How should black people, indeed any other group of people in general, respond when they are grouped together and oppressed on the basis of the contingency of their physical characteristics? Questions of liberation from oppression involve questions about the means to overcome that oppression. Throughout the ages of struggle against racial oppression, for example, collective black identity and solidarity has been one of the favourite responses and rallying call for racial justice and liberation. In South Africa this (...) response has recently emerged through the formation of a number of highly controversial groups such as: The Native Club, The African Forum, and The Forum for Black Journalists. Critics of these formations think that such black solidarity, divisive, irrational, morally objectionable and, above all, racist. This paper defends the emancipatory racial solidarity tradition, examplified by The Native Club and similar constituted organisations, against such serious charges and critiques mounted by contemporary leading thinkers on identity. The tools for such a defense are primarily derived from Jean-Paul Sartre's conception of group formation in his Critique Of Dialectical Reason. I argue that since anti-black racist consciousness always operates at the level of collectives, it is therefore impossible to fight such racism as an individual; that collective black solidarity is a necessary condition for racial emancipation. (shrink)

African American history resounds with calls for black unity. From abolitionist times through the Black Power movement, it was widely seen as a means of securing a full share of America's promised freedom and equality. Yet today, many believe that black solidarity is unnecessary, irrational, rooted in the illusion of "racial" difference, at odds with the goal of integration, and incompatible with liberal ideals and American democracy. A response to such critics, We Who Are Dark provides (...) the first extended philosophical defense of black political solidarity. Tommie Shelby argues that we can reject a biological idea of race and agree with many criticisms of identity politics yet still view black political solidarity as a needed emancipatory tool. In developing his defense of black solidarity, he draws on the history of black political thought, focusing on the canonical figures of Martin R. Delany and W. E. B. Du Bois, and he urges us to rethink many traditional conceptions of what black unity should entail. In this way, he contributes significantly to the larger effort to re-envision black politics and to modernize the objectives and strategies of black freedom struggles for the post-civil rights era. His book articulates a new African American political philosophy--one that rests firmly on anti-essentialist foundations and, at the same time, urges a commitment to defeating racism, to eliminating racial inequality, and to improving the opportunities of those racialized as "black.". (shrink)

In this essay I argue for the role of positive, community-based black identities in the creation and maintenance of black solidarity. I argue against Tommie Shelby’s attempts to reduce the notion of black identity as it relates to solidarity from something social or cultural to something entirely political—“thin” black identity. As an alternative, I propose a model for the relationship between “thin” and “thicker” identities based on Rawls’ contention that the stability of overlapping political (...) consensus isproduced by different groups’ adherence to, rather than denial of, a plurality of comprehensive doctrines. I also discuss the benefits of positive, community-based black identities in terms of “black love” and show why, even if not possessed by each and every black American, such identities are ultimately indispensible to any black solidarity project. (shrink)

The essay provides both an interpretation and a theoretical reconstruction of the political philosophy of Martin Delany, a mid-nineteenth-century radical abolitionist and one of the founders of the doctrine of black nationalism. It identifies two competing strands in Delany's social thought, “classical” nationalism and “pragmatic” nationalism, where each underwrites a different conception of the analytical and normative underpinnings of black political solidarity. It is argued that the pragmatic variant is the more cogent of the two and the (...) one to which Delany is most committed. It is also suggested that pragmatic nationalism can still serve usefully as a theoretical schema through which African Americans can understand and carry out their current political projects. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S89-S89, March‐April 2022.

Does intersectionality divide marginalized groups (e.g., women) along identity lines (e.g., race, class, and sexuality)? In response to the criticism that intersectional approaches to feminist and critical race theories lead to fragmentation and division, this paper notes that it relies on an ontological (mis)understanding of identity as a fixed entity. I argue against this notion of identity by engaging in a detailed case study of how Asian American women experience their Asian identity. The case study demonstrates that identity is lived (...) not as a pre-given static object but rather as a fluid and flexible process: what Asian identity means varies according to how this identity is related to the dynamics of power. I propose a tripartite taxonomy of identity-power relationships exhibited in Asian American women’s lives, in which identities are 1) constructed by and 2) used to reproduce power as oppression, as well as 3) used to build power as resistance. In particular, I explore Black and Asian feminist solidarities to show that those at the margins recreate their identities and, in doing so, build positive forms of power such as resistance and solidarity. The criticism that intersectionality leads to fragmentation does not hold, as it is grounded in a flawed notion of identity that fails to consider how identities are actually lived in their changing relationships to power—especially how marginalized groups, such as women of color, build solidarity to resist oppression by recreating their identities, rather than being fragmented into smaller and mutually exclusive subgroups. (shrink)

While political blackness seems to be making quite a comeback, this resurgence has also met with frustration and ambivalence. This paper aims to make sense of why this mobilising concept is accepted in some contemporary black feminist circles and outright rejected in others. It unpicks the diasporic dimensions of political blackness, reflecting on the issues that converged to foreground ‘black’ as the basis for mobilising women of African and Asian decent to engage in collective activism. Attention is given (...) to the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, a national network that linked black women's organisations and expressed and projected what the author defines as gendered political blackness. Interrogating its implications and the tendency towards ideological policing, the author argues that political blackness must be viewed as a politics of solidarity. If it is to maintain its viability, political blackness needs reframing, contextualising and further analysis. A retelling of its ideological underpinnings, and crucially the tensions and contradictions inherent in political blackness, offers a critical lens through which to rethink how we use it as a mobilising tactic in the present. (shrink)

