Jack Turner, III: Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Exercised by claims that race no longer much matters as a bar to full participation in American society, Turner writes a lively scholarly polemic seeking “to move beyond” “simplistic debates pitting advocates of self-reliance and personal responsibility against analysts of historical inheritance, structural constraints, and inequality of opportunity.” He does no such thing, coming down firmly on the side of historicism, structuralism, and egalitarianism, building a ‘postmodernist’ version of a progressive/social-democratic intellectual history traced through the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Turner presents their thought as an ascending dialectical interplay between individuality and social obligation, calling the final synthesis, seen in Baldwin, the culmination of “an African American democratic individualist tradition” or individualism “properly understood.” These writings are well-trodden ground; Turner’s analysis of Emerson will stand as his most valuable contribution, correcting the relative neglect of Emerson’s writings on slavery. Douglass fits most uneasily into the story—a natural-rights man without a historicist (much less postmodernist) bone in his intellectual body. The book culminates in a chapter that calls for “rhetorical jiujitsu” on behalf of the author’s democratic socialism, a tactic the book itself amply exemplifies. Readers may wonder why African-American democratic individualism speaks with such strong accents of German philosophy.
Turner stages individualism in a Hegelian-dialectical manner: “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.” That is, true individualism is really a social relation or, as Hegel has it, a matter of mutual ‘recognition.’ By ‘structural’ racism, Turner means race prejudice; to this he adds inequality of wealth. Failure to see these things and act upon them constitute “a failure of democratic individualist virtue,” particularly “a failure of self-reliance.” Rhetorical jiujitsu, indeed.
He begins with what can only be a willful distortion of Tocqueville’s discussion of individualism. Accurately reporting Tocqueville’s description of “a pattern of public withdrawal,” whereby “the individualist interacts only with his family and a small social circle,” Turner then absurdly claims that Tocqueville charges “male domination and white supremacy” as the causal culprits of such behavior. As even a novice reader of Tocqueville knows, he regards individualism as a product of democracy itself, of social equality. This, however, would ruin readers’ appetites for the more radical social egalitarianism Turner desires, who calls Tocqueville’s individualist an “atomistic individualist” while reserving the valorous title of “democratic individualist” for socialists and proto-socialists.
Emerson and Thoreau, for example, “transformed these tendencies into something much finer than the individualism portrayed in Tocqueville’s Democracy.” Although Turner prudently ignores it, Emerson (paralleling his contemporary Thomas Carlyle in Britain) became among the first American writers to import German moral and political thought to the United States. Acting as a sort of cultural middleman, he defined ‘self-reliance’ in German-Romantic, anti-‘bourgeois’ terms as self-realization and ‘transcendentalism,’ abhorring prudential thought on quasi-Kantian grounds as sadly immoral timeserving. In Turner’s and Emerson’s defense, they do register Emerson’s central and sound argument against slaveholding, that it “cuts out the moral eyes” of the master, causing him to attempt to justify stealing the labor of another man. The slaveholder doubly lacks self-reliance; he does not work for himself, and he corrodes his own moral and intellectual faculties by habituating them to hypocritical sentiments and sophistic arguments. These habits in turn corrupt public life, as seen in the gag rule on anti-slavery petitions imposed by Congress in 1837. As a good quasi-Kantian, Thoreau went so far as to insist that Americans abandon commerce altogether—hopelessly entwined with slavery as it was—and go ‘back to the soil’ as yeoman farmers. Emerson couldn’t quite bring himself to go that far, preferring moral self-examination to tilling the soil. “In Emerson,” Nietzsche would later lament, “we lost a philosopher”; Turner has the opposite regret, that “Emerson seemed to value his purely philosophical pursuits more than his antislavery activities.” Or, as one might put it today, in Emerson we gained an intellectual. Turner does quite sensibly bring himself around to accept Emerson’s proposal to compensate slaveholders in exchange for emancipating their slaves. “Morally impure” though this is, “prudence is mandatory”; “if self-reliance required moral perfection it would be an unlivable ideal.” He concludes with democratic-socialist fervor, laying down two obligations: the “nonexploitation obligation,” requiring one to ensure that his “pursuit of self-reliance…does not directly abridge others’ ability to pursue self-reliance”; and the “democratic egalitarian obligation,” requiring one to “contribute to the common effort to ensure that all democratic citizens have self-reliance’s material prerequisites” (otherwise known as socialism). He rightly does not claim that Emerson advocates these principles, only that “provides the initial basis” for them.
