Abstract
It has become commonplace to note that, culturally, America’s foundation rests on a strong respect and desire for individualism. Individualism is often seen as fundamental to success in a country where the myth of The Self-Made Man reigns supreme. But American-style individualism has to do with more than serving as a parameter for success. Additionally, and maybe more crucially, it is meant to play a normative role and does so in two parts. Part I says something like, it is intrinsically better to be your own person. Part II, sometimes accepted as an entailment, suggests: individualism makes one responsible for one’s own fate, and personal responsibility is a great virtue. The doctrine of American individualism has been and can be seen as crass in its ambitions or myopic in its assumptions; it can be argued that it is complicit in a free-market-leaning society that sometimes seems to have gone terribly wrong as evidenced by runaway material inequality between income groups. But its least appreciated and most disputed feature has been that doctrine’s role in suppressing American institutions’ and citizens’ motivation for attending to systemic racial inequality. Indeed, that doctrine, especially since Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s now infamous 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” has strongly suggested that blacks have to take responsibility for their own poverty and the often decrepit conditions of America’s inner cities. The doctrine was enthusiastically endorsed with respect to race as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came into effect. 1965 morphed into Year One of blacks’ new American history; thus it marked the beginning of an era that would be characterized by an unspoken slogan among (mostly) white Americans: No More Excuses.
In 2008, Barack Obama was elected president and this was a significant historical moment—a country that had yet to shake loose its history of slavery or emerge from its expansive shadow had managed to elect a black president. Jack Turner’s Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America begins by noting that even liberals decided that if any time was right to chant “No More Excuses,” surely this was it. But this desire to hand over to blacks the reins of their own destiny is not without its hypocrisy—blacks’ future has always hinged on shedding the past, and they have been unable to hand that past back to whites in exchange for a brighter future, a more promising destiny. What to do? Turner’s book stages an important intervention in this quandary as it presents an elegant solution that is surprisingly inventive given its basic yet consistently overlooked insight: personal responsibility in America does not provide a license to avert one’s gaze from others’ suffering, does not grant permission to withdraw from a duty to aid, does not affirm abandonment on the assumption that we can each be equally effectively responsible for our affairs and fates. Rather, personal responsibility in America enjoins us to appreciate the historically and socially contextualized nature of our agency, asks that we pay homage to this fact by being attentive to the quality of others’ lives, and demands that we act to secure the conditions for everyone’s flourishing when those conditions are corrupted by injustice. As Turner cranks the wheel of the history of American political thought, the baroque of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau is followed by the jazz and blues of Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to get us to appreciate the civic and ethical dissonance of American hypocrisy when blacks are told, no more excuses.
Turner is the consummate scholar. The corpuses of Emerson, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ellison, and Baldwin are generously interpreted and then deployed to great effect for the purpose of reconstructing the American individualist doctrine. What begins as a doctrine of benign indifference is recast as malign neglect, and subsequently redeemed as an ethics of respectful liberal compassion. It bears mentioning right away that Turner’s ability to wrangle the works of these unsystematic, and sometimes philosophically nearly inscrutable, thinkers for the purpose of this reconstruction is itself a great feat. What strikes one as even more impressive is that he is able to find common conceptual ground between pre-war white intellectuals, and post–World War I black artists and activists for the purposes of doing what none of them did in any discrete sense: provide a theory of responsibility for racial inequality.
Why does the temporal and racial division I’ve highlighted matter? Turner’s complete restatement of American individualism itself turns on this division because the two groups of thinkers compel us to distinct but, on his view, connected conclusions. “Democratic individualist responsibility entails a nonexploitation obligation,” which “forbids democratic individuals from pursuing self-reliance in ways that directly or indirectly abridge others’ pursuit of self-reliance” (115). This obligation is drawn out from an engagement with Emerson and Thoreau (chapter 2). Turner’s reading of Thoreau and especially Emerson is inventive without giving the reader the sense that he is reaching. One reason for circumspection is that both thinkers were well-known for preaching a perfectionist self-reliance that even the author of The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, found compelling. I invoke Nietzsche here because the general doctrine of self-reliance has and is often taken to promote radical self-awareness and self-perfection at the expense of socially valuable dispositions, such as sympathy, compassion, and altruism, features of persons that at minimum Nietzsche often found to be pseudo-moral distractions from the business of overcoming oneself. That said, Turner does well to not go so far as to reinterpret Thoreau and Emerson as endorsing such virtues. Rather, more modestly, he interprets their position as follows: to the extent that you and I affirm the importance of self-reliance, then you and I are also committed to withdrawing from practices and systems of distribution that depend on exploitation precisely because those suppress others’ ability to be self-reliant. On this view, my self-reliance supports others’ quest for self-reliance by recommending that I refuse opportunities to benefit on at the expense of others’ disadvantages.
