Pragmatism and Black Identity: An Alternative Approach

A lot is at stake when we begin a discussion about racial and national identity in the United States. We question how people orient themselves in a constantly changing world. We worry about how individuals see themselves in relation to their fellows and find their place in a set of stories that binds them to similarly situated selves. (Do they identify with others on the basis of blood, language, customs, and/or inheritance?) We are horrified by the prospect that differences that really do not make a difference serve as the basis for killing and maiming others. We worry about how identities are formed and mobilized in the context of globalization, where we witness the eclipse of national boundaries and the commodification of difference. At any rate, any discussion of identity threatens us with exposure, vulnerability, a loss of security—perhaps because identities provide us, to some extent, with a sense of protection or safety in a threatening world, and critical assessments of them endanger our security. It's important that we begin our discussion here, on an existential level, because identity-talk cuts that deep. We often risk our lives or are willing to kill for our identities. So we ought not to approach the topic lightly or dismiss too easily the various ways identity-talk informs contemporary political conversation.

I am particularly interested in the ways black identity in the United States and its complex relation to nation-language continue to motivate ethical choices that shape our world. For both black identity and the deployment of nation-language entail answers to who we take ourselves to be and how we orient ourselves with respect to “others,” how we conceive of our obligations to those whom we consider to be “one of us,” and what constitutes the good for us. In other words, whether we know it or not, how we think about the relationship between black identity and nation-language affects how we understand notions of virtue, right, and the good in the context of this community of experience. That is to say, when persons act in the name of these identities they often presume that their actions and dispositions form the basis for widespread approbation, that they are obligatory and legitimate, and that there is a supreme end that defines, for the most part, their desires and purposes. What's interesting is that on their own, racial and national identity actually do this sort of ethical work but, when taken together, racial identity (thought about in a particular kind of way) naturalizes the claims of the nation, deepening the purchase these sorts of ethical considerations have on us, while nation-language escalates the political intensity of the claims that circulate around racial identity. It announces that the stakes have just been raised, often making these ethical questions a matter of life and death.

To be sure, how we think about black identity and nation-language matters, particularly when we hold the view that our beliefs about the world have ethical significance. It matters, then, if someone believes that there is a composite African culture that properly orients African peoples throughout the world, or if another person believes that races are fictions and that any attempt on the part of African Americans to appropriate the term only obscures the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope and the hidden relations of power inherent in its usage. Both of these views wield a tremendous amount of influence not only in the U.S. academy but also in the arena of politics. I am interested here in critically examining a particular view of black identity often associated with forms of black nationalism, which assumes that notions of obligation to the race and the desires and purposes of African Americans are derivative and dependent upon who we take ourselves to be. I do this with an eye fixed intently on the task of reconstructing the way many African...