| Review of: |
The Ethics of Identity by Anthony Appiah
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005
We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity by Tommie Shelby
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge/London, 2005
|
| Reviewed By: |
Ina Kerner |
| Reviewed in: |
Constellations |
| Date accepted online: |
14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 14, Issue 03, Pages 454-461 |
Book Reviews
If Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity and Tommie Shelby's We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity are symptoms of something, then that something might be the end of the long decade of the 1990s, a decade characterized by antagonistic theoretical camps engaged in numerous battles against each other. In political theory and philosophy, it was liberals vs. communitarians, universalism vs. particularism. In movement politics and the theory informing them, it was a variant of these disputes, mostly centered around the question of whether to engage, or not to engage in identity politics, and if so, how: deconstructionists charged proponents of identity politics with essentialism, who accused deconstructionists of selling out politics altogether. With regard to this ragged terrain, both Appiah and Shelby deliberately occupy middle grounds. Appiah, asking how we should best conceptualize the role of identity in liberal thought and politics and arguing for ethical individualism and rooted cosmopolitanism to these ends, positions himself between authenticity based claims to selfhood on the one hand and existentialist notions of the self on the other (17); between the extremes of hard pluralist approaches to group-rights and substantive individualism (72f.); as well as between nationalist patriotism and difference-blind versions of cosmopolitanism (237ff). Shelby, on the other hand, attempts to found a non-essentialist notion of black solidarity, a pragmatic form of black nationalism which is rather based in politics than in culture. Doing this, he positions himself between Black Power theory and criticisms of identity politics.
So while Appiah's goal is to enrich liberal ethics by taking identity into account, Shelby attempts to formulate a version of Black Nationalism that is compatible with political liberalism. Appiah argues with reference to authors pertaining to the liberal-thought-and-its-critics canon: John Stuart Mill, most of all, but also figures like Kymlicka, Raz and Taylor. Shelby, on the other hand, works his way through important texts of African-American Studies: Writings by Martin Delany and W.E.B. Du Bois primarily, as well as several contemporary authors like Gilroy and Reed. So how do both authors proceed in their argumentations? Let's have a look at Appiah first.
Appiah's Ethics of Identity is subdivided into six parts, addressing individuality, autonomy, identity, culture, "soul making", or the role that the state should play in our ethical development, as well as rooted cosmopolitanism. He describes his aims as an exploration of "the ethics of identity in our personal and political lives ...in an account that takes seriously Mill's notion of individuality" (xiv). Starting off from the perspective of "the individual engaged in making his or her life" (xvii), identities become important since, according to Appiah, we never make our lives as individuals beyond identities, but always as gendered and racialized subjects with a particular sexuality and nationality - as well as an open number of other identity features that might apply. Drawing on Mill, Appiah accordingly argues for an explicitly social notion of individuality. If we create our lives and thus our selves responding to others and to our environment, individuality cannot be understood as something pre-social and devoid of identitarian elements: in fact, according to Appiah collective identities provide scripts or narratives that we can use to shape our projects and tell our live stories; and because most people would wish for at least a certain sense of narrative unity - not the least because it provides, we can probably say, intelligibility - individuality cannot be detached from identity. And Appiah holds the same with regard to autonomy. He refutes the idea that autonomy and diversity were necessarily opposing notions, that following the rules and norms of a specific community was necessarily detrimental to the exercise of personal autonomy. Rather, he calls for diversity being recognized and incorporated in the way we think about autonomy; autonomy based liberalism needn't justify diverse forms of life, he writes, but it had to accommodate them and extend equal respect to their members - thereby being a precondition for the exercise of autonomy (cf. 42f.). We will see how Appiah imagines this to happen later - after looking a bit closer on how he talks about identity and diversity.
