasized in theories of multiculturalism, the harms that such rights seek to remedy—the structural disadvantages and systemic injustices faced by members of minority groups that make it difficult for them to physically lead free and dignified lives and exercise political agency—are misunderstood to be arguments solely about the need to express and preserve culture. Group rights for disadvantaged groups are necessary not only in order to protect a group’s identity per se but also to remedy material harms suffered by individual members of such groups as a result of their membership in them, such as the threat and reality of racist violence; poverty that is the result of historical racial discrimination; continued racism that manifests itself in unequal access to employment, housing, and health care; the loss of language; and the eradication of one’s culture, to name a few. Liberal multiculturalists mounted their case for permanent group rights for cultural minorities on the claim that the equal moral worth of all persons within a multicultural polity should be expressed through equal recognition by the state of all of the national cultures within it; otherwise, there will be profound consequences for the individual identities and self-worth of members of minority groups. The problem is that the overriding aim of such arguments appears to be the preservation of culture per se (though justified in terms of ensuring the autonomy of individual members of disadvantaged groups), and they are therefore susceptible to the critique that in a multicultural democracy, the goal of collective rights for minorities cannot be to save cultures by making them closed to outsiders. In the words of Jürgen Habermas, minority group rights should not “represent a kind of preservation of species by administrative means.”12 The normative justification of permanent group rights formulated by the branch of the multiculturalism literature focused on questions of ethnocultural justice thus seems (albeit unwittingly) to shift the focus away


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from the disadvantages suffered by cultural minorities—which is the reason such rights are needed in the first place—and onto the preservation of culture and other forms of collective identity instead. Minority group rights as currently conceived by the branch of the multiculturalism literature concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference do not get at the fundamentally racialized character of modern political communities, therefore, as their susceptibility to the critique that they are only concerned with the preservation of culture (or other forms of collective identity) per se clearly illustrates. It might be tempting to argue in response to this claim that liberal multiculturalist arguments about the psychic wounds associated with the nonrecognition of culture could, in fact, constitute a necessary first step toward eventual recognition of the racialized character of the political community. That is because such arguments are likely to be more palatable to dominant groups in racialized societies, as they would appear to be less threatening than rights designed to remedy the material harms stemming from historical racial injustice and continuing structural disadvantage.13 The problem is precisely that while lack of access to one’s culture is a harm that many can sympathize with, such feelings are not necessarily accompanied by a sense that the unearned advantages acquired by dominant groups should be relinquished. Liberal multiculturalist arguments about the need for the preservation of culture do not necessarily lead dominant groups to acknowledge the existence of the racial polity. As noted earlier, this is because (as currently formulated) the arguments of the branch of the multiculturalism literature concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference tend to be understood as concerned only with the preservation of the collective identities of subordinated groups. As a result, problems of systemic disadvantage or injustice recede into the background, to the extent that even the pervasive bias of the state in favor of the cultures of dominant groups that is the premise of liberal multiculturalist arguments is likewise overlooked. In other words, liberal multiculturalist arguments about culture more often than not serve to obscure rather than reveal the existence of the racial polity.

Liberal Theories of Multiculturalism and Racial Justice If the arguments of the strand of the multiculturalism literature focused on the accommodation of ethnocultural diversity fail to make whiteness visible, curiously, the same is true of the branch that has considered the

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justice of remedies for racialized oppression. That is in part because (as a result of the bifurcation in the multiculturalism literature) the arguments of the two branches are at times conflated, such that critics of remedies to racialized oppression conceive the harms of racism as analogous to the nonrecognition of cultural difference. More fundamentally, however, misunderstandings about the nature of racism reflect the failure of the branch of the multiculturalism literature concerned with remedies to racialized oppression itself to conceptualize the problem of racial injustice adequately. That is because this branch of the multiculturalism literature, when considering what would constitute legitimate remedies for racialized oppression, does not take as its premise the fact that modern political communities have been, and continue to be, fundamentally shaped by race. Theorists concerned with the justice of remedies for racialized oppression proceed to theorize as if the political community has not always been pervasively race-conscious. Even those theorists of multiculturalism concerned with remedies for racialized oppression treat racism as epiphenomenal, as a temporary, aberrant deviation from a norm of racial equality, despite the fact that the norm has instead been (and continues to be, albeit in different forms) racial hierarchy structured to white advantage. Like those of the strand of the multiculturalism literature concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference, therefore, the arguments of the branch concerned with the justice of remedies for racialized oppression also do not acknowledge the fact that modern political communities have been organized on the basis of racial hierarchy since their inception. In other words, as counterintuitive as it might seem, the arguments of the branch of the multiculturalism literature that has considered the problem of racial injustice also fail to reveal the existence of the racial polity. The conflation of the disadvantages faced by subordinated racial groups with the kinds of injustices experienced by cultural minorities has been one of the more problematic consequences of the dichotomy in the multiculturalism literature between race and culture. As a result, the harms of racial injustice are misinterpreted, and the specific ways in which racism operates are misunderstood. Instead, racism is conceived in terms of the inability to express one’s culture or have one’s group identity affirmed. To be certain, liberal multiculturalists do not make this mistake, as their initial premise was precisely that racism and the accommodation of cultural difference required different remedies.14 Some critics of multiculturalism,


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however, seem to miss this distinction and conflate race and ethnicity. Consider, for instance, the following claim by David Miller: Ethnicity is a pervasive phenomenon, in the sense that it is something that a person carries with her wherever she goes: you may be a fanatical bird-watcher at weekends, but this has no particular implications for the way in which you are treated in the weekday world, whereas if you are ethnically black in a white dominated society, or ethnically Tamil in a society dominated by Sinhalese, this is likely a condition you experience in all spheres of your life: in work, in leisure, in politics, and so forth. As a result, ethnic identities very often give rise to demands for political recognition. Unless the group you belong to has its identity confirmed in symbolic and other ways by the relevant state, you are likely to feel vulnerable and demeaned.15

Interestingly, in this passage, Miller is mindful of some of the ways in which race operates differently from cultural difference even as he equates the two. Part of the distinct social ontology of race is that it is an embodied form of difference that is eminently visible. Race is a “visible” form of social identity; it operates through visual markers on the body.16 This is not to suggest that race is biological, natural, or immutable, however. It is instead to recognize that we have developed cognitive mechanisms that lead us to “see” race and to ascribe meanings to the morphological traits we associate with it. Racial seeing is thus a learned ability, one that has tremendous consequences for the kinds of social and political relations we establish with one another. Race works through visual markers to delineate the contours of the political community, as the remark by Holmes cited at the beginning of this chapter demonstrates. It demarcates the boundaries of those whom we see as our political and intellectual equals and fellow citizens.17 This difference in the way race operates is clear, for example, when the case of an immigrant from the same racial group as the host country but with a different native language, whose “otherness” would not be revealed until she spoke, is compared with the experience of nonwhite native-born citizens of countries that have historically been envisioned as “white” who are nevertheless assumed to be foreign entirely as a result of their race (as was the case with black British soccer players in Holmes’s view). At the same time as Miller appears to understand this important way in which race operates differently from culture as a permanent visible marker, however, he also critically misunderstands the harms of racism. This is apparent in the claim that the major harm experienced by “ethnic groups,” within which

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he includes racialized groups, is nonrecognition of their collective identity by the state, such that unless the group’s identity is affirmed by the state, it will feel vulnerable and demeaned.18 Yet the harms suffered by subordinated racialized groups are not reducible to the lack of recognition of their collective cultural identities by the state. The harms of racism instead have to do with the way race functions to render some persons legitimate targets of racial discrimination, with all of the ways in which the members of subordinated racial groups are viewed and treated as less than full members of the political communities to which they belong purely as a result of race. To identify the evils of racism principally with the lack of affirmation of the collective cultural identities of subordinated racial groups is crucially to misunderstand the harms of racism, which are not confined simply to ignorance about, or lack of respect for, the collective cultural identities of subordinated racial groups. Racism dehumanizes nonwhites and brands them as other, inferior, and less than full citizens. It renders nonwhite bodies vulnerable to police brutality, racist violence, rape, and so on.19 Racism is a form of structural exclusion that cannot be understood only in terms of the psychic harm to individual members of subordinated racial groups produced by the absence of state recognition and affirmation of their cultural identities (although that is also one of its features). These distinctive consequences of the way race functions as a form of visual, embodied difference are captured in the comments of a London resident after the police shooting of an unarmed Brazilian national in the London underground following the July , , terrorist attacks on that city. Explaining the insecurity that nonwhites would experience as a result of this concrete example of racialized police violence, he observed: “I’m a Londoner, born and bred and buttered, white, blue eyes. So I’m going to be O.K. I’d be worried if I had a brown skin, though, Asian, Brazilian, there’s no difference to these guys [the police].”20 The notable point about this example is that it illustrates the fact that members of subordinated racial groups are vulnerable to violence and other forms of racial discrimination in contemporary Western liberal democratic polities that are largely unrelated to the nonrecognition or denigration of their cultures. Conflating the harms associated with race with the inability to express or preserve a cultural identity makes it difficult to envision the real harms of racism, because it disregards crucial ontological mechanisms through which race is constituted as a basic feature of human existence, such as the visible markers of difference that immediately brand an individual as both “other” and inferior or threatening.21


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The conflation of the harms of racism with the nonrecognition of cultural diversity, in fact, has the effect of making group rights designed to overcome racialized oppression appear unnecessary or unjustified, as they are then susceptible to the same kind of critique of multiculturalism that was analyzed in detail above. Miller’s divergent views about the rights of minority nations and those that other kinds of minority groups may justly demand are a case in point. As a liberal nationalist, he argues that minority nations in a multinational state are entitled to some form of self-government if full independent statehood is not possible.22 He is less sympathetic to demands for collective rights by other kinds of minority groups, however.23 He sees himself as charting a middle ground between hard-core nationalists, who argue for the primacy of the nation over even the individual rights of immigrants, and “radical multiculturalists,” who exalt the value of group difference.24 He argues that cultural minorities are entitled to equal treatment, not to the recognition of their cultures or collective identities per se: “What members of minority groups can justly demand, it seems, is that their opportunities not be restricted in ways that merely reflect the conventions or the convenience of the majority group.” Demands by religious groups for flexible working and shopping hours to accommodate their holy days are examples of such legitimate cases. But he objects to demands by subordinated racial groups for policies to redress historical racial injustices—in other words, remedies for racialized oppression—arguing that they lead to “bizarre consequences,” since they amount to asking the state to compensate an individual whenever he or she is worse off by virtue of having a particular identity. He claims that it is a well-established fact that different group cultures tend to produce differential rates of economic success; following the logic of demands for minority group rights, therefore, Catholics would have a right to compensation as a result of not having been inculcated with the Protestant work ethic in childhood, for example.25 Miller’s arguments about group rights designed to overcome racialized oppression clearly illustrate how the conflation of the harms of racism with the nonrecognition of cultural difference makes it difficult to conceive problems of racial injustice and their solutions. It is certainly true that where demands for the reversal of the effects of historical racial discrimination by subordinated racial groups are concerned, the harm that has led to disadvantage in the present is quite clear, while the appropriate persons to be compensated and the form that compensation should take are more controversial. This is the case with reparations for slavery, for example, as

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well as with the question of how to remedy the discriminatory housing practices followed by the U.S. federal government after the two world wars (e.g., redlining, discriminatory home lending, use of restrictive covenants, etc.) that made it possible for white citizens to acquire homes, by far the single largest source of wealth in most U.S. households, while most African Americans were denied the same opportunity.26 It is impossible to deny that these historical injustices have had an effect on the current economic success (or, rather, lack thereof) of African Americans, but there is certainly significant disagreement about how the United States should best redress these injustices, as illustrated by the current controversy about whether affirmative-action policies in higher education are in fact benefiting the children of recent Afro-Caribbean and African immigrants more than poor native-born African Americans who are the descendants of slaves and the victims of Jim Crow segregation and other white-supremacist policies instituted in the United States.27 Yet it does not follow from these difficulties that the differential success rates of white U.S. citizens and African Americans are therefore attributable to the possession of a group culture that is more or less conducive to economic success. Miller equates an argument about who should benefit from policies designed to remedy past injustices with the highly dubious claim that current inequalities can be attributed to the disparate opportunities available to different cultural groups as a result of the content of their culture. His arguments illustrate how the conflation of the harms of racism with the nonrecognition of cultural difference can result in remedies for racialized oppression being characterized as demands for compensation for arbitrary outcomes that are the result not of active discrimination but of accidents of culture. The misunderstandings about the nature of racism evident in the arguments of critics such as Miller also reflect the failure of the multiculturalism literature itself to construe the harms of racial injustice in full. This is a result of the fact that the branch of the literature that has considered the justice of remedies for racialized oppression presumes that racism is a temporary deviation from a norm of color blindness. The understanding of racism as a discrete, temporary phenomenon confined to the remote past affects the way racial justice is conceived. This problem is evident in the original normative justifications of so-called race-conscious policies needed to counteract the effects of a history of racism proffered by U.S. liberals. As noted in chapter , while the view that temporary group-differentiated rights were legitimate responses to historical racial injustice might have


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been compatible with the accounts of justice formulated by Rawls and Dworkin, the underlying premise of their theories was that color blindness or uniformity of rights constituted the normative ideal of justice. Dworkin, for example, claimed that the aim of policies such as affirmative action was, in fact, the dissolution of the collective identities developed by subordinated racial groups.28 The branch of the multiculturalism literature concerned with racial injustice has always been ambivalent about the validity of the collective identities developed by subordinated racial groups, therefore, a view that is exactly the opposite of the attitude toward cultural identity advocated by liberal multiculturalists. These differences in prevailing understandings of race and culture affect how the aims of minority group rights are conceived. The effects of these differences can be clearly discerned when the presuppositions of the two branches of the multiculturalism literature, one concerned with the accommodation of ethnocultural diversity and the other with remedies for racialized oppression, are compared. The different approaches to “culture” and “race” in the two branches in part reflect the completely divergent evaluations of the ethical validity of these two kinds of collective identities. This difference is not surprising, as race is a problematic category for liberals from a normative perspective. The collective identities of subordinated racial groups, for example, are commonly thought to be defined in terms of ascribed characteristics, while cultural groups are seen as open in principle to all those who wish to adopt their cultural practices. As a result, liberals can endorse the preservation of culture as a necessary social good without raising any ethical qualms, while such claims on behalf of the collective identities developed by subordinated racial groups tend to provoke significant reservations, if not outright antipathy.29 Liberals are thus leery of affirming the collective identities of subordinated racial groups.30 As a result, the two branches of the multiculturalism literature have developed very different approaches toward “culture” and “race.” Minority cultures should be preserved, but the collective identities of subordinated racial groups should be dissolved; these dual assumptions are widely shared by theorists of multiculturalism. That is because the collective identities of subordinated racial groups are viewed as the product of pseudoscientific intellectual theories and of the pursuit of profoundly unjust political projects. Given this judgment, few liberals would endorse the need for the preservation of such identities. They are certainly not “goods” that liberals wish to preserve.31 In fact, the prevailing trend in much contemporary

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scholarship is to argue “against race.”32 The liberal view of race, then, could not be farther from the current liberal approach to culture, which is most definitely a good that liberals (at least those who adopt the perspective of liberal culturalism) wish to preserve. The point of this exercise in comparison is to consider how the dismissal of the collective identities developed by subordinated racial groups as inherently problematic affiliations that should be discarded, affects the way that remedies to racialized oppression are conceived.33 More fundamentally, however, there is a basic tension in the way the branch of the multiculturalism literature that has considered the justice of remedies to racialized oppression conceives the question of racial justice. Even though this branch claims that temporary group-differentiated rights constitute legitimate responses to historical racial injustice, by conceiving racism as a temporary, aberrant deviation from an otherwise color-blind norm—that is, by acknowledging racism in the U.S. polity only in a partial and truncated fashion, both spatially and temporally, confined to a moment in time (the past), a singular institution (slavery and/or Jim Crow segregation), and a specific geographical location (the South)—the problem of racial injustice is conceived as less permanent and pervasive than it actually is. The problem is that to the extent that the persistence and reach of racism are downplayed, so, too, will the remedies thought to constitute appropriate and just responses to the problem of racial injustice be correspondingly weak and limited. In considering what constitute appropriate remedies to the problem of racial justice, the branch of the multiculturalism literature ostensibly concerned with such questions proceeds as if the political community has not always been thoroughly race-conscious. As a result, even limited remedies to racial injustice are viewed as “special” rights, rather than as rightful responses to a history of white advantage and nonwhite subordination. The problem with the way racial injustice is conceived in the multiculturalism literature (and in liberal political thought in general), therefore, is that there is too much ready conceptual slippage from color blindness as an ideal to the assumption that it is, in fact, already the norm. The view that racism is a temporary phenomenon is one of the key assumptions on which the different normative justifications for group rights designed to remedy racialized oppression and those whose aim is to accommodate cultural difference depend. Underlying the argument is the premise that a nonracist society is possible, while a state that is neutral toward culture is not. Liberal multiculturalists explicitly claim that the latter is not possible


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or at least has yet to be achieved, and this is one of the reasons minority cultures require protection by the state. Yet a corresponding questioning of the assumption that racism is a temporary deviation from a norm of color blindness has not occurred in theories of multiculturalism. This is despite the fact that, as Charles Mills has observed, the assumption that color blindness has been the norm runs counter to the reality that ever since the emergence of the modern concept of race, racial inequality has been the rule rather than the exception and, as such, has shaped both the design of political institutions and political morality.34 Modern political communities have always been race-conscious, and the norm for political relations has never been equality, for either subordinated or dominant groups, but rather racial hierarchy, as the latter experience unequally distributed material advantage and political power as both natural and morally legitimate. Instead of being seen as a temporary deviation from a presumed norm of equality, therefore, racism is the institutionalized logic around which existing political communities have been organized. Despite the indisputable pervasiveness of racial inequality in contemporary polities, then, racism continues to be portrayed as a temporary deviation from a norm of equality in the multiculturalism literature, including, most strikingly, the branch that has considered the justice of remedies for racialized oppression. By not acknowledging the way race has fundamentally structured modern political relations, theorists of multiculturalism— even those who have considered the question of racial injustice—have not revealed the existence of the racial polity. As was the case with liberal multiculturalist arguments for the fair accommodation of cultural difference, those of the branch of the multiculturalism literature concerned with questions of racial injustice also fail to make whiteness visible.

Racialized Solidarity and the Politics of Memory It is quite possible to concede that the arguments of both branches of the multiculturalism literature have failed to make whiteness visible to date, however, while nevertheless taking issue with the idea that there is a connection between this omission and the failure to confront the phenomenon of racialized solidarity. That is, one could question why theories of multiculturalism need to make whiteness visible in the first place. Dealing with the racialized politics of solidarity means grappling with the differences in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated groups that

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lead the former to resist attempts to dismantle or reshape the racial polity. An important step in trying to address the problematic of racialized solidarity is thus the attempt to get dominant groups to acknowledge the existence of the racial polity. That is why I suggested in chapter  that directly confronting the problem of racialized solidarity entails trying to bring about transformations in the ethical-historical perspectives of dominant groups. This is an enormously difficult task, however, because it entails changing the way the political community as a whole understands itself and remembers its past, that is, transforming its collective identity and public memory. There is, in fact, an important connection between collective memory—what is remembered about the public past—and conceptions of political obligation in democratic polities. What citizens choose to remember about the past and the mode of that remembrance determine the kinds of relations of political obligation they establish with one another in the present. Indeed, the operation of public memory is characterized by selective forgetting about collective wrongs. In a racial polity, in other words, the collective memory of the political community tends to reflect only the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups, and insofar as it does so, it serves to reproduce racialized solidarity. The reproduction of racialized solidarity is thus directly tied to the politics of the memory of race. Reflecting the importance of the relationship between collective memory and political obligation, political theorists have begun to pay increasing attention to the politics of memory in recent years. The impetus for such reflections has been, on the one hand, questions about the usefulness of identity politics in advancing the struggles of disadvantaged groups and, on the other hand, a concern with the apparently intractable impasse on issues of racial justice in contemporary Western liberal democracies. For instance, progressive critics of identity politics such as Wendy Brown have argued that for subordinated groups, selective forgetting is a crucial precondition of emancipatory political action. In order for the injustices they have suffered not to be paralyzing, she argues, such groups must engage in some measure of forgetting. In her view, partial forgetting is necessary in order to envision a future-oriented politics that is not fixated on the injury that gives rise to the identity.35 Brown’s arguments about memory reflect a concern with its role in the kinds of political claims made by subordinated groups, particularly with the less-than-radical effects of certain kinds of identity politics. She claims, for instance, that identity can become politically paralyzing for members


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of disadvantaged groups and that when it does so, it is “memory that is the house of this activity and this refusal” to engage in a future-oriented politics.36 Brown’s critique of the role of memory in the politics of subordinated groups, while incisive in many respects, nevertheless fails to give sufficient weight to a more fundamental reason memory is central to the struggles of such groups: that the politics of public memory is the locus of contestation over the meaning of justice in contemporary liberal democratic polities. There are at least two different aspects to the connection between memory and justice for democratic politics, therefore: one is the role of memory in shaping the politics of subordinated groups, while the other is the role of collective memory in determining conceptions of political obligation for the political community as a whole. Selective remembrance and/or partial forgetting may have radically different effects on the politics of dominant and subordinated groups. If memory is dangerous for subordinated groups, as Brown suggests, what role does it play for the political community as a whole, especially for dominant groups? Is it possible in their case also to remember too much? The second aspect of the politics of memory that is relevant to the practice of democracy, then, is the effect of how the collective past is remembered on contemporary political arrangements. In this regard, Sheldon Wolin suggests that modern political communities are, in fact, founded on the erasure of the memory of past collective wrongs, which functions to preserve the power of dominant groups. In his insightful reflections on the relationship between collective memory and injustice in modern political communities, Wolin suggests that the function of collective memory is to serve the interests of dominant groups. He defines collective memory as having “to do with the formation, interpretation, and retention of a public past. In a preliminary way collective memory might be said to refer to a public past preserved in public art and architecture, public rites, ceremonies or rituals, the rhetoric of public authorities, the educational curricula, and the ideological themes that pervade these.”37 For the political community as a whole, Wolin argues, collective memory acts as “an accomplice of injustice, forgetting or remembering, whichever is the more convenient.” The reason certain historical injustices are either forgotten or only selectively remembered is that a society can ill afford to reexamine collectively a special class of political events in which the members of society feel tainted by a kind of corporate complicity in an act of injustice done in their name; and yet temporal distance and historical accommodations have so far removed

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them from it that they do not feel responsible, only uneasy. The event is not actually forgotten, only publicly unrecalled. We might call such events “collective wrongs.” . . . Their wrongness seems to consist in singling out a particular group on the basis of its objective differences . . . then drawing unjust conclusions from these differences . . . and, finally, encouraging the group’s slaughter as a patriotic act.38

Wolin’s assessment of the function of collective memory for modern political communities is thus that it works to prevent emancipatory political action, by absolving dominant groups from any sense of political obligation for past collective wrongs. Memory, it might be said, poses different kinds of dangers for different groups in a democracy. Too much of it in the case of subordinated groups could, following Brown, encourage political paralysis; too little of it in the case of dominant groups could, following Wolin, prove equally dangerous, as it encourages amnesia about past collective wrongs and thereby prevents political action to correct the effects of historical injustices.39 There is thus a crucial relationship between collective memory and justice in modern political communities. That is because public memory often serves to mask the operations of power. As Wolin observes, in capitalist liberal democratic societies, the requirement that citizens forget past wrongs serves the interest of power, because these societies are simultaneously committed to inequality and to the rhetorical idea of equal opportunity: “The trade-off is equality for remembrance, or rather a certain kind of equality, not equality as an ideal that is necessarily at war with power (because power presupposes inequality) but equality as a fiction that serves to legitimate power.”40 If subordinated groups sometimes appear obsessed by the need to remember past collective wrongs, it is precisely because selective amnesia about such wrongs serves to deny their most fundamental convictions about what justice is. Selective forgetting is characteristic of the way public memory works to shape conceptions of political obligation, therefore. As Wolin observes, selective forgetting is a precondition of political society, one that weighs more heavily on the victims of past collective wrongs because they are the ones who must forget and forgive such wrongs in order to become members of the political community. He argues that the act of forgetting that is part of the operation of collective memory should not be reduced to mere expediency, oversight, or lost memory. Forgetting, rather, should be conceived as a process by which “the self must renounce some part of itself or of its own experience if it wants to be accepted into political society. In the act of


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reconstituting the self into a civic self, forgetting becomes a rite of passage and as such a condition of membership.”41 Wolin observes that the role of selective remembrance is most evident in the work of theorists of the social contract tradition who sought to overcome the bloody conflicts of their time (which had nevertheless failed to resolve basic disagreements about the nature of political life), by leaving behind inherited resentments generated by past wrongs, thus making mutual absolution feasible. The fiction of the social contract was thus a “device to incorporate social amnesia into the foundation of political society,” he argues, and in order for this collective act of selective forgetting to occur, human beings were forced to dehistoricize themselves.42 In short, conceptions of justice (which are central to democratic practice) are dehistoricized by means of the operation of collective memory. As a result of the selective forgetting characteristic of collective memory, individuals are forced to forget about precisely those characteristics that have been the principal cause of the harms committed against them, in order to secure the benefits afforded by political life. Wolin is suggesting that the requirement that human beings dehistoricize themselves in order to become citizens strips them of their most hard-earned knowledge about what constitutes justice and injustice. The selective remembrance characteristic of public memory thus works to preserve the power of dominant groups by stripping the claims of justice of subordinated groups of their actual ethical-political weight. When collective wrongs are not remembered as such, disadvantaged groups become just another interest group in a pluralist liberal democratic polity. For instance, there is a significant difference in the ethical-political weight of claims of justice formulated in terms of a politics of “I want” (which all interest groups are able to deploy) and those of a politics framed in terms of “justice requires, as a result of X, Y, or Z collective wrong . . . ” The selective forgetting characteristic of public memory makes it possible for dominant groups to portray the claims of justice of subordinated groups as either one of many equally plausible and legitimate sets of demands put forward by like-minded groups of individuals within a pluralist liberal democracy (i.e., interest groups) or, more insidiously, as illegitimate demands for “special” rights. The remembrance of past collective wrongs only in certain limited ways serves to prevent claims of broader political obligations to redress the continuing effects of such wrongs in the present and even to obscure the existence of such legacies. Consider the following example of how selective

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remembrance can function to displace the kinds of collective responsibilities engendered by past collective wrongs. What is it, for instance, that white citizens are supposed to “remember” and, more to the point, forget on Martin Luther King’s birthday, which is now a national holiday in the United States? Is it the struggle of African Americans for racial justice? Or is it the fact that racial justice has yet to be achieved? Or is it white responsibility for black subordination? For some white U.S. citizens, King’s birthday may instead simply be an occasion to “wallow in white guilt.” Facetious as this characterization may be, it perfectly captures what Wolin suggests is most problematic about dominant forms of public remembrance of collective wrongs: the uneasiness caused by the memory of a collective wrong committed by dominant groups accompanied by enough temporal distance from the event that there is no accompanying sense of political obligation derived from it. Instead of inspiring further commitment to, and participation in, struggles for racial justice, the anniversary of King’s birth becomes an occasion for white U.S. citizens to feel an annual pang of conscience tinged with resentment at having (momentarily) been made to feel responsible for events for which they bear no direct responsibility. Public memory can also function to displace the site of contention away from questions of responsibility for past collective wrongs by focusing instead on the content and form of claims for justice. The banning of the category of ethnicity by government decree and the addition of the crime of “divisionism” (an imprecise infraction that includes speaking incitingly about ethnicity) to the penal code in Rwanda in the aftermath of the ethnic conflagration that erupted between Hutu and Tutsi in that country in  is a clear example of how this occurs.43 There is obviously nothing intrinsically troubling about Rwandans’ attempt to move beyond ethnic differences that have served as the catalyst for bloody conflicts—quite the contrary. The issue is, rather, that the outlawing of ethnicity is symptomatic of an approach to collective wrongs that focuses on the conceptual categories through which such conflicts are expressed (such as “ethnicity”) rather than on how and why the categories themselves are mobilized to justify and carry out collective wrongs against fellow citizens. The problem with such an approach to questions of collective justice is that what become the focus of political action are the conceptual categories themselves rather than the actual wrongs they facilitated, so that the harm to be remedied becomes not the collective injustice that was committed but the category or principle in whose name it was committed, in this case “ethnicity.”


