Awakening to Race Individualism and Social Consciousness in America

Awakening to Race Individualism and Social Consciousness in America

Jack Turner

To Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Ellison, and Baldwin, personal responsibility entailed at minimum (1) a refusal to be complicit in injustice, (2) a commitment to examine oneself for complicity, and (3) a willingness to overcome whatever complicity
one finds. Their sense of what counted as complicity was expansive:
one is complicit in injustice insofar as one authorizes it politically or enables
it socially or economically. On the basis of this idea of responsibility,
Emerson and Thoreau determined that they had to act against
racial slavery even though it took them away from the intellectual pursuits
they most loved. On the basis of this idea of responsibility, Douglass
exhorted American citizens after the Civil War to provide emancipated
slaves with the education and land they needed to lead free and
self- reliant lives. On the basis of this idea of responsibility, Ellison and
Baldwin called on white citizens to face up to the ways they benefi t from
both de jure and de facto white supremacy and to work for racial equality
not only in legal form but also in social and economic substance.

The civic project of “awakening to race” therefore
promises not only a morally reformed life, but also a keener sense of reality.
“We are capable of bearing a great burden,” Baldwin declares in
The Fire Next Time (1963), “once we discover that that burden is reality
and arrive where reality is.”13 The book also answers a question for
citizens: why should I be conscious of race and spend time and energy
eradicating racial injustice? The book responds: only by being conscious
of race can you be truly conscious of yourself and your world, and only
by working to overcome racial injustice can you ensure that you are not
complicit in it.

In 2009, African Americans were 80 percent more likely than white
Americans to be unemployed and 175 percent more likely to live in poverty.
Latinos were 38 percent more likely than whites to be unemployed
and 169 percent more likely to live in poverty.14 For every dollar of income
earned by white Americans, African Americans earned 60 cents
and Latinos 70 cents.15 For every dollar of net worth possessed by whites,
African Americans had 10 cents and Latinos 12 cents.16

In a 2008 National Election Study, 60 percent
of white respondents, 61 percent of Latino respondents, and 52 percent
of black respondents agreed that “it’s really a matter of some people not
trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just
as well off as whites.” Yet only 37 percent of white respondents—versus
51 percent of Latino respondents and 63 percent of black respondents—
agreed that “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions
that make it diffi cult for blacks to work their way out of the lower
class.”17 This division in public opinion refl ects a distinctive “agencyversus-
structure debate” in American racial politics.18 Whereas white respondents
tend to see racial inequality as primarily the result of insuffi -
cient effort by African Americans (and presumably Latinos), blacks and
Latinos tend to see it as resulting from a combination of insuffi cient effort
and historical racial bias.19

Agency and structure are mutually constitutive rather than mutually
exclusive.20