With regard to his conception of identity and identity formation in individuals, Appiah draws on his earlier work on "racial identities" - a conceptualization which stresses the importance of "racial" and other particular ascriptions for our identity formation but which also eagerly avoids any form of determinism. [1]Appiah holds that processes of identity formation require several elements and steps. First, there are social conceptions of groups of people - be it Anglo-Americans, women, gays, or Jews. Individuals are confronted with ascriptions of those conceptions, with being treated according to them - and therefore cannot but relate to them, identify with them; even though it is to a certain extent up to themselves to what extent and how they do this (cf. 66ff.). In the contemporary world, not all of these conceptions are positive or at least neutral - several of them are degrading and restricting. Thus, treatment with regard to these labels is often discriminatory; identification with them is not necessarily unproblematic either. Because according to Appiah social identity ascriptions can be both experienced as parameters and as limits, he holds that the mere recognition of identities is not a convincing theoretical and political solution - for processes of recognition might force us to actively identify with categorizations that we don't want to be predominant public features of our selves, like, for instance, our sexuality or our skin color (cf. 110). Likewise, Appiah is skeptical about the affirmation of cultural notions of group difference and of diversity trumping autonomy. Rooted in romantic thought, notions of culture and cultural belonging tend to have essentializing and homogenizing effects. Grouping people into distinct cultures can therefore be detrimental to a person's autonomy. Taking the perspective of the individual as his reference point, Appiah is not against identity politics and claims for recognition as such, and in fact never thinks of individuals devoid of an identity. Nevertheless he favors claims for the recognition as human and as bearer of inalienable rights over claims for the recognition of a specific cultural identity (cf. 118). And he is well aware that identity politics which attempt the advancement of the interests of its constituents as persons instead of as holders of a specific identity might call for the abolishment, or at least the transformation of the identities in question; "a movement for poor people does not seek to affirm their identity as poor people," he holds (141).
These clarifications being given, Appiah brings the state in. Instead of arguing that the state should grant specific rights to culturally defined groups, he calls for state intervention in what he coins "soul making," or "the process of interpretation through which each citizen develops an identity - and doing so with the aim of increasing her chances of living an ethically successful life" (164). He discusses three arenas of such soul making: first, the state and societal actors helping us increase our rationality, like in anti-smoking campaigns; second, antidiscrimination law and its identity effects and third education. The first of these arenas might appear a little irritating, at least when it is cross read with Michel Foucault's ideas on governmentality, which remind us that the state's interest in our souls and personal well-being can be interpreted as a form of power that we rather want to criticize than implement. [2]Appiah's considerations concerning antidiscrimination law are much more convincing: he holds that it helps changing derogatory social conceptions, which again would support processes of identity formation which are not detrimental to those engaged in them. With regard to education, it seems almost obvious that it ranges as a prominent arena of soul making. Irritatingly, Appiah wants most of it to happen within the family, though: "We believe that children should be raised primarily in families and that those families should be able to try to induct their children into the mores, identities, and traditions that the adult members of the family take as their own," he writes (201). Maybe one has to subscribe to feminism and its critique of the feminization of childcare and other aspects of the traditional sexual division of labor, or know too many dysfunctional families, to object to this. Appiah unfortunately doesn't.
But he makes good for it with his chapter on rooted cosmopolitanism, which ends the book and for which - hardly surprisingly, given his appreciation of the core family as location for moral education - he takes his father as a model, a man who "never saw a conflict between his cosmopolitan credo and the patriotism that quickened his spirit and defined his largest ambitions" (223). Challenging the predominant neglect of questions concerning the moral status of political strangers within political philosophy - "island locales are scènes à faire in normative political theory," he holds (219) - he posits "rooted cosmopolitanism" between extreme partiality on the one hand and extreme impartiality on the other, or between "the diversitarianism of the game warden, who ticks off the species in the park," and "simple universalism" (222). According to Appiah, caring about others who are not part of our own political order further implies that we not only integrate others into our reasoning, write and talk about them, but rather that we "have a way to talk to them" (222). Assuming that what we call "the West" should not be thought of as a homogenous entity, and that there are no reasons to assume that cultural diversity necessarily implies disagreement, he consequently argues for cross-cultural dialogue - as a shared search for truth and justice (cf. 250f.). With regard to this task, Appiah rejects the view that points of agreement must be found on the level of principle, of which the local would never be more than an application. Instead, he holds that we could identify points of agreement in local practices themselves, and he therefore is interested in "agreement about particulars rather than about universals" (257). Human rights, for instance, needn't be grounded in any particular metaphysics - many of them were already grounded in many metaphysics and could thus derive sustenance from a great number of sources (265). [3]
