Revisiting the cruel optimism of racial justice – A response to Fadil,Favell and St Louis

I am immensely grateful to Nadia Fadil, Adrian Favell and Brett St Louis for their rich and constructive engagement with The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (hereafter CORJ) (Meer, 2022). Each author is generous, rigorous and more wide-ranging than I can attend to here. So whilst my reply might easily by concerned with the many instances of consensus amongst us, I will make the most of the available space by focusing on some possible disagreements that emerge in their compelling discussion.

The task of curating symposia where participants do not see each other’s contributions in advance, any editor will confirm, is to take a calculated risk that authors speak past one another. In their discussions, however, St Louis and Fadil appear almost in direct dialogue on the virtue and alternatives to racial justice. On the one hand, the indeterminacy of racial justice as a ‘viable enterprise and worthy ambition’, maintains St Louis (2023: 3), requires an answer to the ‘monumental question’ of whether:

‘a constitutionally discriminatory category and concept, can race serve as a repository for justice? From my preferred racial eliminativist perspective (St Louis 2022) the short answer would be ‘no’. Justice cannot be reconciled with race and racial being that is irrevocably synonymous with inequity’ (St Louis, 2023: 3).

Fadil (2023: 5) meanwhile asks if we can think otherwise and ‘imagine a way out of this apparent impasse’, in order to ‘address the question of racial justice differently’. Namely:

‘rather than asking whether equality has been achieved, another question could be to understand what forms of community making and solidarity have been created in this struggle for racial justice. What intellectual traditions, and aesthetic expressions or new routes of migration, away from Europe (Fadil et al., 2021), have been explored?’ (Fadil, 2023: 5).

In challenging the ontological premise for a book on racial justice, and one oriented in large part to the conduct of European states, both authors level intrinsically valuable critiques. It is less clear to me, however, that in so doing they identify shortcomings in CORJ (Meer, 2022). With respect to St Louis, it is certainly true that I rely on Charles Mills (2013: 20) treatment of racial justice as something worth hanging onto, but both my adaptation of Berlant’s (2011) organising concept, and the empirical case studies I work through, show how I am aware of the limitations of this project. For the cruel optimism of racial justice that I elaborate, is characterised neither by an unswerving belief in the teleology of justice nor the pessimism that approaches to justice are necessarily incapable of grasping racism. I am nonetheless unambiguous in arguing that the challenge of racial justice exceeds prevailing liberal approaches as they are currently configured, such that when I argue that our accumulated struggle invites us to recognise certain starting points, this includes our organising categories too. This might be expressed in Baldwin’s (1998: 333) view that to ‘accept one’s past – one’s history’ – as he put it – ‘is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it’.

My response to St Louis then is that the appeal to racial justice should be presented to traditions of ideal theory that have laundered racialization from their criteria of relevance, specifically in forging the very normative categories of personhood, politics and the state though which these address justice. This view is something that traverses categories of practice and analysis, from the appeal to ‘new thinking and the re-evaluation of old concepts’ that MLK advocated (King, 2010: 95), to how Mills (2020: 54) excoriates an ‘idealizing white liberalism [that] has bleached not merely the actual world but whited-out an objective perception of what would be required to right its wrongs’.

As a social scientist, however, my challenge to St Louis begins from the view that theory needs to be a vehicle for more than itself. I am sympathetic to his ambition and, if they have not already, urge readers to consult his discussion in this regard (St Louis, 2022). Yet I deem it insufficient to argue for the elimination of categories of self-description or vehicles for the expression and mobilisation of collective movements for justice. At the risk of rehearsing longstanding debates, I can make my peace with by Du Bois’ (1984 [1940]: 133) view that race is ‘a group of contradictory forces, facts, and tendencies’. I do not like theory’s vice of claiming detached validity, and my criticism of Mills, for example, is precisely that he does not always take up his own invitation to examine racial justice outside the realm of ideal theory, specifically in not including pre-emptive concerns that advance on the grounds of race, in ways that would allow us to traverse that which has happened in the past, that which is manifest in the present, as well as that which will likely occur in the future.

Moreover, those of us who take the view that modernity offers ‘one of many reorganisations and re-articulations of the meaning of race that have occurred throughout the centuries’ (Winant, 2001: 21), and that modernist formulations of race are at least in part assembled from pre-modern components, find ourselves seeking not eliminativist approaches as much as expanding the study of race-making. If it would be better to reiterate in so doing that there are only social and political aspects of race, and that the effects of stigma and discrimination have somatic consequences only as social and political forces – then I am happy to do so, but I do not think we disagree in seeing race ‘as a verb, rather than a noun’ (Soo-Jin Lee, 2015: 27).