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Public memory can thus serve to obscure the ethical and political choices made by individual citizens and groups in the past, as well as the decisions they continue to make in the present about whether and how to address past collective wrongs. Wolin, for instance, suggests: “Memory, we might say, is the guardian of difference. The individual acquires and accumulates his or her different selves, and memory allows for re-collection. Difference within the self and between selves is not merely received; we may not choose our genders or our skin color, but we do choose in some measure how we are going to interpret that difference, how we are going to live it along with the other differences we receive or acquire in the course of our lives.”44 The selective remembrance characteristic of public memory thus has the peculiar effect not of obscuring past collective wrongs per se but of memorializing them in such a way that individuals and political communities are absolved of responsibility for such wrongs.45 As a result, members of dominant groups do not develop conceptions of political obligation toward those among their fellow citizens who have suffered as a consequence. How a political community chooses to remember its past profoundly influences its present ethical self-understanding. As Habermas has argued with respect to the historians’ debate about the Holocaust and Nazism in Germany, to recognize past evil as integral to the national past, as emanating “from the very midst of our collective life,” and not as an unfortunate and accidental occurrence within it “cannot but have a powerful impact on our self-understanding” and “shake any naïve trust in our own traditions.”46 There is a close connection between the accurate remembrance of past collective wrongs, then, and the development of conceptions of political obligation that make it possible to undertake contemporary political action to address such wrongs. Given the fundamental link between memory and justice in democratic praxis, it is not surprising that one of the areas in which political theorists have increasingly begun to pay attention to the politics of memory is in the context of debates about how to move beyond the impasse surrounding questions of racial injustice in contemporary Western liberal democracies. Thomas McCarthy, for example, has suggested that debates about the content and meaning of history raise not only epistemological but also moral and ethical questions. That is because victims of injustice experience representations of the past that deny their suffering as “failures of solidarity in the present.” Scholarly debates about historiography thus intersect with ethical-political questions about present and future political

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arrangements and the content of collective identity to such an extent, that “questions of doing justice to the victims of the past interpenetrate with questions of inclusion and exclusion in the present.”47 Political communities committed to an ethical self-understanding that values equality and justice have a duty to remember past injustice, he argues, not for the sake of the victims but instead so that their political practices might conform with the political rhetoric that justifies their existence. Because public memory tends to serve the interests of dominant groups who are the beneficiaries of past collective wrongs, overcoming such wrongs requires precisely that the political community remember such injustices, and not just selectively, as is its first inclination. The question of racial justice is a paradigmatic example of the pivotal connection between the mode of remembrance of past collective wrongs and the development of political will to address contemporary injustices stemming from such wrongs. In his discussion of the politics of public memory in the United States, for example, McCarthy suggests that it is through a more accurate politics of the memory of slavery and segregation that white resistance to struggles for the achievement of racial justice might be overcome: “Until legal, institutional, normal, everyday racism is publicly and widely understood to have been integral to our history and identity as a nation we [the United States] will . . . continue to encounter major obstacles to developing the degree of transracial political solidarity required for democratic solutions to the forms of racial injustice that are its continuing legacy. Without a developed awareness of the sources and causes of our racialized practices and attitudes, we will . . . continue to find it extremely difficult even to carry on reasonable public discussions of racially inflected problems, let alone arrive at just and feasible solutions to them.”48 The politics of memory is integral to contemporary struggles for racial justice, as McCarthy observes, because what a political community chooses to remember about its past determines what it considers to be just or unjust in the present.49 In other words, public memory about race is central to the reproduction of racialized solidarity in the racial polity. That is because in order to achieve racial justice, a political commitment to right past collective wrongs is required, and generating such conceptions of political obligation among members of dominant groups may be possible only on the basis of a public memory that deals more honestly and forthrightly with histories of racism. In order to change a political community’s present where race is concerned, therefore, it is necessary to transform its understanding of its past.


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In contrast to the view that direct engagement with histories of racism is most likely to produce the political will necessary to achieve racial justice, it has been suggested that antiracist politics is instead better served by the renunciation of race altogether.50 The view that this is the best way to overcome the problem of racialized solidarity has many contemporary adherents. In fact, certain scholars of racial politics have argued that it is best to abandon the category of race entirely.51 Paul Gilroy, for example, claims that the political culture of contemporary multicultural Western liberal democracies needs to be reimagined such that solidarity within them is no longer based on notions of sameness, particularly those derived from race and race-thinking. Racism, nationalism, and fascism, he argues, are all equally complicit in the modern project of producing solidarity, identity, and belonging on the basis of homogeneity. The ethical and political problem with race, in his view, is that it appears to afford shortcuts into solidarity. He argues that “the spaces in which ‘races’ come to life are a field from which political interaction has been banished. It is usually replaced by enthusiasm for the cheapest pseudo-solidarities: forms of connection that are imagined to arise effortlessly from shared phenotypes, cultures, and bio-nationalities.”52 In contemporary multicultural social and political life, he suggests, the idea of race has no ethically defensible place. Solidarity in multicultural democracies should rather be constructed on the basis of what he calls a “radically nonracial humanism” that avoids “the allure of automatic, prepolitical uniformity.”53 Is renouncing race the solution to the problem of racialized solidarity, as Gilroy suggests? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to consider whether the renunciation of race and the repudiation of white supremacy are, in fact, equivalent.54 For the renunciation of race to be meaningful, it would have to bring about transformations in the ethical self-understandings of the political community as a whole and of dominant groups in particular; otherwise, it seems more likely that it would instead serve the interests of what might be called (following Wolin) amnesic power. Assuming that the renunciation of race constitutes a heroic act of sacrifice on the part of subordinated racial groups, precisely because their deepest moral convictions about what constitutes justice are derived from the experience of racial injustice, such heroic acts of forgiveness could be justified, if at all, only if they required similar ethical-political transformations on the part of those whom Gilroy describes as “the majority who are unlikely to count themselves as affiliated with either of the principal groups: victims and perpetrators.”55 This is the

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crux of the problematic of racialized solidarity, however, as it is precisely the views of the majority who do not see themselves as having benefited from white supremacy that must change if the political will to achieve racial justice is to be developed. It is this sense of unaffiliation that is so problematic for the development of genuine political solidarity. The majority does not develop a sense of collective political obligation to right past collective wrongs precisely because of the way such wrongs are forgotten (or only selectively remembered). The renunciation of race might not only not address collective amnesia about white supremacy in a racial polity, therefore; it might, instead, also promote and reinforce it. Overcoming the problem of racialized solidarity—particularly the resistance of dominant groups to attempts to dismantle the racial polity, their dismissal of notions of political obligation derived from past collective wrongs having to do with race—appears to require not the renunciation of race per se but the full remembrance and repudiation of white supremacy, which are not one and the same. To see why this is the case, it is useful to consider Joel Olson’s arguments regarding the failure of dominant approaches to racial justice in political theory to date to “confront the persistent problem of whiteness.” His point is that approaches to multiculturalism in political theory tend to focus on including previously excluded subordinated racial groups without attacking continuing racial privilege, without seeking “the dissolution of whiteness as a significant social-political category.”56 It might be tempting to dismiss Olson’s critique as mere semantic nitpicking, yet the contrast between his claim that whiteness must be superseded in order to achieve racial justice and arguments in favor of the renunciation of race point to a more profound analytical difference with respect to the relationship between the politics of the memory of race and racialized solidarity. For Olson, overcoming racial injustice will not be accomplished simply by the inclusion of subordinated groups into preexisting political and philosophical categories but rather by the abandonment of whiteness, of the expectation of advantage by some that is built on the disadvantage of others. Such a “disinvestment” in whiteness requires radical changes in the ethical self-understanding of dominant groups that can occur only if past collective wrongs and the resulting political responsibilities associated with such injustices are directly confronted.57 The problem with arguments for the repudiation of race, then, is that they appear to have little to say about the kinds of transformations in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups that are necessary for progress toward racial justice. They are


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curiously silent on the question of how the collective identities of dominant groups would need to be reshaped in order to move beyond the racialized solidarity produced by the racial polity, other than apparently assuming that the renunciation of race would somehow accomplish this difficult task. In contrast, I have argued that confronting the phenomenon of racialized solidarity entails trying to bring about transformations in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups, a complex undertaking that involves reshaping the public memory of the political community as a whole so that its character as a racial polity is acknowledged. If theories of multiculturalism are formulated to make whiteness visible, I further want to suggest, debates about minority group rights can serve as a site where public memory about race is contested and possibly transformed. In a racial polity, debates about such rights are among the few sites where the divergent ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated groups are confronted, when official narratives about the character of the political community (which reflect the perspectives of dominant groups) are challenged. In other words, in a racial polity, when such processes of contestation occur, whites are sometimes capable of seeing themselves “seeing whitely.” Debates about multiculturalism can serve this important function, however, only when normative justifications of minority group rights are formulated such that they make whiteness visible. To the extent that arguments for minority group rights fail to do this, they do not directly address the problematic of racialized solidarity, which raises the possibility that remedies to racialized oppression and the accommodation of cultural difference as currently conceived will not result in a decisive reshaping or dismantling of the racial polity (i.e., a political community organized on the basis of racial hierarchy). In other words, (returning to Holmes’s analogy) the stable, of which horses are deemed to be the only legitimate inhabitants, will not be dismantled and reconstituted.

Making Whiteness Visible in Theories of Multiculturalism If theories of multiculturalism as presently conceived do not make whiteness visible, how can normative justifications of minority group rights be reformulated to address the phenomenon of racialized solidarity? First, it is important to note that the bifurcation of the multiculturalism literature, with one branch focused on appropriate responses to racialized oppression and the other on the accommodation of cultural difference, has exacerbated

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this problem. Both strands proceed to theorize as if there were two entirely separate types of disadvantaged groups: subordinated racialized groups entitled to temporary group rights as a result of historical injustices and ethnocultural groups entitled to permanent group rights as terms of fair coexistence. Yet this is often not the case in practice; instead, these types of disadvantage often overlap. More significant, however, is that the bifurcation of the multiculturalism literature has led to the formulation of normative justifications of group rights for subordinated racial and cultural minorities that make it appear as if the preservation of collective cultural identity is the main reason such rights are necessary in the case of the branch concerned with the fair accommodation of ethnocultural diversity and as if these rights are exceptions to an otherwise color-blind norm in the case of the branch that has considered the justice of remedies to racialized oppression. Thus, not only do both branches fail to reveal the existence of the racial polity, but the presumed dichotomy between “racial” and “cultural” injustice (paradoxically) also impedes the adequate conceptualization of the aims of multiculturalism. I therefore suggest that the two branches of the multiculturalism literature need to be reintegrated and that normative justifications of minority group rights need to be reformulated in order to make whiteness visible. In the rest of this chapter, I consider how these two goals might be accomplished and briefly examine some of the potential advantages (and possible drawbacks) of the solution I propose. I argue that the artificial theoretical division between race and culture in theories of multiculturalism can be overcome by focusing arguments in favor of minority group rights on the shared need to reverse disadvantages rooted in both racialized oppression and cultural difference. Both kinds of struggles of subordinated groups—those for the fair accommodation of culture and to overcome racialized oppression—can be encompassed within a single normative justification of minority group rights that also makes the racial polity visible. Refocusing arguments for such rights on the need to reverse the disadvantages suffered by minorities as a result of cultural difference, racialized oppression, or both focuses debates about multiculturalism directly onto problems of collective injustice. Centering normative justifications of minority group rights on historic and continuing disadvantage makes it clear that the basis of such rights is the existence of a state that has been neutral toward neither culture nor race. Reformulating normative justifications of minority group rights in this way would make it clear that the aim of such rights is to overcome those disadvantages that continue


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to affect the life chances of individual members of subordinated minority groups today. Framing arguments for minority group rights in this way addresses a number of thorny problems that have bedeviled theories of multiculturalism. The approach I propose avoids the critique to which the normative justifications of permanent group rights for the fair accommodation of ethnocultural diversity formulated by liberal multiculturalists have been susceptible: that their sole or main concern is preserving the collective identities of subordinated groups. That is because it is more difficult to claim that an approach that frames arguments for minority group rights in terms of redressing or overcoming historic and continuing disadvantage is concerned mainly with the preservation of culture as such or with the value of collective cultural identity as the basis for such rights. In fact, normative justifications of minority group rights that focus on them as remedies for past and continuing disadvantage are to a certain extent agnostic about the value of collective identity. That is, they grant that cultural or racialized disadvantaged groups do not experience these identities solely as a burden; in fact, as in the case of members of dominant groups, not only do they perceive distinct benefits from membership in such groups, but perceptions of the particular benefits of these kinds of collective identities also vary within the groups themselves.58 The goal of minority group rights from this perspective is not the preservation of either the cultures or the collective identities of disadvantaged minority groups per se, however, but rather the reversal of enduring inequalities resulting from historical injustices and contemporary forms of disadvantage that impede members of such groups from exercising political agency individually and collectively. Naturally, in the case of certain kinds of disadvantaged groups, the predominant form that such injustices have taken has been in terms of the denial or active suppression of their collective cultural identities, which is why the demands of such groups tend to focus on the need for measures that allow them to preserve these identities, but the logic underlying arguments for such rights is still the same. Group rights for minorities are justified from this perspective because they constitute the best means of correcting or overcoming persistent forms of inequality, whether they stem from cultural or racial difference. The approach I propose differs from those pursued thus far by both branches of the multiculturalism literature. As I explained in chapter , questions about the normative justification of minority group rights initially emerged from a disagreement between U.S. and Canadian liberals about

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whether such rights should constitute temporary or permanent features of justice in liberal democratic polities. In the United States, liberals working within the framework of a theory of liberal neutrality as articulated by Rawls and Dworkin, argued that racially differentiated treatment was justified only on a temporary basis in order to overcome historical injustices. Canadian liberal theorists such as Kymlicka and Taylor agreed with the argument as it pertained to race, yet they also wanted to sustain the position that permanent group rights were justified in the case of cultural minorities. Their solution was the argument that membership in a (national) culture is necessary to an individual’s ability to exercise freedom and autonomy, and as a result, cultural membership is a central feature of individual identity.59 What Canadian liberal multiculturalists did not do was challenge the presumption of color blindness in the arguments of U.S. liberals. My approach does the opposite. It differs from the normative justification of permanent group rights for cultural minorities advanced by liberal multiculturalists in that it does not make claims about the instrumental value of collective cultural identities per se. As a result, it is less susceptible to the kind of critique that critics of identity politics and of the politics of cultural recognition, such as Fraser and Brown, have mounted against the arguments of liberal multiculturalists (critiques whose presuppositions seem quite akin to a politics of liberal neutrality, by the way). Additionally, the approach I propose contests the premise of color blindness underlying the way remedies for racialized oppression have been conceived to date. It also differs from the arguments of U.S. liberals, therefore, because it abandons the presumption of color blindness as the normative ideal of justice and actual mode of political organization of the state. Replacing the view of racism as a temporary, discrete deviation from an otherwise race-neutral norm with the recognition that modern political communities have been thoroughly race-conscious since their foundation would constitute a conceptual move analogous to the claim made by liberal multiculturalists that the premise that the state is neutral toward culture is quite simply false. As a result, they argue, there are disadvantages that inevitably follow from being a cultural minority within a multinational state. Kymlicka, for example, has suggested that in the next phase of the debate about minority rights, the idea that the liberal state in its normal operation abides by a norm of ethnocultural neutrality should be replaced with a more accurate nation-building model of the state.60 Following this logic, the focus of future debates about multiculturalism would be on the


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kinds of nation-building measures that are compatible with liberal democracy, that is, on whether and how group rights for minorities counteract the injustices produced by the nation-building efforts of cultural majorities. The same principle could be extended to analyses of racial injustice in the multiculturalism literature. Theorists of multiculturalism have so far failed to consider whether (and how) the pervasiveness of racial injustice calls into question fundamental presuppositions of liberal political thought in the same way that they contend the reality of ethnocultural injustice thoroughly disproves the notion that the state can be neutral toward culture. In contrast, the approach I favor proposes that theorists of multiculturalism need to do for race what they have already done for culture. Abandoning the presumption of color blindness (i.e., the assumption that racism is a temporary deviation from a nonracist baseline) would have significant consequences for the way remedies for racialized oppression are conceived. A shift in perspective that recognizes the political community’s character as a racial polity would make it possible to theorize racial justice more adequately. Recognizing racism for the profound and intractable problematic it is might, in fact, make it possible to envision broader, more comprehensive remedies to racialized oppression. Such an approach might also go a long way toward addressing the problems that have followed from the debate about whether certain kinds of group rights for minorities are best viewed as temporary and others as permanent features of a just society. What would be the consequence, for example, of viewing the political community as thoroughly race-conscious, as organized in terms of racial hierarchy for the benefit of dominant racialized groups in the same way that it is always engaged in nation-building practices on behalf of cultural majorities? How might the normative evaluations of what constitutes racial justice found in the branch of the multiculturalism literature concerned with remedies to racialized oppression differ, for example, if their initial premise was the existence of the racial polity? The approach I propose suggests that it might be necessary for theories of multiculturalism to acknowledge that as racism has shown itself to be a far more resilient phenomenon than has thus far been recognized, policies designed to compensate for the thoroughgoing race-consciousness of the polity might also need to be seen as semipermanent features of the apparatus of multicultural justice in any political community in which racial hierarchy has been a defining feature. Abandoning the assumption of color blindness would make it possible to see that race-conscious remedies are

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actually remedial rather than exceptional, that they are responses to the way the state, despite its presumed neutrality, has, in fact, been unjustly organized for the benefit of dominant racial groups at the expense of subordinated racialized groups. Thinking about racism as a semipermanent, if undesirable, aspect of modern political communities might thus lead to the development of deeper and more sustained antiracist politics. It might make possible the adoption of broader and more comprehensive measures designed to achieve racial justice than the weak and limited remedies that have been viewed as legitimate responses to the problem thus far. Abandoning the presumption of color blindness does not necessarily require that we think about race as a good similar to culture that liberals wish to preserve, however. A normative justification of minority group rights that views them as remedies for past and continuing disadvantage emphasizes the way injustices resulting from ethnocultural diversity and racial hierarchy are experienced by disadvantaged groups. In the case of the collective identities developed by subordinated racialized groups, therefore, it might lead to the abandonment of the presupposition (currently accepted by both branches of the multiculturalism literature) that the aim of remedies to racialized oppression should be the dissolution of the collective identities developed by subordinated racialized groups. This is not on the basis of claims about the instrumental value of such identities, however. As noted above, the approach I propose is to a certain extent agnostic about the value of collective identities; it grants that subordinated groups may wish to preserve such identities—and this will likely be the case for groups that are racialized and also possess distinct cultural identities—but the reason they are entitled to measures that allow them to do so is that the predominant form taken by the disadvantages they have suffered has been in terms of the denial or active suppression of these identities. When group rights for minorities are defended on the basis of historical and continuing injustice, it is thus necessary to adopt a different perspective toward the issue of whether the aim of such rights should be to dissolve or preserve the collective identities of subordinated groups, which has been a source of much disagreement within the multiculturalism literature. In the case of racial justice, therefore, the aim of an approach to minority group rights that frames them as remedies for past and continuing disadvantage is to develop a theory of permissible race-consciousness whose aim is the elimination of racial hierarchy (as has been the case with cultural diversity).61 As Kymlicka suggests with regard to the liberal state’s


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relationship to culture, since nation building can serve both morally legitimate and illegitimate ends, there may be some forms of nation building that are compatible, and others that are incompatible, with liberal democracy. I am not arguing that what is needed are permanent group rights to ensure the survival of subordinated racial groups, therefore, which is the way the argument in favor of rights to ensure the fair accommodation of cultural difference has been framed. Instead, I am suggesting that in order to formulate adequate responses to the problem of racial injustice, it is necessary to recognize the pervasive and semipermanent character that racism has acquired in modern political communities. Placing the emphasis in normative justifications of minority group rights on the need to overcome disadvantages resulting from the liberal state’s dual nation-building and thoroughly raceconscious character might also allow the formulation of different answers to certain difficult questions that theories of multiculturalism have yet to resolve in their entirety. In addition to reintegrating the two branches of the multiculturalism literature, refocusing arguments for minority group rights on the need to reverse the disadvantages suffered by subordinated groups (as a result of cultural difference, racialized oppression, or both) can function to make whiteness visible. Normative justifications of such rights based on the need to redress past and continuing disadvantage focus debates about multiculturalism on problems of collective injustice. They bring the differences between the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated groups to the forefront of the processes of contestation that inevitably accompany the adjudication of such rights. Debates about group rights for minorities can begin to address the phenomenon of racialized solidarity because they are one of the few instances where the political community’s public memory about race is challenged and thereby possibly transformed. Normative justifications of such rights that make whiteness visible thus intervene precisely at the site where racialized solidarity is reproduced. I am suggesting that it is through the processes of contestation that accompany struggles for minority group rights—when these are framed in terms of overcoming past and continuing disadvantage—that dominant groups might come to see themselves seeing whitely. Such a claim naturally raises questions about how and why this might be the case, especially since given the existence of racialized solidarity, it might seem more likely that instead of fostering changes in the ethicalpolitical perspectives of dominant groups, contestation about group rights

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for minorities would lead to an impasse on questions of multicultural and (especially) racial justice. A rationale for such rights that frames them as remedies for past and continuing disadvantages resulting from cultural difference and/or racial hierarchy might initially appear more prone to contestation regarding who is entitled to which rights, for example, especially in comparison with theories of multiculturalism that conceive racial and cultural groups as radically distinct and on this basis assign the different kinds of collective rights that each group may justly demand. Yet contestation about who is entitled to what rights is an unavoidable feature of the process of adjudication of minority group rights. It is a question that all theories of multiculturalism must contend with, although this fact is sometimes obscured by the typologies found in many theories of multiculturalism, which assume that a kind of strict demarcation exists between different kinds of minority groups. Indeed, even the seemingly most parsimonious theories of multiculturalism that proceed as if clear-cut distinctions exist between different kinds of minority groups must confront the fact that the line of demarcation between these categories is difficult to draw.62 Nevertheless, because many theories of multiculturalism offer clearcut typologies of minority groups and the kinds of collective rights to which each group is entitled, they give the appearance that there is consensus regarding the key concepts on which such distinctions are based. Yet this is hardly the case.63 Consider, for example, the significant disagreements among political theorists (and social scientists more generally) about the concept of culture—how to define it, how it works, and the nature of its relationship to individual identity. Reflecting on the contemporary preoccupation with culture in political theory, anthropologist David Scott has observed that most theorists of multiculturalism “are less interested in culture per se than in identifying a culture-concept that best suits their political theory of liberal democracy.”64 He suggests that political theory’s current fascination with culture elicits questions (which political theorists to date have failed to ask themselves) not only about the reasons for this preoccupation but also regarding “the contours of the concept of culture” that has been mobilized to meet this demand, the extent to which these contours and their generative assumptions are made explicit in theorizing about contemporary politics, and (insofar as they are not made explicit) the conceptual and ideological effects of this failure on arguments about rights and justice.65 I point to Scott’s questions not in order to critique the particular concepts of culture utilized by different theorists of multiculturalism but to illustrate the fact


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that the central conceptual categories in most theories of minority group rights are hardly beyond dispute. If contestation about who is entitled to different kinds of minority group rights is unavoidable, then the question is precisely whether normative justifications of such rights that frame them as remedies for past and continuing disadvantage (whether resulting from racial hierarchy or cultural difference) might actually be better equipped to deal with such disputes. It may be that in certain instances, this type of contestation might lessen rather than promote solidarity, for example, as is likely the case when there are disagreements between disadvantaged groups about the basis on which group rights are allocated. This is especially possible when there is overlap between categories contrary to the strict demarcation that is assumed to exist between race and culture in much of the multiculturalism literature. While it is certainly possible that in cases such as these, contestation between subordinated groups over who is entitled to certain kinds of group rights might detract from solidarity, a normative justification of such rights that does not reproduce the strict distinctions between race and culture on which many of these disagreements are likely to center might actually be better positioned to resolve such disputes. This kind of normative justification of minority group rights does not assume that contestation over who is entitled to what rights could be entirely avoided solely by means of the proper application of concepts internal to a particular theory of multiculturalism; it incorporates the contention that inevitably accompanies the process by which such rights are adjudicated as an essential feature. More fundamentally, however, why would contestation between dominant and subordinated groups over the justice of group rights for minorities framed in terms of historical and continuing collective injustice lead the former to see themselves seeing whitely? First, let me be clear about the fact that I am certainly not suggesting that such an outcome is inevitable by any means. What is inevitable, rather, is contestation between dominant and subordinated groups over the justice of such rights, given the existence of racialized solidarity. In other words, disagreements between dominant and subordinated groups about whether group rights for minorities are legitimate and necessary are highly likely given the differences in their ethical-political perspectives. The questions at stake in debates about multiculturalism tend to be the subject of serious disagreement in political communities in which racialized solidarity is the norm, as is the case in most contemporary liberal democracies. Racialized solidarity, as I have been

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arguing throughout this book, poses a significant challenge for all theories of multiculturalism, because enormous gaps exist between dominant and subordinated groups regarding perceptions of responsibility for past collective wrongs, the cause of present inequality, and even what constitutes justice. The fact of the matter is that the existence of racialized solidarity renders contestation about minority group rights between dominant and subordinated groups unavoidable in a racial polity. The relevant question for theories of multiculturalism that wish to address the phenomenon of racialized solidarity, therefore, is how can arguments for minority group rights be framed such that dominant groups might come to see themselves seeing whitely? In my view, normative justifications of such rights framed in terms of past and present disadvantage engage directly with the problem of the differing ethical and political perspectives of dominant and subordinated racial groups, that is, racialized solidarity, because they place the focus of the inevitable processes of contestation about such rights squarely on questions of collective injustice. Debates about group rights for minorities framed in this way involve propositions about what constitutes justice, as well as how best to remedy particular kinds of collective injustices. They involve questions about history, public memory, and the ethical self-understanding of the political community as a whole and could thus lead to reevaluations of the political community’s past, present, and future. When the aim and basis of minority group rights are defined such that the focus is on collective injustice, debates about multiculturalism might become a site where the problem of racialized solidarity could be directly confronted (where dominant groups might be made to see themselves seeing whitely), because through such processes of contestation, the public memory of the political community about race is challenged and possibly transformed. This is key to the development of conceptions of political obligation needed to right past collective wrongs on the part of dominant groups. As Wolin and McCarthy observe, members of the majority who have benefited from such wrongs but do not view themselves as having done so (in Gilroy’s words, those who think of themselves as “unaffiliated” in any way with the wrong in question) do not develop a sense of shared political obligation to right collective wrongs precisely because of the way such wrongs are forgotten, or only selectively remembered, in the public memory of the political community. Part of what I am suggesting is that processes of contestation and debate about minority groups rights can also involve learning, and when


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these rights are framed such that questions of collective injustice are brought to the forefront, it is possible that through such processes, dominant groups might come to recognize the existence of a state that in its normal operation is neutral toward neither culture nor race. In order for dominant groups in a racial polity, through debates about multiculturalism, to come to see that (far from being a neutral polity in which everyone is treated equally) their political community has, in fact, been organized on the basis of racial hierarchy and cultural difference, however, normative justification of minority group rights will need to make whiteness visible.66 If theories of multiculturalism need to pay more attention to racialized solidarity, therefore, they would do well to embrace the processes of contestation that accompany the adjudication of such rights as key sites where it could begin to be confronted. Such transformations in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups and the public memory of the political community are clearly enormously difficult to carry out, however, and the processes of contestation by which they occur are likely to be extremely fraught. They are not likely to resemble the idealized depictions of deliberation put forward by advocates of deliberative democracy, as they will involve disputes between dominant and subordinated groups enmeshed in highly unequal power relations. They are also likely to be long-term and open-ended. Nevertheless, it is through such processes of contestation that racialized solidarity might begin to be addressed, because it is on their basis that the collective identity and public memory of the political community as a whole might also come to reflect the ethical-political perspectives of subordinated groups. The claim that processes of contestation over group rights for minorities framed in terms of past and continuing disadvantage could lead to changes in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups could naturally prompt a certain amount of skepticism. Given existing asymmetries in power between dominant and subordinated groups, for example, the much more likely result of public policy debates about such rights might seem to be that dominant groups would both refuse to recognize past collective injustices and fail to develop any resulting sense of shared political obligation to redress such wrongs. Indeed, normative justifications of minority group rights to date reflect this problem. Insofar as both branches of the multiculturalism literature have failed to make whiteness visible, they have been susceptible to the critique that they are solely or mainly concerned with the preservation of collective identity in the case of liberal multiculturalist arguments for the fair accommodation of cultural difference or

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have produced only weak and limited defenses of temporary remedies to racialized oppression in the case of the branch ostensibly concerned with questions of racial justice. It is quite possible that processes of contestation over minority group rights may not lead to transformations in the ethicalpolitical perspectives of dominant groups. I am certainly not suggesting that reframing arguments for such rights so that debates about multiculturalism are focused on questions of collective injustice will constitute either an instantaneous or complete solution to the phenomenon of racialized solidarity.67 Rather, this is an argument about how theories of multiculturalism might begin to confront the issue of racialized solidarity directly in order to conceive racial and multicultural justice more adequately. I have argued that in order to do so, they need to reveal, rather than obscure, the existence of the racial polity; this may or may not lead dominant groups to see themselves seeing whitely, but at the very least, it will foreground the problematic of racialized solidarity. Critics of the approach I propose could nevertheless object that making whiteness visible would actually work to reduce, rather than promote, solidarity between dominant and subordinated groups. As the claim by Holmes regarding the status of black Britons clearly illustrates, however, durable perceptions of embodied racial difference already pose significant obstacles to the development of genuine political solidarity. Racialized solidarity is the norm rather than the exception. By contrast, concerns that arguments for minority group rights that make whiteness visible will detract from solidarity between dominant and subordinated groups appear to assume that genuine solidarity already exists. Alternatively, the claim could be that solidarity between dominant and subordinated groups is best served by social amnesia, that is, by the renunciation of race. As previously noted, however, this solution fails to address the issue of how the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups are to be transformed such that (in Olson’s words) “whiteness” is also dissolved. Struggles for group rights by subordinated racial and cultural groups framed in terms of collective injustice amount to efforts to reconstitute relationships between citizens radically, and political solidarity is a horizontal bond between citizens. Returning to Holmes’s analogy, in order to develop genuine relations of trust and political obligation that transcend racial hierarchy as well as cultural difference in contemporary multiracial and multicultural polities, dogs as well as horses must come to be seen as equally legitimate occupants of the stable, but in order for this to occur, the stable needs to be radically reconfigured. As with


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most home-remodeling projects, the process might be somewhat contentious, but the alternative is a stable that continues to be imagined as the sole province of horses. As the floods in New Orleans and the riots in Paris demonstrated all too clearly, racialized solidarity continues to pose a formidable obstacle to the achievement of racial justice in most contemporary Western liberal democracies. Addressing the problematic of racialized solidarity directly is thus crucial to the project of establishing genuine democracy and achieving racial justice in diverse polities. The processes of contestation that accompany the adjudication of minority group rights framed in terms of past and continuing disadvantage resulting from either cultural difference and/or racial hierarchy are among the few instances of political discourse about public-policy decisions in which the content of public memory is challenged, because in them, the differences in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated groups are confronted. It is possible that through such processes of contestation, dominant groups might come to see themselves seeing whitely, thereby leading to the development of greater political will to address the seemingly insurmountable problematic of racial justice. Such an outcome is by no means assured, however. Throughout this chapter, I have suggested that this would be possible only if arguments for minority group rights made whiteness visible. In order to do so, normative justifications of such rights need to be framed in terms of past and continuing disadvantage resulting from cultural difference and/or racial hierarchy, which serves both to focus debates about such rights on questions of collective injustice and to reintegrate the two branches of the multiculturalism literature. In chapter , I show what such a reintegration would entail in more concrete terms, by analyzing the models of multiculturalism that have been developed in Latin America, particularly in Nicaragua, to deal with the presence of multiple indigenous and Afro-descendant groups requiring both remedies for racialized oppression and the accommodation of cultural difference. I argue that debates about multiculturalism in Nicaragua produced only limited transformations in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups, because arguments for minority group rights framed mainly in terms of the acknowledgment of cultural diversity failed to reveal underlying dynamics of racial hierarchy.