Free of historicism, Frederick Douglass proves harder to force into Turner’s framework, although not for want of trying. Referring to Douglass’s “transracial humanism” instead of his natural rights doctrine, Turner “awakened to race” as “a historical and social force,” preferring to concentrate on Douglass’s postbellum writings on the “economic underpinnings of freedom,” particularly “the idea of fair play” enforced by “a strong central state.” After disputing Peter Myers’s natural-rights interpretation of Douglass’s thought he eventually gets round to admitting Myers is right, but laments that “this prevented Douglass from supporting the plans of Thaddeus Stevens and other Radical Republicans to confiscate rebel land and redistribute it to freedmen.” Those pesky property rights, you see. In fact, natural rights doctrine most assuredly does not prevent confiscation and redistribution of land owned by defeated enemies in a just war, as American Tories learned in the 1780s, on their way to Canada and other points British. Turner does cite Douglass’s alternative proposal: to establish a National Land and Loan Company which would sell stock and use the money to purchase Southerners’ property and then lease or sell it to former slaves. The failure of this proposal allows Turner to condemn industrial and financial interests that overbore the Radical wing of the party after Stevens’s death; this valid point sets up his next move, which is to try to squeeze a bit of socialism out of his man by citing a passage in which Douglass urges that black men be given straw to make bricks. What Douglass actually means is that black men should not be cut off from access to building materials on the basis of unjust, racially-based discrimination; Douglass remains a very good Lockean indeed by insisting on the value of work as the basis of self-help. American “political culture lacked a philosophic vocabulary of positive economic rights,” or, to put it in plainer language, there weren’t many socialists around here. Nonetheless, “it is plausible to read him as a forerunner of twentieth-century ideas of positive economic rights” because he thought “freedmen were owed the material rudiments of self-help.” This is nonsense, inasmuch as confiscation of property, homesteading, and similar policies were entirely compatible with the American regime from early on, and had none of the foundation in the historicist economic egalitarianism Turner strains to see in Douglass.
In Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Turner finds much more congenial spirits. Ellison joined the American Communist Party in the 1930s, breaking with it in the mid-40s because it had become insufficiently Marxist and anti-bourgeois for a self-respecting militant; expatriate Baldwin was a socialist throughout his adult life. No natural-rights republicanism for Turner to worry about, here. “The primary responsibility of the American writer, Ellison insisted, was ‘to give as thorough a report of social reality as possible,'” “arbitrating the representation of reality.” To Marxist class consciousness he very understandably added race consciousness to counter the “false consciousness” of writers and readers who ignored racism. In an area where natural rights and Marxist ideas do intersect, Ellison was on board: He eschewed any attempt (which would have been entirely Quixotic, anyway) of substituting black racial dominance for white racial dominance; proletarian dictatorship was one thing, race-based dictatorship another. “Black people would be their own death and destruction if they sought not equality and justice but merely an inversion of American racial hierarchy”; “interracial fraternity” or genuine racial integration fits well enough with ‘America’ and ‘Germany’ alike. (Race and class, yes, but Turner pauses to deplore the notion of fraternity, a sex-based word that he should have discarded. Even Ellison did not achieve the trifecta of the twenty-first century Left, ‘race, class, and gender.) “Well versed in Marx, Ellison recognized the economic and social roots of white supremacy,” but he also saw that white supremacy contradicts the “unalienable rights and natural equality” enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. He did not base his own critique of racism so much on natural rights as on the analysis of the neo-Marxist Erich Fromm’s claim that the remedy for modern man’s loss of the security of “a stable social order” (i.e. feudal aristocracy) was “self-creation and the pursuit of meaningful work,” lest one turn toward the new ‘aristocracy’ offered by fascism. Racial supremacy feeds into this quest for a new aristocracy; Ellison’s rhetorical strategy was to point this out, alerting American ‘innocents at home’ that they should not “take for granted their own good character” in matters of race relations. He remained a historicist, “treat[ing] the word America as an indefinite signifier of mystical importance,” “keep[ing] the word’s significance indefinite, so as to encourage his audience to regard the meaning of American as evolving”—the characteristic strategy of the ‘progressive’ Left, Marxist or not.
