Three kinds of race-related solidarity

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 53-72

  Blum, Lawrence ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67349190453     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00366.x     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (20)

1. I am drawing my conception of solidarity partly from Tommie Shelby's discussion in We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005), especially pp. 67-71.
2. Bill Lawson, in a comment on a previous draft, points out that another possible scenario is that the Asian-American student experience a sense of vulnerability as a potential victim of a hate crime, but without feeling solidarity with the other Asian Americans. There are several distinct options here, and I mean only to bring out the difference between solidarity and community. In a previous paper, I have referred to the Asian-American students' form of group consciousness as an "anti-discrimination identity." See my "Ethnicity, Identity, Community," in Justice and Caring: The Search for Common Ground in Education, eds. M. Katz, N. Noddings, and K. Strike (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 127-45.
3. The perpetrators were a white supremacist group who also targeted Native Americans and African Americans in the town. Other forms of solidarity were proffered to those communities. For example, when hate messages were painted on a Native American family's home, many members of the community came to the home as a union group and painted over the hate messages. "Not in Our Town" (aired on PBS in December 1995).
4. Ewa Berberyusz, "Guilt by Neglect," in My Brother's Keeper? Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. Anthony Polonsky (New York: Routledge, 1990), 70.
5. Such out-group solidarity is directed toward a group that may be too demoralized to experience in-group solidarity. Perhaps this form of solidarity is akin to a use familiar in philosophical literature, in which one speaks of solidarity with the human race, or with human beings as such. Richard Rorty says, "At times like that of Auschwitz⋯ we want something that stands beyond history and institutions. What can there be except human solidarity, our recognition of one another's common humanity?" ("Solidarity," in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 189.)
6. Rorty goes on to argue that there is no such common humanity to be appealed to in morality. Martin Luther King, Jr. disagrees, and recognizes and affirms such solidarity: "A third ethical demand of integration is a recognition of the solidarity of the human family." ("The Ethical Demands for Integration," in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 121.
7. Shelby discusses mutual trust and loyalty as two features of solidarity, in We Who Are Dark, 69-70.
8. A Soldier's Story (1984, Norman Jewison director, screenplay by Charles Fuller, from his play, A Soldier's Play).
9. Rajini Srikanth, "'South Asian American': Powerful Solidarity or Mere Illusion," The Subcontinental 1, no. 1 (2003): 15-25. Srikanth often refers to what she is arguing for as a "coalition" rather than a solidarity group. That is an important distinction that I will discuss below, but the argument here does not depend on it.
10. Srikanth, "South Asian American," 19, 20.
11. Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
12. The goods of solidarity referred to here are non-instrumental but extrinsic (rather than intrinsic); they depend on the existence of the shared political goal. Shelby recognizes that political solidaristic relationships do not exhaust the forms of valuable bonds among members of an identity group, and that communal bonds can be valued non-instrumentally. However, he tends to see the alternative to political solidarity as social solidarity, which is close to what I mean by "community." (See Shelby, We Who Are Dark, 206f.) What seems absent in his account is the non-instrumental but extrinsic value of political solidaristic bonds.
13. Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
14. W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1984), 117,
15. Amy Gutmann, Identity in Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
16. William Julius Wilson, The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 83-85.
17. USAction (http://www.usaction.org)
18. and ACORN (http://www.acorn.org) are two well-known organizations that do not focus on racial issues as such but, by working on justice-related concerns related to low income (health care for all, opposing tax cuts for the wealthy, quality public schools, social security protection), disproportionately benefit blacks and Latinos and other racial minorities in their justice-related interests.
19. We need not here engage the issue of whether Latinos are rightly thought of as a racial group all things considered. (On that issue, see Linda Martín Alcoff, "Latinos and the Categories of Race," in Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006], chap. 10.) For the purposes of this paper, Latinos are sufficiently race-like to be grouped with blacks in this context.
20. bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 272.