Why liberals should value 'identity politics'

Daedalus

Volumn 135, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 32-39

  Jung, Courtney ^a  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33750709652     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/daed.2006.135.4.32     Document Type: Review

References (21)

1. Eleanor Holmes Norton, interviewed by Tavis Smiley, The Tavis Smiley Show, National Public Radio, August 25, 2003.
2. Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvarc University Press, 2002). Not all politically salient identities are emancipatory, progressive, or sympathetic to democrats. Not all people are seeking simply inclusion for a group that has been marginalized. Many Afrikaners in South Africa, for example, have a highly developed Afrikaner political identity that was organized, in the apartheid era, around maintaining privilege and the boundaries of existing exclusions. This example corroborates the underlying premise, however, that it is political contestation over exclusions and inclusions that produce political identities. Democracy implies that Afrikaners have as much right to try to maintain their privilege as others have to contest it. Critical liberalism insists on providing the grounds that will enable the others to contest it.
3. Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
4. Mahmoud Mamdani, Citizen and Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996);
5. Courtney Jung, Then I was Black (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000);
6. Courtney Jung, "The Politics of Indigenous Identity: Neoliberalism, Cultural Rights, and the Mexican Zapatistas," Social. Research 70 (2) (Summer 2003): 433-462.
7. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Random House, Inc., 1963).
8. Leroy Vail, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991);
9. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject;
10. Marx, Making Race and Nation.
11. Jung, Then I was Black.
12. John Rawls, "Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical," Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (3) (Summer 1985): 242.
13. John Rawls, Philosophy and Public Affairs Ibid., 243.
14. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (London: Oxford University Press, 1971);
15. Stephen Macedo, "Liberal Civic Education and Religious Fundamentalism: The Case of God Versus John Rawls?" in John Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
16. Brian Barry, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
17. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).
18. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
19. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon, eds., Democracy's Edges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
20. This is one of the problems Will Kymlicka runs into when he tries to discriminate among what democratic societies owe to immigrants and aboriginals. Having established that the state has a responsibility to protect cultural groups because individuals cannot process meaning without them, Kymlicka undercuts his subsequent claim that the state has different obligations toward different cultural groups. Will Kymlicka, ed., Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
21. Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).