Tommie Shelby II

A few months ago, I wrote about Orlando Patterson’s rave review of Tommie Shelby’s book, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. I’ve now read the book myself, and the praise is entirely deserved. Shelby indeed “knows how to ask all the right questions.” And his answers are always thoughtful, clear, insightful, and he shows almost unbelievable patience with his many mistaken rivals. I admit to being pre-disposed to his position, but I learned a lot. My review is below.

Shelby understands solidarity (in general) to be “a feeling that entails normative constraints.” Specifically, it entails: a “tendency of group members to identify, both subjectively and publicly, with each other or with the group as a whole”; “special concern, in particular a disposition to assist and comfort those with whom one identifies”; a shared “set of values or goals”; “group loyalty”; and “mutual trust.” (68-70) Shelby’s main question is whether there is a defensible form of black solidarity that serves the cause of racial justice. There is one, he believes, but he rejects many familiar alternatives.

Shelby presents an extensive discussion of the history of black nationalist theory, which he calls “one of the oldest and most enduring traditions in American political thought.” (24) His idea is critically to appropriate the work of many authors, including especially Martin Robison Delany and W.E.B. Du Bois, teasing out a contrast between two forms of black nationalism that runs through the tradition. Strong – or classical – black nationalism advocates independence and self-determination as “a constitutive and enduring component of the collective self-realization of blacks as a people.” Weak – or pragmatic – black nationalism, in contrast, advocates black solidarity “as a means to create greater freedom and social equality for blacks.” (27) Although black nationalists have often relied on the rhetoric and tropes of strong nationalism, Shelby insists that “Pragmatic nationalism … is the more firmly held position among black nationalists, despite the fact that they occasionally evince the classical form.” (29)

Shelby defends a pragmatic form of nationalism – if that isn’t too misleading a term – against the stronger, classical form, which he believes is untenable. In making this case, Shelby is at his best (and that is very, very good), painstakingly pointing to the multiple dimensions of diversity within the “black community” – including class, gender, education, cultural identification, and on and on. Insisting on a shared identity in the face of this diversity would be self-defeating to the cause of racial justice. (11) “For although most blacks believe in the struggle for racial equality and the value of black communal relations, they also value the freedom to choose their cultural affiliations and to decide on their own conception of human flourishing.” (229) Passages like this make it clear that Shelby is defending a conception of solidarity that is political in Rawls’s sense. While not dismissing the value of shared cultural identification, he is interested in conditions for pursuing a political conception of (racial) justice. And for this project, insisting on strong identification with a particular interpretation of black culture can only be destructive.

Instead, the shared experience of anti-black racism is sufficient to ground black political solidarity in the service of racial justice.

A black solidarity based on the common experience of antiblack racism and the joint commitment to bringing it to an end can and should play an important role in the fight against racial injustice. But a form of black unity that emphasizes the need to positively affirm a ‘racial,’ ethnic, cultural, or national identity is a legacy of black political thought that must now be abandoned for the sake of the struggle against racial domination and black disadvantage. (206)

One important implication of emphasizing the common experience of antiblack racism is that it allows Shelby to reject attempts to ground black identity on any biological category, cultural practice, ancestral origin, religious, or political orientation. On this thin account, he can also defend black solidarity without assuming any particular deep identity. Another implication is that “the aim of black political solidarity should not be to discover the essential group-affirming core of all modalities of blackness, but to release all of these identities from racial stigma.” (235) If successful, it will “transcend itself… Once [a racially just social order] has been achieved, black political solidarity as such would be no longer necessary, and perhaps even counterproductive.” (254) This is something we should look forward to – allowing people of all races to constitute their identities in accordance with their substantive ideals and commitments.

Shelby is also very, very good in describing the variety of injustices that afflict blacks, their multiple origins (not only in racism), and how they interact with race. Blacks should “focus their critical analyses and political activism on lingering racism, persistent forms of socioeconomic inequality, unequal educational opportunity, and racialized urban poverty, for it is these that give rise to unflattering and disrespectful views of black people and thus of the cultural forms associated with them.” (199-200)

All of this is convincingly argued in rich and careful detail. Near the end, he briefly considers “why black solidarity is needed at all, especially because racism is not unique to the experience of blacks and, as has been emphasized throughout this book, solidarity between antiracist blacks and nonblacks is both possible and necessary.” (240) This is a challenge that Anthony Appiah, for example, has pressed. Shelby answers: “Although blacks should surely work with antiracist nonblacks against racism and other forms of social injustice, there is no principled reason why blacks must give up their solidaristic commitment to each other to do so. The two forms of solidarity are not mutually exclusive.” (240) This seems right. But people may form solidaristic bonds on the basis of class, or ethnicity, or cultural identification, or sexual orientation, or geography, or just about anything else. What is special about the shared experience of antiback racism? His answer, which he doesn’t really spell out in much detail, is that the experience of antiblack racism is likely to lead one to identify with other victims of such discrimination and to direct that solidarity toward reducing or eliminating that injustice – “it is often the shared experience of specific forms of racial injustice that creates the strongest motivation to act and the most enduring bonds among victims of racism.” (241)

This may be true, but it is a generalization – a prediction. Shelby is impatient with attempts to ground solidaristic political commitments on other generalizations: “we cannot determine on the basis of cultural identification alone who will or won’t be willing to make such a solidaristic commitment. Thus it is more reasonable to be as inclusive as is consistent with the basic goals of such unity, as there is power in numbers.” (232) Perhaps experience of racial injustice is a better predictor of commitment to racial justice than identification with some interpretation of black culture, but it seems to me that we still should be as inclusive as possible. In the end, Shelby is unwilling to say that blacks have an obligation form solidaristic attachments with other blacks to fight against racial injustice.

Of course we all, whether black or not, have an obligation to resist racial injustice. The obligations of blacks in this regard are certainly no greater than those of nonblacks. But blacks would arguably have an obligation to pursue their antiracism through black solidarity if in its absence racial justice could not be achieved…. In this book, I leave open the question of whether a commitment to black political solidarity is strictly obligatory, for answering it would require resolving the difficult empirical question of whether such solidarity is absolutely necessary to achieve racial justice. Instead I focus on what should and should not be required of those who choose to fight antiblack racism through black political solidarity, noting, as I have emphasized throughout, that such group efforts are a legitimate and constructive means to effect social change. (214-215)

So, the claim is that it is permissible and beneficial to the cause of racial justice for the victims of antiblack racism to form solidaristic attachments with one another. This may be a weaker conclusion than one might have hoped, but that doesn’t mean it is wrong, and as Shelby admits, “The conception of solidarity defended in this book is not a radical departure from what many black Americans already accept.” (243) But a far more powerful conclusion that Shelby demonstrates patiently and carefully is that stronger forms of identification are not required and are likely to be harmful to the cause of racial justice. Patterson is right that “Shelby’s powerful critique of black cultural particularism incorporates and supersedes all previous discussions of the subject.”