Racial structural solidarity

Abstract

Effective political action against racial injustice requires a conception of solidarity based on the social and material reality of this form of injustice. I develop such a notion of solidarity by extending Iris Young’s notion of ‘gender as seriality’ to race. This notion of solidarity avoids the problems encountered by Shelby’s ‘common oppression view’ and Gooding-Williams’s non-foundational view. On Shelby’s ‘common oppression’ view, solidarity is based solely on the victims’ shared condition of oppression. According to Shelby, all victims of racial oppression can be reasonably expected to endorse a set of principles that will move them to common action. Gooding-Williams sheds doubt on the idea that such shared principles exist and defends instead a view of politics as action-in-concert, marked by reasonable disagreement, and a non-foundational view of solidarity constituted through the controversy of politics rather than given in virtue of pre-political commitments or interests. I argue that the problem with such a notion is that it is unable to link the material and social reality of the unjust structures to the forms of political action that would effectively transform social reality. My notion of ‘structural racial solidarity’ would avoid these problems.

Keywords:

• Race
• black solidarity
• black interests
• seriality
• structural injustice
• economic inequality

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Andrew Dilts, Avigail Ferdman, Michaele Ferguson, Bob Gooding-Williams, Waheed Hussain, Peggy Kohn, Avery Kolers and Daniel Silver, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for this journal for suggestions and discussions of the ideas in this paper.

Notes

1. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-reparations/424602/checked on May 5, 2016.

2. Seehttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/reparations-ta-nehisi-coates-cedric-johnson-bernie-sanders/, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/cedric-johnson-brian-jones-ta-nehisi-coates-reparations/, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-right-on-reparations/426,720/, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/why-we-write/459,909/, checked on May 5, 2016.

3. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/ta-nehisi-coates-case-for-reparations-bernie-sanders-racism/, p. 14.

4. Shelby (2005, p. 156) does, however, argue that the non-consensus issues should be supported because they can affect racism against everyone. See Gooding-Williams (2009, pp. 228–230) for a criticism of this argument.