Abstract

Despite the abolition of racial slavery and legal segregation, James Baldwin believed that African Americans were not recognized as free and equal citizens and that they would not be until Americans of all races examined the racial assumptions undergirding American society. His essays, which were written between the 1940s and the 1980s, provide a valuable guide for political theorists interested in the possibilities of democracy in a society where white supremacy has been discredited and yet the distinction between "white" and "black" citizens resists eradication. Reading Baldwin's essays against contemporary works of political theory, this dissertation investigates the gap between democratic principles and American practices. It defends a contextualist approach to political life and aims to show how attention to race consciousness and to the specificity of black citizens' experiences reveals the hollowness of claims for race-blind theorizing. ;In the first chapter, I explore Baldwin's critique of "innocence" as a way of discussing contemporary political theorists' relative silence on matters of race. The second chapter challenges assumptions about the construction of cultural identity that overlook the complicated relationship between "white" and "black" in American experiences. In Baldwin's hands, W. E. B. Du Bois's metaphor of double consciousness becomes a critical tool, revealing how white Americans' identities, no less than those of black Americans, are bound up with race consciousness. Silence about the significance of race in defining political identity, citizenship, is addressed in the third chapter through a discussion of the public and private power of racial images. Comparing Baldwin's essays to Michael Walzer's work on social criticism, the fourth chapter identifies ways in which African Americans' American history is neglected even by a theorist who takes historical identity seriously. The concluding chapter addresses the difficulties of articulating experiences that have been excluded from the dominant discourse. What joins these chapters is a suspicion that matters of race are excluded precisely where they expose the limits of theorists' capacity to justify political principles in the face of the countervailing evidence of practice