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five enac tin g solidarit y Often people’s racial, gendered commonsense understandings become palpable when they try to work in solidarity with others. As Gadamer suggests, it is something outside our horizon of presupposition—a text, a person— that puts our prejudgments into play. Minnie Bruce Pratt describes feeling that she could not simply move to a place where she “joined others to struggle with them against common injustices.” Rather, working with others against injustice required her to struggle against aspects of herself and her history. And it seems that her realization of the need to struggle against her own history was only provoked by her attempts to work with others. Working with others in solidarity is a powerful ideal, though often equally difficult to enact. As I will lay out below, attempts to think about and work in solidarity show some of the subtle effects of calcified common sense and habituated modes of perception that happen on the level of implicit understanding . Because the practice of solidarity brings one’s presuppositions, aspirations , and hopes into conversation and sometimes conflict with others’ dreams and practices, it shows clearly the limits, the challenges, and the importance of commonsense, implicit understandings. While it is crucial to shift conceptual understanding in order to act in solidarity, much of the work of solidarity depends on more pervasive shifts in implicit understanding . To use Michael Polanyi’s terms, the work of solidarity brings tacit, or distal, knowledge into the forefront and also produces new configurations of one’s implicit knowledge. Solidarity involves different investments and commitments of the personal attention Polanyi theorizes as central to knowing. In chapter 4 I argued that complex negative affect is an appropriate response to racialization, offering shame as an example of one such affect. I suggested that one aspect of its utility lay in the relational identification and transformation implied in the experience of shame, expressed in terms of experiences and transformations of the habitus. One form of relational enacting solidarity | 99 re-identification might be created through the process of acting in solidarity with others. This is a space that might come out of, and produce, new possibilities for action. In this chapter, I argue that the grounds for white antiracist solidarity are partially interleaved with complex experiences of negative affect, shame among them. One important aspect of this negative affect is the knowledge-without-words revealed when white people feel bad in response to racial situations. This is a productive discomfort, which could open spaces for political antiracist transformation. But the experience of discomfort needs to be paired with matrices of perception and habit that enable positive, sustainable action. To generalize: people who take political action solely out of feeling bad about themselves and their world are among the least effective of political actors, tending toward martyr complexes, assumed moral superiority, and insufficient compassion toward others less conscious of injustice. White people in particular need approaches that articulate an understanding of the shame-worthiness of our social position as white, with a sensibility that moves toward another political and social world out of a sense of joy and connection. That is, I am keeping in mind Michelle O’Brien’s statement: Let’sassumemycomplicityandparticipationinwhitesupremacy is, to some extent for all white people, unavoidable. I don’t get off scot-free, I never get to feel just good about myself, and that’s not the fucking point. Being antiracist isn’t the same as carefully avoiding ever doing or saying the wrong thing; it’s about actually caring about real people and actually helping to make a different kind of world. (2002–3) I am looking for accounts of why, if we can’t just feel good, white people work against racism and against white primacy. More important, as O’Brien indicates, there has to be more to antiracist transformation than just avoiding doing or saying the wrong thing. Consider, then, examples in thinking about sympathy as ground for engaging in solidarity work. I take two theoretical touchstones for thinking about the roots of solidarity: philosophical work on sympathy, and people’s accounts of how they came to work in a radical justice framework—particularly against racism. Solidarity is an important optic through which to see the political stakes and effects of implicit understanding. Caring about people and helping make a different kind of world involves propositional, claim-making activity, for sure. But this activity only matters within the context of that [3.134.102.182] Project MUSE...

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