Fadil’s appeal to imagining justice otherwise or through an epistemic disobedience is well received, and her reference to aesthetics is a reminder of the sentiment attributed to Fuentes (1988) that art gives life to what philosophy killed. In this regard, her examples are compelling (Fadil et al., 2021), and yet it is precisely these concerns that I address in my discussion of the challenges, revisions and contestations of founding narratives of imagined communities. Perhaps I should have said more however on the function of the multi-in multiculturalism, as Modood (2013) has elaborated, that may be the key here. Namely, in carrying on the unfinished multicultural conversations (to misquote Stuart Hall) through which we can see new forms of community making, identity articulations and solidarity movements. My argument is merely that these new formations too will likely struggle for racial justice and the promise this heralds (even if the criteria of racialization may be different).

I appreciate that this is also about scales, and it is true that I spend much time on national identities, but I also include examples of city and local-level endeavours that have advanced despite national-level racialised closure. The International Cities of Refuge Network, Cities of Sanctuary, the Save Me Campaign and the Eurocities network are illustrative of the ways that might signal a re-crafting of social imaginaries that elevates the capacity of cities ‘to foster new forms of solidarity’ (Vandevoordt, 2019: 48). Taking the renewed sociality at one time apparent in the town of Riace, CORJ (Meer, 2022) discusses the reimagining of a space in ways that did not marginalise displaced migrants and refugees – precisely what the writer Lefebvre characterised both as the abstract claim to city life and as a concrete claim to spaces of work, leisure, education, healthcare and accommodation that could be shared by all urban dwellers (Lefebvre et al., 1996). An implication being that these features can be imagined-out just as much as they are imagined-in, if only we refuse to be ensconced by that which prevails.

It is in these possibilities that Favell (2023: 4) detects my ‘upbeat’ sense of the fate of multiculturalism for re-making membership, despite his own assessment of their being ‘precious little here to suggest anything except the bleakest pessimism about the UK and its entrapment in own postcolonial condition’. As amongst the foremost chroniclers of UK citizenship trajectories in a European Union context, he makes a forceful observation. It is connected too, as Favell rightly observes, to Brexit which begs the question of my omission of a substantive discussion, something that Favell places alongside my lack of attention to ‘cosmopolitan critique and transnationalism [that] are dismissed in one line without discussion’ (Favell, 2023: 5).

I regret that this appears as a dismissal, for this was not my intention, and I have elsewhere considered what Brexit means for anti-racism in the nebulous public policy sphere (Meer, 2017). In CORJ, however, I was trying to take a longer view of British national identity formation and re-formation, an analysis that is not out of kilter with the concerns Favell raises. Specifically, that imperialism was constitutive of European nation-state formation in ways that have implications for how national identities are presently imagined. In this respect there is a continuing dialogue between the colonial and the postcolonial and decolonial. This sounds like a contradictory statement until we grasp that alongside symbols are other vestiges of imperialism; the economic assets, and built environments, the very laws that govern our societies bear their imprint – and chief among these: our very criteria of citizenship.

I was especially keen to show that our understanding of this has not been served well by nationalism studies as a field of inquiry, and which I think reflects a profoundly unsatisfactory engagement with race, empire and its implications. Seeing too little in the racialized histories of nation-state formation is self-evidently a problem, not least because Empire has been constitutive of nation-state formation, something that in Britain came ‘home’ long before Windrush docked in Tilbury. The missed opportunities to recognise and engage with how this flows into Brexit, moreover, is a source of a continuing frustration in race scholarship.

This does not quite address Favell’s important points about cosmopolitanism, and here there is more disagreement. I say this because I have increasingly found, though not in Favell’s case, that cosmopolitanism has become tied to, or at least limited by, the very critique of multiculturalism it has advanced. For example, many of the identity promises contained within ideas of post-national citizenship and post-war cosmopolitanism more broadly have not come to fruition, or at least are not obviously visible across a variety of citizenship regimes. This is particularly true of those accounts which anticipated a diminution in the particularistic content of political communities, such that the boundaries between nations, states or indeed societies, might become empirically porous and even morally irrelevant.

These positions have not successfully grappled with something of a trend in the valorisation of national identities in nation-state citizenship across Western Europe, something that may be characterised as a re-nationalisation of various citizenship regimes. This is the analysis of Britain that I want to take up in CORJ which, as Favell (2020) himself has shown, we should not mistake the study of state level discourse and policy as methodological nationalism. On this final point of agreement then I will take the opportunity of to reiterate my sincere gratitude to Fadil, Favell and St Louis for the important insights contained in their rich discussion, and look forward to carrying on the spirit of this symposia in our future conversations.