An encyclopedia entry on "solidarity". Around the 1840’s the term was adopted in German and English, and was politicized, adopted to social sciences, and came to be used in a broader meaning of emotionally and normatively motivated readiness for mutual support, as in the slogan “one for all and all for one”. In rival meanings, the concept has been used in four main contexts: first, in the context of explaining or understanding the nature of social cohesion, social order, ‘groupness’ (...) or the ‘glue’ that keeps societies or groups together (social solidarity, group solidarity). Second,related to the ideal of fraternité, as a desirable feature of societies, political communities or welfare states (social solidarity, civic solidarity). Third, as an attitude or demand relevant in struggles for liberation and against injustice or oppression (political solidarity,workers’ solidarity, black solidarity, women’s solidarity). Fourth, as a universalistic ethical ideal of responsiveness to the human moral standing (human solidarity, moral solidarity, global solidarity). This entry focuses especially on the first use, and then briefly discusses the other three. (shrink)

Solidarity is a significant but poorly understood feature of political life. It is typically conceived, in “associative and teleological” terms, as working together for common political aims. But this conception misses the fact that solidarity requires individuals to will collective ends despite incompletely shared interests. Careful consideration of these elements reveals four “dynamics of solidarity”: its characteristic duties, the durability of commitments made in solidarity, the deference it involves, and its effects over time on agents’ habits (...) and capacities. In this article I describe these dynamics, first contrasting solidarity-given duties with duties of beneficence, justice, and loyalty. These contrasts lay bare the distinctive durability of solidarity, which differs from both the liberal’s commitment to justice and the loyalist’s commitment to the group. I then discuss deference, a feature of solidarity that has implications for individual engagement in political life more generally. Finally, I discuss the effects of solidarity on agents’ intellectual and physical capacities. I conclude by drawing out implications of these dynamics, challenging Tommie Shelby’s influential conception and justification of black solidarity and buttressing Philip Soper’s rejection of the Principle of Autonomy. (shrink)

Being aware of social injustices can cause existential and mental pain; comes with a burden; and may impede a flourishing life. However, I shall argue that this is not a reason to despair or to choose to be willfully ignorant. Rather, it’s a reason to conclude that being conscious is not enough. Rather, during times of oppression, resisters must also prioritize well-being. One way to do this is by extending what I refer to as solidarity care. I begin by (...) providing an account of solidarity care. I then offer pragmatic ways in which one can extend solidarity care to others. I conclude by responding to two possible worries. (shrink)

In recent years, politically active Latinx and Asian American Pacific Islander youth have addressed anti-Black racism within their own immigrant and refugee communities, engaged in protests against police violence, and expressed support for #SAYHERNAME. Reflecting the broader patterns of a new political generation and of progressive social movement leadership, women and nonbinary youth have disproportionately committed to inclusive fights for racial justice. In this essay, through two biographical examples, we highlight the role of grassroots youth organizing groups in training (...) their diverse young members to become effective allies, introducing them to intersectional frameworks that motivate solidarity across racial and ethnic boundaries. (shrink)

The article posits that philosophy’s visual bias has limited exploration of the ways in which sound, and the awareness of sound, offers an alternative framework for social change. It moves from sight to sound and from visual witnessing to sound-based wit(h)ness to illustrate the implications of sound as a form of political resistance. Combining insights from the work of Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Levinas with elements of the Black Vernacular tradition, it articulates the ways in which the blues, jazz (...) and work songs evoke distinctive sound-based wit(h)ness to perform philosophical interventions by destabilizing the status quo, offering a nonphenotypical account of black solidarity, and transforming what counts as work. (shrink)

This essay aims to demonstrate how attention to black political thought might expand and complicate our understanding of modern politics and the conceptualization of the political in contemporary political theory, and in modern politics more generally. Black political thought can be viewed as the attempt to develop a set of critical tools to help explain the political distinctiveness of black life-worlds and how this distinctiveness is structured by a series of relations between individual and community, self and (...) other, state and society, citizen and non-citizen, and national and multinational (or global) circumstances. Too often, black politics is exclusively considered as a form of minority group politics and phenomena reducible to empirical investigation and observation, rather than a set of practices with underlying conceptual, theoretical, and epistemological premises. If we understand race as a fundamentally relational concept, namely, an assumption of dynamic interaction between two or more putatively distinct groups, and racism as a political phenomena that is conditioned and articulated through politics, then taken together they provide the opportunity for reflection and consideration of how black peoples and subjects have conceptualized, created and engaged in politics, political communities, and their articulation. Race and racism, the modalities of political participation and, conversely, the modalities of political exclusion have been recurrent themes in black political thought. The distinctiveness of black political thought is symptomatic of the distinctive trajectories of black politics, which first emerged from spaces of exclusion in Western polities and colonies. The histories of black political and social movements provide evidence of the ways in which black subordination in Western societies and polities required the reconfiguration of the actual boundaries between the public and private, the political and the social. Race and racism, the distinction between identity and identification, black solidarities, and the relationship between history, context, and politics and the political are themes central to black political thought. (shrink)

