Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of U.S. Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair
Abstract
This essay seeks to understand the complex response to the current Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, which pose deeper questions about the forms of politics that black citizens—who are experiencing a defining moment of racial terror in the United States in the twenty-first century—can and should pursue. When other citizens and state institutions betray a lack of care and concern for black suffering, which in turn makes it impossible for those wrongs to be redressed, is it fair to ask blacks to enact “appropriate” democratic politics? These questions are explored via a reading of Danielle Allen and Ralph Ellison’s meditations on the problem of democratic loss and Hannah Arendt’s critique of school desegregation battles in the 1960s. I suggest that there is a conceptual trap in romantic historical narratives of black activism (especially the civil rights movement) that recast peaceful acquiescence to loss as a form of democratic exemplarity.
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Biographies
Juliet Hooker is an Associate Professor of Government and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a political theorist specializing in comparative political theory and critical race theory. Her primary research interests include black political thought, Latin American political thought, political solidarity, and multiculturalism. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2009); her most recent publication is: “A Black Sister to Massachusetts’: Latin America and the Fugitive Democratic Ethos of Frederick Douglass,” American Political Science Review 109, no. 4 (Nov. 2015). Her forthcoming book from Oxford in 2016 is an intellectual genealogy of racial thought in the Americas that juxtaposes four prominent U.S. African-American and Latin American thinkers: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos.
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Article first published online: April 4, 2016
Issue published: August 2016
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