Racing to Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society

Introduction Moving beyond the Isolated Self

xvii Justice involves claiming a shared, mutual humanity. It is about interrelationships . Until now, every major attempt to achieve racial justice in this country has come up short, and each time, we have seen race and racial hierarchy reinscribed in different ways. Slavery gave way to Jim Crow. The explicit discrimination of Jim Crow laws was replaced with tacit segregation through spatial arrangements, like white suburbs that wall themselves off from the larger regions of which they are a part. Today many of the older suburbs have become diverse, yet racial hierarchy shows no sign of going away but instead continues to mutate. Institutional supports for the racial caste system, such as anti-miscegenation laws, have been dismantled, but with no corresponding increase in the fluidity of the racialized self. Indeed, although we may try to ignore or explain them as choice, racialized disparities persist across all areas of life opportunity, and segregation divides us not only in our neighborhoods, schools, and businesses but also in non-competitive spheres like spirituality or music. Without an examination of the construction and presence of whiteness, and specifically the role of whiteness in the formation of the modern separate self, inequitable arrangements based on fear and exclusion will endure. Even laws and policies considered fair, equal, and universal will continue to falter or fail as long as they rest on a foundation of racialized injury and injustice. The problematic and isolated white self forms the backbone of resistance to a truly robust, inclusive America and energizes much of the conservative movement. This self is all too easily controlled by fears–in Introduction Moving beyond the Isolated Self Introduction xviii part because it was born of fear–whether of declining property values, the “predatory” black man, the other’s “culture of poverty,” or any of a range of similar racialized images. Beyond these distortions, however, lies a more fundamental fear: self-annihilation. For in the context of this society’s unwillingness to come to terms with its racial organization, to ask people to give up whiteness is to ask them to give up their sense of self. We cannot expect people to expose themselves to ontological death or worse. Instead, we must provide space–institutional space, political space, social space, and conceptual space–for the emergence of new relationships and a new way of being that exists beyond isolation and separation. The Western self, especially the American self, is particularly isolatedandseparate .Thisconceptionoftheselfhasahistory,alargepartof which is its construction in conjunction with ideals that assert a radical individualism: rationality, objectivity, private property, market capitalism , and race. This notion of the self is at the core of the American dream of liberty and opportunity for all, of pure meritocracy, but also of exclusion and domination. Certainly we can see this idea of the self active in the conservative movement today. The visceral fear of terrorists, the tightening of national borders, racial profiling, and tough rhetoric on crime would all make Hobbes proud–the authoritarian state protecting us, each one from the other. The liberal worldview, however, is based on the same isolated and autonomous self, especially in its dogmatic adherence to secularism, rationality, and a strict separation of church and state. Jeremy Rifkin has asserted that the American Dream is in decline and that we should look to Europe for an alternate vision. Even today, with crises rippling through its Union, such an inquiry can provide a starting point in questioning our views of self and community. Rifkin writes that “[f]or Europeans, freedom is found not in autonomy but in embeddedness. To be free is to have access to many interdependent relationships . The more communities one has access to, the more options one has for living a full and meaningful life. It is inclusivity that brings security–belonging,notbelongings.”1 Wemighttakeexceptiontolooking toward Europe, but the sense of America’s decline is largely shared. There is a need for an alternative vision, a beloved community where being connected to the other is seen as the foundation of a healthy self, Introduction xix not its destruction, and where the racial other is seen not as the infinite other, but rather as the other that is always and already a part of us. Even aspirations like these are not enough, however; visions must be reflected in social structures and institutions, or they remain merely dreams deferred. Rifkin points to the increasingly interconnected infrastructure of Europe as an...