What makes #BlackLivesMatter unique is the implication that it isn’t only some black lives that matter, that is, not only the most commonly referenced male lives. Rather, the hashtag suggests that all black lives matter, including queer, trans, disabled, and female. This movement includes all those black lives who have been marginalized within the black liberation tradition, as well as in greater society. The movement highlights the ways in which black people have been traditionally deprived (...) of dignity and human rights. State racism and state violence are sustained together. The law creates a “subrace” out of those whom white society fears and holds in contempt. This leaves not only black Americans but all citizens vulnerable. A way to fight this form of racism is not only to create a solidarity among the oppressed members of the subrace but to create a solidarity with all members, in “vulnerable solidarity.”. (shrink)

This essay places Paulo Freire in dialogue with a Black Radical Tradition (BRT) in three distinct yet interrelated ways. First, the paper situates the significance of Cedric’s Robinson’s articulation of a BRT while exploring how contemporary scholars are troubling his disputatious relationship with Marxist social thought. Second, the paper foregrounds Freire’s modest contributions to a BRT in his anticolonial literacy campaigns in Guinea Bissau, Africa. Extending the principles of ‘dialogical cultural action’ in the context of African struggle that Freire (...) documented in the letters compiled in Pedagogy in Process, a robust theorization of solidarity comes into sharper view. Third, the paper calls for further reinvention of Freire pointing to the ways his cogent analysis can be augmented by other racialized groups and radical traditions in solidarity with Black struggle to more explicitly confront the inherent racism and anti-Blackness fundamental to global capitalism. (shrink)

Solidarity-the reciprocal relations of trust and obligation between citizens that are essential for a thriving polity-is a basic goal of all political communities. Yet it is extremely difficult to achieve, especially in multiracial societies. In an era of increasing global migration and democratization, that issue is more pressing than perhaps ever before. In the past few decades, racial diversity and the problems of justice that often accompany it have risen dramatically throughout the world. It features prominently nearly everywhere: from (...) the United States, where it has been a perennial social and political problem, to Europe, which has experienced an unprecedented influx of Muslim and African immigrants, to Latin America, where the rise of vocal black and indigenous movements has brought the question to the fore. Political theorists have long wrestled with the topic of political solidarity, but they have not had much to say about the impact of race on such solidarity, except to claim that what is necessary is to move beyond race. The prevailing approach has been: How can a multicultural and multiracial polity, with all of the different allegiances inherent in it, be transformed into a unified, liberal one? Juliet Hooker flips this question around. In multiracial and multicultural societies, she argues, the practice of political solidarity has been indelibly shaped by the social fact of race. The starting point should thus be the existence of racialized solidarity itself: How can we create political solidarity when racial and cultural diversity are more or less permanent? Unlike the tendency to claim that the best way to deal with the problem of racism is to abandon the concept of race altogether, Hooker stresses the importance of coming to terms with racial injustice, and explores the role that it plays in both the United States and Latin America. Coming to terms with the lasting power of racial identity, she contends, is the starting point for any political project attempting to achieve solidarity. (shrink)

This study examines the case of community resource mobilization within the context of a farmers market incentive program in Washington D.C., USA to illustrate the ways in which providing opportunities for people impacted by food inequities to develop and lead programming can help to promote food access. Through an analysis of interviews with 36 participants in the Produce Plus program, some of whom also served as paid staff and volunteers with the program, this study examines the ways that group-level social (...) interactions among program participants helped to ensure the program was accessible and accountable to the primarily Black communities that it serves. Specifically, we explore a particular set of social interactions, which we collectively term social solidarity, as a community-level form of social infrastructure that program volunteers and participants mobilized to support access to fresh, local food in their communities. We also examine the elements of the Produce Plus program that contributed to the flow of social solidarity within the program, providing insight into the ways in which the structure of food access programs can serve as a social conduit to facilitate or hinder the mobilization of community cultural resources like social solidarity. (shrink)

Starting with Richard Wright’s controversial address to the Paris Congress of Black Writers and Authors of 1956, this article explores Wright’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s focus on existential freedom as key to an emancipatory political subjectivity. Both Wright and Beauvoir reject the content of identity formed via oppression, seeking to move beyond categories of culture, religion, femininity and blackness. They argue that solidarity can be better forged across identity groups by nurturing a political subjectivity that recognizes the historical (...) and political impact of embodied identities but is driven by ontological freedom expressed in collective action and dissociation with normative categories. Putting Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices in conversation with Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, we can more fully appreciate Wright’s political writing after he left the United States. Here we see the potential for solidarity across borders, and with women and other oppressed peoples. Most important, we witness these two thinkers imagining political invocations that do not reinforce political meanings given to bodies, thus allowing new forms of solidarity and collective action to emerge. (shrink)

In past work, Habermas has claimed that justice and solidarity stand in a complementary relationship—that ‘ethical’ relations of solidarity are the ‘reverse side’ of justice. Yet in a recent address to the World Congress of Philosophy, he rejects this idea. This paper argues against this rejection. After explaining the idea, arguing for its centrality to Habermas' thought, and evaluating Habermas' scant reflections on this major transformation, I argue that his rejection of the idea is a result of a (...) newfound skepticism about the power of secular reason, and should thus be understood in terms of his corresponding turn to religious traditions as alternative sources of solidarity. I argue against this ‘religious turn’ by developing an alternative advocated by Habermas himself in earlier reflections—attention to real sociopolitical movements. In particular, I analyze feminist and black liberation movements to demonstrate that Habermas' pessimism about secular sources of justice-producing solidarity is unwarranted, and that, while ‘postsecular’ sources may provide one avenue for actionable solidarity, they are not the only one. I conclude by identifying a conceptual commonality in these two alternatives: an inclusive conception of what it means to be human. (shrink)