4 Multiculturalism and Solidarity in Nicaragua

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he failure of theories of multiculturalism as they have been conceived to date to address the phenomenon of racialized solidarity naturally raises important questions about the institutional design of minority group rights, in other words, about the specific forms of such rights that would make possible the fair accommodation of ethnocultural diversity, remedy racialized oppression, and foster political solidarity. I have argued that theories of multiculturalism need to be centrally concerned with the obstacle that racialized solidarity poses to the project of multicultural and (particularly) racial justice. In chapter , I suggested that debates about minority group rights framed in terms of collective injustice are one of the few sites where the differences in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated groups are confronted, where the content of public memory is disputed and possibly transformed. It is through such processes of contestation that the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups might begin to be transformed, but only if arguments for minority group rights are reframed so that they reveal the existence of a state that is neutral toward neither race nor culture. In order to do this, normative justifications of such rights need to be reformulated in terms of the need to reverse past and continuing

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disadvantages that are the result of cultural difference and/or racial hierarchy. This would not only refocus debates about minority group rights on questions of collective injustice but would also serve to bridge the current dichotomy between race and culture in theories of multiculturalism. Reintegrating the two branches of the multiculturalism literature in this way would make it possible to address overlaps between demands for the accommodation of cultural difference and remedies for racialized oppression, rather than a priori assuming that racial groups are not culturally distinct and that ethnocultural groups are not racialized. In this chapter, I consider the concrete implications of these claims for the institutional design of minority group rights by means of a detailed analysis of the model of multiculturalism adopted in a specific case, Nicaragua, which features the presence of multiple indigenous and Afro-descendant groups requiring both remedies to racialized oppression and to the accommodation of cultural difference. As a result, it is an excellent case from which to analyze the question of whether minority group rights as currently conceived are able to address the problematic of racialized solidarity, as well as to evaluate the configurations of such rights that might best enable the fair accommodation of ethnocultural diversity, remedy racialized oppression, and foster political solidarity in contexts where multiple groups facing overlapping forms of disadvantage are present. Latin America has become a major site of institutional innovation with respect to minority group rights in recent decades, yet the region has generally not received significant attention in the literature on multiculturalism in political theory.1 Insofar as this has been the case, certain key questions raised by the Latin American experience with multiculturalism have remained underexplored in the multiculturalism literature. Most centrally, in having to contend with the presence of both Afro-descendant and indigenous groups demanding various kinds of collective rights, Nicaragua’s multicultural model is, in fact, exemplary of the dilemmas of multiculturalism evident throughout much of Latin America, where race and culture, far from being dichotomous (as theories of multiculturalism assume), instead routinely overlap. Latin America is not the only region in the world where this is the case; because the phenomenon is often not fully recognized elsewhere, however, minority group rights have often been conceived as if cultural difference and racialized oppression never occurred in conjunction. Yet this is not even true in the United States and Canada, two of the most common empirical referents in theories of multiculturalism, where (to cite but one example) the presence of black immigrants complicates the view

Nicaraguan Multiculturalism and Solidarity

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that cultural difference and racialized oppression are entirely separate phenomena.2 Indeed, the overlap between culture and race has not been sufficiently addressed in either the multiculturalism literature in political theory or even the more empirically oriented literatures on racial and ethnic politics in the United States and Latin America.3 The reality of overlaps between race and culture so clearly evidenced by Latin America raises important questions for theories of multiculturalism: Should race and culture be viewed as distinct? What are the effects on solidarity between subordinated groups of conceiving them thus? What is the most appropriate configuration of minority group rights when racialized oppression and cultural difference occur in conjunction? Not only have both strands of the multiculturalism literature not seriously considered these questions thus far, but answering them is further rendered difficult by the apparently divergent, if not totally incompatible, aims of the two branches: the preservation of the collective identities of subordinated cultural groups in the case of the strand concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference and the integration of subordinated racial groups on equal terms into the political, economic, and social life of the dominant group in that of the branch concerned with the justice of remedies to racialized oppression. Liberal multiculturalists, for example, have been critical of the way the aim of U.S. multiculturalism, which is integration, is assumed to be the appropriate goal of models of multiculturalism elsewhere.4 Theorists concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference do not consider integration an appropriate goal for all subordinated groups, particularly national minorities, for whom the appropriate aim is, instead, the preservation of their cultures. The problem, then, is not only that the two branches of the multiculturalism literature have divergent aims that require different remedies but also that their aims seem directly opposed. The appropriateness of the goals of preservation and integration (and how best to achieve them) in the case of each branch has not been beyond dispute, however. In the case of the branch that has considered the justice of remedies to racialized oppression, for example, the extent to which the ultimate goal of integration should guide the immediate design of such remedies has begun to be questioned. Liberals in the United States have generally argued that while the collective identities of subordinated racialized groups might be morally problematic because they restrict individual freedom, race-conscious policies designed to overcome the effects of historical racial discrimination that continues unfairly to limit the life chances of individual

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members of such groups are nevertheless ethically defensible.5 Their aim, however, is the integration of African Americans into the dominant society, and indeed, this is the other reason such policies are said to be legitimate.6 In the United States integration has thus been viewed as the appropriate goal for African Americans (as it is for immigrants). There are generally two reasons given for the claim that the aim of remedies to racialized oppression should be integration. One is that the collective cultural identities developed by African Americans have been a response to racial oppression and are therefore not necessarily goods that the state should seek to preserve, and the other is that achieving racial justice will require the full and equal integration of African Americans into all aspects of U.S. life since historical discrimination against them took the form of racial segregation.7 The assumption that integration should be the aim of remedies to racialized oppression has been challenged, however, by the patent failure to achieve racial justice and end racial inequality of policies that have sought to integrate subordinated racialized groups into dominant institutions (such as affirmative action, nondiscrimination guarantees, etc.) without changing those institutions themselves. As a result, it has been suggested that what might be necessary, instead, is the creation of separate spaces and institutions for African Americans in the short run that will empower them as a group in order to achieve racial justice and integration on equal terms in the long run.8 Similar questions have arisen with regard to how best to achieve the aim of cultural preservation in the case of the branch of the multiculturalism literature concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference, given that in many cases, not only do subordinated groups suffer from overlapping types of disadvantage, but they also find themselves in situations where various types of groups are present within the same geographical space. This fact has raised important questions about whether the goal of preserving the cultures of national minorities, such as indigenous groups, can be met only by means of the creation of separate, autonomous spaces where these groups can exercise self-government (which is often one of their principal demands). As Iris Young observes, for example, “space itself matters.”9 She suggests that if self-determination was understood as nondomination rather than noninterference, it would make possible the creation of spaces where national minorities could exercise self-government, which were “spatially overlapping or shared, or even lack spatial reference entirely.”10 She does not discuss in detail what such spaces might look like, except to note that in situations where multiple groups are present, such as where indigenous


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and nonindigenous people live together, the result might be sites that are heterogeneous or multicultural, with group representation rights allotted to all groups, or in other cases, certain groups might be granted specific rights to land and resources without gaining exclusive control over a territory, or group autonomy could be territorially based but in the form of interlocking federal arrangements that would preserve the rights and freedoms of internal minorities.11 The question, then, is whether the goal of cultural preservation requires the creation of distinct, separate spheres of noninterference for each group or if it can be met by the creation of heterogeneous spaces that foster political communication between groups but that do not give each group complete control over a national homeland. Young’s suggestion is that in cases where multiplicity and overlap are the norm, political solidarity might best be served by the creation of heterogeneous rather than closed, separate spheres of noninterference for each group. In light of these concerns about the institutional design of multiculturalism, this chapter is principally concerned with the following key questions: Can remedies for racialized oppression and cultural accommodation be combined in ways that foster political solidarity between groups in contexts where multiple subordinated groups are present and when those groups face overlapping types of subordination? Do minority group rights as currently conceived reveal (and therefore make it possible to address) the racialized character of society? These are precisely the challenges faced by the model of multiculturalism developed in Nicaragua. Different features of Nicaraguan multiculturalism have had mixed effects with regard to these two issues. First, I want to suggest that granting the same rights to Afro-descendant and indigenous groups on the country’s Atlantic Coast (rather than classifying the former as cultural groups and the latter as racial groups) has been an appropriate response to the overlaps between race and culture present in Nicaragua. This was achieved essentially by treating both Afro-descendants and indigenous people on the Atlantic Coast as cultural groups, however, which brings me to the second key concern of this chapter, whether minority group rights as currently conceived adequately address relations of racial hierarchy. In this respect, Nicaraguan multiculturalism has clearly been much less successful. The second point I want to make about Nicaragua’s multicultural model, then, is that it is an example of the failure of multiculturalism conceived purely in terms of cultural accommodation to get at problems of racial hierarchy and inequality. Insofar as arguments for minority group rights framed mainly in terms of the acknowledgment

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of cultural diversity failed to reveal the racialized character of Nicaraguan society, debates about multiculturalism produced only limited transformations in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups, who recognized the existence of cultural diversity but not racial hierarchy. As a result, the Nicaraguan case seems to suggest that debates about minority group rights can begin to address the problem of racialized solidarity by ushering in contestation about the content of public memory, but only if and when arguments for such rights reveal the existence of a state organized on the basis of both cultural difference and racial hierarchy. In this chapter, I do not claim to provide an exhaustive account of how minority group rights might need to be reconceived in order to address the problematic of racialized solidarity or of how remedies for racialized oppression and the accommodation of cultural difference could be pursued in conjunction in cases of overlapping disadvantage. Its far more modest goal is to use the lessons derived from the Nicaraguan example to show how theories of multiculturalism in general might begin to address these questions. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first describes the historical background of the adoption of multicultural citizenship policies in Nicaragua and places this case in the context of other models of multiculturalism developed elsewhere in Latin America. The second section sketches the main features of Nicaragua’s multicultural model. The third section analyzes the effects of the various minority group rights adopted in Nicaragua on solidarity. Finally, the fourth section shows why debates about multiculturalism in Nicaragua failed to foster comprehensive transformations in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups.

Racialized Oppression and Cultural Difference in Nicaragua During the twentieth century, Nicaragua came to be portrayed as a uniformly mestizo (racially and culturally mixed) nation, the product of a mixing process between Spaniards and Indians that had been fully realized by the end of the colonial period.12 Yet official discourses of mestizo nationalism in Nicaragua were deeply at odds with the historical ethnoracial reality of the country’s Atlantic Coast.13 This region, which encompasses approximately  percent of Nicaragua’s territory and  percent of its population, did not officially become a part of the country until ; before that, it was a British protectorate. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the


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region was intermittently under British influence and protection but with a significant degree of autonomy, especially at the local level, where traditional indigenous authority structures continued to prevail. Even after its forcible incorporation into the Nicaraguan republic, the Atlantic Coast and its indigenous and Afro-descendant inhabitants were never fully integrated into Nicaraguan political, economic, or sociocultural life. Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños (as the region’s inhabitants are known) were denied equal political rights well into the twentieth century, when the region continued to be governed as a semicolonial dependency of the Nicaraguan state, with local officials and political representatives appointed directly from Managua (the capital of the country). Indeed, official mestizo nationalisms that obscured the presence of indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños served to justify exclusive mestizo political power in Nicaragua. As a result, indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños possess languages, cultures, and collective identities that are quite different from the dominant Indo-Hispanic culture and national identity of the rest of Nicaragua. During the twentieth century, Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños continued to demand the self-government rights they had retained in the treaties governing the region’s incorporation into Nicaragua.14 Their political activism was limited by the authoritarian regime of the Somoza family, however, which dominated Nicaraguan politics from the s until , when they were overthrown by leftist Sandinista guerrillas. It was in order to resolve the armed conflict that developed between them and indigenous groups that joined the contras (the counterrevolutionary guerrilla forces that were trying to overthrow the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or FSLN, with the aid of the United States) in their armed struggle against the Sandinista state during the s that the Sandinista government adopted a number of multicultural policies in .15 The new constitution ratified that year recognized the “multiethnic character” of the Nicaraguan nation and enshrined the following collective rights for costeños: to preserve and develop their distinct cultures, languages, and religions; to establish their own forms of social organization and administer their local affairs according to their historical traditions; to have ownership of their communal lands; to use and benefit from the region’s natural resources; and to enjoy regional autonomy.16 Today, the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua is inhabited by six distinct ethnoracial groups: three indigenous groups (Miskitu, Mayangna, and




Rama); two groups of African descent (Creole and Garifuna); and mestizos, who began migrating from the Pacific and central regions of the country to the Atlantic Coast after it was incorporated into Nicaragua in . As a result of intensifying migration, mestizos now make up the majority of the population on the Atlantic Coast. The region continues to be identified with its original Afro-descendant and indigenous inhabitants, however, who exerted control over the region before the arrival of mestizos. The two largest and most politically powerful indigenous and Afro-descendant groups, respectively, are the Miskitus and the Creoles. They vied for dominance in the region during the nineteenth century and have been historical rivals for power on the Atlantic Coast. As a result of the presence in Nicaragua of multiple indigenous and Afro-descendant groups seeking collective rights and control of a region that they share, the country exemplifies the kind of overlap between race and culture that is the norm rather than the exception in Latin America but which runs counter to the assumption in both branches of the multiculturalism literature that these two kinds of disadvantage occur in isolation from each other. Because they tend to assume that subordinated racial groups and cultural minorities are totally distinct, theorists of multiculturalism have discussed the form that minority group rights should take mainly in terms of how remedies to racialized oppression are not suitable measures for the accommodation of cultural difference, and vice versa. While it may be possible analytically to distinguish between different types of subordinated groups, empirical realities in Latin America suggest that conceptualizing minority group rights as if national minorities, ethnic groups, and racial groups were singular and distinct is more difficult in practice and also has important consequences for solidarity. Liberal multiculturalists are right to claim that different forms of disadvantage require different kinds of remedies, yet once it is recognized that subordinated racialized groups and disadvantaged cultural groups cannot be conceived as totally distinct, it also becomes clear that the problem is not resolved by deciding which of the two categories a particular group belongs to. In cases of overlap, some combination of remedies designed to overcome racialized oppression and to accommodate cultural difference may be necessary. The models of multiculturalism developed in Latin America both reflect and depart from the expectations of the multiculturalism literature in key ways. The principal disadvantaged groups that demanded and gained collective rights in Latin America during the wave of multicultural citizen-




ship reform that swept the region in the s and s were indigenous and Afro-descendant groups. Current Latin American models of multiculturalism encompass some combination of the following collective rights for Afro-descendant and indigenous groups: (a) formal recognition of the multicultural nature of national societies and of the existence of specific ethnic/racial subgroups; (b) recognition of indigenous customary law as official public law; (c) collective property rights, especially to land; (d) official status for minority languages in predominantly minority regions; (e) guarantees of bilingual education; (f) autonomy or self-government; and (g) collective rights to redress racial discrimination, such as affirmative action in education and employment.17 In the case of Latin America, the prescriptions of the multiculturalism literature would appear to be that Afro-descendants should be conceived as subordinated racial groups entitled to temporary remedies to racialized oppression, while indigenous groups should be viewed as national minorities entitled to permanent group rights that would enable them to preserve their cultures. Because indigenous people in Latin America also suffer from racial discrimination in addition to being entitled to rights to ensure the fair accommodation of cultural difference, however, and since some Afrodescendants also make claims relating to language, culture, and territory in addition to suffering from racism, neatly encapsulating either indigenous people or Afro-descendants solely within the national minority, ethnic group, or racial group categories commonly utilized in the multiculturalism literature is difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, Latin American states have developed varying configurations of multiculturalism to address the presence of multiple subordinated groups suffering from overlapping forms of disadvantage. Currently, there are three distinct patterns of minority group rights distribution in Latin America: one in which Afro-descendant and indigenous groups have achieved fairly similar levels of rights, another in which indigenous groups have gained collective rights but Afro-descendants have not, and a third in which indigenous and Afro-descendant groups have gained varying levels of collective rights to land and culture but Afro-descendants have also won collective rights to redress racial discrimination. In the first configuration of multiculturalism in the region, Afro-descendants and indigenous groups have both been considered national minorities, and as a result, they have both gained the same kinds of collective rights to land and culture. This is the pattern that has emerged in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In a second set of cases, indigenous groups have been considered national minorities, while Afro-descendants are not recognized as either national




minorities or subordinated racialized groups. In this configuration, indigenous groups have gained collective rights to land and culture, but Afrodescendants have not, and Afro-descendants have also not achieved specific rights to redress racial discrimination. This is the situation in Venezuela and Mexico. Finally, in a third set of cases, indigenous groups have been considered national minorities, while Afro-descendants have also been seen as cultural groups, albeit ones entitled to lower levels of cultural accommodation than indigenous groups; in addition, however, Afro-descendants have also been considered a disadvantaged racial group. In this variant of multiculturalism, indigenous groups have gained collective rights to land and culture; meanwhile, Afro-descendants have gained fewer collective rights to land and culture than indigenous groups, but they have also achieved collective rights to redress racial discrimination. This has been the case in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The different configurations of minority group rights adopted by Latin American states have accorded with the assumption in theories of multiculturalism that cultural and racial groups are singular and distinct in certain instances, while departing from it in other cases. These differing choices with regard to the institutional design of multiculturalism have important potential consequences for solidarity. For instance, following the prescriptions of the multiculturalism literature, it would seem that indigenous people should be viewed as cultural groups, while Afro-descendants should be thought of as racialized groups, but this might lead states to grant different levels of collective rights to similarly positioned disadvantaged groups, which could have potentially negative consequences for solidarity. Similarly, adherents of certain notions of indigenous rights might object to Afro-descendant and indigenous groups being included in the same category.18 In certain cases where both indigenous and Afro-descendant groups have made demands for the fair accommodation of cultural difference in the region, for example, the claims of the latter have sometimes been dismissed on the grounds that they are “racial” groups and thus do not possess distinct cultures requiring protection from the state; collective rights to the protection of culture and communal lands have been viewed as exclusively “indigenous rights” in such instances.19 Nicaragua, which features the presence of multiple indigenous and Afro-descendant groups seeking collective rights and control of a region that they share, is an example of the first variant of Latin American multiculturalism, in which Afro-descendant and indigenous groups have achieved the




same rights to the protection of land and culture. Treating Afro-descendant and indigenous Latin Americans as racial and cultural groups, respectively, as the multiculturalism literature would suggest, or taking an alternative approach, such as including both groups in the same category, are both strategies that have different potential consequences for solidarity. It is therefore necessary to consider how effective the strategy adopted in Nicaragua has been in dealing with the key questions with which this chapter is principally concerned: how to combine remedies for racialized oppression and cultural accommodation in ways that foster solidarity in contexts where multiple subordinated groups facing overlapping types of disadvantage are present and whether minority group rights conceived in this way are able to get at problems of racial hierarchy and inequality. First, it is necessary to describe briefly the specific features of Nicaragua’s multicultural model.

The Institutional Design of Multiculturalism in Nicaragua The model of multiculturalism enacted in Nicaragua has four key elements: equal collective rights for all costeños, the granting of autonomy or selfgovernment within ethnically and racially heterogeneous territorial units, weak mechanisms for the group representation of indigenous and Afrodescendant costeños, and the absence of remedies for racialized oppression and historical discrimination. Regarding the first feature, adoption of equal collective rights for all costeños, as noted earlier, Nicaragua is one of three Latin American cases where Afro-descendants and indigenous groups have gained exactly the same level of collective rights within new multicultural citizenship regimes. The Nicaraguan Constitution guarantees equal collective rights for the “communities of the Atlantic Coast,” while the Autonomy Law approved in  establishes an autonomy regime for the Atlantic Coast, within which “the members of the communities of the Atlantic Coast” are guaranteed “absolute equality of rights and responsibilities, regardless of population size and level of development.”20 Nicaragua’s multicultural model deviates from the expectations of the multiculturalism literature, therefore, in that it does not distinguish between racial and cultural groups. Instead, it resolves the problem of the overlaps between culture and race in the case of Afro-descendant and indigenous groups by essentially regionalizing the issue. In other words, it sets aside issues of racial hierarchy and grants autonomy to a culturally




distinct and historically marginalized region as a whole. This all-encompassing language has the virtue of guaranteeing the same level of collective rights to Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños. At the same time, however, it is also one of the greatest drawbacks of the institutional design of multiculturalism in Nicaragua, because it obscures questions of historical injustice and racial hierarchy by extending the same collective rights gained by indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños to mestizos living in the region as well. This is despite the fact that mestizos not only have not suffered the same historical disadvantages as the Atlantic Coast’s longstanding indigenous and Afro-descendant inhabitants, but they are also the dominant group at the national level. Thus far, mestizos appear uninterested in exercising most of the collective rights they are legally entitled to under the multicultural policies adopted in the s, with the important exception of participation in the regional political institutions created for the exercise of self-government. Yet, as a result of having been granted the same rights as indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños, their demographic majority in the region has important consequences for indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños’ ability to exercise self-government and other collective rights that they officially gained in the s. The second important feature of Nicaragua’s multicultural model is the granting of autonomy or self-government to costeños within heterogeneous regional territorial units.21 In Nicaragua, heterogeneous multiracial and multiethnic regions were created within which all costeños enjoy equal collective rights. Instead of following the formula of national federalism, whereby a group gains exclusive control over a national homeland or territory, in Nicaragua, the Autonomy Law divides the Atlantic Coast into two administrative units: the Northern Autonomous Region of the Atlantic Coast (RAAN) and the Southern Autonomous Region of the Atlantic Coast (RAAS). Both autonomous regions are ethnoracially heterogeneous. Two indigenous groups (Miskitu and Mayangna), one Afro-descendant group (Creole), and mestizos inhabit the northern autonomous region, or RAAN. Three indigenous groups (Miskitu, Mayangna, and Rama), two Afro-descendant groups (Creole and Garifuna), and mestizos inhabit the southern autonomous region, or RAAS. The Autonomy Law mandates that all ethnoracial groups who inhabit an autonomous region must be represented in its respective regional government. Currently, mestizos are estimated to constitute a demographic majority in both regions. The Miskitus are the second-largest group in the RAAN, where they are concentrated, followed by the Mayangnas and small numbers




of Creoles. In the RAAS, where they have historically settled, Creoles are the second-largest group, followed by small numbers of Miskitus, Mayangnas, Ramas and Garifunas.22 The decision to create heterogeneous regions rather than spatially segregated units controlled by each group for the exercise of autonomy is one of the most unusual features of the model of multiculturalism adopted in Nicaragua. As a result, indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños have not gained national homelands over which they can exercise exclusive control; instead, they are forced to share in self-government. This is in contrast to the expectations of the branch of the multiculturalism literature concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference, which tends to hold the view that indigenous people and other national minorities are entitled to, and indeed require, the creation of separate, autonomous spaces for the exercise of self-government in order to ensure the preservation of their cultures. The creation of heterogeneous territorial units in the Nicaraguan case fails to meet this expectation, as indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños have not gained exclusive control over separate portions of the Atlantic Coast.23 The Nicaraguan model is closer to the kinds of heterogeneous spaces that Young argues are most likely to foster political communication between groups, therefore, than to the closed, separate spheres of noninterference preferred by liberal multiculturalists. The question of how to configure territorial spaces for the exercise of self-government on the Atlantic Coast was complicated by a number of factors, including the fact that indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños themselves were—and continue to be—divided on the issue, the geographical dispersal of certain groups, and the presence of mestizos. During the initial debates about autonomy, there were significant disagreements between indigenous groups who favored a model that would create a national homeland for indigenous people on the Atlantic Coast and other costeños who favored the creation of heterogeneous regions along the lines of the model that was ultimately adopted. In the s, for example, the main Miskitu organizations advocated “Indian self-government”; they articulated a vision of regional autonomy under Miskitu hegemony. Yet this proposal faced serious resistance from both Creoles and the two smaller indigenous groups (Mayangna and Rama), all of whom feared being overshadowed by the Miskitus. To this day, significant disagreements remain among costeños on the question of the creation of separate territories under the control of each group versus shared heterogeneous regions. The geographical dispersal of




many of the region’s indigenous and Afro-descendant groups also renders the creation of a separate national homeland for each group difficult, although not impossible. Some groups, such as the Ramas, live in self-contained geographical areas, but most are dispersed throughout the region; Creoles, for instance, are concentrated in the larger urban areas of the southern Atlantic Coast.24 Finally, the presence of mestizos in the region also poses a problem with respect to the design of territorial units for the exercise of autonomy. The continued influx of poor mestizo peasants displaced from the Pacific and Central regions of the country has dramatically changed the region’s demography, making mestizos the majority in both autonomous regions today. The question of how to balance mestizo representation in the political institutions created for the exercise of regional autonomy with indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños’ demand for self-government also played a role in the initial decision to create heterogeneous territorial units.25 The third important feature of Nicaragua’s multicultural model is the lack of adequate group representation rights for historically disadvantaged indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños in the political institutions created for the exercise of self-government. Indeed, the demographic preponderance of mestizos on the Atlantic Coast today, which has resulted in their having greater representation in regional governments than indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños, has become one of the most pressing political problems in the region. The Autonomy Law contains only minimal provisions for group representation; it relies on limited electoral mechanisms to ensure the political representation of indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños. The law mandates the creation of a regional government for each autonomous region. Each regional government is made up of a legislative body, the Regional Council, and a Regional Coordinator, or governor, elected from the ranks of the council who is the region’s top executive as well as the representative of the central government in the region. The members of the regional council are elected in regional elections in which only inhabitants of the Atlantic Coast or their descendants are allowed to vote and run for office; Nicaraguans from other regions of the country are able to participate in regional elections only if they fulfill certain residency requirements. Thus, only persons born on the Atlantic Coast or children of persons born in the region who have resided in the region for at least one year immediately before the elections in question can be elected to the regional councils. Nicaraguans from other regions of the country can be elected to the regional councils if they have resided in an autonomous region for at




least five consecutive years immediately before the relevant regional election. The requirements for voting in regional elections are somewhat looser: a person born on the Atlantic Coast, or the descendant of one, is eligible to vote if he or she has resided in one of the autonomous regions during the three months preceding a regional election. Nicaraguans from other regions of the country must have resided in an autonomous region for a minimum of one year immediately before a regional election in order to be eligible to vote in it. Nevertheless, while the Autonomy Law does restrict participation in regional political institutions to residents of the Atlantic Coast, it contains only weak guarantees of group representation for the region’s historical inhabitants: Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños. Regional council elections are contested in fifteen electoral districts, each of which elects three representatives under a proportional representation system. In order to ensure that all ethnoracial groups in a given region are represented in its respective regional council as established by the Autonomy Law, electoral districts were created, in which the first candidate of each party must be a member of one of each of the different ethnoracial groups that inhabit a region. In the RAAS, for example, out of a total of fifteen electoral districts, there is one district each in which the first candidate of every political party must be Miskitu, Creole, Mayangna, Garifuna, Rama, or mestizo. This means that of the total forty-five regional council seats, only six are groupdesignated, and each ethnoracial group is assured of a minimum of only one seat. As a result, out of a total of forty-five members of the RAAS Regional Council, only five are guaranteed to be either Afro-descendant or indigenous costeños. The same is true in the RAAN, where one district each must have as its first candidate a Miskitu, a Creole, a Mayangna, or a mestizo. Thus, out of a total of forty-five seats in the RAAN Regional Council, only three seats are set aside for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños. A number of features of this system of group representation for Afrodescendant and indigenous costeños have worked to further dilute its effectiveness. Two are the electoral law’s self-identification requirement and the continued role of national political parties in regional politics. The first issue is an unintended consequence of the Autonomy Law’s guarantee that costeños have the right to define and choose their own ethnoracial group identity. As a result, in order to meet the requirements of the electoral law, political candidates in all of the ethnically designated districts must declare their ethnoracial group identity before each regional election. A frequent complaint of