A perspective that attempts at combining group-centered and group-transcending elements is also to be found in Tommie Shelby's We Who are Dark, even though with a slightly different touch. Shelby's book is a plead for black political solidarity - while he holds that people in the U.S. who are classified as black should simultaneously cultivate bonds of unity "with progressive members of other racial groups" (Shelby 242). Drawing on Du Bois, Shelby conceptualizes black solidarity not as something that is supposed to spring from a shared cultural identity, but rather as "based strictly on the shared experience of racial oppression and a joint commitment to resist it" (11f.). He identifies five normative requirements for such a form of solidarity: first, identification with the group, both subjectively and publicly; second special concern, a disposition to assist and comfort those with whom one identifies, not precluding, by the way, a sense of moral duty to those outside the group; third, shared values or goals, fourth loyalty to the group and its ideals, and fifth, mutual trust (cf. 68ff.). Black solidarity according to Shelby is not an end in itself, but rather a political tool to help undoing black disadvantages. Of those, he identifies three variations: First, disadvantages that all black people face because of contemporary racism - racism here being conceptualized as an ideology, a set of misleading assumptions and beliefs, that foster structural relations of oppression. Second, he identifies structural disadvantages that stem from past injustices and racial discrimination, like racial wealth and education gaps which are at least partly belated effects of slavery and segregation. And third, disadvantages because of nonracial structural factors, which nevertheless have negative impacts on black people, like the decline of economic sectors that mostly rely on low-skilled workers. Like the second variation, the third affects not all, but some black people in the U.S. (cf. 141ff.). Shelby makes very clear that he does not intend to construct black Americans as a homogenous social group, but rather stresses their diversity. In this, his reasoning resonates with considerations that we know from Appiah; and in fact, in the preface to We Who are Dark Shelby gives ample tribute to the former. From Appiah, Shelby informs us, he has learned that the concept of race is a problematic foundation both for African American identity and for black political solidarity (cf. xi). This is why his conception of black solidarity is political rather than cultural. It is why, drawing on Delany, he distinguishes two distinct forms of black nationalism, of which he refutes the first and embraces the second. The first of these is race and identity based classical black nationalism, which defines black political autonomy as an intrinsic goal, and therefore follows a separatist logic. The second form, on the other hand, is what he calls "pragmatic nationalism," an integrationist, predominantly equality-oriented approach to black politics that sees black political organization rather as a means than as an end in itself.
But why then is it still blackness and not some non-racial trait like strong anti-racist convictions that Shelby starts off from? Shelby lists three distinct reasons. First he stresses that anti-black racism differs from other forms of racist injustice like anti-Semitism or the harassment of Arab Americans - and that shared experiences of specific forms of this wrong created the strongest motivation to act as well as the most enduring bonds among victims. Second, he holds that due to the black experience with racism in the U.S., many blacks would have difficulties trusting non-blacks with regard to antiracist politics. He therefore suggests the double strategy of black solidarity on the one hand, and coalitions with progressive people regardless of their racial classification on the other. And finally he holds that the shared experiences of racism and collective antiracist struggle were important elements of social bonds among blacks - this legacy should therefore be seen and used as a resource for hope, strength and mobilizing (cf. 242). Explicitly parting from Black Power theory, Shelby doesn't conclude, though, that black solidarity should lead to forms of political organization characterized by institutional autonomy. Instead, he calls for "trans-institutional black solidarity," which he explains as "a form of group unity that does not depend on organizational separatism but rather extends across social organizations within which blacks (could) participate" (137).
Appiah's and Shelby's books are dedicated to very different agendas, and their respective theorizing on the middle grounds differs, too: while Appiah attempts to stay as liberal as he reasonably can, taking identity questions seriously, Shelby remains as loyal to black nationalist thought as it seems necessary to him for political reasons, in other words as loyal as he must. What both texts have in common is that they demonstrate that assessing the terrain between camps is worthwhile. That we need this kind of theorizing is something that we should have learned from the battles of the long decade of the 1990s.
[1]Cf. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious. The Political Morality of Race (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
[2]Cf. Michel Foucault, "Afterword: The Subject and Power", in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow ed., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 208-226.
[3]For a similar view concerning Islamic values and German political culture, see Werner Schiffauer, Der Islam als civil religion. Eine deutsche Geschichte, in his Fremde in der Stadt (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1997): 50-70.
