[UPDATE, Sat 18 Jan 2014: 4:00 pm CST: Moving to front to highlight this very important post by Tommy Curry and John Drabinski, with thoughtful comments by Jason Stanley.]
Many people have already read this important piece in NYT's The Stone. I have seen a few online reactions as well, including this one and this one by Eric Schliesser. Here's one by Peter Levine. What I'd like to do here is offer the comments to further reactions and / or to links of other online discussion.
Disappointed to see no mention of Michelle Alexander, and that Omi and Winant weren’t credited for their concept of racial democracy. In general it’s amazing that they only used white theorists & sources (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Constant, Dewey, Elizabeth Anderson, Herbert Schneider, & Becky Pettit) and despite acknowledging the problematic nature of the ideological function of ever unfulfilled “American” ideals, they end by endorsing this approach. This allows one to not speak of white supremacy – it’s much more comfortable to speak of not fulfilling our ideals, rather than identifying a group that systematically and ruthlessly seeks racial advantage at the expense and suffering of others.
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Chad – the reason for using Aristotle was to make I think something like your point. Aristotle had very problematic views about slavery and equality and gender. Nevertheless, the ideal of political participation is a powerful one. Our idea was to connect this with the ideals of the US constitution, which are also powerful, despite coming from a time at which they were wildly misapplied. So the idea was to say that there is a long-standing issue of gaps between ideals and realization, and in some sense the ideals themselves may be implicated in that (the point I take it of Weaver’s classic 2007 paper, “Frontlash”). This is a big theme in the book I’m writing, which develops worries about the masking function of ideals. It is a misreading of our piece to think we are talking about “not fulfilling our ideals”. As we write, we are instead talking about ideals “standing in the way of their own fulfillment”. So that decision was explicit (also it’s worth mentioning that 50% of us are a black woman). As to the expression “racial democracy”, to be honest in came to us at 3 am in the morning before a noon deadline for the final version. Originally, the piece was called “Is America a Racial Oligarchy?”, and the editor said we had to explain the distinction between an oligarchy and a democracy. As a consequence the beginning was deadly boring and there was no explanation of why political participation is a particularly central kind of liberty, and so not set up for Weaver’s research. After we submitted it, we were reminded that the expression is already wide use in the literature on Brazilian democracy, where it means something good, not something bad. If we hadn’t had a noon deadline, we would have used the expression “Herrenvolk democracy”.
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Jason – I appreciate your response.
I understood your engagement with the issue of ideals & their realization to be critical, but not to entail rejection. The sense I had from your piece is that we need to be aware of the possibility or even the tendency for ideals to cloud our judgement about actually existing conditions and that this critical awareness will save us from reproducing unjust social relations. Perhaps I’m wrong about this and you’re presenting an alternative to (liberal) political critique structured around ideals, but then I’m unsure what alternative you had in mind.
My comment about white supremacy was to illustrate how focusing on ideals, even in a critical, reflective way, takes our attention away from the relations of power and conflict in white supremacy, where identities are hierarchically constructed through social relations that benefit a particular racial group.
Also, I can appreciate our comment about the last-minute turn to the term “racial democracy”, but as you say the Brazilian usage is positive, whereas Omi and Winant’s is intended in the sense that you use it… although their work is perhaps too distant from the tradition you’re working with.
As for your sources being all white, I don’t think my critique is mitigated by the race of one of the authors. There are a lot of people of color, particularly women of color, working on this issue and have been for many years. To speak of Dewey, but not Angela Davis, for example, only reinforces the old and problematic assumption that the white canon is our only choice, even when talking racial democracy.
Indeed, restricting oneself to this tradition makes it almost inevitable that one will end up talking about racial discrimination and ideals, rather than white supremacy and power.
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Chad – excellent points. In my own thinking (not now speaking for Vesla), I am struggling between the position you describe, to which I am attracted, and one that preserves ideals but prevents them from playing a masking role. I don’t know where I will end up. But one worry I have for the position that is full-on ideology critique is that I’m not sure how to explain moral motivation.
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What Chad said.
But also: Jason, can you say more about what you mean by “…one worry I have for the position is that full-on ideology critique is that I’m not sure how to explain moral motivation”? This is an innocent question. I’m not seeing what you’re meaning to flag by it, and how it relates to what Chad said. Are you saying that white people won’t want to change things if they understand white supremacy as a relation of structural power?
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If we unmask ideals of freedom and equality as mere ideological cover for underlying relations of structural power, what reason do white Americans have to oppose those systems? Why not think, “Oh yeah, I guess that is how that works; how lucky that I’m on the privileged side in this one, given how stable and pervasive those structures seem to be.”
In my case (as a white American) it’s precisely because I remain committed to the original liberal ideals (or a suitably modified version thereof) that I take myself to have strong reason to oppose structural power systems even where I’m on the unfairly advantaged side.
I’m not sure if this is what Jason has in mind, but it seems to me to be a good reason not to let go of the ideals if we don’t have to.
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Perhaps this could be compared with what Dell McWhorter calls the “myth of the myth of the black rapist.” Her argument (roughly) is that white people would justify the lynching of black people in the South by claiming that black men were sexual predators. When that got unmasked as false, folks supposedly became enlightened, and would say things like “ahh – I see. Black men aren’t rapists, so these lynchings are the product of the ideology that says black men are rapists.” But these “enlightened” folks thereby prevented themselves from seeing the deep, systemic and structural nature of white supremacy
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Based on this article alone, I find the term “racial democracy” odd and most perplexing, and wonder why the authors chose it to describe the phenomenon they are interested in addressing. It seems like “racial oligarchy” or “racial aristocracy” or something similar would be far more appropriate. When I first heard of this article, and knew only that it was about something termed “racial democracy”, I wondered what in the world it might be about. The actual content of the article then surprised me.
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Dan Kervick – lol. The original title of the article was “Is America a racial oligarchy?” The problem was the editors wanted us to explain what an oligarchy was and how it differed from a democracy. That made the first four paragraphs really dull. We entirely rewrote the piece the night and morning before it was due, and the only expression we could find that wouldn’t require us to give a boring initial explanation that would sink the piece was “racial democracy”. It was not the best choice. We just were under a lot of pressure – had to use something that didn’t need an explanation, and “racist democracy” is not really something you can use in the New York Times.
I have been writing for the NY Times for three years. It is an entirely different kind of writing. It has taken years to learn. Also, the schedule of journalism is simply nothing like the schedule of academic philosophy.
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No question we should have used Du Bois, Souls of Black Folks in particular, and Mills for the point attributed to Anderson, since he makes it very clearly. It won’t happen again.
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Late to this, but here is an online response. Jason has some smart and good replies (thanks for those).
http://flyam.ps/tcjd1
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Yes, it might really be worth directing colleagues who are not familiar with Mills to his work. Let alone Du Bois. Here is a link (I think) to a PDF of The Racial Contract. bmorereadinggroup.files.wordpress.com/…/ebooksclub-org__the_racial_… If this doesn’t work, people can just Google it.
Glad to hear you say it, Jason. You are in a position to affect what some number of white people in the profession might now read.
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Also late to this, but I’ve posted my own response to Stanley and Weaver’s argument here: http://politicalphilosopher.net/2014/01/24/the-unfairness-of-a-racial-democracy/
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New APPS 
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