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Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, however, is that national political parties routinely exploit this provision by having candidates adopt ethnoracial group identifications at will in order to maximize their chances of being elected or in order to present the appearance of having complied with the requirements of the law that they field candidates who are representative of the region’s various ethnoracial groups in the designated districts. Another factor that has contributed to weakening mechanisms for the group representation of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños in regional political institutions has been the continued role of national political parties in regional politics. While costeños are allowed to form regional parties under the law, the reality is that the barriers to doing so are so steep that in practice, national political parties continue to dominate regional politics, although it must be noted that the ethnically designated districts have at least forced national political parties to put forward a slightly more diverse slate of candidates (but subject to the problems noted above). As a result of the weak mechanisms for the group representation of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, mestizos have dominated regional political institutions; this has hampered indigenous and Afrodescendant costeños’ ability to exercise self-government on the Atlantic Coast. The restriction of group representation of historically disadvantaged groups such as Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños to one seat on the regional council per group, combined with the growing size of the mestizo population in the region, has resulted in mestizo preponderance in both regional councils. While mestizo predominance on the regional councils may well be in line with their growing demographic strength as a result of their increasing rates of migration to the region from other areas of the country, it directly contradicts the stated goal of regional autonomy, which was to enable Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños to exercise selfgovernment on the Atlantic Coast. The inadequate group representation measures for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños in Nicaragua’s multicultural institutions reflect a more general failure of the model to take into account historical relations of racial hierarchy. The fourth key feature of multiculturalism in Nicaragua, then, is the absence of specific remedies for racial discrimination for Afro-descendants or indigenous costeños or any other policies that recognize the historical disparities between these groups and dominant mestizos. Instead, the guarantee of equal collective rights for all groups living in the region has been extended to mestizos as well. This is despite the fact that they are not only the


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dominant group at the national level but are now a demographic majority within the Atlantic Coast as well and have not suffered from past discrimination and political exclusion as have Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños. The consequence of this lack of specific antiracial discrimination rights designed to compensate for historical injustice has been, according to the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report for the Atlantic Coast issued in , “the erosion of the fundamental principles of the Autonomy Statute.” The UNDP report further suggests that for multiculturalism in Nicaragua to achieve its aim of promoting equality, it will need to include “affirmative measures” that explicitly address the historical disparities between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and dominant mestizos.26 In sum, Nicaragua’s multicultural model contains four key elements: equal collective rights for all costeños, heterogeneous territorial units for the exercise of autonomy or self-government, minimal group-representation rights for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, and the absence of specific rights to remedy historical disparities between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and dominant mestizos. Many of the features of Nicaragua’s multicultural model do not constitute what either branch of the multiculturalism literature would consider effective measures for the accommodation of cultural difference or remedies for racialized oppression. First, Nicaragua’s multicultural model did not create separate spaces or a national homeland for each group over which it could exercise exclusive control, which liberal multiculturalists would likely claim is necessary in order for indigenous groups and other national minorities to be able to preserve their cultures. Second, it did not reproduce the dichotomy between race and culture in the multiculturalism literature that would classify Afrodescendant costeños as racial groups and indigenous costeños as cultural groups. The problem of the overlap between race and culture in the cases of these groups was resolved in Nicaraguan multiculturalism by, in essence, treating both Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños as cultural groups in some sense, by regionalizing the issue and granting collective rights to a historically marginalized region as a whole. As a consequence of this, mestizos were also granted exactly the same rights as Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, which has the effect of obscuring historical disparities between these groups. Third, Nicaragua’s multicultural model systematically occludes dynamics of racial hierarchy. It also deviates from the expectations of the branch of the literature concerned with remedies to racialized




oppression, therefore, because it does not include specific rights to redress historical inequalities between indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños and mestizos. Below, I discuss the impact of these key elements of Nicaraguan multiculturalism on solidarity on the Atlantic Coast.

Nicaragua’s Multicultural Model and Solidarity Nicaragua’s multicultural citizenship regime had to contend with complex configurations of race and culture that posed significant challenges of institutional design. The four key elements of Nicaragua’s multicultural model sketched above—equal collective rights for all costeños, autonomy or selfgovernment within heterogeneous territorial units, minimal group representation provisions for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, and the absence of specific rights to remedy historical disparities between Afrodescendant and indigenous costeños and dominant mestizos—have had different, and sometimes opposing, effects on solidarity. In order to assess their impact on solidarity, it is necessary to distinguish between two different kinds of solidarity: solidarity between disadvantaged groups (i.e., between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños) and solidarity between subordinated and dominant groups (i.e., between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and mestizos). Some elements of Nicaragua’s multicultural model— namely, granting Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños the same collective rights and the creation of heterogeneous regions where these groups have had to share in self-government—appear to have fostered the first type of solidarity, between disadvantaged groups. That is, these two features seem to have promoted solidarity between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños. In contrast, other features of the model of multiculturalism implemented in Nicaragua—specifically, granting mestizos the same collective rights as Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños on the Atlantic Coast, minimal group representation provisions for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, and the lack of specific rights to address historical disparities between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and mestizos—appear to have had a more mixed, if not outright detrimental, effect on the second type of solidarity, between dominant and subordinated groups. They do not seem to have promoted solidarity between mestizos and Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños. Nicaragua’s multicultural model appears to have been most successful at fostering solidarity between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños.


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Granting Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños the same levels of collective rights and the creation of heterogeneous regions for the exercise of regional autonomy are the two features of the institutional design of multiculturalism in Nicaragua that seem to be most directly responsible for this positive outcome. By granting Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños the same level of collective rights, Nicaragua’s multicultural model did not create asymmetries in rights between subordinated groups with overlapping disadvantages, thus promoting solidarity (as we shall see, overall granting of equal collective rights to all costeños has had contradictory consequences for solidarity, however, since granting mestizos the same collective rights as indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños appears to have had precisely the opposite effect). The creation of heterogeneous regions for the exercise of autonomy, rather than national homelands for each group, also appears to have fostered political solidarity between indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños, by creating spaces for political communication and incentives for political cooperation between the two groups. In Nicaragua, granting Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños the same levels of collective rights and the creation of heterogeneous regions for the exercise of autonomy appear to have facilitated political communication and cooperation between indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños. This is especially evident in the changing political trajectories of Afro-descendant and indigenous ethnic organizations and political parties on the Atlantic Coast, specifically the creation of unprecedented electoral alliances between Afro-descendant and indigenous political parties and organizations. The relationship between indigenous and Afro-descendant costeños has traditionally been quite complicated. As the two dominant groups on the Atlantic Coast before the region’s incorporation into Nicaragua, (Afrodescendant) Creoles and (indigenous) Miskitus have traditionally seen each other as rivals for political power. Tensions between the two groups can be traced back to the colonial period, when Creoles were the dominant political and social force in the region. For the Miskitus and other indigenous groups, the new regional autonomy regime established in the s represented a long-awaited opportunity to exercise political power in the region. In the s, for example, the main Miskitu political organizations were committed to regional autonomy under Miskitu hegemony. The most successful regional party in regional elections since  has been YATAMA (Yapti Tasba Masraka Nani, or Descendants of Mother Earth in Miskitu), which is the main Miskitu political organization today. YATAMA




is an almost exclusively Miskitu party in its leadership, membership, and voting base; it has been very strong electorally in the RAAN, where most Miskitus live, and weak in the RAAS, where most Creoles live. The success of YATAMA has led many Creoles to fear growing Miskitu political power, even as they seek to emulate it. As a result, the electoral alliance between YATAMA and the Creole organization Coast Power in  was unprecedented in many ways. Coast Power (also known as the Coast People Political Movement) was founded in  by prominent Creole political leaders. Publicly, its stated goals are the promotion of “costeñismo” (a concept it defines rather vaguely), but it is widely perceived as a Creole political movement that emphasizes a strong “black” racial group identity among Creoles. The alliance between Coast Power and YATAMA thus brought together two organizations that are committed to achieving greater political power for Afro-descendants and indigenous people, respectively. The YATAMA-Coast Power alliance was extremely successful in the  regional elections in the RAAS. Coast Power, which has not yet been formally recognized as a political party, used the YATAMA slot to field its candidates in the elections. Forty percent of YATAMA-Coast Power candidates to the RAAS Regional Council were Creole, the largest percentage ever put forward by a regional or national political party. As a result, the YATAMA-Coast Power alliance proved quite successful in the three districts in the RAAS, with significant Creole presence, including the designated Creole district (the district where the first candidate on all party lists must be Creole). They achieved first place in districts one and eight, with  percent of the vote (in comparison, the second-place parties in each district received  percent and  percent of the vote, respectively), and they came in second in district nine, with  percent of the vote (the first-place party received  percent). For many Creole voters, this was the first time they had ever voted for YATAMA or any other predominantly indigenous political organization, while for YATAMA, this was the first time they had fielded a list of candidates that was not overwhelmingly Miskitu. Such instances of political cooperation between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños could certainly be viewed as purely strategic responses to political calculations about the kinds of electoral alliances necessary to counter growing mestizo demographic (and hence political) power in the region, yet they also seem to exemplify a higher degree of political cooperation between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños that is also reflected




in public opinion survey results. While there is still significant distrust of Creoles among Miskitus, for example, a majority of Miskitu respondents ( percent) believe that they can trust Creoles as much as they can trust other Miskitus.27 Miskitu respondents also agreed by a large margin ( percent) that alliances between Miskitus and Creoles could benefit both groups. Similarly, an overwhelming majority ( percent) of Creole respondents agreed that Creoles should enter into alliances with other ethnic groups who are fighting for the rights of all costeños. These results, coupled with instances of political cooperation between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, suggest that Nicaragua’s multicultural institutions, particularly granting the same collective rights to Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and creating heterogeneous regions for territorial autonomy, have been at least somewhat successful at fostering solidarity between subordinated groups. Nevertheless, it is important to consider whether similar results could not have been achieved by different means. That is to say, it is certainly the case that Afro-descendant and indigenous groups have cooperated elsewhere in Latin America, for example, even when they did not have the same levels of collective rights and absent the existence of shared political institutions for the exercise of autonomy.28 While I believe that granting both Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños similar collective rights has been an effective response to the overlaps between race and culture present in the Nicaraguan case, this is certainly not the only possible strategy for dealing with this issue (as I discuss below). Likewise, while the creation of heterogeneous regions for the exercise of self-government seems to have fostered political collaboration between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños in Nicaragua, it is not clear that this would be the case in all contexts or that it was the only way to achieve such a result on the Atlantic Coast. Heterogeneous regions for the exercise of selfgovernment create spaces for political communication between groups, which is important, because (as Young observes) the absence of such spaces poses an important obstacle to the development of solidarity. Yet it is also certainly possible that costeños might have still cooperated with each other to defend shared regional interests against the national state even if a separate homeland for each group had been created. Likewise, it is important to consider whether, by regionalizing minority group rights, the Nicaraguan model did not preclude solidarity between indigenous people outside the Atlantic Coast and indigenous costeños, for example, as well as




between Afro-descendants within the region and in the rest of the country. While this does not appear to have been a significant problem in Nicaragua, that is mostly because there has been much less identification and organizing on the basis of ethnoracial group identities in the rest of the country than on the Atlantic Coast.29 In countries where issues of racial hierarchy and cultural difference are not spatially contained or regionalized, however, this feature of the Nicaraguan model of multiculturalism might prove to be counterproductive in terms of promoting solidarity between disadvantaged groups. There might also be other drawbacks to the creation of heterogeneous regions, such as whether they are as likely to meet the goal of cultural preservation compared with separate, autonomous spaces over which each group could exercise exclusive control. It is certainly possible, for example, that a multicultural model that combined the creation of a national homeland for each group of Afrodescendant and indigenous costeños combined with larger regional political institutions for the exercise of self-government similar to those that exist today (but with greater group-representation rights for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños) might have better balanced the goals of cultural preservation and the promotion of solidarity between disadvantaged groups in Nicaragua. Indeed, there seem to be indications that this is the direction in which the country is currently moving, although there is still considerable disagreement among costeños (as well as at the national level) about what kind of territorial model to implement on the Atlantic Coast if the current autonomous regions are to be modified. For example, the efforts of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños to achieve the demarcation and titling of their communal lands under the Communal Property Law of  seem to be moving in the direction of creating separate territories under the control of each group. By pursuing land claims in large blocs, some containing a mix of Afro-descendant and indigenous communities, others only single Afro-descendant or indigenous communities, and others groups of Afro-descendant or indigenous communities, the aim is to gain control over most of the territory of the Atlantic Coast at the local level. This would potentially create a system similar to the one I describe above, although it is not clear what the relationship would be between the communities (which would be governed by territorial boards) and the regional, municipal, and central governments. It is also not clear what the effects of such changes would be on solidarity between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, given the profound disagreements that continue to exist between the vari-




ous groups on how best to configure territorial spaces for the exercise of self-government.30 In contrast to its relative success in promoting solidarity between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, Nicaragua’s multicultural model appears to have been much less successful at fostering the second type of solidarity, that between dominant and subordinated groups, in other words, between mestizos and Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños. Three features of Nicaraguan multiculturalism in particular—granting mestizos on the Atlantic Coast the same rights as Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, minimal group representation provisions for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, and the absence of specific rights to remedy historical disparities between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and mestizos—appear to have had a detrimental effect on solidarity between dominant and subordinated groups, that is, between mestizos on the one hand and Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños on the other. By and large, this is because these elements of Nicaragua’s multicultural model have failed to address lingering problems of collective injustice and racial hierarchy. By granting mestizos the same rights as Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños on the Atlantic Coast, for example, Nicaragua’s multicultural model has failed to ameliorate historical disparities between the latter and mestizos, who are the dominant group at the national level. It might be that granting mestizos the same collective rights as Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños on the Atlantic Coast would have had a more positive effect on solidarity if it had been combined with adequate group-representation rights for historically disadvantaged groups in regional political structures, but coupled with the absence of specific rights to redress racialized oppression, this feature of Nicaragua’s multicultural model has led to the reproduction at the regional level of imbalances in political power at the national level between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and mestizos. As a result, these measures do not seem to have fostered greater solidarity between dominant and subordinated groups. The lack of adequate group representation provisions for Afrodescendant and indigenous costeños in regional political institutions and the absence of specific rights to redress the racialized oppression of subordinated groups in Nicaragua’s multicultural model have not reduced historical disparities between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and mestizos, who are the dominant group at the national level. This dynamic is especially evident with regard to political power at the regional level, for




example, as the preponderance of mestizos within both regional councils has hampered the ability of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños to exercise and defend the various collective rights they gained in the s, such as the right to bilingual education, the titling of communal lands, and so on. As a result, Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños have not been able to exercise meaningful self-government on the Atlantic Coast. Between  and , for example,  percent of regional council members in the RAAS have been mestizos, while only  percent have been Creole; meanwhile, in the RAAN,  percent of regional council members during the same time period have been mestizos, while  percent have been Miskitus. While these proportions may actually reflect the current demographic composition of the two autonomous regions, given the growing rate of mestizo migration to the Atlantic Coast, the problem is that mestizos (especially recent migrants to the region) tend to vote overwhelmingly for national parties in regional elections, and in general, they are less concerned with the preservation of regional autonomy and other collective rights. While it could be argued that the lack of adequate group representation of Afrodescendant and indigenous costeños serves as an incentive for political cooperation between the former and mestizos, the numerical advantage of mestizos is such that the incentives it creates are rather lopsided. That is, Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños must work with mestizos in order to govern both autonomous regions, but mestizos have fewer incentives to do so, as they are generally less committed to self-government. More fundamentally, however, for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, the purpose of regional autonomy was finally to put them on equal footing with mestizos (who are the dominant group at the national level). Thus, when mestizos also dominate regional political structures on the Atlantic Coast, the idea of costeño self-government is undermined. As a result of its failure to address historical disparities between dominant and subordinated groups, Nicaragua’s multicultural model has not promoted greater solidarity between mestizos and Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños on the Atlantic Coast. The persistence of racialized solidarity is clearly reflected in continuing disagreements between dominant and subordinated groups about what constitutes justice, for example, as public opinion survey results measuring attitudes toward the distribution of political power on the Atlantic Coast illustrate. When asked whether groups should dominate politics in regions where they are the majority, for example,  percent of mestizos strongly disagreed or disagreed, while  percent of




Miskitus and  percent of Creoles strongly agreed or agreed. These results make it clear that most Creoles and Miskitus strongly support the idea that Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños should dominate politics on the Atlantic Coast, while mestizos seem to have a different view. At first glance, it appears that mestizos are opposed to the idea that they should be the dominant group in the region; in all likelihood, however, this finding instead reflects mestizo opposition to the view that Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños should exercise political control over the Atlantic Coast. That is, by not endorsing the idea that any group should dominate politics in a region where they are the majority, mestizos are, in fact, expressing their opposition to the claim that Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños (who have been the region’s historical inhabitants) should wield greater political power on the Atlantic Coast than recent mestizo migrants. Similar disagreements between mestizos and Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños with regard to the existence of historical disparities between the two groups speak to the failure of Nicaragua’s multicultural model to foster greater solidarity between dominant and subordinated groups. These differences are evident in the responses of mestizos and Afrodescendant and indigenous costeños to public opinion survey questions about racism. For instance, overwhelming majorities of Creoles ( percent), Miskitus ( percent), and mestizos ( percent) agree that racism is a problem in their society. When asked against whom such racism is directed, however, differences of opinion emerge between dominant and subordinated groups. While Creoles ( percent) and Miskitus ( percent) overwhelmingly believe that black and indigenous costeños face discrimination in access to education, employment, and political representation, a majority of mestizos ( percent) disagree. These disagreements reflect the failure of Nicaragua’s model of multiculturalism to address the racialized character of the state. As a result, not only is racism conceived as a problem of individual attitudes rather than of historical disparities between dominant and subordinated groups, but recent mestizo migrants to the Atlantic Coast, in particular, also tend to view Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños as the dominant groups in the region because of the multicultural policies adopted since the s. In contrast, Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños believe that such gains have not been sufficient to alter the balance of political power between them and mestizos to a significant degree. In other words, racialized solidarity persists. Nicaragua’s multicultural model thus appears to have been much less successful at fostering greater solidarity




between dominant and subordinated groups on the Atlantic Coast, that is, between mestizos and Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños. The various elements of Nicaragua’s multicultural model have had significant and, in certain cases, antithetical effects on solidarity between disadvantaged groups (i.e., between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños) on the one hand and on solidarity between dominant and subordinated groups on the other (i.e., mestizos and afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, respectively). I have suggested that granting the same levels of collective rights to Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños within heterogeneous, multiethnic regions in Nicaragua has fostered solidarity between these subordinated groups. As noted above, however, it is debatable whether the creation of heterogeneous regions is essential to such an outcome. Similarly, it could be argued that while granting Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños the same rights has been an effective way of dealing with the overlapping disadvantages faced by these groups compared with an approach that assumes that there is a strict divide between racial and cultural groups, the success of this strategy may also entail certain costs. In Nicaragua, for example, this outcome was achieved, in essence, by conceiving of both Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños as cultural groups. The main drawback of this strategy is that it obscures the existence of racial hierarchy; it fails to address the racialized character of society. This failure is directly related to the inability of Nicaragua’s multicultural model to foster solidarity between dominant and subordinated groups. Certain features of Nicaragua’s multicultural model, such as granting the same rights to mestizos on the Atlantic Coast as to Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and the absence of remedies to racialized oppression, have failed to reduce historical disparities between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and dominant mestizos. As a result, Nicaragua’s multicultural model has not been nearly as successful in promoting solidarity between Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños and mestizos. At the most basic level, this analysis of the effects of the key features of Nicaragua’s multicultural model on solidarity suggests that each of the three variants of multiculturalism currently found in Latin America—one in which Afro-descendant and indigenous groups have achieved similar levels of rights to land and culture, another in which indigenous groups have gained collective rights but Afro-descendants have not, and a third in which indigenous and Afro-descendant groups have gained different levels of collective rights to land and culture but Afro-descendants have also




won collective rights to redress racial discrimination—is likely to have a different impact on solidarity. How each model of multiculturalism attempts to resolve the dilemmas posed by the presence of multiple subordinated groups facing overlapping types of disadvantage is likely to have the most direct impact on whether or not it is able to foster solidarity between disadvantaged groups, while the way in which questions of racial hierarchy are approached (or not) is likely to have the most impact on the ability of each model to promote solidarity between dominant and subordinated groups. It is therefore important to consider how effective Nicaragua’s strategy has been in dealing with the key questions with which this chapter is principally concerned: how to combine remedies for racialized oppression and cultural accommodation in contexts where multiple subordinated groups facing overlapping types of disadvantage are present and how to conceive minority group rights in order to be able to get at problems of racial hierarchy and inequality, compared with the other approaches pursued elsewhere in Latin America. There is no single formula for how best to address overlaps between racialized oppression and cultural difference. Nicaragua is an example of the first variant of Latin American multiculturalism, where Afro-descendant and indigenous groups have gained similar collective rights to the preservation of culture, and this approach appears to have fostered solidarity between subordinated groups (in this case, Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños). It could nevertheless be suggested that a better solution would have been to grant Afro-descendant costeños rights to remedy racialized oppression and indigenous costeños rights designed to ensure the preservation of their cultures, while acknowledging that these two sets of rights would certainly overlap, given that indigenous costeños also suffer from racial discrimination and that Afro-descendant costeños have distinct cultures that also require accommodation. Indeed, of the three models of multiculturalism that have been implemented in Latin America to date, the third variant appears to be the one that has most closely approximated this approach, as it combines remedies for racialized oppression for Afro-descendant groups with the accommodation of cultural difference for indigenous people and, to a lesser extent, Afro-descendants. In order for this approach to work, it would be necessary to reconceive the aims of the two branches of the multiculturalism literature, however. That is, in the case of the branch of the literature concerned with remedies to racialized oppression, whose aim has traditionally been seen as the dissolution of the collective identities




developed by subordinated racial groups, the assumption that these groups do not possess cultural identities that deserve or merit protection would need to be abandoned. Likewise, liberal multiculturalists concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference would need to acknowledge that some cultural groups also suffer from racialized oppression. While it is possible that this could occur, the tendency to date has been to view racial and cultural groups as entirely distinct. The danger with this approach, however, is that it will ultimately prove incapable of addressing the overlaps between race and culture that are such a salient feature of Latin American multiculturalism. The question of how minority group rights would need to be reconceived in order to address problems of racial hierarchy and inequality seems both clearer and more elusive. The first two variants of Latin American multiculturalism, for example, provide for the accommodation of cultural difference without taking account of racialized oppression in any way. The third approach is the only one that has begun to grapple with the problem of racial hierarchy in some way. Indeed, Nicaragua’s multicultural model is an example of failure to grapple with the racialized nature of the state. It is precisely the deficiencies in the Nicaraguan case that demonstrate that multiculturalism conceived solely in terms of the accommodation of cultural difference is insufficient for addressing problems of racial hierarchy and inequality. That is, the Nicaraguan experience demonstrates that granting Afro-descendants and indigenous groups the same rights may be an effective approach for dealing with the issue of overlaps between racialized oppression and cultural difference, but if the problem is resolved by, in effect, classifying both Afro-descendants and indigenous people as cultural groups, dynamics of racial hierarchy are occluded. It may be that in racialized societies, arguments for minority group rights centered on the recognition of cultural difference are more easily accepted than those grounded in the need to remedy racial injustice. In other words, it could be argued that gaining agreement on rights to the accommodation of cultural difference is a necessary first step before more radical remedies that seek to dismantle the racial polity can be broached. The problem with this approach, however, is that the recognition of cultural difference does not necessarily lead to the acknowledgment of the existence of a state that is neutral toward neither culture nor race. Arguments for the recognition of ethnocultural diversity will not be able to play this role unless they are framed in such a way that they focus on questions of collective injustice (whether arising from cultural




or racial difference), that is, unless they reveal the existence of a state that, rather than being neutral, is racial.