Identity politics is often perceived as that which cannot serve as a force for just societal change since it is thought to undermine the possibility of crossing differences and engendering solidarity. Such an endeavor is seen to be especially important for addressing the racial polarization and cultural divisions that are evidenced in the United States today. However, such critiques against identity politics jettison any deep understanding or recognition of the structures and orientations that sustain the call to racial identity (...) politics as found, for example, in the Black Lives Matter movement. In this article, I examine what those structures and orientations are, and explore the ways in which such an examination may reframe our understanding of what it is that might be required for the cultivation of solidarity. I argue that what gets lost or remains unaddressed in the way the critiques against identity politics are currently framed, is the reality of what I call the mobilization of the aesthetics of racialization. It is only by foregrounding how we come to our identities through the habituated movements, patterns, orientations and capacities called out of our bodies in relation to spaces, places, other bodies and things, that can we begin to understand what sustains the call toward racial identity politics. (shrink)

White supremacy dominates the academy and political discussions. It first consists of conflating the geography of the West (where Black, Indigenous, and People of Color—BIPOC—are to be found) with a specific colonizing tradition originating in ancient Greek thought—call this tradition the West. Secondly, and more profoundly, it consists in treating this tradition as the frame for the study of every other intellectual tradition, which since the Romans it brands as religion. The political function of this marginalization of BIPOC philosophy (...) is to shield Western colonialism from moral philosophical criticism. The mechanism of colonialism is interpretation— explanation in terms of propositional attitudes, like belief. Not only is this a basic commitment of the Western tradition owing to its foundational linguistic account of thought (LAT), the South Asian moral philosophy of Yoga shows interpretation to be the essence of irresponsibility: it undermines the possibilities of choice as it is antilogical and is the mechanism of oppression. In contrast, Yoga, a fourth basic ethical theory (in addition to virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) identifies an alternate metaethical choice as the essence of moral responsibility: explication—understanding in terms of inferential relationships. Yoga is not only the locus classicus for a nondiscriminatory, antioppressive approach to moral standing: it constitutes reason-based, (both ideal and nonideal) normative practices of solidarity with people (including nonhumans and celestial bodies like the Earth). This paper explores the mutually exclusive disjunction between interpretation and explication, the historical impact of these methodologies, and the colonization by the West of philosophy in the game of Publish or Perish. Shaking this off is as easy as returning to the philosophically indigenous practice of explication. (shrink)

White supremacy dominates the academy and political discussions. It first consists of conflating the geography of the West (where Black, Indigenous, and People of Color—BIPOC—are to be found) with a specific colonizing tradition originating in ancient Greek thought—call this tradition the West. Secondly, and more profoundly, it consists in treating this tradition as the frame for the study of every other intellectual tradition, which since the Romans it brands as religion. The political function of this marginalization of BIPOC philosophy (...) is to shield Western colonialism from moral philosophical criticism. The mechanism of colonialism is interpretation—explanation in terms of propositional attitudes, like belief. Not only is this a basic commitment of the Western tradition owing to its foundational linguistic account of thought (LAT), the South Asian moral philosophy of Yoga shows interpretation to be the essence of irresponsibility: it undermines the possibilities of choice as it is antilogical and is the mechanism of oppression. In contrast, Yoga, a fourth basic ethical theory (in addition to virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) identifies an alternate metaethical choice as the essence of moral responsibility: explication—understanding in terms of inferential relationships. Yoga is not only the locus classicus for a nondiscriminatory, antioppressive approach to moral standing: it constitutes reason-based, (both ideal and nonideal) normative practices of solidarity with people (including nonhumans and celestial bodies like the Earth). This paper explores the mutually exclusive disjunction between interpretation and explication, the historical impact of these methodologies, and the colonization by the West of philosophy in the game of Publish or Perish. Shaking this off is as easy as returning to the philosophically indigenous practice of explication. (shrink)

To flesh out love's potential for transformative imaginaries and politics, it is important to explore earlier examples of Black feminist theorizing on love. In this spirit, I examine Anna Julia Cooper, an early Black feminist educator, intellectual, and activist whose work is generally overlooked in feminist and anti-racist thinking on love, affect, and social change. Contesting narrow readings of Cooper, I first explore how critics might engage in more “loving” approaches to reading her work. I then delineate some (...) of her contributions to a Black feminist love-politics. In unmasking dominance enacted in love's name, Cooper analyzes romantic love, marriage, and gendered care-work in the domestic sphere. Using an intersectional lens, she contests gendered-raced hierarchies and links normative masculinity and femininity with white supremacy, xenophobia, and imperial rule. Cooper also extolls the possibilities of love rooted in nonhierarchical, intersubjective cooperation: such loving has the potential to transform interpersonal relations and foster broad collaborative action to eradicate inequality, locally and globally. Structural subjection, internalized oppression, and colonized imaginations have no part in Cooper's reciprocal, political love-force. Unfortunately, her ideas about transforming gender relations, contesting racism, challenging imperialism, seeking decolonized selves, and pursuing solidarity as a loving political orientation remain relatively unknown. (shrink)