Baldwin not only “personifies ‘awakening to race'”; he also adds the category of ‘sex’ to race and class. “I interpret Baldwin as a democratic individualist,” which is to say a democratic socialist, and the interpretation is fair enough, at least when considering his later writings—especially The Fire Next Time. He rejected the progressivist liberals of his time; “liberal idols such as Roosevelt and Kennedy, according to Baldwin, defended black humanity only when it cost them little or nothing,” or, as a politician who has responsibility for making real-world decisions in a republic might say, when the public opinion upon which they depended for accession to and continuation in high public office permitted them to act. A critic of American ‘exceptionalism,’ Baldwin viewed his native country as “a prosaic nation among prosaic nations, unexceptionally capable of both good and evil. At the same time, Baldwin believes we have it in our power to create a redeeming future if we admit that redemption has yet to occur.” This is why he was so foolish. Why would human beings “capable of both good and evil” transform themselves into purely good ones?
Baldwin replies in the accents of neo-Hegelian egalitarianism. “White citizens must accustom themselves to hearing blacks’ imperative voice”—Hegelian recognition. In Baldwin’s words, “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it…and history is literally present in all that we do,” that is (in Hegelian terms) immanent. Turner sees the problem. “Baldwin runs into a classic problem of democratic reconstitution: reconstitution is necessary both to do justice to citizens and to create citizens capable of sustaining a just regime. But for citizens to recognize that reconstitution is necessary, they must be better than they presently are.” Historicists typically invoke the figure of the leader to address this problem, but Turner’s Baldwin contents himself with calling for “the assertive speech of dissident citizens.” But are not members of the Ku Klux Klan equally dissident citizens? Indeed so: American “self-creation” must then become “a self-conscious struggle with historical inheritance, a battle to reduce history’s power over the self through patient and forthright confrontation.” Turner makes a brave if implausible effort to refute Locke on this basis. “In Locke’s political theory, property is conceived as a natural institution that comes into existence prior to the constitution of either political society or government,” a claim Turner’s Baldwin denies on the basis that Locke assumed that “any pauper could find untilled land and create property by mixing his labor with it.” The real Locke defined property first and foremost as the innate capacities and characteristics of human beings—physical strength, moral rights, and intelligence. Arrangements for civil property rights derive from human nature. It isn’t hard to refute Locke if you haven’t understood what he says. But it is hard to understand Locke if you read him assuming that human beings ‘constructed’ by their society—”socialized all the way down,” as Richard Rorty puts it, along with hundreds of lesser historicists.
Although Turner dresses his “democratic individualism” in American garb, it really amounts to familiar contemporary postmodernism, “sensitivity to dialectics of identity and difference” wedded to “historical consciousness.” With these elements in hand, his readers will develop “appreciation of relinquishment as a virtuous act,” also known as ‘give us your money, and do it with a smile.’ Such are the arts of “rhetorical jujitsu.” “Though advocates of racial justice argue in a sense for a type of group equality”—one must admire that “in a sense”—”they must put the rhetorical focus on the individuals within the group.” This enables them to “talk about conditions of deprivation and inequality” in “specific terms,” as they affect individuals, or what might be called the HLN News approach to social analysis. Disagree in whole or in part? Well, “those who pretend otherwise do not have the courage to face reality.” So there. You are probably “a very specific type of citizen insulated from the worst aspects of American life: the white, middle-class, heterosexual male.” You blackguard.
It is equally necessary to face unreality. To take ‘race, class, and gender’ as a moral slogan intended to reduce one’s political rivals to a condition of guilt-ridden disarray confuses morality with rhetoric. To take it as a political slogan to unite socialists overlooks the question of whether socialism would actually produce the egalitarian effects its proponents seek, or claim to seek. Inasmuch as socialism transfers economic resources from private to public control, it enhances the power of the modern state, as Marx forthrightly admitted. Marx also claimed that once the state had done its proper work of eradicating socioeconomic classes it would wither away, yielding communism. That has yet to happen anywhere socialism has been tried; supposed socialist realism turned out to be utopianism and then soured into a scam (as in the old joke, ‘We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’). Egalitarianism wasn’t served. To insist that this time it will be different because this time we will have democratic socialism studiously overlooks the need to empower the state in order to redistribute income, an empowerment unlikely to be relinquished once—if—redistribution has been accomplished.
Recent Comments