Multiculturalism, Mestizo Nationalism, and Racialized Solidarity in Nicaragua The claim that racialized solidarity persists in Nicaragua, despite the adoption of multicultural policies, or that such rights were adopted without confronting the existence of racial hierarchy might at first glance appear counterintuitive, if not outright contradictory. That is, did the adoption of multicultural policies in the s not require the abandonment of racialized solidarity? Similarly, was the racialized character of the Nicaraguan state not already confronted back when multicultural policies were first adopted? In short, the answer to both of these questions is no. The adoption of multicultural policies in Nicaragua during the s was accompanied by certain changes in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant mestizos but not by the complete abandonment or overcoming of racialized solidarity. Similarly, minority group rights were adopted in Nicaragua in the s without direct confrontation with the racialized character of the state. That is because what occurred in the s was a kind of superficial recognition of cultural difference that was not necessarily accompanied by an acknowledgment that the Nicaraguan state had been systematically biased in terms of culture, much less race. The impetus for the adoption of group rights for subordinated racial and cultural groups most often comes from the struggles for justice of such groups, while the immediate reasons dominant groups might agree to consider such demands will vary and may include concerns about the stability of the political community, international pressure, and so on. Indeed, scholars of racial and ethnic politics in Latin America have provided a variety of explanations for the adoption of multicultural policies in the region from the s onward. Some have argued that neoliberal reforms, especially economic adjustment policies, challenged indigenous local autonomy and livelihoods, and this led to increased ethnic mobilization, which, in turn, forced Latin American states to agree to indigenous demands. Others have suggested that Latin American states adopted such rights in order to enhance their domestic legitimacy at a time when they found it increasingly difficult to meet the material demands of their citizens. Still others have argued that neoliberal states in Latin America have chosen to meet




demands by indigenous groups for cultural rights in order to delegitimize more radical claims. Finally, some have pointed to the influence of international institutions and transnational movements on Latin American states’ decision to adopt collective rights for indigenous and Afro-descendant groups.31 In Nicaragua in particular, the immediate impetus for the adoption of multicultural policies was the desire of the FSLN to end one front of the ruinous civil war in which it was engaged with counterrevolutionary forces supported by the United States and with whom disillusioned Miskitus and other costeños had become allied when they took up arms against the Sandinista state in the early s, after the FSLN failed to meet their initial expectation that it would be more amenable to self-government and other collective rights for costeños than previous mestizo central governments. In and of itself, the implementation of multicultural policies does not necessarily signal the abandonment of racialized solidarity, however, where racialized solidarity refers to the diametrically opposed ethical-historical perspectives developed by dominant and subordinated groups in a racialized polity that tend to lead the former to resist the adoption of rights that seek to reshape the state in a decisive way. The adoption of collective rights for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños in Nicaragua in the s thus did not mean that racialized solidarity had been overcome. In Nicaragua, dominant groups met the demands of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños for collective rights, but the way such rights were conceived did not force mestizos to confront underlying dynamics of racial hierarchy. Collective rights for costeños were understood largely in terms of the recognition of cultural difference; they were framed in terms of the need to preserve the cultures of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños. A careful analysis of the  constitutional debates about the adoption of multicultural rights in Nicaragua’s National Assembly illustrates how mestizos began to recognize the existence of cultural difference in the country as a result of such debates.32 They did so in response to costeño demands for collective rights framed in terms of both cultural difference and historical injustice cast in regional terms. During the  constitutional debates about collective rights for costeños, for example, legislators from the Atlantic Coast argued that Nicaragua would only become a real democracy when the racial and cultural identities of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños were formally recognized by the state and when the histories of internal colonialism and political exclusion that had characterized its relationship to the region were thoroughly repudiated. Dorotea Wilson, a Sandinista




Creole legislator, claimed that including the phrase “the people of Nicaragua are by nature multiethnic” in the new constitution would signal a new way of conceiving of national unity that was not dependent on the myth that all Nicaraguans were mestizo.33 It would remedy the traditional understanding, in Nicaragua and the rest of Latin America, of “unity as excluding any element of diversity and plurality and therefore as synonymous with uniformity, homogeneity.” In contrast, Wilson argued, Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños believed that “unity is possible within diversity.”34 While such arguments for the recognition of the country’s cultural and racial diversity were ultimately successful, they initially faced resistance from non-Sandinista mestizo legislators of all ideological persuasions. As noted in chapter , debates about minority group rights tend to involve processes of contestation over public memory. This was certainly the case in Nicaragua, where the adoption of collective rights for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños required the (at least partial) reformulation of previous official mestizo nationalisms. In Nicaragua, nationalist discourses developed during the twentieth century held that the nation was the result of a mixing process between Spaniards and Indians that was completed during the colonial period. Some variants of these official discourses of mestizo nationalism emphasized Spanish contributions to the mixing process and the resulting mestizo nation, while others exalted indigenous contributions to mestizaje and national identity. In both cases, however, African participation in mestizaje was denied or ignored, as was the survival of indigenous people in the present. The adoption of multicultural rights for costeños thus directly challenged established ideas about Nicaraguan history and identity. As a result, costeño legislators faced significant difficulties convincing mestizo deputies in the National Assembly that rather than continued attempts at integration into dominant conceptions of Nicaraguan national identity, the distinct identities of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños should be recognized and protected. Mestizo legislators were unused to acknowledging the country’s cultural diversity, and they initially resisted doing so. Deputy Allan Zambrana from the Nicaraguan Communist Party, for example, argued that an article whose sole purpose was the recognition of racial and cultural diversity was “entirely unimportant” and “irrelevant.”35 Others claimed that any mention of racial or cultural diversity had no place in the Constitution, because such characteristics had no bearing on politics. As Carlos Cuadra of the Marxist-Leninist Movement for Popular Action put it: “In order to express concrete political interests one does not have to




be white or black, since the color of one’s skin or hair or the fact of having a particular racial ancestry do not have a specific political effect.”36 Cuadra and his fellow Marxists, who were critical of the way myths of harmonious mestizaje glossed over class conflict throughout the country’s history, nevertheless failed to see how these national narratives had also functioned as myths of cultural homogeneity that served to obscure racial hierarchy and cultural difference. Non-costeño mestizo legislators also objected to the recognition of racial and cultural diversity because they viewed it as a threat to national unity. In order to forestall concerns that the adoption of multicultural rights would lead to separatism, costeño legislators suggested that the wording of Article  be changed from “the Communities of the Atlantic Coast are an integral part of the Nicaraguan people” to “the Communities of the Atlantic Coast are an indivisible part of the Nicaraguan people.” Yet even such changes did not satisfy non-costeño deputies who viewed any recognition of racial and cultural diversity as inherently divisive. For example, Representative Eduardo Molina Palacios of the Conservative Democratic Party urged his fellow legislators to “consider the dangers that could present themselves against our own national identity, as a result of a certain tendency of these communities of the Atlantic Coast to autarky or secession, the former understood as the power to govern oneself.”37 Nevertheless, the constitutional debates about the adoption of multicultural rights in Nicaragua also reveal how struggles over the content of public memory can lead to changes in national narratives that have important consequences for the self-understanding of dominant groups. This is most evident in the disagreements that emerged during the debates about whether the language of clauses ensuring costeño collective rights should be altered to include indigenous people in the country as a whole. Initially, the term used to describe costeño recipients of multicultural rights in early drafts of the Constitution was “indigenous peoples,” which was later replaced by “communities of the Atlantic Coast” in the final version. The change was a result of opposition from both the FSLN, which was concerned about the more extensive set of rights implied by the use of the term pueblos (peoples), and Creoles, who were concerned that the term might be construed in a way that applied only to indigenous groups, thereby excluding Afro-descendants. During the floor debate, however, some non-Sandinista mestizo legislators sought to revert to the use of the term pueblo. Costeño deputies objected to the proposal, not because they opposed the idea that indigenous groups outside the Atlantic Coast were also entitled to multicultural rights but,




rather, because they were concerned that the specificity of their experiences would be diluted in a constitutional clause encompassing all of the country’s indigenous groups. For instance, Ronas Dolores Green (a Mayangna Sandinista deputy) argued that because indigenous costeños had preserved their cultures, languages, and ways of life and had historically been isolated from the rest of Nicaragua, they “face a very different situation” from indigenous groups in other regions of the country.38 In Green’s view, including Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños in an article that encompassed all indigenous Nicaraguans would have unfairly and inaccurately assumed a homogeneous indigenous experience. Similarly, Afro-descendant costeño legislators were concerned that an article that referred solely to the rights of indigenous peoples would exclude Afro-descendant groups. For non-costeño mestizo legislators, by contrast, the issue of whether the recognition of cultural difference should be confined to costeños or include indigenous people outside the Atlantic Coast was bound up with questions not only about how to interpret the national past (i.e., about the content of public memory) but also about the meaning of such recognition itself. Mestizo legislators who objected to the proposal tended to do so on the basis of one of the central tenets of official discourses of mestizo nationalism: that indigenous people in the rest of Nicaragua had entirely disappeared during the colonial period as the process of mestizaje progressed. The main objection that Sandinista deputies raised against the proposal (which was ultimately defeated mainly as a result of FSLN opposition) was thus precisely the claim that mestizaje was so advanced in the rest of Nicaragua that there were no indigenous people left in those areas. For example, Carlos Nuñez Téllez, the president of the National Assembly and a member of the FSLN’s National Directorate, claimed that indigenous people outside the Atlantic Coast “are in the process of extinction . . . because finding themselves in . . . regions of the country whose socioeconomic development throughout all these years has been more accelerated, they have . . . passed from the condition of craft-based [production] to the process of economic and social insertion.”39 Indigenous communities outside the Atlantic Coast did not deserve protection from the state, Nuñez argued, because they were not “real” Indians anymore. Another Sandinista legislator, Alejandro Serrano Bravo, likewise claimed that “what we call indigenous communities on the Pacific . . . are no longer anything but groups of peasants that preserve some traditions, some cultural ties, but are not per se united by that powerful ethnic-cultural tie, as are our brothers from the Atlantic.”40 Non-Sandinista mestizo legislators who also opposed




the measure likewise claimed that it was unnecessary, because outside the Atlantic Coast indigenous people had been thoroughly absorbed into a mestizo culture derived from Spanish sources.41 Meanwhile, mestizo deputies who supported the measure argued that if costeño cultural differences had previously been erased by national myths of mestizo homogeneity, the same was also true of indigenous groups outside the Atlantic Coast. The problem they faced is that claims for collective rights to the fair accommodation of cultural difference tend to rest on notions of cultural distinctiveness, and indigenous people outside the Atlantic Coast did not appear to meet this criterion. As one of its proponents, Domingo Sánchez Salgado of the Nicaraguan Socialist Party observed, the proposal to alter the language of the constitutional clauses about multiculturalism to recognize the existence of indigenous people outside the Atlantic Coast faced so much opposition because “this type of Indian of the indigenous communities . . . from the Pacific unfortunately only has one type of physiognomy, there are no blacks, no cobrizos [copper-colored], they speak only a broken Spanish. They do not speak other languages; they do not speak English as the majority of those ethnicities on the Atlantic Coast do.”42 While the approval of multicultural rights for costeños in Nicaragua during the s did not entail wholesale transformations in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant mestizos, therefore, it did lead to a certain amount of recognition of the nation’s racial and cultural diversity. The recognition of cultural difference in Nicaragua during the debates about minority group rights for costeños in the s was divorced from any analysis of racial hierarchy, however, and even from any deeper understanding that collective rights to ensure the fair accommodation of cultural difference were necessary in order to remedy the ways in which the Nicaraguan state had been systematically biased in terms of culture. This dynamic is best illustrated by the emergence of a new discourse of mestizo multiculturalism in the wake of the adoption of collective rights for costeños in the s, which abandons the claim that every Nicaraguan citizen is biologically or culturally mestizo found in previous nationalist narratives and acknowledges the nation’s racial and cultural diversity. At the same time, however, this recognition of the presence of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños occurs in the context of a nation as a whole that it still said to be mestizo, although mestizo is now redefined as referring to the overall diversity of ethnoracial groups that make up the nation, not to the single, homogeneous product of a mixing process.43 This attempt to




reconcile mestizaje and multiculturalism is noteworthy, because the recognition of difference in both discourses serves very different ends. Ideologies of mestizaje implicitly recognize diversity insofar as they assume the prior existence of distinct groups that participate in the mixing process, but in them, such groups are also portrayed as rapidly declining in the course of producing the new homogeneous mestizo norm. Multiculturalism—which recognizes diversity and seeks to protect it, to preserve heterogeneity—is thus quite different from traditional understandings of mestizaje. Despite its apparent philosophical incoherence, however, the idea of mestizo multiculturalism is, in fact, quite consonant with the kind of superficial recognition of cultural difference that characterized the adoption of minority group rights for costeños in Nicaragua in the s. During the constitutional debates, for example, some non-costeño mestizo legislators who supported collective rights for Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños sought to reconcile such rights with the trope of mestizaje. Deputy Danilo Aguirre Solís of the FSLN, for example, claimed that the article acknowledging Nicaragua’s multiethnic character, “besides recuperating racial mixing . . . completes the definition of our racial origin, of our ethnic origin in which we find Caribbean elements, racial mixing, and the ethnicities of the Atlantic Coast. . . . The article such as it stands is beautiful; it gathers great traditions not only of the Atlantic Coast but also of mestizaje.”44 Aguirre’s remarks illustrate the way mestizos strove to reconcile multiculturalism, whose defining feature is the acknowledgment and protection of the collective identities of Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, with the trope of mestizaje that had been a key element of dominant narratives about Nicaraguan history and identity. A similar conflation of the kind of recognition of cultural difference with which multiculturalism is partly concerned with that implicit in mestizaje is evident in an August  tribute to Nicaraguan regional music. While the concert featured no Afro-descendant or indigenous costeño artists, it did include a Miskitu song performed by artists from the Pacific region of the country and the repeated assertion by the main performers to the audience that what characterized Nicaraguan national identity was that “we are mestizos, with enormous cultural diversity. We are a multilingual and multiracial nation.”45 In Nicaragua, we thus find that the adoption of multicultural policies entailed a certain amount of recognition of cultural difference, but even this did not necessarily represent a decisive break with past narratives of cultural homogeneity.




Dominant groups in Nicaragua, that is, mestizos, did not totally refashion their identities in the course of debates about multicultural rights in the s. Nevertheless, the Nicaraguan example does illustrate why the processes of contestation that accompany the adoption of minority group rights can have important effects on the political subjectivities of dominant groups, because they are one of the few instances in which the differences between the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated groups are confronted, where the public memory of the political community inhabited by both groups, albeit often worlds apart, is contested and therefore possibly transformed. This is only possible, however, if arguments for minority group rights are framed such that they reveal the existence of a state that is neutral toward neither race nor culture. What occurred in Nicaragua in the s during the process of adoption of multicultural policies was an incipient recognition of cultural difference on the part of mestizo elites that has since led to the development of somewhat more inclusive conceptions of national identity, but this was not accompanied by a similar recognition of the racialized nature of the state. The overall aim of this chapter was to analyze two of the principal questions about the institutional design of minority group rights raised by the claim that theories of multiculturalism need to be centrally concerned with the phenomenon of racialized solidarity: how to combine remedies for racialized oppression and cultural accommodation in ways that foster political solidarity between groups in contexts where multiple subordinated groups facing overlapping types of disadvantage are present and how to conceive minority group rights such that they reveal (and therefore make it possible to address) the existence of racial hierarchy. I tried to do this by analyzing the impact on solidarity of the specific approach to multiculturalism pursued in a particular case where both of these challenges were present. This is certainly not a comprehensive account of the way in which different configurations of minority group rights might or might not promote solidarity, therefore. Nevertheless, one of the lessons that can be derived from Latin American experiences with multiculturalism is that the recognition of cultural difference does not necessarily lead to the acknowledgment of the existence of a state that is neutral toward neither culture nor race. In contexts such as Latin America, where race and culture routinely overlap, models of multiculturalism constructed purely on the basis of the recognition of cultural difference will not necessarily address the problematic of racialized solidarity, because they obscure, rather than confront, underlying




dynamics of racial hierarchy. More generally, I have sought to show that it is not only possible but also necessary for theories of multiculturalism to incorporate questions about the promotion of multiple kinds of political solidarity, between disadvantaged groups and between subordinated groups and dominant groups, into their conceptual apparatus. Theorists of multiculturalism need to be more attuned to the fact that it is not simply identities that demand rights; rights—and debates about the justice of such rights—also shape identities. Indeed, even apparent cases of failure make clear that debates about multiculturalism are a key site in which racialized solidarity can begin to be confronted, because they are among the rare instances of political communication in contemporary polities characterized by being neutral toward neither culture nor race, where the identity of the “we” involved in contestation cannot be taken for granted.


Conclusion

I

began this book by drawing attention to the way two events in —the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the riots by disaffected youths of North and West African descent in Paris—exposed for all to see the profound gaps in political solidarity across racial, religious, and cultural difference that exist in the two polities of the developed West (the United States and France) most thought to possess preeminently political conceptions of political association. These are hardly the only examples that could be used to illustrate the persistent and acute challenge that racial hierarchy and cultural diversity continue to pose for the development of genuine political solidarity in contemporary liberal democracies. Curiously, theorists of multiculturalism have nevertheless had comparatively little to say about the way solidarity continues to be fundamentally delimited by race. Racial justice and the fair accommodation of cultural difference require more than the “inclusion of the other” (although this is certainly an important first step).1 The development of genuine political solidarity involves overcoming forms of radical othering that negate not the humanity of the other, exactly, but his or her status as a fellow citizen. That is, in order to come to terms with questions of multicultural justice, it is necessary to grapple with the phenomenon of racialized solidarity,




with the way in which embodied racial difference renders the pain and suffering of nonwhites either invisible or, when visible, less deserving of empathy and redress. The disparate ethical-historical perspectives developed by dominant and subordinated racialized groups have enormous consequences for how racial inequality is adjudicated in the public sphere. Theorists of multiculturalism have to begin to grapple with the obstacle the racialized politics of solidarity poses to the long-term projects of multicultural and racial justice. The central claim of this book has been that theories of multiculturalism need to be vitally concerned with the phenomenon of racialized solidarity. Race in particular (but other forms of difference as well) circumscribes felt communities of obligation in fundamental ways. This is a result of both the social ontology of race—the way it works through markers on the body, in a visual register, to demarcate the boundaries of trust and empathy—and the physical and moral distance it establishes between citizens, which leads dominant and subordinated groups in a racialized polity to develop radically divergent ethical-historical perspectives. In order to make progress toward racial justice, it is thus necessary to develop conceptions of political obligation that transcend the limits established by racialized solidarity. In order to develop genuine political solidarity, citizens of contemporary liberal democracies will have to learn to “see” the other as such while simultaneously envisioning him or her as a fellow citizen. They will have to forge solidarity on the basis of shared membership in a political community. To the extent that individuals are members of the same political community, their actions have unavoidable consequences on the lives of all those who share it with them, and they are thus enmeshed in relations of mutual obligation. It is thus possible to envision the development of an alternative conception of political obligation grounded in shared structural conditions that force individuals to see their fates as inextricably linked in important ways and which can lead them to develop contingent solidarities that are not dependent on mutual identification. This kind of political solidarity, which is capable of encompassing persons who are strangers to one another, has more normative appeal than a conception of solidarity based on a politics of commonality whose premise is that we are only able to envision others as having claims on us to the extent that we think of them as being “like us.” Solidarity premised on homogeneity is, by definition, limited and particularistic. As such, it is highly unsuitable for political communities in which diversity is a fundamental social fact and an inescapable political reality.

Conclusion



The problem, however, is that in practice, political solidarity has most often been conceived as based on sameness, whether racial, cultural, or national. This is true even in political communities that view themselves as being bound together only by agreement on certain political principles. Some of the arguments put forward by supporters of the proposal to designate English as the official language of the United States, which is routinely identified as a country whose national identity is now understood largely in terms of certain key political ideas embraced by all citizens, illustrate this fact quite clearly. Supporters of the proposal claim that it is not about a certain kind of Anglo-Saxon nativism but, rather, corresponds fully with the country’s founding political ideology, which emphasizes that what binds the political community together is agreement on shared political principles. They claim that in order to express their participation in this political project, immigrants need to be able to read the Constitution in English. There are, of course, many good arguments that can be made for the position that immigrants need to learn the dominant language of their new country, not the least of which is the absolutely crucial political competence of being able to communicate with one’s fellow citizens and participate in all aspects of the country’s political life. Yet this is not the argument that is being made in favor of the designation of English as the official language of the United States. Instead, the claim is one about the need to understand the basic political principles on which the country was founded. What is so interesting about this argument is that coupled with an eminently political requirement, that the core political principles on which the polity is based be understood by new members, is the assumption that learning those political principles is only meaningful if it occurs in the language of the country’s dominant ethnic group. Yet there is nothing about the claim that what makes one a good citizen of the United States is agreement with a certain set of political ideas that requires that such ideas be understood, or indeed even learned, in a particular language. In fact, could there be a more heartwarming spectacle for the most fervent U.S. patriot (if one understands by this someone who believes that what defines the country are its core political principles) than the sight of an Iraqi or Guatemalan person reading the U.S. Constitution in Arabic, Spanish, or Kaqchikel2 and, as a result, deciding that he or she not only agreed with the political ideology expressed in it but also wanted to become a member of the U.S. polity? It is clear that the desire to make English the official language of the United States reflects more than just a purely political understanding of what binds




the political community together, therefore. It also expresses a belief that those principles are directly linked to certain kinds of prepolitical affinities that render certain persons (to begin with, English speakers) as more likely and natural compatriots than those for whom English is not a first language (or even the only one?). Despite claims to the contrary, then, contemporary conceptions of political association continue to naturalize certain visions of community, particularly those based on cultural and racial homogeneity, that delimit who can be imagined as a fellow citizen. For this reason, it is crucial that the basis of political solidarity, that is, the grounds on which it is developed, be reimagined. I suggested in chapter  that it was more useful to think about political solidarity as the product of structural conditions that require individuals who are strangers to one another to develop contingent solidarities, however momentarily, every day. The basis of such solidarity is not mutual identification, shared nationality, or some form of cultural or racial homogeneity. Rather, solidarity is seen as arising from the (geographical, social, political) spaces that individuals share and as a result of which their actions have unavoidable consequences on the lives of others that also inhabit such locales. This kind of reconceptualization of the nature of political obligation is necessary in order to move beyond the racialized politics of solidarity. It is no easy task, however, and there is no magic formula or quick fix that will instantaneously bring about such changes. It is important to recognize that the ethical and political dilemmas posed by racialized solidarity may well be intractable. Nevertheless, I have suggested that one way to begin to confront the way race shapes the ethical and political orientations of individual members of dominant and subordinated groups in a racial polity is to attempt to make the existence of the racial polity visible to dominant groups. This is not the same as including nonwhites in dominant moral and political categories such as human and citizen without a radical reevaluation of the meaning of the categories themselves. Instead, it is to suggest that it is necessary to make whiteness visible to dominant groups, so that they might come to see these categories as the instruments of a thoroughly racialized moral and political order. In other words, the ethical-historical perspectives of dominant groups need to be transformed.3 Debates about minority group rights can play a key role in this process, but only if arguments for such rights are framed such that they make whiteness visible. These claims raise important questions, however, about how theories of multiculturalism might incorporate the promotion of solidarity,

Conclusion



both between disadvantaged groups and between subordinated groups and dominant groups, into their conceptual apparatus. I suggested in chapter  that the processes of contestation that accompany the adjudication of minority group rights are a crucial site where the ethical and political orientations of dominant groups might begin to be reformulated, because they are among the few instances where the content of the political community’s public memory is challenged, where the differences between the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated groups are confronted. It is possible that through such processes of contestation, dominant groups might come to see themselves seeing whitely, thereby leading to the development of greater political will to address the seemingly insurmountable problematic of racial justice. This would be possible only if arguments for minority group rights made whiteness visible, however. In order to do so, normative justifications of such rights would need to be reframed in terms of past and continuing disadvantage resulting from either cultural difference or racial hierarchy. This would not only focus debates about minority group rights on questions of collective injustice, but it would also serve to reintegrate the two branches of the multiculturalism literature. These arguments force us to consider both whether minority group rights as currently conceived are able to address the problematic of racialized solidarity and what specific configurations of such rights would best enable the fair accommodation of ethnocultural diversity, remedy racialized oppression, and foster political solidarity in contexts in which multiple groups facing overlapping forms of disadvantage are present. I tried to show what these arguments might entail in more concrete terms in chapter , by analyzing the impact on solidarity of the specific approach to multiculturalism pursued in a particular case, Nicaragua, that features the presence of multiple indigenous and Afro-descendant groups requiring both remedies to racialized oppression and the accommodation of cultural difference. I suggested that arguments for minority group rights framed mainly in terms of the acknowledgment of cultural diversity failed to reveal the racialized character of Nicaraguan society, and as a result, debates about multiculturalism produced only limited transformations in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant groups, who recognized the existence of cultural diversity but not racial hierarchy. In my view, the results in Nicaragua illustrate the fact that debates about minority group rights can begin to address the problem of racialized solidarity by ushering in contestation about the content of public memory, but only if and




when arguments for such rights reveal the existence of a state organized on the basis of both cultural difference and racial hierarchy. This book has thus been centrally concerned with the obstacle posed by racialized solidarity to the development of multicultural, and especially racial, justice. Adequately conceptualizing this problematic necessitated bringing together a number of different literatures that are not always in conversation with one another. In order to map the racialized contours of the politics of solidarity, I have drawn on the literature on solidarity in political theory and on African American political philosophy and linked the insights derived from these to the main concerns of theories of multiculturalism. I suggested that in order to begin to address the phenomenon of racialized solidarity, it is necessary to make whiteness visible. Yet this strategy of directly confronting past racial injustice in order to rethink the current politics of race enjoys much less popularity in academic, policy, and popular circles today than the claim that what is needed to achieve cross-racial solidarity is, instead, the abandonment of (what are seen as) divisive forms of politics centered on identity. Indeed, much of the recent upsurge of interest in the concept of solidarity is framed precisely in terms of this (presumed) dichotomy between identity and solidarity.4 In an unusual convergence, much of the preoccupation in the literature on race in recent years has also been with the philosophical and political status of racial identity itself. In other words, the focus has been on the ethics, rather than the politics, of race.5 In contrast, many of the key texts in African American political philosophy, provide a corrective to these trends, as they suggest, instead, that in order for racial justice to be achieved, the political order would need to be reconceived such that the thoroughly race-conscious character of modern political communities is acknowledged and becomes the premise of political action and theorizing.6 If we take such arguments seriously, it is clear that it is only through direct engagement with the problem of racialized solidarity that members of subordinated racialized groups will be able to become members of the political community on terms of equality, reciprocity, and mutual respect. The development of genuine political solidarity is not accomplished by suturing the wounds created by past racial injustice and continuing racial inequality. To presume that racism was a temporally and geographically restricted aberration from a norm of color blindness that has since been thoroughly overcome in contemporary Western liberal democracies is to fail to abandon, in the case of race, the analogous claim to the premise that the state can be neutral toward culture that has been so thoroughly discarded

Conclusion



by theorists of multiculturalism concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference. To claim that political solidarity can be developed from the acknowledgment of racial injustice is to claim that political obligations can be grounded on previously established relations between individuals and groups that may have been manifestly unjust but have nevertheless made of them compatriots in the present. Another important contribution of this book has been to engage the literature on multiculturalism in political theory with Latin American experiences with minority group rights, which have not been at the forefront of most theorizing about questions of racial justice or the fair accommodation of cultural difference to date, despite the fact that the region has become a major site of institutional innovation with respect to such rights in recent decades. As I explained in chapter , the contemporary debate about group rights for minorities in political theory initially developed in the context of a disagreement between U.S. and Canadian liberals about whether policies that took account of race and cultural membership should constitute temporary or permanent features of justice in a liberal democratic polity committed to fairness and equal respect. As a result, both branches of the multiculturalism literature assumed that there were two entirely distinct questions of multicultural justice that required completely different remedies—racialized oppression and the fair accommodation of cultural difference—an assumption that is deeply at odds with empirical realities in Latin America. Throughout this book, I draw on the various strategies adopted in Latin America to contend with the overlaps between race and culture that are common throughout the region, in order to complicate some of the key assumptions of both branches of the multiculturalism literature in political theory. This is certainly not meant to suggest that Latin America has successfully resolved all of the challenges associated with either the fair accommodation of cultural difference or the achievement of racial justice.7 As a matter of fact, there are significant problems with the multicultural models adopted in the region thus far. I am not suggesting that what is needed is the development of a third branch of the multiculturalism literature focused on cases in which race and culture overlap. That is not my aim. Rather, I hope to have made clear that there is much to be gained by bringing Latin America to the forefront of debates about multiculturalism in political theory. Given the problems with prominent theories of multiculturalism revealed by this undertaking, however, it might well be reasonably suggested




that it is unnecessary, and possibly counterproductive, to continue to frame the questions posed in this book in the context of the multiculturalism literature. This is a valid question, and, indeed, many political theorists writing about questions of racial justice do not engage with the arguments of the branch of the multiculturalism literature concerned with the fair accommodation of cultural difference. In my view, however, the best way to understand current debates about what constitutes racial justice is to place them in the context of the initial disagreement between U.S. and Canadian liberal theorists about the requirements of justice in diverse liberal democratic societies. For better or worse, theories of multiculturalism have become the dominant framework through which questions of justice having to do with racial and cultural difference are analyzed in political theory. I hope to have shown that it is possible to acknowledge this fact while also recognizing that this literature has important limitations. One of these is its failure to deal with questions of political solidarity in general and the challenge of racialized solidarity in particular, which in turn has hampered its ability to envision the problem of racial injustice more adequately. It may well be that adequately conceiving what racial justice entails requires moving beyond the confines of theories of multiculturalism altogether. That, however, is a project beyond the scope of this book. In the meantime, I believe that it is still important to grapple with the multiculturalism literature in order to figure out why it has not been able so far to do for race what it has done so successfully for culture, that is, establish that the premise that the liberal state is capable of being neutral toward culture needs to be thoroughly discarded and that the debate is no longer about the justice of remedies designed to ensure the fair accommodation of cultural difference but is now about how best to do so. Unfortunately, in the case of race, the (unrecognized) persistence of racialized solidarity has impeded the achievement of a similar consensus regarding the existence of a state that, rather than being color-blind, has been thoroughly race-conscious. The comparative failure to establish the parameters of racial justice as decisively, owes much to the reluctance to acknowledge the indelibly racialized character of most modern political communities, that is, the fact that they have been thoroughly informed by, and indeed organized on the basis of, racial hierarchy since their inception. In other words, it is a result of the failure to recognize the existence of the racial polity. As a result of this omission, the fact that solidarity has been, and unfortunately continues to be, grounded in ideas of racial and cultural homogeneity in most liberal dem-

Conclusion



ocratic polities tends not to be acknowledged. The consensual language of social-contract theories of political association, for instance, has served to obscure the fact that our conceptions of political community have been rife with notions of prepolitical affinity that have made it difficult to “see” those who do not embody such sameness as fellow citizens.8 In practice, citizens of contemporary multicultural and multiracial polities have thought about shared membership in a political community as if there were some persons with whom this type of association was inevitable and, as a result, others with whom it was not. One of the keys to building genuine solidarity, therefore, is to reconceive the way we think about the nature of political association. It is past time that we recognized that there is nothing inevitable about shared membership in a political community, that all such relations are, in fact, the result of contingency, historical accident, and, in many cases, radical and constitutive injustice. Only then can we begin to construct the kind of solidarity of strangers suitable for contemporary polities whose only inevitable characteristic is the social fact of racial and cultural diversity. In order to build genuine solidarity, it is necessary to acknowledge that in many cases, our compatriots are not chosen; they are often not “like us” or even to our liking. As the concept of the racial polity makes clear, we have in many cases become fellow citizens on the basis of profound injustice, and it is out of these hardly ideal histories that we must forge solidarity in the present. Recognizing the contingency of shared political membership, its accidental character, and the fact that in many cases it is also rooted in radically unjust beginnings constitutes a fundamental element of rethinking the basis of political solidarity in today’s diverse liberal democratic polities. This book has tried to show how theories of multiculturalism would have to be reconceived in order to make the racialized politics of solidarity the starting point for thinking about the question of racial justice. The undeniable persistence of profound gaps in the ethical-political perspectives of dominant and subordinated groups in most contemporary liberal democracies belies the notion that genuine political solidarity already exists. Theories of multiculturalism must therefore begin to address the question of whether and how the phenomenon of racialized solidarity might be directly confronted. As the rioting in Paris and the aftermath of the hurricane in New Orleans demonstrate, formidable gaps in solidarity continue to be the norm in even the most advanced liberal democracies. The issue of how to generate and sustain genuine political solidarity in the face of what is experienced as radical dif-




ference is becoming more, not less, pressing in contemporary political communities. In order to develop political solidarity, the citizens of such polities must engage in the hard work of seeing the other as radically different and yet as a fellow citizen. They will have to reach across the fires raging in Paris and the waters flooding New Orleans and recognize one another as fellow citizens. To do this, they must learn to see through the other’s eyes, to explain the other to themselves, as Fanon suggests. Doing so would entail finding common ground in the painful and, for some, profoundly unjust histories and political spaces they share, not always willingly and most certainly not inevitably.

