Abstract

This project makes new contributions to race-based affirmative action discourse. I engage interdisciplinary work on racial redress and racial healing concerns , and explore the relationship of race-based affirmative action to these movements. My concern is with the possibility of organizing affirmative action to promote African American rectificatory and "white" redemptive interests in racial healing. These interests point to the possibility of a more racially just future. Normalized "white" participation in racial injustice includes repressive forgetting and other collective deceptions about America's racial history and performance of "white" identities amidst racialized commodification. I focus on two commodification practices, and resultant redress claims and obligations. The first is the commodification of what W. E. B. Du Bois marked as the "gift" of black labor . The second is participation in systems of "white" privilege undergirded by recognized property interests in "whiteness." At minimum, "white" participation occurs due to ascriptive racialization practices, embodied performance of racialized identities, and habituated assent to socially conditioned attitudes and beliefs . I look to the histories of racial redress programs and African American redress demands, and work within existing legal parameters to articulate complimentary new directions for race-based affirmative action to intersect recent redress and healing movements. Of particular importance is my discussion of interpersonal affirmative action practiced as "white" "gifts" of atonement. These "gifts" include developing new self-understandings and new attitudes toward redress responsibilities, promoting more just and healing ways to perform "white" identities and "white" culture-making, and supporting more thoroughgoing institutional redress. The project focuses on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, contemporary and historical African American philosophy, interdisciplinary Critical Race Theory and Critical White Studies, and emerging scholarship on collective redress and healing processes