To flesh out love's potential for transformative imaginaries and politics, it is important to explore earlier examples of Black feminist theorizing on love. In this spirit, I examine Anna Julia Cooper, an early Black feminist educator, intellectual, and activist whose work is generally overlooked in feminist and anti-racist thinking on love, affect, and social change. Contesting narrow readings of Cooper, I first explore how critics might engage in more “loving” approaches to reading her work. I then delineate some (...) of her contributions to a Black feminist love-politics. In unmasking dominance enacted in love's name, Cooper analyzes romantic love, marriage, and gendered care-work in the domestic sphere. Using an intersectional lens, she contests gendered-raced hierarchies and links normative masculinity and femininity with white supremacy, xenophobia, and imperial rule. Cooper also extolls the possibilities of love rooted in nonhierarchical, intersubjective cooperation: such loving has the potential to transform interpersonal relations and foster broad collaborative action to eradicate inequality, locally and globally. Structural subjection, internalized oppression, and colonized imaginations have no part in Cooper's reciprocal, political love-force. Unfortunately, her ideas about transforming gender relations, contesting racism, challenging imperialism, seeking decolonized selves, and pursuing solidarity as a loving political orientation remain relatively unknown. (shrink)

The essay provides both an interpretation and a theoretical reconstruction of the political philosophy of Martin Delany, a mid-nineteenth-century radical abolitionist and one of the founders of the doctrine of black nationalism. It identifies two competing strands in Delany's social thought, "classical" nationalism and "pragmatic" nationalism, where each underwrites a different conception of the analytical and normative underpinnings of black political solidarity. It is argued that the pragmatic variant is the more cogent of the two and the (...) one to which Delany is most committed. It is also suggested that pragmatic nationalism can still serve usefully as a theoretical schema through which African Americans can understand and carry out their current political projects. (shrink)

This article draws on recent transnational protests against police brutality to advance an understanding of anti-racist solidarity that aims to improve over Mara Marin’s ‘structural solidarity’ view. On Marin’s view, anti-racist solidarity is grounded in the racial structure. But Marin forgets that racial domination exerts a segregative influence on different groups, so that whites and middle-class blacks tend not to frequent the social milieux that would help them develop a sense of solidarity with working-class blacks. To (...) address this problem, the article hypothesises that the conditions for anti-racist solidarity are not inherent in the racial structure but created by social movements, as exemplified by Black Lives Matter: to the extent that white and middle-class black participants in the George Floyd protests experienced the racist police brutality they were denouncing on behalf of the black working class, these protests functioned as non-segregated milieux that could ground the solidarity of the former with the latter at the national and transnational levels. (shrink)

In his review of Eddie Glaude's Exodus! “Politics, Racial Solidarity, Exodus!” Robert Gooding-Williams argues that, despite sympathizing with Glaude's conception of racial solidarity, he finds that “Glaude's approach to racial solidarity is not pragmatic enough, precisely because the myth of the essential black subject still haunts it, its claims to the contrary notwithstanding.” This article challenges Gooding-Williams's reading of Exodus!, demonstrating that despite his grasp of Glaude's conceptual map, he misses precisely what is at stake for (...) Glaude's pragmatic notion of racial solidarity. Understanding what is at stake for Glaude's conception of racial solidarity, one sees how the subtlety of his pragmatism actually resists any lingering essentialism. However, this article concludes by showing that despite Glaude's evasion of Gooding-Williams's charge, it is his emphasis on the Deweyan language of “problem solving” that courts the criticism in the first place. To circumvent the potential for misunderstanding, this article emphasizes a “negotiation of social practices” as an alternative to Glaude's emphasis on the language of “problem solving activity.”. (shrink)

In our emerging climate future, devastation will not land evenly. “Climate apartheid” names a world where the rich insulate themselves from its most catastrophic effects, while the global poor stand increasingly subject to rising seas, failing crops, intensifying weather events (floods, hurricanes, wildfires) and thus to the necessity of movement: some project a billion climate refugees by 2050. Yet analyses often fail to link climate apartheid to the existing systems mobilized to execute it—policing, prisons, borders—and so fail to connect climate (...) politics to enduring racialized projects of carceral control, as well as to Black, Native, and Latinx struggles against them. A key task is to develop capacious conceptual frameworks for understanding how religious actors are addressing the deep entanglements of political ecology and racial violence. This paper pursues that task in four parts. Part 1 introduces climate apartheid and proposes “cross-border solidarity” as an organizing concept for response, while underscoring that solidarity's chief virtue—its being already in use across diverse moral communities—is also what requires rigorous specification. What is the shape of “solidarity” amid climate futures? Parts 2 and 3 critique two frameworks ethicists might employ in facing that question: anthropocene discourse obscures race, while mestizaje discourse addresses race but risks reproducing its deepest logics. Part 4 proposes an alternative I will call cimarronaje. Of Taíno-Arawak and Spanish origin, the word refers to the historical experience, across slaveholding societies of the Americas, whereby enslaved African people fled plantations, escaped to surrounding hills and swamps, and reimagined forms of life with Indigenous communities, forged new ecologies together and, in the shadows of colonial empire, prefigured the theory and practices of cross-border solidarity we need today. (shrink)