Notes Introduction . See Bernstein, “The View from Abroad.” . This is not a new or even recent phenomenon. Consider, for example, Walter Mignolo’s argument that coloniality is the reverse side of modernity, its darker side. See Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance. . Already, in , the Katrina disaster is remembered more as a symbol of the incompetence and cronyism of the George W. Bush presidency than as a reminder of persistent racial inequality in the United States. . Morrison, Beloved. . Solidarity is by no means confined to democracies, of course, nor does it only enable morally defensible political projects. It is certainly possible to develop high degrees of solidarity in nondemocratic polities and to use it to pursue externally imperial or internally authoritarian political projects. Moreover, states can also seek to produce solidarity by means that are themselves morally repugnant, as in the case of Nazi attempts to build particular kinds of national and racial solidarity through the extermination of Jews or the racialized solidarity developed in the United States after the Civil War, where the price for white unity was black subordination. . Aristotle, for instance, famously questioned whether egalitarian political relations were possible in the context of extreme social class differences. See Aristotle, The Politics. . The United States has oscillated between the adoption of limited race-conscious policies for racialized minorities and color blindness, while France has been committed to a policy of color blindness. . Alcoff, Visible Identities, p. . . In an insightful critique of the way the discrediting of biological conceptions of race has resulted in the philosophical position that it is necessary to abandon the idea of race altogether, which has the perverse effect of



. . . . .

.

.

.

. . .

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once again making the persistence of racial injustice and inequality invisible, Charles Mills has argued that we should instead learn to think about race “as both real and unreal: that race can be ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one’s being without being in one’s shape.” Mills, Blackness Visible, p. xiv. Alcoff, Visible Identities, pp. –. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. . Mills, Blackness Visible, p. . Ibid., p. . Residential segregation also perpetuates the racial gap in solidarity, as it is much easier to continue to see the racial other as threatening, dangerous, and morally deficient when one’s primary contact with him or her is on the television screen rather than as one’s next-door neighbor. On residential segregation in the United States, see Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. Nevertheless, this positive reading of the photograph is complicated when the politics of dissemination and the performative aspect of the photo opportunity itself are taken into account. The photograph appeared following well-deserved critiques of the racist overtones of much of the initial media coverage of the aftermath of the disaster, including the branding of black disaster victims seeking provisions as unlawful “looters” in contrast to whites shown undertaking similar actions. Combined with the damage to the country’s international image wrought by the government’s inadequate response, the embodiment of solidarity in the photo could also be read as an intentional attempt to refute accusations of racism and restore the country’s self-image. This is especially true of images that are not sexual in nature or do not involve some kind of confrontation. Except for families involved in transracial adoption, it is, in fact, rare to see images of whites caring for black children (the reverse is far more common). Notable exceptions are scholars of the racial divide in U.S. public opinion who note the difficulties that this divide poses for the implementation of policies designed to overcome racial discrimination and inequality. Ignatieff, “The Broken Contract,” p. . Ibid., pp. –. As Rogers M. Smith has shown, U.S. citizenship has been shaped as much by political ideologies of “ascriptive inegalitarianism” as by the more commonly acknowledged traditions of liberalism and republicanism. See Smith, Civic Ideals.

Notes to Pages –



. There is an extensive literature on the racial divide in U.S. public opinion. For a discussion of the impact of this divide on U.S. policy, see, for example, Dawson, “Slowly Coming to Grips,” and Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color. . Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. . Emphasis added. . For nonwhites, seeing through the eyes of the other would involve seeing through white eyes. Theorists of racial consciousness such as W. E. B. DuBois have claimed that nonwhites possess a certain epistemic privilege in this regard, since they are in a sense forced to see the world not only through their own eyes but also through those of the dominant group (whites), as the experience of the latter is the one that is reflected in the wider society and political institutions in which blacks must operate. This is what DuBois means by the notion of “double consciousness.” Because dominant institutions deny their life experiences and worldviews, nonwhites are forced to see through both black and white eyes. As a result of the social distance that is the norm in racialized polities, the same is not routinely true for whites unless they consciously choose to expose themselves to nonwhite perspectives. . On this point, see Mills, Blackness Visible, pp. –. . Collins and Gold, “NBC Deletes Rap Star’s Remarks.” . “Barbara Bush Calls Evacuees Better Off.” . Huddy and Feldman, “Worlds Apart,” p. . . Dawson, “After the Deluge,” pp. –. . As Dawson observes, this particular result could reflect ideological or partisan leanings or differences of opinion regarding the proper role and size of government. While this is true, I also think the result can be read as indicative of the extent to which empathy and solidarity travel across race, that is, the extent to which people think it is acceptable to spend shared resources to aid those whom they see as racial others. . See, for example, the essays in the section entitled “Reverse Discrimination” in Dworkin, A Matter of Principle; Dworkin, “Affirmative Action”; and Rawls, A Theory of Justice. On Dworkin’s arguments about race, see Altman, “Policy, Principle, and Incrementalism,” and Simon, “Individual Rights and ‘Benign’ Discrimination.” On the place of race in Rawls’s political thinking, see Nagel, “John Rawls and Affirmative Action”; Shelby, “Race and Social Justice: Rawlsian Considerations”; and Shiffrin, “Race, Labor, and the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle.” . This view is encapsulated in recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions upholding affirmative action in education, in which the justices in the majority rather implausibly suggested that progress toward racial justice would be such “over

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the next generation’s span” that affirmative action would no longer be necessary. See Grutter v. Bollinger et al.  U.S.  (). The debate about the justice of various kinds of remedies for racial discrimination in the United States, which initially focused almost exclusively on affirmative action policies in education and employment, has expanded to include issues such as reparations for slavery and Jim Crow segregation and electoral reform (i.e., the creation of minority-majority districts and questions of minority political representation more generally). These debates have obviously not been confined to political theory, but it is with the arguments of political theorists that I am primarily concerned in this book. A few examples of some of this (extensive) literature, many of which explicitly reject the presumption of justice as color blindness, are Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious; Balfour, “Reparations after Identity Politics”; Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory; Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority; McCarthy, “Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II”; and Valls, “The Libertarian Case for Affirmative Action.” See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, and Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition.” Liberal multiculturalists, for instance, claim that cultural membership is a central feature of individual identity. As states cannot be neutral among cultures, minority national groups require collective rights in order to ensure the preservation of their cultures. This is the position adopted by Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka; they focus, respectively, on the importance of the recognition of collective identity to individual human flourishing and on the centrality of an individual’s national culture to his or her ability to exercise fundamental liberal values such as freedom and autonomy. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, and Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition.” They include Allen, Talking to Strangers; Dean, Solidarity of Strangers; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; and Shelby, We Who Are Dark. I discuss these works at greater length in chapter . Key texts in the field include Boxill, Blacks and Social Justice; GoodingWilliams, “Race, Multiculturalism and Democracy”; Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism; Gordon, Existence in Black; Lott, Subjugation and Bondage; Lott and Pittman, A Companion to African-American Philosophy; McGary and Lawson, Between Slavery and Freedom; Mills, Blackness Visible; Mills, The Racial Contract; Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy; and Pittman, ed., AfricanAmerican Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions. These debates have centered on the ethics of racial identity and the use of race in public policy. The conclusion of those who see racial injustice as a continuing problem but who are also suspicious of the way racial identity might work to constrain individual freedom is that race is not a legitimate collective identity (because it is not voluntary) but that it is morally permissible to take

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it into account in public policy in order to overcome present inequality resulting from past discrimination. See, for example, Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious. Others eschew the use of race in public policy altogether. See Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, and Gilroy, Against Race. For a similar claim about the dearth of work on racial politics in the more empirically oriented subfields of political science, especially comparative politics, see Hanchard and Chung, “From Race Relations to Comparative Racial Politics.” In other words, the project of African American philosophy, broadly speaking, is to use the tools of philosophy to rethink key problems of black political life and to show how bringing such problems to the forefront of political theorizing reshapes the fundamental categories and themes of philosophy itself. On the status and aims of African American philosophy, see chapter  in Mills, Blackness Visible. Kymlicka, for example, claims that in the next stage in theorizing about multiculturalism, the premise of a state that is neutral toward culture should be abandoned and replaced with a vision of the state as always already engaged in nation building. The point of departure for debates about multiculturalism would thus be that the state protects and preserves the culture and identity of majorities, and the relevant questions are what are the effects of these nation-building efforts on minorities and whether group rights for minorities remedy these injustices, that is, to identify just conditions of majority nation building. See Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, pp. –. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. viii. Wolin, Politics and Vision.

Chapter  . . . . . .

Hollinger, “From Identity to Solidarity,” p. . See Brunkhorst, Solidarity. The Oxford English Dictionary, nd ed., , s.v. “solidarity.” Aristotle, The Politics, Book IV, .–, p. . Ibid., Book IV, .–, p. . Ibid., Book IV, .–, p. . Aristotle famously excludes women and slaves from citizenship. Yet it is not clear whether he thought about their political exclusion as conventional or natural. At times, he describes the subjection of women and slaves as expedient, such as when he argues that their labor was necessary to provide citizens with the leisure necessary to cultivate political judgment. Elsewhere, however, he suggests that slavery and the inferiority of women are natural, as, for example, when he argues that there are certain persons who are suited only to be ruled, such as those who became slaves at birth rather than by conquest.

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Notes to Pages –

. Ibid., Book III, .–, p. , and Book IV, .–, p. . A more detailed analysis of Aristotle’s arguments about citizenship and friendship can be found in Allen, Talking to Strangers. Allen draws in part on Aristotle to develop a notion of political friendship. Greek conceptions of citizenship as friendship are also discussed in Derrida, Politics of Friendship. . Allen, Talking to Strangers, p. xiii. . Deciding what constitutes a just society involves not only deciding what justice is, however, but also what kinds of persons compose the society in which justice is to be institutionalized and who is a full person. The latter question is not only an ontological one, regarding the nature of the persons who are members of said society, but it also has historical and ethical dimensions, as it involves questions about who these persons have been in the past, who they are in the present, and the kind of shared identity they wish to have in the future. By eschewing the issue of how collective political identities arise, contemporary political theorists have also tended to set aside the question of how political solidarity is generated. Political theorists are not alone in this omission. Political scientists in general have not devoted much attention to the processes by which collective political identities and solidarities are generated and reproduced. As Rogers M. Smith notes, they “have paid far more attention to questions of state structures and issues of the distribution of resources and power than they have to issues of how, in general, political memberships and identities come to exist and become institutionalized, and how they are then sustained and transformed.” See Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, pp. –. . It would thus be a mistake to think about identity and solidarity as opposed concepts. Before it is possible for political communities to make public policy decisions about the distribution of rights and resources, they must decide who their members are. In this sense, all politics is simultaneously about both identity and solidarity at a certain level. The social contract tradition in Western political thought, for example, is centrally preoccupied with the creation of collective political identities that are the basis of modern political activity and theorizing. Critics of identity politics who believe that such movements are morally and politically troubling because they reify ascriptive collective identities and limit individual freedom are thus mistaken when they claim that there is something new and distinctive about the politics of identity itself. That is not to say that all aspects of identity or all identities are inherently political but rather that many recurring political problems involve questions of collective identity. For a discussion of the confusion surrounding the concept of identity politics, see Appiah, “The Politics of Identity.” . Rawls, for example, cites the wrongness of racial discrimination as one of those “considered convictions” of justice against which other claims can be evaluated. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. . This seems to suggest that he

Notes to Pages –

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viewed racialized solidarity, if not the effects of past racial injustice, as a problem that had been transcended. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. xvi. Allen, Talking to Strangers, p. xxi. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Reciprocity should not be confused with self-sacrifice, however, as it does not involve the complete renunciation of one’s self-interest. Nor should it be equated with communitarian conceptions of common or identical interests between citizens. Sacrifice is a key concept for Allen. I discuss her arguments about sacrifice at greater length below. Shelby, We Who Are Dark, p. . Brunkhorst, Solidarity, pp. –. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. . Shelby, We Who Are Dark, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory. Consider, for example, the definitions of the nation adopted by two of the most prominent theorists of nationalism, Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. Anderson famously defined the nation as “an imagined political community . . . imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. . . . It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.” Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. –. Like Anderson, Gellner stresses the idea that the nation is a political community. Nationalism, he argues, is “a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state . . . should not separate the power-holders from the rest.” Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, p. . For both Anderson and Gellner, therefore, it is an attribute of nations that they are political communities. This is not to say that they believe that all nations have a right to self-determination or that all nations have been able to acquire their own independent states. The point is rather that they both stress the extent to which the idea that it is also a political community is inherent to the very way in which the nation is imagined. Most theorists of social justice today agree that redistribution schemes must be the result of consensus rather than coercion, for example, which means

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that the implementation of social justice schemes would require high degrees of solidarity among citizens. Yet, they tend not to address the question of how individuals might voluntarily arrive at a vision of themselves as a community of obligation within which they are committed to sharing goods. The fact that theorists of social justice routinely accept national boundaries as givens when considering the units within which redistribution should occur (even though doing so represents an enormous concession to contingency in determining the life chances of individuals) is further evidence of the tacit assumption that political communities are nations. See Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory, p. . The same is true of theorists of democracy, as decisions about the boundaries of democracy cannot be made democratically, because doing so would require the existence of prior agreements identifying those persons eligible to participate in democratic deliberation, and the question of who is a citizen is precisely what is at stake in decisions about political borders. See Whelan, “Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem,” p. . On liberal political theory’s tacit assumption that the relevant unit within which individual freedom and autonomy are to be enshrined is the nation, see Tamir, Liberal Nationalism. Miller, On Nationality, pp. –. Ibid., p. . Emphasis added. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. On the role of race in debates about welfare reform, see Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency.’” This dynamic is mirrored in white feelings about affirmative action. According to Paul Sniderman and Edward Carmines, for example, whites are more likely to support policies to help disadvantaged groups if they are not framed in terms of race. See Sniderman and Carmines, Reaching beyond Race. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina illustrates this dual dynamic. On the one hand, the widespread outrage in the country that U.S. citizens left behind in New Orleans suffered inhuman conditions more reminiscent of life in thirdworld countries than in the world’s sole remaining superpower appears to confirm Miller’s claim that nationality produces strong bonds of solidarity. On the other hand, however, the fact that those left to suffer for so long as a result of poor planning for the evacuation and an inadequate response to the crisis after the storm were overwhelmingly black and poor points to the limits of shared nationality in producing bonds of solidarity. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –.

Notes to Pages –

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. The case is Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al.,  U.S. [volume forthcoming] . . Dean, Solidarity of Strangers. . Allen, Talking to Strangers, p. xxi. . Paul Gilroy, for example, argues that in modernity, solidarity is seen as emanating from sameness, because race, nationalism, and fascism all make identity and belonging the result of prepolitical affinity. In his view, developing solidarity in multiracial democracies requires abandoning the idea of race altogether. Gilroy, Between Camps. . For an accessible introduction to the scientific research on race, see Graves, The Race Myth. . Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, p. . . I take a different position from that of many commentators for whom the abandonment of the category of race (because it depends on ascribed characteristics) for analytical purposes appears to constitute an important step in the elucidation of forms of political solidarity not dependent on race. I believe that abandoning the category altogether is a mistake in any normative analysis that seeks to elucidate problems of justice, because individuals are treated as if they belong to racially defined groups, and the differential treatment they receive has significant effects on their life chances. Any discussion of the practice of democratic citizenship must take the reality of racism into account while at the same time rejecting the view that race has any biological basis. For a review of current debates on the use of the concept of race in political theory that arrives at similar conclusions, see Fogg-Davis, “The Racial Retreat of Contemporary Political Theory.” . Census data from the United States, for example, reveal significant gaps in income, wealth, and educational achievement between whites and nonwhites. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, for example, the median income of whites is still significantly higher than that of nonwhites; in , median white income was $,, compared with median black income of $, and median Hispanic income of $,. Likewise, . percent of whites lived below the poverty line in , compared with . percent of blacks and . percent of Hispanics. See http://www.census.gov/prod/pubs/p-. pdf. The persistence of racial discrimination against nonwhites in housing, employment, and the justice system in the United States has also been well documented. . Mills, The Racial Contract, p. . . Mills, Blackness Visible, pp. –. . By way of illustration, consider how the recent controversy about Asian American representation in U.S. higher education exemplifies the unconscious reproduction of white privilege. Much of the media reporting about

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the subject, for example, as well as the arguments of many of the students who have alleged that Asian Americans are discriminated against in college and university admissions, focuses on the admission of black or Latino students with lower test scores instead of Asian Americans, without questioning the rate of white admissions. That is, it is taken for granted by all participants in the discussion that the majority of students admitted to U.S. colleges and universities should be white, a premise that on its face contradicts the very idea of merit-based admissions. An underlying and unspoken assumption in the debate is that there are a limited number of spots open to nonwhites at U.S. colleges and universities, which then frames the issue of Asian American admissions in terms of competition between this and other historically subordinated racial groups. This formulation of the issue evades the real problem, which is the continued reproduction of historic white advantage that is not based on merit. See Takagi, The Retreat from Race. In the case of the United States, this is merely to acknowledge that slavery and Jim Crow segregation were not legal or political crimes during their heyday. They were both the law of the land and reflected the considered opinions of the (white) citizens who were a majority of the U.S. polity. Their subsequent disavowal contributes to the all-too-tempting tendency to fall back on presumptions of original fairness or self-congratulation that such evils have been extirpated. The reluctance of many white U.S. citizens to contemplate the idea that the founding fathers could have held racist beliefs or to view racism as a fundamental and persistent feature of their political community, despite clear evidence to the contrary, is symptomatic of a deliberate misreading and evasion of their country’s actual political history. Mills, The Racial Contract, p. . Ibid., p. . Emphasis in original. This is certainly not meant to suggest a quasi-biological correlation between racial identity and political attitudes. There are clearly distinct variations in ethical orientations and political ideologies within all racialized groups. What I am suggesting, however, is that in the aggregate, the experience of racial injustice appears to produce distinct differences in attitudes toward the state and about obligations toward fellow citizens. The well-established research in American politics on the racial divide in U.S. public opinion (particularly with respect to attitudes about social justice and redistribution) supports this claim. See Kinder and Sanders, Divided by Color. As previously noted, the idea of the racial polity explicitly presupposes that the political community has always been “race-conscious.” As a result, it would be a mistake to view policies designed to overcome the effects of racial discrimination as anomalous deviations from a color-blind norm, as such a norm has never existed.

Notes to Pages –

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. While it is true that mainstream political theory has not confronted the reality of the racial polity, it is possible to find glimmers of recognition of the problem of racialized solidarity even in what Rawls calls “ideal theory.” The “veil of ignorance,” for instance, Rawls’s famous device for ensuring that individuals not choose political institutions that would reproduce unmerited advantages that were the result of contingency, can be seen as a response to this problematic. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls observes that “the combination of [the assumption of] mutual disinterest and the veil of ignorance achieves much the same purpose as benevolence. For this combination of conditions forces each person in the original position to take the good of others into account.” Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. –. This formulation suggests some recognition on his part of the challenge that individual self-interest poses to solidarity but also of what I have been calling racialized solidarity. That is, the use of the “veil of ignorance” suggests that Rawls understood that an individual’s view of what constitutes justice would inevitably be shaped by his or her social position. Otherwise, it begs the question: Why is the original position necessary in a political community with shared “considered convictions” and an “overlapping consensus” about fundamental questions of justice? Given Rawls’s concern and distaste for the United States’ history of racial injustice, one could thus read the “veil of ignorance,” however unorthodoxly, as a procedural response (at least in part) to the problem of racialized solidarity. Indeed, there is something paradoxical about the status of race in Rawls’s political thought, as he rarely discusses the issue directly, as evidenced by the fact that the idea that race is obscured in the original position is only stated clearly in his later work. See Shiffrin, “Race, Labor, and the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle.” . Bell, “The Interest Convergence Dilemma,” p. . . Indeed, Bell claims that the more idealistic view that racial justice will be achieved because whites can be persuaded to accept the moral wrongness of white privilege needs to be abandoned. Pessimism about the possibility that black freedom and equality will ever be achieved need not lead to nihilism or apathy in his view, however. Instead, he believes that this can free African Americans to pursue more realistic goals within the constraints imposed by fundamental white resistance to black equality. He calls for such a pragmatic approach to racial justice in Bell, “Racial Realism.” . Mills, Blackness Visible, p. . . Allen, Talking to Strangers, p. . . Ibid., p. . . Ibid., p. . . Consider, for example, the enormous sacrifice that peacefully tolerating the inhuman conditions they were forced to endure constituted on the part of those who were abandoned by their elected officials and fellow citizens in

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the Convention Center and the Superdome in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Or consider the much more routine sacrifice of submitting to police harassment and abuse without resorting to violence that black citizens are forced to make almost daily in the United States, especially those who live in poor inner-city neighborhoods. Allen, Talking to Strangers, p. . It is not clear whether both groups would be susceptible to the kind of distrust she describes in the passage cited above. This is precisely what has occurred with the branch of the multiculturalism literature that has considered the issue of what constitute just remedies to racialized oppression. I discuss how and why this is the case in greater detail in chapters  and . Mills, Blackness Visible, p. . Arendt, On Revolution, p. . Arendt did not view violent political beginnings or revolutionary violence as intractable problems. In fact, she suggested that the dangers they introduced could be resolved by means of constitutionalism and the rule of law (pp. –, ). Indeed, it is ironic that her model for how this might be accomplished was the United States, of whose racial politics she was a famously misguided observer, as evidenced by her response to the battles over school integration in the s. See Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock.”

Chapter  . Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, p. . . Ibid., pp. –. According to this typology, among those who could be classified as liberal nationalists are Margalit and Raz,“National Self-Determination,” and Tamir, Liberal Nationalism. Meanwhile, liberal multiculturalists might include Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. . See, for example, the essays in the section “Reverse Discrimination” in Dworkin, A Matter of Principle, and Rawls, A Theory of Justice. . See Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, and Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition.” I classify Taylor as an advocate of liberal multiculturalism even though he is often identified as, among other things, a communitarian thinker, because in the essay discussed here, he identifies the version of multiculturalism he endorses as being fully within, and bounded by, the horizons of liberalism. . As Kymlicka observes, during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, there was significant debate among liberal theorists about the rights owed to minority nationalities. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. –.

Notes to Pages –

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. This is not to suggest that there has not been important work on multiculturalism produced elsewhere or that all theorists writing on the subject have done so from within the liberal tradition. My point is rather that the arguments developed by the theorists discussed in this chapter have played a central role in setting the terms of the debate, such that even theorists who do not share their premises have felt it necessary to respond to their claims. . See Shiffrin, “Race, Labor, and the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle,” p. . . In his two major works, for example, race is mentioned only a handful of times. In A Theory of Justice, he claims that the belief that racial discrimination is unjust is among our most firmly held moral convictions, that racist doctrines are not only unjust but irrational and therefore cannot constitute the basis for any positive principle of justice, and that all races have the capacity for moral personhood and are therefore entitled to equality. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. , –, . Later, in Political Liberalism, he explicitly places race behind the veil of ignorance, reiterates the claim that the unjustness of slavery and racial discrimination are among our considered moral convictions, and discusses the history of racial inequality in the United States and the struggle against it at various points in the text. Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. , –, , –. . Allen, “Race, Face, and Rawls,” p. . . For a discussion of Rawls’s views about racism in the United States, see Nagel, “John Rawls and Affirmative Action.” See also n.  in Shiffrin, “Race, Labor, and the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle.” . Shelby, “Race and Social Justice,” p. . . Ibid., p. . . See Nagel, “John Rawls and Affirmative Action.” . See Shiffrin, “Race, Labor, and the Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle.” . See Shelby, “Race and Social Justice.” . See Foster, “Rawls, Race, and Reason.” . Mills, Blackness Visible, p. . . Dworkin, “Affirmative Action,” p. . . See, for example, Simon, “Individual Rights and ‘Benign’ Discrimination.” . Dworkin, “Bakke’s Case: Are Quotas Unfair?” chapter  in A Matter of Principle, p. . . Altman, “Policy, Principle, and Incrementalism,” p. . . Dworkin, in fact, rejects the argument that so-called race-conscious policies constitute compensation for past injustice: “Compensatory justifications suppose that affirmative action is necessary, as Scalia put it, to ‘make up’ to minorities for damage done to their race or class in the past, and he was right to point out the mistake in supposing that one race ‘owes’ another compensation. But universities

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Notes to Pages –

do not use race-sensitive admission standards to compensate either individuals or groups: affirmative action is a forward-looking, not a backward-looking, enterprise, and the minority students whom it benefits have not necessarily been victims, as individuals, of any distinct injustice in the past. Great universities hope to train more blacks and other minority students not to repay them for past injustice, but to make the future better for everyone by helping to lift a curse that the past laid on us all.” Dworkin, “Affirmative Action,” p. . Indeed, this very ambiguity might account for the continuing debates in the United States about the justice of affirmative action and other so-called raceconscious policies. The enduring nature of this controversy might indicate that the debate about the justice of group rights for minorities, at least those to redress racialized oppression, has not been nearly as conclusively resolved as Kymlicka seems to think. As with race, Rawls has little to say about culture. He fails to take cultural membership into consideration in his theory of justice. As a result, his views about permanent group rights designed to ensure the fair accommodation of cultural difference also have to be inferred from his other arguments. Characteristically, Dworkin addresses the issue more directly. For a detailed discussion of whether questions of cultural membership can be encompassed within the conception of liberalism endorsed by Rawls and Dworkin, see Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, pp. –. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. . Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition.” Ibid., pp. –. In his subsequent work, Kymlicka claims that this dilemma can be resolved by differentiating between minority group rights that constitute “internal restrictions” and those that function as “external protections.” External protections are collective rights that try to limit the power of the majority over the resources and institutions of the group, while internal restrictions are attempts by the group to limit the rights of individual members in order to preserve group solidarity or purity. In a liberal polity, he argues, minorities are allowed external protections against the wider society, but they cannot place internal restrictions on their members. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. –. Some feminist theorists have suggested that the argument that cultures are necessary to individual freedom and agency is seriously undermined when gender is taken into account. For instance, Susan Moller Okin has argued that because self-respect and self-esteem cannot be attained by women in patriarchal cultures, granting collective rights to more traditional minority cultures that exist within larger, less sexist societies will not necessarily enhance the agency of the female members of such groups. See Okin, “Feminism and

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Multiculturalism.” Okin’s feminist critique of multiculturalism generated significant controversy among both other feminist theorists and liberal advocates of multiculturalism. The debate is reflected in the essays in Okin et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? See, for example, Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago, and Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism. This is hardly a new issue for liberal theorists. John Stuart Mill’s attempts to justify European colonialism in the nineteenth century while supporting representative government at home reflect similar tensions. Mill recognized cultural difference but utilized the idea to buttress the claim that the liberal freedoms he defended for Europeans should not be thought to apply to “backward” societies incapable of self-government, as they could only benefit from colonization by more advanced nations. He made similar arguments about small minority national groups in Europe. See “On Liberty” and “On Representative Government” in Mill, Three Essays. On the subject of English liberals’ relationship to the British empire, see Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. He claims that it is possible to have such a presumption but that a priori judgments to that effect would constitute the grossest cultural relativism. See Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” pp. –. Some of these tensions are evident in Taylor’s critique of the initial formulation of Kymlicka’s rationale for taking cultural membership into account in ideal theory, which in Taylor’s view is still squarely within the framework of a theory of liberal neutrality. See Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture. Taylor reads Kymlicka’s arguments about culture as parallel to claims that temporary group-differentiated rights designed to overcome past racial injustice can be justified from within the conceptual universe of liberalism as articulated by Rawls and Dworkin. He claims that as a result, Kymlicka’s argument fails to capture demands for permanent group rights designed to ensure cultural survival. See Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” p. , n. . He defines a societal culture as “a culture which provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres. These cultures tend to be territorially concentrated, and based on a shared language.” Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Other theorists of multiculturalism have critiqued the concept of “societal cultures” and the subsequent distinction between national minorities and ethnic groups in Kymlicka’s work. Young, for example, has argued that his theory reifies the idea of bounded, separate, and internally homogeneous national cultures and peoples with inherent rights to sovereignty over a particular territory. See Young, “A Multicultural Continuum.”

