Abstract
This article shows that William E. Connolly’s work holds resources for projects of racial justice but must be revised to fully meet the challenge of racial inequality. There are two interrelated problems in Connolly’s theory: first, the drive to destabilize identity, for which he argues, rejects the need for collective identity, which is necessary in democratic politics. Furthermore, because domination renders identity unstable, the call to destabilize identity places too great a burden on already marginalized groups. The problem of destabilizing identity is underwritten by a second problem: the white working class and its grievances occupy too important a position in Connolly’s analysis. This article uses insights provided by James Baldwin to amend Connolly’s contributions. The article argues that there is a need to destabilize the ‘we’ of American politics that allows white, male identity to occupy the ‘heart’ of liberal democracy. Baldwin’s insights help solve the problem of the ‘black hole’ at the center of liberal democracy which, Connolly argues, sustains fundamentalism and racial injustice. This article’s contribution is to amend Connolly’s work to meet the challenge of racial injustice, offer a novel reading of the place of political imagination in Baldwin’s work, and show how political imagination adds depth to conversations about democracy, racial justice, and pluralism.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, D. (2004) Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown V. Board of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Anderson, B. (2016 [1983]) Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Baldwin, J. (1985) The Price of the Ticket. Boston: Beacon Press.
Baldwin, J. (2018 [1974]) If Beale Street Could Talk. New York: Vintage Books.
Baldwin, J. (1993 [1963]) The Fire Next Time. New York: First Vintage International.
Balfour, L. (1998) ‘A Most Disagreeable Mirror’ race consciousness as double consciousness. Political Theory 26(3): 346–369.
Birth of a Nation (1915) Directed by D.W. Griffith [Film]. Epoch Producing Co.
Brown, W. (1993) Wounded attachments. Political Theory 21(3): 390–410.
Chozick, A. (2016) Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers 'Deplorables', and G.O.P. Pounces. The New York Times.
Connolly, W. (2019) Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth. Durham: Duke University Press.
Connolly, W. (2017a) Aspirational Fascism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Connolly, W. (2017b) Facing the Planetary. Durham: Duke University Press.
Connolly, W. (2013) The Fragility of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Connolly, W. (2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Durham: Duke University Press.
Connolly, W. (2005) Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Connolly, W. (2002) Identity/Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Connolly, W. (1999) Why I am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Connolly, W. (1995) The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dienstag, J. (2009) Connollyism, What. Theory & Event. https://doi.org/10.1353/tae.0.0093.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1935) Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Doherty, C., Kiley, J. and Johnson, B. (2018) An examination of the 2016 electorate, based on validated voters. Pew Research Center. Aug 9, 2018.
Fanon, F. (2007 [1952]) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.
Frank, J. (2014) Publius and Political Imagination. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke J. and Roberts, B. (2013 [1978]) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harris, C. (1993) Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review 106(8): 1707.
Hartman, S. (2019) Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: WW Norton and Company.
Hooker, J. (2016) Black lives matter and the paradoxes of U.S. black politics from democratic sacrifice to democratic repair. Political Theory 44(4): 448–469.
Ignatiev, N. (1995) How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge.
Jones, M.S. (2020) Vanguard. New York: Basic Books.
Levitsky, S. and Ziblatt, D. (2018) How Democracies Die. London: Penguin Random House.
Lewis, R.L. (1987) Black Coal Miners in America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
McBride, D.A. (1999) James Baldwin Now. New York: New York University Press.
Olsen, M.E. (1970) Social and political participation of blacks. American Sociological Review 35(4): 682.
Olson, J. (2004) The Abolition of White Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Quashie, K. (2012) The Sovereignty of Quiet. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Roediger, D. (1991) The Wages of Whiteness. New York: Verso Books.
Serpell, N. (2021) Pixar’s Troubled ‘Soul’. The New Yorker.
Scudder, M.F. (2016) Beyond empathy: Strategies and ideals of democratic deliberation. Polity 48(4): 524–550.
Silver, N. (2016) The Mythology of Trump’s ‘Working Class’ Support. FiveThirtyEight.
Soul (2020) Directed by P. Docter, K. Powers [Film]. Disney and Pixar.
Tropic Thunder (2008) Directed by B. Stiller [Film]. DreamWorks.
Wagle, G. (2022) Counterimagination and the plurality of radical politics. Polity 54(2): 334–358.
Zerilli, L. (2005) Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Wagle, G. This is Us: Imagination, identity, and American racial hierarchy. Contemp Polit Theory 22, 483–505 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00620-w
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00620-w