Unusual among Western philosophers, Schopenhauer explicitly drew on Hindu and especially Buddhist traditions inhis moral philosophy. He saw plurality, especially the plurality of human persons, as a kind of illusion; in reality all is one, and compassionate acts express an implicit recognition of this oneness. Max Scheler retains the transcendence of self aspect of compassion but emphasizes that the subject must have a clear, lived sense of herself as a distinct individual in order for that transcendence to take place properly. (...) This feature is absent in the Buddhist tradition. Feminist philosophers of the early second wave built on this insight (only occasionally drawing it from Scheler) to recognize ways women are often not socialized to develop this distinctive sense of self, therefore harming their ability to engage in compassion and other forms of care for others. Iris Murdoch adds a Freudian-inspired (though Freud influenced Scheler also) pessimism about the ability of humans to keep their identities sufficiently distinct from the other to allow a clear view of the other, and thus real care and help to the other to take place. But in her later work, Murdoch explicitly recognizes and draws on the Buddhist tradition of oneness and transcendence of the self. Group solidarities can partake of aspects of Buddhist oneness and self-transcendence, for example the sense of fellowship in a social justice movement in which Blacks draw on a shared identity to experience connection, compassion, empathy, and solidarity with one another. But social justice movements also allow for a solidarity across racial lines, grounded in the shared commitment to justice, including justice for one of the groups in the solidarity community. (All these issues are powerfully portrayed in the 2014 film, Selma.) None of these solidarities, however, express the universalistic dimension of Buddhist oneness. (shrink)

Recent studies on non-dominant or minority groups have begun to look at how their members reconstruct resistance, sculpt a positive identity for themselves and engage in solidarity formation for group empowerment. The present study contributes to this growing scholarship by examining the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement’s use of Twitter to promote an emancipatory agenda for Black communities/people. Based on the tweets produced by the BLM movement, I analyze various discursive mechanisms utilized by the movement to resist (...) institutional oppression and systemic racism with vehemence, while advocating freedom, liberation and justice for Black people. Three discursive strategies were identified: (1) critiquing oppressive institutions and systemic racism, (2) denouncing white supremacy and redefining demeaning racial narratives and (3) calling out racist attitudes and commending people who oppose such behavior. Through these strategies, the BLM movement amplifies the voice(s) of Black people and moves issues concerning their development, progress and welfare from the margins to the center. The paper illustrates the agentive power of discourse to stimulate action towards social change. (shrink)

What is freedom without the ability to wonder and imagine new ways of being in the world? This question is at the heart of the works and contributions of Frantz Fanon and James H. Cone in their responses to the colonialities operating in the Black world, and the appropriate response to such colonialities through the medium of strategic alliances and a theological imagination of what it means to be human that is oriented towards blackness itself. However, since blackness is (...) a production of white gaze, it is intended to embody pathologies of dehumanisation. Fanon and Cone do not shy away from shedding light on these pathologies. However, rather than slipping into the realm of nihilism, a pneumatological turn is articulated that allows for blackness to be a medium of encountering the gift of authentic humanity that is in solidarity with God's epiphany of life in the world. Fanon's and Cone's centring of rebellion as the pathway for an embrace of an anthropology of freedom is retrieved as a way of understanding the link between hope and a rich reading of anthropology of freedom that blackness evokes. (shrink)

Revisiting James Baldwin's under-engaged contribution to heated debates over Black (Christian)-(white) Jewish relations in New York City in the late 1960s, “Blacks Are Anti-Semitic Because They Are Anti-White,” in what follows I explore the surprising ways in which two European Jewish women political theorists, Emma Goldman and Hannah Arendt, otherwise celebrated for their rigorous sobriety, enacted the very blindness that framed their Jewishness as a form of whiteness worthy of Baldwin's criticism. I close by considering the ways of envisioning (...) being Jewish that we might build from Baldwin's reflections, ones that would, in enlarging the distance of Jewishness from whiteness, invite transformative brands of solidarity rather than specifically black forms of anti-Semitism. Ironically, this path would have entailed American Jews' becoming more fully themselves rather than indexing their advancement or flourishing through a white, Christian index. Put slightly differently, this essay turns backward to look forward, aiming to understand what I consider missed opportunities worth lamenting so we might proceed differently. (shrink)

The world of work is undergoing major surgery. Future economic historians may yet describe the cumulative impact of globalisation, technological change and new work patterns that are currently shaking the OECD countries as an economic revolution similar in magnitude and significance to the industrial revolution of the 19th century. There is certainly plenty of pain around, but scattered in so many countries and cultures that this late 20th century revolution will probably prove to have been beyond the capacity of any (...) Charles Dickens, or of a Marx and Engels, to chronicle.From the perspective of the European Union, the pain is clearly visible in two areas: a growing insecurity and stress attending many who are at work in the Union, particularly in occupations and employments where earnings have risen a lot; and the level and persistence of long-term unemployment together with the growing number of discouraged workers, primarily men, who are opting out of the labour force altogether. Not visible within the EU, but no less real of course, is the impact on workers in other countries when the Union adopts protectionist or aggressive trading policies.[...]CONCLUSION :The dislocation that is evident throughout the world of work today, and the insecurity and pain it is causing, is influencing political life in the European Union. What Americans would call the ‘feel bad’ factor tempts some to support protectionist measures, abrupt limits to immigration, cuts in taxation and social services, workfare or — if they are outsiders — abuse of the social welfare system and black market activity. It is important to appreciate that very few people are escaping; the upheavals in the world of work are affecting insiders and outsiders. Making common cause requires forging a fresh consensus on fundamental values of which two key ones are the nature of a business enterprise and the place of a job in a person’s life. These are the key areas where social innovation must match the apparently ceasless innovations on the part of technology. They may, hopefully, prove capable of redirecting the process of technological change itself. (shrink)