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Notes to Pages –

. He articulates this argument more fully in later works, such as Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, pp. –. . As Kymlicka observes, the far-reaching lesson drawn from victories against racial segregation in the United States (such as in Brown v. Board of Education) was that liberal justice and equality required that all citizens be treated the same, that is, uniformity of rights. See Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, pp. –. . For instance, compare the amount of attention political theorists in the United States have devoted to debating the justice of affirmative action and other “race-conscious” policies to the amount of time they have spent analyzing the situation of Native Americans and other minority nationalities in the United States, such as Puerto Ricans. . When I say that liberal multiculturalists focus on culture rather than race, I do not mean to suggest that race and racial injustice somehow occur outside the realm of culture. As noted in chapter , one of the premises of this study is that race is a social construct. My point is precisely to critique the apparent assumption in the multiculturalism literature that race and culture are, in fact, thoroughly distinct. . Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. . . Ibid., pp. –, –. . Ibid., pp. –. . Most theorists do not consider African Americans to be national minorities, because the cultures and collective identities they have developed are said to be at least partly the result of either imposed ideas (i.e., false claims about the biological character of race) or years of segregation and exclusion from the dominant society (which led them to adopt a strong racial group identity). For a discussion of whether African Americans can be said to possess a “societal culture” as defined by Kymlicka, see Ingram, Group Rights. . Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. –. . This is evident in the case of Canada’s black population. Kymlicka points out that the situation of black immigrants, who make up the majority of Canada’s black population, is different from that of other immigrants, because they face certain kinds of racial discrimination that other immigrants (even other nonwhite immigrants) do not. See “A Crossroad in Race Relations,” chapter  in Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular. . He recognizes, for example, that to date, his theory has had little to say about the case of African Americans. He attributes this to the fact that they are difficult to situate within a typology that distinguishes between voluntary immigrants and national minorities. Ibid., pp. –. . Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. . . Spinner suggests that rather than trying to achieve racial justice by means of the integration of African Americans, which has generally been pursued at the

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expense of black institutions, the goal might best be attained by encouraging and supporting black institutions, as these would provide African Americans with a base from which to struggle for equality in the wider society and allow them to preserve those cultural practices that are important to them. See “Race and the Failure of Liberal Citizenship,” chapter  in Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, pp. –. Young originally claimed that in the United States, women, African Americans, Native Americans, old people, poor people, disabled people, gay men and lesbians, Latinos, young people, and nonprofessional workers might all constitute disadvantaged social groups. In her subsequent work, she refined the concept of a disadvantaged social group by introducing a distinction between “structural” and “cultural” groups. She argues that differences of race, gender, and ability are more akin to class than ethnicity, because they involve structural relations of power, resource distribution, and ideological hegemony. As a result, the movements of structural groups are more explicitly political in their orientation and more directly concerned with questions of justice than those of cultural groups. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy. There are, in fact, significant immigrant ethnic communities in a number of Latin American countries, but up to this point, they have not been involved in struggles for minority group rights. This is a modified version of a typology of Latin America’s multicultural model of constitutionalism that originally did not include rights to redress racial discrimination. See Van Cott, “Constitutional Reform and Ethnic Right.” Reinserting questions about race and ethnicity in national censuses, many of which were removed in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, is a major demand of Afro-descendant and indigenous movements throughout Latin America today. The reasons for this are complex. Scholars of racial politics in Latin America have pointed to the development of national ideologies of mestizaje (biological and cultural mixing) that obscured or actively denied the existence of racism as one of the conditions that have hindered racial group identification and political mobilization among Afro-descendants in Latin America. They have shown how these myths of “racial democracy” encouraged identification with an overarching national identity rather than specific racial group identities, by portraying countries in the region as racially mixed to such a degree that it was impossible to distinguish between different ethnic or racial groups. They have also pointed to the role played by political institutions in shaping patterns of racial group identification among Latin American Afro-descendants. They have noted that in contrast to the United States and South Africa, Latin American states did not develop legally enforced racial discrimination, which

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Notes to Pages –

in those countries had the unintended consequence of reinforcing a collective racial group identity among subordinated groups that, in turn, became the basis for resistance to white supremacy. See, for example, Hanchard, Orpheus and Power; Marx, Making Race and Nation; and Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimates that there are between  million and  million indigenous people in Latin America, accounting for approximately  percent of the region’s total population, and approximately  million people of African descent, equivalent to  percent of the total population of the region. See Hopenhayn and Bello, Discriminación Étnico Racial y Xenofobia en América Latina y el Caribe. On the issue of transformations in indigenous identity and their consequences for the ability to claim rights from the state, see Speed, “Global Discourses on the Local Terrain.” Anthropologists documenting indigenous communities undergoing processes of “re-Indianization” in order to claim collective rights today, for instance, tend to stress the fluidity and constructed nature of collective identity in general, the impact of global discourses on local reinterpretations of indigenous identity, the importance of self-making to individual and collective identity, and the need to discard unhelpful notions of authenticity when analyzing indigenous identity. The problem is that national states and indigenous movements traffic precisely in this language of authenticity and cultural distinctiveness. In Guatemala, for example, the Presidential Commission against Racism and Discrimination against Indigenous People was created in  in response to indigenous activism against this type of racial discrimination. Elsewhere in Latin America, we can identify a second group of Afro-descendants who are also the descendants of slaves brought during the colonial period but who (in contrast to Afro-mestizos) have developed a strong racial group identity and have struggled for collective rights against racial discrimination. They tend to be overwhelmingly urban. The movimento negro in Brazil is an example of this kind of Afro-descendant group. See Hanchard, Orpheus and Power. Following independence, there was a general absence of legally codified racial discrimination in Latin America. The situation of West Indian immigrants was anomalous in this respect, however, as the U.S. companies that imported these laborers did establish racial segregation in the economic enclave zones in which they operated in the region. Additionally, many West Indian immigrants and their descendants were legally prohibited from gaining citizenship (with its accompanying legal rights) for many decades after their arrival in various Central American countries. See, for instance, Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica.

Notes to Pages –

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. On the history of one such group, Creoles in Nicaragua, see Gordon, Disparate Diasporas. . This fact is acknowledged by their inclusion alongside indigenous people in the same constitutional and legal categories when multicultural citizenship policies were adopted by various states in Central America in the s and s. In Honduras, for example, both indigenous people and Afro-descendants were included in the category of “autochthonous ethnicities”; in Nicaragua, the term used was “ethnic communities”; and in Guatemala, it was “ethnic groups.” See Hooker, “Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion,” pp. –. . Instead, theorists of multiculturalism and their critics have focused almost exclusively on the effect that granting group rights to minorities would have on relations between majorities and minorities. . See, for example, the essays in Gracia and De Greiff, eds., Hispanics/Latinos in the United States. . Indeed, this summary of the issues at stake does not even take into account the undoubted racialization of Latinos in the United States, which suggests that they should also be thought of as a disadvantaged “racial” group. . See Hooker, “Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion.” . In Brazil, for example, affirmative action policies in public sector jobs and higher education have recently been introduced, in addition to existing legislation protecting the communal land rights of indigenous groups and Afrodescendant quilombo communities. See Htun, “From ‘Racial Democracy’ to Affirmative Action.” . See Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. . Kymlicka, for example, claims that as a consequence of its dominant position in international affairs, the conception of multiculturalism that has emerged in the United States has enormous influence on global debates about minority group rights. The result is that models of multiculturalism developed in other countries faced with different questions of multicultural justice are assessed in light of the U.S. experience. See Kymlicka, “American Multiculturalism and the Nations Within.”

Chapter  . “A Source of Shame.” . On the concept of the racial polity, see Mills, Blackness Visible, pp. –. . Addressing critics who claim that minority group rights would have a detrimental effect on solidarity, for example, Will Kymlicka contends that it is through the accommodation rather than the suppression of cultural differences that solidarity can be furthered in multinational contexts. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. . Similarly, Iris Young argues that formally

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democratic politics, rather than breaking the cycle of exclusion of previously disadvantaged groups, tends to reproduce existing inequalities, and this is the reason inclusive deliberative democracies are needed that would break the circle and undermine structural inequality by including subordinated groups as equals in the processes of deliberation that lead to policy decisions. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy. For example, David Miller argues that for radical multiculturalists, “the very purpose of politics is to affirm group difference.” Miller, On Nationality, p. . As noted in chapter , these are theorists who argue that liberal democratic states should adopt (in addition to common civil and political rights for all individuals) various group-specific rights intended to recognize and accommodate the distinctive identities and needs of minority cultural groups. There are two types of proponents of this position, which Kymlicka calls “liberal culturalism”: liberal nationalists, who are mainly concerned with the protection and promotion of the national cultures of all nations encompassed within a state, and liberal multiculturalists, who claim that nonnational cultural groups, such as immigrants, refugees, religious minorities, and even nonethnic cultural groups (such as gays and the disabled), are also entitled to recognition and accommodation from the state. Among those who could be classified as liberal nationalists are Margalit and Raz, “National Self-Determination,” and Tamir, Liberal Nationalism. Meanwhile, liberal multiculturalists include Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference. Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition: Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist’ Age,” chapter  in Justice Interruptus, p. . I set aside the question of whether Fraser’s characterization of current approaches to questions of justice is valid and the utility of the analytical framework she utilizes. My concern is rather with her critique of normative justifications of minority group rights. For an assessment of Fraser’s recognition-redistribution paradigm, see Robeyns, “Is Nancy Fraser’s Critique of Theories of Distributive Justice Justified?” Fraser acknowledges that in practice, cultural and economic injustices are difficult to separate. Many groups mobilized along the lines of recognition also make redistributive claims, for example. She nevertheless argues that it is possible and necessary to make an analytical distinction between the two forms of injustice. Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition,” pp. –. Wendy Brown, for example, argues that the quest for rights characteristic of identity politics is symptomatic of a decisive orientation toward the state that signals the loss of a critique of liberal-capitalist political and economic structures on the part of disadvantaged groups in contemporary liberal democratic societies. She worries that identity politics of this type results in a decisive

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reinscription of the state. Proponents of identity politics are insufficiently concerned with the regulatory dimension of rights, she argues; they do not consider the way rights based on identity reinscribe the identity in question while seeking to protect it, making possible further regulation of individual and collective identities by the state. She concedes that rights might be important for contemporary progressive politics but argues that they might be most effective to the extent that they “remain empty of specific content,” meaning to the degree that they do not recognize particular identities and do not seek to redress specific injuries. That is, when they “function to articulate a political universal that, as an ideal or a vision, operates as a critique of status quo inequalities and hence as an incitement to address those inequalities politically rather than legally.” See Brown, “Revaluing Critique,” p. . Fraser briefly acknowledges that for African Americans, who are relegated to second-class citizenship by economic structures in the United States, race tends to be pushed to the forefront as a cultural category on the basis of which they are consistently attacked. Faced with this situation, the only alternative for critical African American subjects is to embrace racial group identity as a matter of pride. Similarly, she recognizes that indigenous groups seeking some form of self-government (independently of whether their demands encompass both recognition and redistribution) are not trying to put themselves out of business as groups. Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition,” nn. –, p. . There is also the danger that this mode of framing arguments for permanent group rights to the accommodation of cultural difference will reify a view of culture as a static, unchanging, ahistorical “thing” to be preserved, rather than as a dynamic, ever-changing process. For an analysis of the consequences of the reproduction of such a view of culture in the theory and praxis of indigenous rights, see Barcham, “(De)Constructing the Politics of Indigeneity.” Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, p. . It is also true that attempts at cultural accommodation have also sometimes met with stiff resistance and outright hostility, however, such as when native English speakers in the United States have objected to public libraries in heavily immigrant areas purchasing texts in Spanish. Kymlicka, for example, makes precisely this point when explaining why critiques of permanent group rights to the accommodation of cultural difference based on the ideal of integration derived from the experience with racial segregation in the United States are mistaken. See Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, pp. –, –. Miller, On Nationality, p. , emphasis added. Interestingly, Miller is a critic of (some forms of) multiculturalism from a liberal nationalist perspective, that is, he is concerned with defending a liberal form of majority nationalism.

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Notes to Pages –

. See Alcoff, Visible Identities. . The pervasive racialization of national identity in modern political communities is reflected in the fact that subordinated racial groups have in some instances also used the language of nationalism to describe their political movements and cultural identities, as in the case of Black Nationalism in the United States. . This understanding of what is at stake in multiculturalism follows Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition.” . The persistence of active racism in Western liberal democracies is undisputed. Racial discrimination against nonwhites in housing, employment, and the justice system have been well documented in the United States. To take but one small example, a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union found that while African American youths represent a smaller percentage of youth arrests than whites, they are more likely to be incarcerated. African American youths represent approximately  percent of all youth arrests in Massachusetts, but they constitute  percent of all juveniles who are removed from their homes and imprisoned. See Rose, “Racism’s Role in the State Juvenile Justice System.” While this disparity could be attributed solely to the lack of access of black youths to adequate legal representation compared with whites as a result of differences in education and economic resources, the size of the gap between arrest and incarceration rates is such that it suggests that forces of active racial discrimination are at work, namely that black youths pay a price for dominant images of black persons as prone to criminality, violence, and so on. . Cowell, “Fleeing Man and a Burst of Gunfire,” p. . . It may be that critics of multiculturalism equate the two because arguments for minority group rights grounded in the need to overcome the material disadvantages that are the result of historical injustice are more controversial in capitalist societies that routinely accept the justice of certain types of inequality, such as socioeconomic disparities that are believed to be the result of differences in work ethic or natural ability. The socioeconomic gap between whites and nonwhites in the United States, for example, is often attributed to precisely such factors. . Miller, On Nationality, pp. –. . Miller objects to certain kinds of minority group rights because he thinks they will detract from the shared nationality that is the basis of political solidarity in contemporary liberal democracies. He claims that “the principle of nationality is resistant to special rights for groups, over and above what equal treatment requires, because of the fear that this will ossify group differences, and destroy the sense of common nationality on which democratic politics depends.” Ibid., p. . As noted in chapter , I do not subscribe to the view

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that political solidarity is or should be grounded in shared nationality. That is because the extent to which shared nationality can function as the source of social cohesion in modern polities is always incomplete, contested, and contingent. It is worth noting that liberal nationalists such as Miller seem to share the U.S. liberal view that the aim of group rights for minorities should not be the affirmation of their collective identities (but rather their dissolution), while at the same time suggesting that such an aim is entirely legitimate, and indeed necessary, in the case of national identities in contemporary liberal democracies. Indeed, the primary reason they reject this aim in the case of the former is a concern with its potential effects on an overarching shared nationality. Miller, On Nationality, pp. –. On the various discriminatory policies in the United States that account for the disparities in wealth accumulated by whites and blacks, see Oliver and Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth. See, for example, Arenson and Rimer, “Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?” See Dworkin, “Bakke’s Case,” pp. –. The protection of illiberal minority cultures poses more of a quandary for liberal theorists of multiculturalism, however, as evidenced by the significant amount of attention devoted to this question in their theories. See, for example, Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. –, –. Liberal theorists may well be correct in their assessment of the potential openness of culture in comparison with race, but it is worth noting that racialized groups are far more diverse than commonly supposed in terms of the variety of cross-cutting identities and individual human types they encompass. Additionally, national cultures are not as open as is commonly supposed, as Holmes’s remark demonstrates. The distinction between race and culture is also difficult to sustain because the two are often conflated (as we have seen). Nevertheless, whatever the ultimate merits of the claim, the point I wish to make does not depend on a rejection of the argument that cultures are in principle more open and inclusive than racialized group identities. It might be instructive to consider why a similar hesitation does not arise with regard to nations among many contemporary liberals, when nationalism and race have often resulted in equally reprehensible political projects. It is also intriguing to consider why political theorists have embraced the idea of the nation at a time when so many theorists of nationalism have been at pains to emphasize its contingent and constructed character. Two of the most influential works along these lines are Anderson, Imagined Communities, and Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. Gilroy, Against Race.

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Notes to Pages –

. In contrast, it is important to note that subordinated racial groups do not experience the collective identities they have developed solely as a burden. In fact, many members of such groups highly value these identities. . He argues that “it is a mistake to use the language of ‘deviation,’ as if there were an abstract colorless norm from which people contingently fell short. Rather, there was an abstract norm that was generally realized, the norm of a more or less consistent racially structured ethic. Race did not introduce a deviation into a previously uncontaminated abstract ethic; in the construction of this ethic, race was not abstracted from in the first place.” Mills, Blackness Visible, pp. –. . As Brown sees it, part of the problem with identity politics is that it can be a paralyzing mode of politics, as fixation on the injury that is constitutive of the identity is inward-looking, not transformative. She argues that the solution to the potentially paralyzing effect of identity politics is not denial of the injury but the ability to act as if the injury does not exist while speaking from the point of view of the injured. In other words, instead of continuing to experience the pain constitutive of the injury, subordinated groups must voice grievances without losing themselves completely in the performance of their pain, thus guarding against the elision of the political and the therapeutic. She proposes a shift in the political discourse of disadvantaged groups from the language of “I am” to that of “I want this for us,” thereby leaving behind the “defensive closure on identity” and “insistence on the fixity of position” that she claims characterize identity politics. See Brown, States of Injury, pp. –. For a critical assessment of Brown’s critique of identity politics, see Balfour, “Reparations after Identity Politics.” . The full statement is “if identity structured in part by ressentiment resubjugates itself through its investment in its own pain, through its refusal to make itself in the present, memory is the house of this activity and this refusal.” Brown, States of Injury, p. . . Wolin, “Injustice and Collective Memory,” chapter  in The Presence of the Past, p. . . Ibid., pp. –. . However, in contrast to his arguments cited above, elsewhere Wolin has formulated critiques of identity politics that are quite similar to Brown’s. See Wolin, “Democracy, Difference, and Re-Cognition.” . Wolin, “Injustice and Collective Memory,” p. . . Ibid., p. . Emphasis added. . Ibid., p. . . Lacey, “A Decade after Massacres.” . Wolin, “Injustice and Collective Memory,” p. . . An excellent example of how collective memory functions in this manner is the way the Civil War became encoded in U.S. public memory as the story of

Notes to Pages –

.

. . .

.

.



a regional power struggle between equally legitimate white elites, thus eliding the conflict’s central concern: the question of black freedom. See Blight, Race and Reunion. Habermas, “On the Public Use of History,” chapter  in The Postnational Constellation, pp. –. The question of how Germany should remember its past continues to generate significant debate, as illustrated by claims that it is strange that a country should remember and commemorate the worst moments of its national past and that it might also be counterproductive for its memorials to focus on the victims of the Holocaust if the aim of such memorials is to generate political will to resist injustice. McCarthy, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the USA,” p. . Ibid., pp. –. Arguments for minority group rights can be made in such a way that they try to reshape debates about policies designed to remedy the effects of racialized oppression that have proven to be profoundly controversial. An excellent example of the way this might be done is Ira Katznelson’s book on the history of affirmative action, which focuses on past state practices directly relevant to contemporary debates about the policy that are nevertheless largely forgotten in public memory. His argument is that the enormous social programs initiated by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal of the s and s not only disproportionately advantaged whites, but they also actively discriminated against blacks, exacerbating inequalities between blacks and whites that today’s affirmative action programs seek to overcome. He argues that the case for affirmative action should thus be made in terms of reparations for the unfair advantages the federal government granted to whites during the thirty years preceding the civil rights struggles of the s. See Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White. In an odd twist, such arguments (which are generally articulated from an antiracist perspective) more often than not tend to shift the emphasis away from a politics of racial justice and onto a blanket condemnation of all forms of race-thinking. As a result, the forms of political activity and collective identity developed by the victims of racial injustice are implicitly equated with those of the architects of racial oppression to such an extent that it becomes almost impossible to make any meaningful moral or ethical distinctions between them. Gilroy’s arguments against race have been part of rancorous disagreements about the content and aims of contemporary black politics, particularly between black British and African American scholars. My aim here is not to intervene in that debate but, rather, to consider Gilroy’s work in terms of its stated preoccupation with the ethical-political consequences of past racial injustice. Moreover, it is also worth noting that this debate suffers from an



. .

.

. . .

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Notes to Pages –

overwhelmingly Anglophone slant. To date, notions of the “Black Atlantic” and the African Diaspora have not been nearly as attuned to the history and experiences of non-English-speaking people of African descent in the Americas, for example, despite similar histories of enslavement, dispersal, and racial subordination. Gilroy, Between Camps, p. . This is the British edition of Gilroy, Against Race. He uses the terms race, raciology, and racism interchangeably throughout the text. Gilroy claims that nanotechnology and other advances in the study of genetics might facilitate the development of more universal forms of solidarity based on the common humanity of all persons, because they make it possible to see below the skin, as it were, allowing individual persons to envision the underlying commonalities below superficial differences in physical appearance: “I want to argue that perceptual and observational habits that have been associated with the consolidation of today’s nano-science might also facilitate the development of an emphatically postracial humanism.” Ibid., p. . Ironically, this argument also appears to fall squarely within the conceptual horizon of a politics of solidarity based on sameness (i.e., we are all humans below the skin). The ontological logic of such a claim is still underlying commonality, it is not an argument that individuals need not be the same in order to establish political relations of mutuality and reciprocity. Gilroy’s stated aim is to further antiracist politics. In the preface to the British edition of Against Race, for example, he writes: “I hope it is obvious that a concern with the politics of racism supplied a central focus” for the analysis undertaken in the book. He acknowledges that his position “might be viewed as a betrayal of those groups whose oppositional, legal, and even democratic claims have come to rest on identities and solidarities forged at great cost from the categories given to them by their oppressors. But to renounce ‘race’ for analytical purposes is not to judge all appeals to it in the profane world of political cultures as formally equivalent.” Gilroy, Between Camps, pp. ix, . The argumentative strategy Gilroy adopts to pursue his stated aim is puzzling, however, as the focus of the text itself is on critiquing instances of the adoption of seemingly essentialist understandings of the concept of race by members of subordinated racial groups. Ibid., p. . Olson,“Whiteness and the Participation-Inclusion Dilemma,” p. . Emphasis in original. The idea of whiteness as property, as something that whites need to disinvest in, has been articulated by Hines, “Whiteness as Property,” and Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Some argue that racial identities can restrict individual freedom. See, for example, the essays by Appiah in Appiah and Gutman, Color Conscious.

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

. This particular argument naturally also reflects the fact that Canadian liberal theorists of multiculturalism continue to defend permanent group rights for cultural minorities from within the conceptual universe of liberalism, hence the need to link cultural membership to fundamental liberal values such as individual freedom and autonomy. . Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, pp. –. . I am paraphrasing Kymlicka here, who argues that “what we need, in other words, is a consistent theory of permissible forms of nation-building within liberal democracies.” Ibid., p. . . One of the most well-known typologies of minority groups is Kymlicka’s. He distinguishes between different kinds of cultural groups (national minorities and ethnic groups) but has difficulty accounting for racialized groups such as African Americans. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship. A notable exception to the pattern of producing strict typologies is Young, who originally included both subordinated racial and cultural groups within the broader category of “disadvantaged social groups.” She later amended the concept to distinguish between “structural” and “cultural” groups and included disadvantaged racial groups in the former category and ethnic groups in the latter. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy. . This difficulty also points to another problem: the question of how collective identities are constituted and transformed. Decisions about who is entitled to certain kinds of minority group rights are also debates about who is what. The problem, however, is that collective identities and cultures are not static. Given the constructed nature of culture and other kinds of collective identity, there is something paradoxical about trying to pin down the exact content or meaning of different collective identities in order to formulate rights to protect them. This is because the content of the cultures and other collective identities that such rights are intended to preserve will necessarily be transformed by the very process through which their “survival” is being ensured. . Scott, “Culture in Political Theory,” p. . . Ibid., p.  . For an analysis of how the public past is deployed in debates about multiculturalism and of how processes of contestation between dominant and subordinated groups can lead to changes in public memory (however contingent and ambiguous) in a specific case, see Hooker, “Beloved Enemies.” The Nicaraguan example is analyzed in detail below in chapter . . Many factors affect the reproduction of racialized solidarity, such as the existence of spaces for political communication between groups, to name one. To the extent that affective distance between groups is a reflection of social distance, for example, group residential patterns may well have an effect on racialized solidarity. Young makes precisely this point when she analyzes the

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Notes to Pages –

effect of residential segregation on the practice of democracy. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy, pp. –.

Chapter  . In one edited volume that brought together political theorists writing about the struggles of indigenous peoples, for example, there were no articles on Latin America. See Ivison, Patton, and Sanders, eds., Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. . For a discussion of how this affects the way black immigrants are viewed in the U.S. context, see Pierre, “Black Immigrants in the United States.” On the situation of blacks in Canada, the majority of whom are immigrants, see “A Crossroad in Race Relations,” chapter  in Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, pp. –. . The tendency in scholarship on racial and ethnic politics in Latin America has been to study Afro-descendant and indigenous movements separately and to assume that “race” applies only to Afro-descendants and “ethnicity” only to indigenous groups, although this has begun to change somewhat in recent years. See Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. . In Will Kymlicka’s view, U.S. multiculturalism, which developed largely in light of the experience of white immigrant ethnic groups and subordinated racialized groups, is ill equipped to understand, and indeed hostile to, the demands of national minorities and the kinds of remedies required to meet their needs. He claims that U.S. multiculturalism is “typically defended in contrast to minority nationalism. That is, when [U.S.] American authors explain what a closed, static and involuntary conception of multiculturalism would look like, they typically point to cases of groups (like many indigenous peoples) which view themselves as ‘nations within’ and which mobilise along nationalist lines.” Kymlicka, “American Multiculturalism and the Nations Within,” p. . The problem with this is that as a consequence of its dominant position in international affairs, the United States’ preferred version of multiculturalism has enormous influence on global debates about minority group rights. The outsized influence of U.S. ideas owes much to the country’s position as the sole remaining superpower and to the fact that U.S. foundations and government agencies are the leading sources of funding for scholarly research and political activism on issues of multiculturalism around the globe. . See, for example, Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious. . This is precisely what Ronald Dworkin argues in defense of affirmative action policies, for example. See Dworkin, “Bakke’s Case,” pp. –. . This is the view adopted even by those who concede that African Americans possess a “societal culture,” according to Kymlicka’s definition, and are there-

Notes to Pages –

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. . . .

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.

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fore more akin to national minorities than to ethnic groups. See, for example, Ingram, Group Rights, pp. –. This is Jeff Spinner’s argument with regard to African Americans, for example. See Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship, pp. –. Kymlicka has made similar suggestions along these lines in the case of blacks in Canada. See Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, pp. –. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Nicaragua is hardly anomalous in this regard. During the twentieth century, elites in various Latin American countries concerned with resisting U.S. imperialism and its justification on the basis of scientific racism formulated new national ideologies, in many cases of mestizaje. National ideologies of mestizaje advocated the fusion of different “races” because it produced a new and superior racial type, the mestizo. These ideologies challenged European and North American scientific theories that unequivocally advocated the superiority of Anglo-Saxon peoples and inverted the view that racial mixing led to degeneration. At the same time, however, national ideologies that advocated mestizaje as a form of “whitening” left intact the basic racist evaluations of nonwhites as inferior. Most significant is that these myths of mestizaje or “racial democracy” also obscured or actively denied the existence of racism. They not only portrayed countries in the region as racially mixed to such a degree that it was impossible to distinguish between different racial and cultural groups, but they also encouraged identification with an overarching national identity rather than specific racial or cultural group identities. The Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos formulated one of the most influential accounts of Latin American mestizaje. See Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race. Recent historical research has also begun to question the accuracy of these claims for the Pacific and central regions of the country as well. See Gould, To Die in This Way. For comprehensive analyses of the politics of the two largest Afro-descendant and indigenous groups on the Atlantic Coast, Creole and Miskitu, during the twentieth century, see Gordon, Disparate Diasporas, and Hale, Resistance and Contradiction. The conflict stemmed from the Sandinista government’s initial hostility to demands for self-government by Afro-descendant and indigenous costeños, who had generally not participated in the revolutionary armed struggle. Afrodescendant and indigenous costeños initially welcomed the triumph of the FSLN because they believed it would allow them to realize their demands for selfgovernment, but these goals were not easily reconciled with the FSLN’s brand of mestizo nationalism. As a result, the initial support of Afro-descendant and

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Notes to Pages –

indigenous costeños for the revolution turned into active resistance by . By , the Atlantic Coast was a war zone, and the FSLN’s international image had been damaged by accusations that it had committed human rights violations against indigenous groups. For detailed accounts of the conflict between Afrodescendant and indigenous costeños and the FSLN in the s, see Gordon, Disparate Diasporas, and Hale, Resistance and Contradiction. Asamblea Nacional de Nicaragua, Constitución Política de Nicaragua. This is a modified version of a typology of Latin America’s multicultural model of constitutionalism that originally did not include rights to redress racial discrimination. See Van Cott, “Constitutional Reform and Ethnic Right.” As Ivison, Patton, and Sanders observe, while the concept of “indigenous rights” has received scant philosophical attention to date, the question of whether indigenous peoples’ rights claims are normatively distinct from those of other historically subordinated groups in some significant sense constitutes a thorny philosophical problem. The three predominant arguments put forward in this regard are appeals to notions of the “inherent” sovereignty of indigenous peoples, to a historical record of treaties and other legal instruments between nominally equal parties signed by indigenous peoples and European settlers, and to indigenous peoples’ cultural differences from Europeans. The first two arguments are the weakest of the three, because other national minorities have also exercised historical sovereignty over their lands, and colonial governments also reneged on pledges made to other groups. This leaves claims about the distinctiveness of indigenous culture, which (among other things) is said to envision a very different relation to land and property from Western states and cultures. According to this view, other subordinated groups converged with dominant Western nations on certain cultural self-conceptions and economic and social needs in the course of state- and nation-building processes, while indigenous peoples remained apart and were integrated only by means of the forcible suppression of their culture. See their introductory essay in Ivison, Patton, and Sanders, eds., Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, p. . The following statement by an indigenous leader in Peru critiquing the placement of both indigenous and Afro-descendant concerns within the same government office is a typical example of this argument: “We, the Amazonian peoples, are a nation, we have identity, we have culture. The Andean peoples have been a nation, have had identity, have had language and culture. The black peoples are not a people, do not have identity, do not have language [and culture].” Cited in García, Making Indigenous Citizens, p. . Asamblea Nacional de Nicaragua, Estatuto de Autonomía de las Regiones de la Costa Atlántica de Nicaragua. Autonomy has generally not been a part of Latin American models of multiculturalism, even though it is a key demand of indigenous movements in

Notes to Pages –



the region, as it fulfills their desire for self-government. Nicaragua is the only country in Latin America where territorial autonomy has been granted at the regional level. Other Latin American countries have granted autonomy at the municipal (Colombia), sectional (Bolivia), or indigenous comarca level (Panama), while in Mexico and Bolivia, the question of some form of indigenous territorial autonomy continues to be debated. The creation of autonomy regimes has been resisted because it entails the loss of certain policymaking powers by national (as well as local, nonindigenous) elites. It is true that many countries in Latin America have pursued decentralization initiatives that devolve administrative and political power to the local level, and in some cases, such decentralization has resulted in greater indigenous political participation. Autonomy and decentralization are not the same, however, as the former is primarily conceived as a means of enabling indigenous people and other national minorities who are spatially concentrated to gain control over their local affairs, while the latter aims to increase citizen involvement and participation. See Lapidoth, Autonomy. . Reliable data on the actual size of the different ethnoracial groups on the Atlantic Coast are currently lacking. Not until after the results of questions about race and ethnicity included in the latest national census carried out in  are published will exact figures become available. During most of the twentieth century, census data in Nicaragua were not broken down by race or ethnicity, and in any case, the Ministry of Statistics had been relying on demographic projections based on the last comprehensive census carried out on the Atlantic Coast in the s in order to generate the population data it was reporting for the region. The total population of the Atlantic Coast is estimated to be between more than , and more than , inhabitants. . It is not entirely clear what theories of multiculturalism as they are presently conceived would have to say about the rights of Afro-descendant costeños in this regard. If they were viewed as racial groups, they would not be seen as being entitled to rights to the preservation of their distinct cultures, since the goal of the branch of the literature concerned with remedies for racialized oppression is integration. However, if they were viewed as national minorities, they would presumably be entitled to the same self-government rights as indigenous groups. . The majority of Ramas live on an island off the coast of Bluefields, the capital city of the RAAS. Aside from the problem of geographical dispersal, there is also the question of how to draw boundaries. The Ramas, for example, would like to regain communal lands that have been illegally occupied by mestizo subsistence farmers. They would thus likely object to the creation of a national homeland that confined them to the island they now inhabit.