The other half of Turner’s refreshed democratic individualism is captured by the democratic egalitarian obligation, which “requires democratic individuals to contribute to the common effort to ensure that democratic citizens have self-reliance’s material prerequisites” (115). Turner employs Douglass’s novel brand of libertarianism (chapter 3) to illustrate that blacks also could be and were concerned about being self-made men, and that, maybe more radically, what they really wanted was to be left alone by whites. However, such independence depended on whites’ restoring the American political and economic system to a state of fair play. Ellison and Baldwin (chapters 4 and 5) then enter as twentieth-century thinkers who present us with a real dilemma—quite beyond hosting unfair institutions, America’s soul suffers from a marked and tragic form of hypocrisy. Many decades after the abolition of slavery, Ellison’s novel portrays a black man whose journey from south to north runs parallel to a quest of becoming, in a very substantial existential sense, something, someone—a kind of thing that whites have long been able to become: a socially visible and respected human. Baldwin’s role in Turner’s project is maybe the most unsettling. Though Baldwin begins to play his part in American redemption in the middle of the twentieth century, his views press us with even greater force to face the way persistent American democratic hypocrisy disfigures the characters of its citizens and erodes the ground for genuine mutual regard well past the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act. Ellison gave the ideal of mutual regard the valence of love. And it is here that Turner’s book runs into a bit of trouble.
Individualism is a fairly uncomplicated idea. It asserts that along some dimension, the self is primary to other kinds of things in society. Turner is able to coherently identify a negative duty when engaging Thoreau and Emerson because being the best person I can be is compatible with not being a villain towards others. But the positive duty culled from Ellison and Baldwin is on shakier ground. For one thing, it is not entirely clear that either were essentially concerned with the material pre-requisites for blacks’ ability to be self-made. Rather, both seemed concerned with what we might call soulcraft politics—a mode of political address that draws the listener or reader to not merely identify faults in reasoning (thus aiding them in identifying where rationality is failing them) but to diagnose the limits of their own compassion. Baldwin, for example, once said to his white acquaintances at a dinner party: “I toted your barge, baby, I picked your cotton, I nursed your babies, where were you when Martin [Luther King, Jr.] was shot?” Allow me to sequentially formalize the representations here: I labored for you, I labored for you, I labored for you, where were you during my tragedy, my moment of devastating loss? Baldwin’s corpus, and in many ways Ellison’s as well, is founded on the basic premise that before we can discuss what whites can give blacks, we have to discuss whether whites are effectively and appropriately positioned to recognize blacks’ humanity. And this is fundamental because recognition of our common humanity entails the possibility of respect, care, and love. And these are what crucially will allow blacks to secure their rights, without further despair or existential pain, their place as both persons and citizens in America.
Turner is not without a suitable defense. He could easily concede that the term “individualism” is doing more conceptual work than it can bear. He could then intelligibly claim that as a political theorist for whom politics matter, his framing the solution in terms of individualism is tactically valuable—it is an idea and doctrine affirmed to some degree by a very wide cross section of Americans. Thus, consistent with his own idea in the final pages of the book, Turner is performing what he calls rhetorical jujitsu: turning an idea that is often thought to release Americans from duties to each other into a principle of mutual aid. This is a response that is understandable. It represents a strategy for a society whose citizens’ propensity for self-love and racial indifference drove Ellison’s protagonist underground hoping and waiting for a day he could take his rightful place alongside those who had for so long walked over him. Awakening to Race is valuable reading for racially conscientious Americans; it is necessary reading for the racially unconscientious.