Police killings of unarmed Black people have ignited a national and international response unlike any in decades. But differing from their civil rights-oriented predecessors, today’s activists do not think that the institutions and values of liberal democracy can eradicate structural racism. They draw instead on a Black radical tradition that, Terrence L. Johnson argues, derives its force from its unacknowledged ethical and religious dimensions. We Testify with Our Lives traces Black religion’s sustained influence from SNCC to the (...) present, reconstructing a radical lived ethics of freedom and justice. Johnson demonstrates that Black Power fundamentally contests liberalism’s abstract understanding of democracy, calling instead for new embodied frameworks to achieve human flourishing and dignity. Black bodies represent the primary form of resistance against violent and oppressive regimes of white supremacy and exploitation, and the individual and collective struggles of Black life bear witness to the dogged determination to cultivate beauty, rage, and joy. Considering the writings of Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin, We Testify with Our Lives makes its case through a new narrative of the evolution of Black radicalism from the civil rights movement through the Movement for Black Lives. It forges new insights into Black Power’s vital contributions to debates on ethics, transnational politics, democracy, political solidarity, and freedom—and its potent resources for the ongoing struggle to build democratic possibilities for all. (shrink)

The intrusive state has long viewed women as fetal containers. The Dobbs decision goes further, essentially causing women to vanish when fetuses are abstracted from their relationships to pregnant persons. The ways in which women are first controlled and then made invisible are clearly connected with the move from obedience to omission that has historically affected black Americans. When personal decisionmaking and participation in democracy are regarded as threats, those threatened restrict decisional freedom and political power, deepening structural injustices (...) relating to sex, race, and poverty. Fear of Dobbs has health effects on conditions unrelated to pregnancy and connects with erasures of human value that are not health-related. We reaffirm solidarity as a countering influence. Taking account of the richly relational context in which issues like abortion and political representation arise should lead to better, more meaningful policies, making so many people impossible to unsee. (shrink)

Taking its direction from references to Black and Indigenous struggles present in Leonard Harris’ oeuvre, this chapter turns to politicized acts of resistance among Black and Indigenous communities. More specifically, the essay traces the functions of cultural pluralism, value relativism, and representative heuristics within solidarity work that enact logics of resistance to settler colonization and anti-Black racism, among other forms of oppression. Through this analysis, we see that Harris’ views about insurrection and normativity entail that both (...) oppression and resistance are the result of multiplicitous forms of agency. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis, race, and racism -- From psychoanalysis to political theory -- Reparative group leadership -- Conflict and authenticity -- Bonding and solidarity -- Coalitions and reparative politics.