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Notes to Pages –

. The FSLN also had obvious strategic reasons for wishing to ensure mestizo participation in regional political institutions, as mestizos were much more likely to be supportive of the party than were Afro-descendant or indigenous costeños. . Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo, Informe de Desarrollo Humano , p. . All translations from texts originally in Spanish are my own. . The results cited throughout this chapter are from a public opinion survey carried out in  on the Atlantic Coast among mestizos, Miskitus, and Creoles. They are from a sample of  respondents who self-identified as Miskitu,  respondents who self-identified as Creole, and  respondents who self-identified as mestizo. The survey contained approximately  questions about racial, ethnic, regional, and national identity; perceptions of and attitudes toward other groups; and political participation. . One of the most notable examples of this is the collaboration between AfroColombian and indigenous activists during the National Constituent Assembly deliberations about the adoption of multicultural rights in Colombia in . See Van Cott, The Friendly Liquidation of the Past, p. . . While the survival of indigenous communities well into the twentieth century in the Pacific and central regions of Nicaragua has been well documented by recent historiography, indigenous mobilization has been far less visible in these areas. Nevertheless, the National Assembly created a Commission on Ethnic Affairs, Autonomy Regimes, and Indigenous Communities in the s to cover all areas of the country, not only the Atlantic Coast. Similarly, while there are communities in these regions that could be classified as Afrodescendant on the basis of phenotype, they tend not to have a sense of group identification as such. . The law governing the communal titling efforts is the Ley del Régimen de Propiedad Comunal de los Pueblos Indígenas y Comunidades Étnicas de las Regiones Autonómas de la Costa Atlántica de Nicaragua y de los Ríos Bocay, Coco, Indio y Maíz. In  the situation is quite fluid, with a number of different proposals for territorial reform on the Atlantic Coast being floated by various political parties and organizations. See Pantoja, “Feudos for Decreto.” . See Brysk, From Tribal Village to Global Village; Brysk and Wise,“Liberalization and Ethnic Conflict in Latin America”; Hale,“Does Multiculturalism Menace?”; Tilley, “New Help or New Hegemony?”; Van Cott, The Friendly Liquidation of the Past; and Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America. . This is the unicameral legislative branch of the central government. . Asamblea Nacional de Nicaragua, “Sesión Constituyente,” Diario , no. , p. . . Ibid., p. . . Ibid., p. . . Ibid., p. . . Asamblea Nacional de Nicaragua, “Sesión Constituyente,” Diario 6, no. , p. .

Notes to Pages –



. Ibid., p. . . Ibid., p. . The National Directorate was the governing body of the party. In the s it consisted of nine members. . Ibid., pp. –. . Representative Gerardo Alfaro of the Conservative Democratic Party, for example, claimed that the loss of indigenous identity was signaled by the adoption of Spanish cultural practices. “I have not seen in the rivers of the Pacific our women bathing with a piece of cloth around their waists and naked from there on up. I have not seen that custom, so pure in the Indians of the Atlantic, in the Pacific. To the contrary, in the Pacific, they say that in times past, women used to wear up to seven skirts to cover their bodies, and that is not an indigenous custom, that is influenced by Spanish culture.” Ibid., pp. –. . Ibid., p. . . For a more extensive analysis of the changes in dominant narratives of national identity that accompanied and followed the adoption of multicultural policies in the s, see Hooker, “Beloved Enemies.” . Asamblea Nacional de Nicaragua, “Sesión Constituyente,” Diario , no. , pp. –. . It should be noted that the prevailing understanding of “regional” music in Nicaragua is of a musical genre developed by mestizo peasants in the Central and Pacific regions of the country, never music from the Atlantic Coast.

Conclusion . Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other. . Kaqchikel is an indigenous Maya language spoken in Guatemala. . By this, I mean political communities organized on the basis of racial hierarchy and white supremacy, as most polities have been since the invention of the modern concept of race. I borrow the term from Charles Mills. See Mills, The Racial Contract. . See Dean, Solidarity of Strangers, and Hollinger, “From Identity to Solidarity.” . See, for example, Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, and Gilroy, Against Race. . The work of Charles Mills is especially noteworthy in this regard. See Mills, Blackness Visible, and Mills, The Racial Contract. . It is important to avoid falling into the trap of portraying “the other,” in this case Latin America, as the “emancipatory supplement” that can resolve all of the problems of the West. This problematic and all-too-tempting formulation is evident in some of the claims that are currently being made about the way Latino immigrants, with their different views of racial identity, are poised to reshape debates about race in the United States. The problem with such claims is that they assume that Latin American societies have “figured out” the race question

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Notes to Page 

and portray Latinos as some kind of panacea for racial problems in the United States. Obviously, neither of these assumptions can withstand serious scrutiny. In an odd twist, by obscuring the different forms taken by racism in Latin America, such arguments tend to occlude, rather than illuminate, the way modes of racial seeing and racial hierarchy are constituted differently from place to place. I thank Cristina Beltrán for drawing my attention to the first point. . Consider, by way of illustration, Samuel Huntington’s widely discussed claims regarding the potential effects of Mexican immigration on U.S. national identity. He claims that U.S. national identity was initially defined as white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant by the British settlers who founded the country but has since been broadened to include a definition of the nation based on certain political principles that are now thought to be essential components of U.S. national identity. Echoing a familiar account of U.S. national identity, Huntington also claims that there has been a continual progression throughout the country’s history away from ethnic, religious, and racial understandings of its national identity to the point that it is now understood largely in terms of certain key political principles. His central point, however, is that this so-called American creed is the product of a particular culture, the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers, which remained the bedrock of U.S. identity until the present moment, when it is under unprecedented attack. In his view. this Anglo-Protestant culture and the political principles derived from it are threatened today by the greater adherence to more particularistic collective identities based on race, ethnicity, and gender than a broader national identity in the United States (among other factors), particularly the influx of immigrants from Latin America, especially Mexico, who possess dual loyalties and resist integration into the dominant AngloProtestant culture. These developments, he argues, raise the possibility that instead of remaining a country with a single national language (English) and a core Anglo-Protestant culture, the United States will eventually be transformed by Mexican and Latin American immigration into two separate peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish), much like Canada and Quebec. Huntington’s claims have been the subject of widespread criticism, both from those who disagree with his empirical assertions about either the substance of U.S. national identity or the degree of assimilation of Latinos in general and Mexican Americans in particular and from those who (whether or not they concede his empirical claims) are disturbed by the political implications of his argument and accuse him of Anglo-Saxon nativism, among other things. Whatever the merits of his claims, I think they perfectly illustrate the way assumptions of cultural and racial homogeneity are smuggled back into what are said to be purely political conceptions of political community. See Huntington, Who Are We?

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Spinner, Jeff. The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Takagi, Dana Y. The Retreat from Race: Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, . Tamir, Yael. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, . Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, pp. –. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, . Tilley, Virginia Q. “New Help or New Hegemony? The Transnational Indigenous Peoples’ Movement and ‘Being Indian’ in El Salvador.” Journal of Latin American Studies , no.  (): –. Valls, Andrew. “The Libertarian Case for Affirmative Action.” Social Theory and Practice  (): –. Van Cott, Donna Lee. The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, . ———. “Latin America: Constitutional Reform and Ethnic Right.” Parliamentary Affairs , no.  (): –. Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition. Translated by Didier T. Jaén. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . Wade, Peter. Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . ———. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto, . Whelan, Frederick G. “Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem.” In J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds., Liberal Democracy, pp. –. New York: New York University Press, . Wolin, Sheldon S. “Democracy, Difference, and Re-Cognition.” Political Theory , no.  (): –. ———. “Injustice and Collective Memory.” Chapter  in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, . ———. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Expanded ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, . Yashar, Deborah. Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, . Young, Iris Marion. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, . ———. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, . ———. “A Multicultural Continuum: A Critique of Will Kymlicka’s Ethnic-Nation Dichotomy.” Constellations , no.  (): –.

Index affirmative action policies. See also race-consciousness in Brazil, n controversies over, , n Ronald Dworkin’s defense of, –, , –n as forward-looking, n making the case for, n U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding, –n affirmative remedies to injustice,  African American philosophy, –, n African Americans, U.S. See also Hurricane Katrina disaster and black solidarity, – racial discrimination against youths, n Jeff Spinner on achieving racial justice for, –n treatment of, in multiculturalism literature, , n Afro-descendants. See also African Americans in Central America, –, n collective rights of, , , – cooperation with indigenous groups, – as disadvantaged racial group,  groups of, on Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, –

in Latin America, –, n as national minorities, –,  perception of, as racial subjects, ,  self-government demands, –n Alcoff, Linda Martín, – Allen, Anita,  Allen, Danielle approach to problem of racialized solidarity, –,  on demands of democratic citizenship on racially subordinated groups,  on democracy and trust,  and effect of race on solidarity,  on interracial distrust, , , – on political friendship as model for solidarity, – Anderson, Benedict, n Arendt, Hannah, , , n Aristotle, –, n, n Asian American representation in higher education, in the U.S., –n Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua efforts to gain local control of, – ethnoracial groups of, –, n features of institutional design of multiculturalism in, –  constitutional debates and legislators from, 



Index

Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (continued) political power distribution in, , – regional governments of, – self-identification provision for costeños, – autonomy, individual,  autonomy, territorial, –, –n Autonomy Law, Nicaragua, , , ,  Bell, Derrick, –, –, n black immigrants, in Canada, n Black Nationalism,  black solidarity, – Brazil, minority group rights in,  British National Front, – Brown, Wendy, –, –n, n Brown v. Board of Education,  Brunkhorst, Hauke, ,  Canada. See multiculturalism theories, of Canada versus U.S. Canada, black immigrants in, n Canovan, Margaret,  Central America, –, –, n Chicanos, defined, – civil rights movement, U.S.,  Civil War, U.S., –n classification difficulties in multiculturalism, – Coast Power (Coast People Political Movement),  collective identities constitution and transformation of, n and individual identity,  and mutual obligations between citizens,  and solidarity, , , n split on question of, in two branches of multiculturalism literature,  subordinated racialized groups and, , n

collective injustice, –, , –, , – collective memory, –, –n. See also public memory collective rights of Afro-descendants, , , – for costeños, , , – culture preservation as basis for, – demands for, – distribution patterns in Latin America, ,  Will Kymlicka on types of, – and political solidarity,  Colombia, minority group rights in,  color blindness, , , –, –, –, n Communal Property Law, Atlantic Coast, Nicaragua,  contestation processes in addressing racialized solidarity, –, , – effect of, on political subjectivities of dominant groups,  and meaning of justice, – and transformation in ethicalpolitical perspectives, – contingent solidarities, , , –, ,  costeños. See also Afro-descendants; Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua; indigenous groups collective rights for, , , – disagreements among, on regional autonomy, – lack of adequate group representation in regional government, – and mestizo nationalism, – minority group rights for,  multiculturalism theories and rights of Afro-descendant, n political solidarity among, , – public opinion on distribution of power, – self-government demands by, –n

Index



self-identification provision for, – Creoles, in Nicaragua, , –, , –, , ,  cultural accommodation, resistance to, n cultural differences challenges of, to political solidarity,  fair accommodation of, –, –, –,  in justification for minority group rights,  limitations of multiculturalism based only on recognition of, – nonrecognition of,  and permanent group rights, n and racialized oppression in Nicaragua, – recognition of, by mestizo elites in Nicaragua,  cultural groups, –,  cultural identity and gender, in patriarchal societies, –n and ideal theory,  individual autonomy and,  and individual identity, , , , n lack of state recognition of,  cultural rights, ,  cultures and culture. See also race/culture bifurcation in multiculturalism literature; race/culture overlaps concept of,  dual assumptions about,  equal worth claims, – and liberal multiculturalism, , – national, – preservation of, as aim of liberal multiculturalists,  race in comparison to, –, –, n state neutrality toward, n

boundaries of, n friendship as metaphor for, – inclusive deliberative, –n racial, myths of, n, n reciprocity as basis of trust and solidarity in, –, , , n Western, racism in, n democratic citizenship, , , , n disadvantaged groups minority rights for,  overlapping categories of, in Latin America,  racial, Afro-descendants as,  solidarity between, – Iris Young on, , n discrimination, , , , n. See also racism double consciousness, n Du Bois, W. E. B., , n Dworkin, Ronald, –, –, , –n

Dean, Jodi, – democracies

fair coexistence of cultural groups, requirements for, , , –

Ecuador, minority group rights in,  embodied character of race, –,  English-as-official-language efforts, in the U.S., – ethical-historical perspectives, , , –, , ,  ethical orientation of political solidarity,  ethical-political perspectives changes in, and struggle for racial justice, –,  differences in, as racialized solidarity, –,  transformation of, through learning, , –, – ethical reciprocity,  ethical self-understanding, , –,  ethnocultural diversity, arguments for recognition of, – European colonialism, n



Index

Fanon, Frantz,  fellow feeling, and solidarity, ,  France, –, , n Fraser, Nancy, –, n friendship, as model for political solidarity, , –, ,  FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional), , , –, –n, n Garifunas, in Nicaragua, ,  Gellner, Ernest, n Gilroy, Paul, –, n, –n, n global protest movements, as universal form of solidarity,  group representation rights, –,  group solidarity,  group-specific rights. See minority group rights; permanent groupspecific rights Guatemala, minority group rights in,  Herrenvolk ethics, –, , , – heterogeneous territorial spaces, , , ,  higher education, Asian American representation in, U.S., –n Hispanics, U.S., – historically grounded theorizing, – homogeneity, and political solidarity, – Honduras, minority group rights in,  Huntington, Samuel, n Hurricane Katrina disaster aftermath of, n as example of racialized solidarity,  failure of citizenship in,  memory of, n racial divide in perceptions of, – racial injustice in, – and sacrifice of black citizens, –n

ideal theory, –, , , n identification, mutual, as requirement of solidarity, – identities and identity. See also collective identities individual, , , , , n national, n, n overlapping, – racial, –n, –n and solidarity, , n identity politics, –, –, n, –n, n Ignatieff, Michael, – immigrant ethnic groups, –, –, n immigration, illegal, – indigenous costeños. See costeños indigenous groups arguments for rights of, n of Atlantic Coast, Nicaragua, –, –, –n characteristics of, in Afrodescendants, – cooperation with Afro-descendants, – of Latin America, , –, , –,  (see also costeños) as national minorities, ,  population of, in Latin America, n re-Indianization of, n survival of, in th century in Nicaragua, n individual rights, preservation of societal cultures versus, – inequality, persistence of,  injustices, –, , , –, –. See also racial injustices institutional design of multiculturalism, –, , ,  integration, of minority groups in the U.S.,  interest-convergence strategy, – interracial distrust, , , , , –

Index

justice for African Americans, –n and collective memory,  color-blindness as, critique of,  multicultural, ,  poles of, in contemporary political life, – racial, –, –, , n social, , –n theories of, –, , – just societies, , , , , , n King, Martin Luther, Jr.,  Kymlicka, Will on classification of Hispanics and Latinos in the U.S., – on liberal culturalism, n on minority group rights, , –, n, n, n on nation building, – and permanent group-specific rights,  and recognition of collective identity, n Charles Taylor on, n on U.S. multiculturalism, n, n Latin America immigrant ethnic communities in, n indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in, –, –, n, n minority group rights in, –, –, –, –,  multiculturalism in, –, –, –n national ideologies of mestizaje in, n, n race/culture overlaps in, ,  racism in, –n as site of institutional innovation on minority group rights,  subordinated groups in, –



Latinos, U.S., –, n liberal culturalism, –, n liberal multiculturalism, –, , , – liberal nationalists, , n liberal theories of justice, , – liberal theory of minority rights, – loss, in democratic citizenship,  maroon communities, in Central America, – Mayangnas, in Nicaragua, , – McCarthy, Thomas, – memory, politics of, –, –n. See also collective memory; public memory mestizaje, national ideologies of, , –, , n, n mestizo multiculturalism, in Nicaragua,  mestizo nationalism, in Nicaragua, –, –, –, –n mestizos Afro-, in Central America,  of Atlantic Coast in Nicaragua,  changes in ethical-political perspectives of,  classification of,  as demographic majority in RAAN and RAAS, ,  and distribution of power on the Atlantic Coast, – FSLN and participation of, in regional politics, n and national ideologies of mestizaje, n recognition of cultural differences by,  redefinition of, in Nicaragua,  Mexican Americans, U.S., – Mexico, minority group rights in,  Mill, John Stuart, n Miller, David, , , –n Mills, Charles W., , –, –, –, –n



Index

minority group rights. See also collective rights; Latin America; permanent group-specific rights aims of, , – arguments for, –, –, –,  collective injustice as focus in, – criticisms of, –,  debate about, , –, n differences in, and effect on political solidarity,  and fair accommodation of cultural differences,  and individual agency versus cultural survival, – institutional design of, – internal restrictions versus external protections in, n Will Kymlicka on, –, n, n liberal nationalists’ view of, n limitations in theories of, – in Nicaragua, , –, ,  permanent, as requirement for fair coexistence,  of representation,  temporary, to redress past wrongs, –, – minority groups, typologies of, n Miskitus, in Nicaragua, –, –, –, , – mixed-race populations, and race-counting in Latin American censuses,  multiculturalism. See also Nicaraguan multiculturalism debates about, –, –, – institutional design of, –, , ,  in Latin America, – opponents of, and uniformity of rights,  reintegration of branches of, 

multiculturalism literature, , –, , ,  multiculturalism literature, bifurcation in emergence of,  as impediment to conceptualization of aims of, – between race and culture, –,  and racialized solidarity, – as trend, – multiculturalism theories absence of racialized solidarity in, , – African Americans in, n and analysis of racial and cultural justice,  benefits of reframing, to incorporate racialized solidarity,  of Canada versus U.S., , –, –, –, –, – Canadian, –, –, –, n dual assumptions on minority cultures in,  failures of,  Will Kymlicka on, in the U.S., n, n liberal culturalism as emerging consensus in, – limitations of, – and promotion of solidarity, – and questions of justice, – racial justice and, – on racially differentiated treatment,  and rights of Afro-descendant costeños, n multicultural justice, ,  mutual identification, as requirement of solidarity, – nation, defined, n national culture, – national homelands, for minority groups, versus heterogeneous spaces, 

Index

national identity, n, n national ideologies of mestizaje, in Latin America, , n, n nationality, –, n national minorities, –, –, ,  nation building, , –, n nation-building states, – nation-states, – New Orleans. See Hurricane Katrina disaster Nicaragua changes in ethical-political perspectives of mestizos,  institutional design of multiculturalism, – minority group rights in, , –,  multicultural model of, –, –, – multicultural rights in, – racialized oppression and cultural difference in, – regional music in, n Nicaraguan Constitution,  Nicaraguan multiculturalism limitations of, –,  and solidarity, –, –, –,  as variant of Latin American,  Paris, riots by North and West African immigrant youths in, – partial compliance theory,  permanent group-specific rights cultural differences and, n defense of, –, , n in liberal theories of justice, , – as requirement for fair coexistence, , , – temporary versus, – Peru, minority group rights in,  political association, conceptions of, ,  political communities



assumptions underlying, – defining aspect of, for subordinated racial groups,  features of, – political solidarity and, – presupposition of, as nation-state, – racial hierarchy as basis of,  racialized character of, – recognition of, as racial polity, ,  political friendship, as model for solidarity, , –, ,  political membership, ,  political obligation, conceptions of, ,  political solidarity. See also solidarity; racialized solidarity basis of, ,  as bond between citizens, – concept of,  in context of difference,  core problem of, for political theorists,  gaps in,  gaps in, of developed West,  key characteristics of,  key elements of,  meaning of term,  racial seeing as challenge to development of,  requirements for development of, –, – tension inherent in idea of, – as type of solidarity, – ways of arising,  political theorists and theorizing, , –, –,  polyethnic rights, – public memory. See also collective memory contestation of, –, –, , – and ethical self-understanding, –,  of Katrina disaster, n



Index

public memory (continued) selective remembrance in, –, ,  transformation in, of political community,  RAAN (Northern Autonomous Region of the Atlantic Coast), , , ,  RAAS (Southern Autonomous Region of the Atlantic Coast), , , ,  race biological understandings of,  classification issues of,  and culture, –, n effect of, on solidarity, , –, ,  embodied character of, –,  focus on ethics versus politics in contemporary thinking about,  liberal approach to,  in political philosophy,  in public policy, –n renunciation of, , –, n as social construct, – social ontology of,  in theories of liberal multiculturalists,  and trust,  in welfare reform debates, n race-consciousness. See also affirmative action policies Ronald Dworkin’s defense of, –, , –n and elimination of racial hierarchy,  in public policies, , n, –n, n in political communities, – theorists of, n race/culture bifurcation in multiculturalism literature, –, –, –, – race/culture overlaps, , , – racial contract, 

racial democracy, myths of, in Latin America, , n, n racial difference, , –, ,  racial equality, ,  racial gaps, in public opinion and solidarity, , , n racial groups, in multiculturalism literature,  racial hierarchy absence of notion of, in ethical self-understanding of dominant groups,  as basis of modern political communities,  challenges of, to political solidarity,  and minority group rights, –,  in the racial polity, – recognition of, as essential to confrontation of racialized solidarity, – racial identity, –n, –n racial injustices. See also racism against African American youths, n as contingent versus constitutive,  harms of, in multiculturalism literature,  harms of, misinterpreted, – as obstacle to solidarity,  persistence of, in twenty-first century,  remedies for, , , , – role in present racial inequality,  in Western liberal democracies, – racialized moral psychology,  racialized polities confrontation of reality of, , , n defining features of, – existence of, as revealed by contestation over minority group rights,  differences in ethical-historical perspectives of groups in, 

Index

failures of multiculturalism literature to reveal existence of,  failure to acknowledge U.S. as,  idea of, n as starting point for political solidarity, – visibility of, to dominant groups, –,  racialized solidarity addressing, through contestation of public memory, –, –, , – consequences of,  ethical and political dilemmas posed by,  factors in reproduction of, –n meaning of, ,  as the norm,  as obstacle to racial justice, , –, ,  ontological dimension of,  paradoxical impact of,  philosophical and political problems of, – political theorists’ assumptions about,  problems of, , –, , ,  and questions of multicultural justice,  renunciation of concept of race and problem of, – racialized thinking,  racial justice, , –, –, , , n racial seeing, –, , ,  racism. See also racial injustices debate about remedies for, in U.S., n in discussions of democratic citizenship, n divergent opinions about existence of, between groups,  in failure to cross social distances, – harms associated with, –



as institutionalized logic,  and Katrina disaster, –, – in Latin America, –n misunderstandings about nature of, ,  in modern political communities, –, , , –,  persistence of, n, n politics of,  portrayal of, as temporary aberration, , , , – John Rawls on, n as societal problem,  treatment of, as epiphenomenal, , – U.S. founders and, n view of, by dominant racial groups,  Ramas, in Nicaragua, , , , n Rawls, John, –, –, n, n reciprocity, as basis of trust and solidarity, –, , , n residential segregation, n Rorty, Richard, , –, –,  sacrifice, and trust, , , –n Sandinista government, Nicaragua, , , –, –n, n scope of solidarity, , – Scott, David,  segregation, in the U.S., n, n selective remembrance, , –, ,  self-determination, – self-government, , , –, , –n Shelby, Tommie, –, –, –,  slavery, in the U.S., n social amnesia, and solidarity,  social class differences, as problem of political solidarity,  social contract tradition, , n social identity, race as form of, 



Index

social justice schemes, implementation of, , –n societal culture, –, –n, n, n socioeconomic disparities, n sociopolitical order, reconceptualization of, – solidarity. See also political solidarity; racialized solidarity absence of, and improbability of achieving racial justice,  affective dimensions of, , – among strangers in democracies,  basis of, –, , , ,  concerns about, in context of difference, – contemporary theorists and topic of,  in debates about multiculturalism,  fellow feeling and, ,  homogeneity and, – and identity, , n minority group distinctions, and consequences for, – as multiple and overlapping, – in nondemocratic polities, n origins of concept, – and race, effect on, p. , , –, ,  reconception of nature of,  scope of, , – and shared collective identity,  sympathy versus, – task of,  tension at core of,  types of, – Somoza regime, of Nicaragua,  space, and solidarity, – Spinner, Jeff, , –n states, nation-building model, – structural discrimination, ,  subordinated racialized groups, , , n

Taylor, Charles, , , –, n, n, n territorial autonomy, –, –n trust as crucial to implementation of social justice schemes,  lack of, between races,  reciprocity as basis of, –, , , n and transcendence of racial hierarchy,  United States (U.S.). See also multiculturalism theories citizenship in, n Civil War, –n disadvantaged social groups in, n English-as-official-language efforts in, – incomplete recognition of, as racial polity, ,  race-consciousness in policies of, n racial divide in public opinion, – racism in, , , n, n, n remedies to racial injustices in, , n veil of ignorance, n, n Venezuela, minority group rights in,  West Indian immigrants, in Central America, –, n whiteness, making visible, , –, , –, –, –, – whitening, mestizaje and, n white supremacy, , , ,  Wolin, Sheldon, , –, ,  YATAMA, – Young, Iris, , , –, n, –n, n

Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities)

Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities)

Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities, and the Call for a Deep Democracy (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities)

Politics in the Pews: The Political Mobilization of Black Churches (The Politics of Race and Ethnicity)

The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality (Transgressing Boundaries)

Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb

Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought

Black Feminist Voices in Politics

In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Transgressing Boundaries)

Radicals Against Race: Black Activism and Cultural Politics

'There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Black Literature and Culture Series)

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race

Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City

Invisible politics: Black political behavior

An Alliance Of Women: Immigration And The Politics Of Race (Immigration and the Politics of Race)

Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics (Comparative Feminist Studies)

Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics (Comparative Feminist Studies)

Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

Race And British Electoral Politics

Race, Politics and Social Change

For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932

Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity

Communities Of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics

The Boundaries of Welfare: European Integration and the New Spatial Politics of Social Solidarity

Defeat of Solidarity: Anger And Politics In Postcommunist Europe

David Duke and the Politics of Race in the South

Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton (Contemporary Black History)

Ain't I A Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities)

Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities)

Double Trouble: Black Mayors, Black Communities, and the Call for a Deep Democracy (Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities)

Politics in the Pews: The Political Mobilization of Black Churches (The Politics of Race and Ethnicity)

The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality (Transgressing Boundaries)

Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb

Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought

Black Feminist Voices in Politics

In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Transgressing Boundaries)

Radicals Against Race: Black Activism and Cultural Politics

'There Ain't no Black in the Union Jack': The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Black Literature and Culture Series)

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race

Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City

Invisible politics: Black political behavior

An Alliance Of Women: Immigration And The Politics Of Race (Immigration and the Politics of Race)

Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics (Comparative Feminist Studies)

Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics (Comparative Feminist Studies)

Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

Race And British Electoral Politics

Race, Politics and Social Change

For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932

Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity

Communities Of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics

The Boundaries of Welfare: European Integration and the New Spatial Politics of Social Solidarity

Defeat of Solidarity: Anger And Politics In Postcommunist Europe

David Duke and the Politics of Race in the South

Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton (Contemporary Black History)

Ain't I A Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

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