Frederick Douglass (1817?–1875) is a monumental American figure. As a runaway slave and leading black thinker, speaker, and writer in the abolitionist movement and during Reconstruction and its tragic collapse, his legacy in American history is singular. His ideals and scorching criticisms have marked American political thought about democracy, religion, race, racism, liberty, and equality. American political parties claim him, especially the Republican Party, with which he has an early connection and which has used his figure as cover for (...) their less than egalitarian projects, as do different ideological camps. One can find accounts of Douglass as an existentialist, revolutionary, proto-libertarian, liberal, civic republican thinker. His North Star continues to guide those who welcome its light, although it may lead them down different political-ideological paths.In all of this, one can imagine that those not familiar with the details of Douglass’s narratives and deeds might, in the context of all of that national hagiography, lose track of the fact that he was a black man. Frederick Douglass was a black man born into slavery, survived that brutal regime for twenty-one years, and then escaped and became a principal leader of the American abolition movement and leading black political thinker. Shortly after escaping slavery, he wrote his first famous autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and subsequently two more, in addition to volumes of speeches, articles, and a novel. It is as if his monumentality, like marble, alabaster, or bronze—the stuff of civic memorials—would obscure that irreducible fact in its grand monotones.Nick Brommell’s The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass reminds readers that that irreducible fact is a nontrivial, essential element of Douglass’s life and work. Bromell argues that this includes the political theory, a product of Douglass’s black political philosophy that runs through it all. He contends that Douglass argued for an inclusive conception of personhood and active citizenship, which America’s founding public philosophy, distorted by white supremacy, purposefully did not. Its elements include a defense of the moral personhood of blacks and their full and equal citizenship and a view of political community enlivened by group solidarities and active citizenship in defense of justice.In the course of his analysis, Bromell, a literary theorist, draws on an assortment of contemporary philosophical, rhetorical, and political theories, all of which have a critical theoretical bent, to explicate Douglass’s ideas. This method bears fruit in an instructive analysis of the rhetorical structure of Douglass’ his arguments. Brommell’s analysis of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom usefully explains how it stands out, not only in terms of updated autobiographical details, but also style and analytical and argumentative intent. This is a reading that other scholars have pioneered, but his rhetorical analysis fleshes out, for example, the role of moral sentiments, care, and intimate and social relations in Douglass’s narrative.A central feature of Bromell’s analysis is that Douglass employs what he and others call a “fugitive rhetoric” that comprises an emphasis on the perspective of his and other black Americans’ standpoints, the holding of opposite ideas in tension, and the use of the rhetorical technique “chiasmus,” where a statement is repeated in reverse order in successive phrases or clauses. It is an illuminating analysis, but Bromell goes further by claiming that Douglass was committed to the tenets of contemporary standpoint epistemology. Douglass certainly referenced and employed his experience and viewpoint as a black man and former slave in his work, just as he directly addressed the viewpoints and interests of black Americans. However, whether this means that Douglass was committed to the set of ideas that we now call standpoint epistemology is another matter. This concern applies to Bromell’s reading of Douglass’s method of holding seemingly contrasting ideas in tension and his use of chiasmus. Contemporary philosophical theories of chiasmus carry particular metaphysical and epistemological implications, and those theories might shed light on Douglass’s political projects. However, their incidental utility does not mean they definitively describe Douglass’s intent or public philosophy. This is a specifically important point because those theories lead to subjective conceptions of truth, especially relating to ethics and politics, while Douglass, as Bromell recognizes, repeatedly and emphatically endorsed what he took to be universal normative truths.In the same vein, Bromell makes several additional claims regarding the conceptual distinctiveness of Douglass’s view of power, dignity, rights, and citizenship. Douglass employed conceptions of each and other important ideas specific to his style, approach, and ends. As other black political thinkers did before him, he used these concepts to condemn slavery, racism, and the hypocrisy of American Republicanism and Christianity to assert the equal moral personhood and dignity of blacks and demand equal rights and citizenship. Bromell rightly emphasizes the role of “power,“ as an individual capability, in Douglass’s view of natural rights, moral dignity, and citizenship. It is an emphasis that is in keeping with both Douglass’s personal narrative and his national political projects. Douglass did not think that Americans—that Black Americans or abolitionists—should passively wait for deliverance from either God or national political leadership. Likewise, Bromell is correct to push back on reductions of Douglass’s views to Lockean, Rousseauian, or Kantian interpretations. Douglass is more than an incarnation of standard deontological, liberal, or civic republican philosophy. As a nineteenth-century black radical thinker, he stood in relation and contributed to those moral and political philosophical traditions. However, Bromell’s claim that Douglass’s conceptions of power, natural rights, and citizenship are conceptually distinct from the large host of major philosophical, theological, and political theoretical accounts that preceded him and influenced those ideas in his time is suggestive but not decisive.Like other writers and theorists before him, Bromell offers us another Douglass—as a black critical political theorist. This is a testament to the fecundity of Douglass’s black political-philosophical legacy. It is a legacy that leads to competing interpretations of him; all the same and for all their differences, his scorching prophetic vision of liberty, equality, citizenship, and progress unites them all. (shrink)

This article argues that blacks should reject integration on self-protective and solidarity grounds. It distinguishes two aspects of black devaluation: a ‘stigmatization’ aspect that has to do with the fact that blacks are subject to various forms of discrimination, and an aesthetic aspect (‘phenotypic devaluation’) that concerns the aesthetic devaluation of characteristically black phenotypic traits. It identifies four self-worth harms that integration may inflict, and suggests that these may outweigh the benefits of integration. Further, it argues that, (...) while the integrating process may reduce stigmatization, there is less reason to think that it can do the same for phenotypic devaluation. (shrink)

Norman Daniels' and James Sabin's theory of “accountability for reasonableness” (A4R) is a much discussed account of due process for decision-making on health care priority setting. Central to the theory is the acceptance that people may justifiably disagree on what reasons it is relevant to consider when priorities are made, but that there is a core set of reasons, that all centre on fairness, on which there will be no disagreement. A4R is designed as an institutional decision process which will (...) ensure that only those reasons which everybody will agree are relevant and appropriate form part of decision-making. The argument which we will put forward in this paper questions whether it is a simple matter to delineate the core set of reasons and claims that it is a potential problem in A4R that it does not provide an indication of the exact content of this process. The paper first briefly outlines the content of A4R. It is argued that disagreement on what services should be high priorities cannot be resolved solely with a reference to “due process.” In order to retain consistency over time, decision-makers are required to agree and articulate what reasons qualify as relevant and how conflicting reasons are to be balanced in the course of the process. The second and main part of the paper then considers how the reason of “solidarity” can be handled within the A4R framework, and it is shown that deciding whether solidarity should be admitted to the core set of allowable reasons is not a simple matter. (shrink)

This article theorises the relationship between 1970s US Third World queer and feminist movements and Latin American anti-imperialist revolutions of the late twentieth century. I focus upon the historically occluded relationships between Third World feminists and queers in Chile and the United States throughout the transition to neoliberalism. My archive includes June Jordan’s little-known writings on Chile, the writings of Audre Lorde, and, primarily, a 1973 Third World feminist poetry reading staged in San Francisco shortly after the Pinochet coup. By (...) assembling this unconventional archive, I intervene into the domestication of US anti-racist queer, black and feminist of colour politics. I argue for the profoundly internationalist foundation of these formations. I work to re-animate a moment when the affective economies of anti-colonial ‘global revolution’ opened up space for the imagination of joint struggle – allowing a visceral sense of struggle’s urgency and vitality in ways that have since been partially eclipsed. (shrink)