Abstract
Both advocates and critics of racial integration have often depicted it as fundamentally hostile to enduring forms of racial identification and racial solidarity. This article questions the presumed antithesis between racial integration and racial solidarity through a sustained engagement with Elizabeth Anderson’s The Imperative of Integration, which depicts strong forms of racial solidarity as obstacles to integration that citizens must transcend in order to achieve racial justice. Contra Anderson, I argue that, especially under present conditions of racial segregation and inequality, we can and should reconceptualize integration as a process unfolding in time that can incorporate deeply felt racial solidarities without undermining itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, D. (2004) Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Anderson, E. (2010) The Imperative of Integration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Asante, M. (1993) Racism, consciousness, and afrocentricity. In: G. Early (ed.) Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation. New York: Penguin Books.
Baldwin, J. (1993) The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage Books.
Bickford, S. (2000) Constructing inequality: City spaces and the architecture of citizenship. Political Theory 28 (3): 355–376.
Bell, D. (2005) Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bernasconi, R. (ed.) (2001) The invisibility of racial minorities. In: Race. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Buchanan, P. (2002) The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Carr, L. (1997) Color-Blind Racism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Glazer, N. (1997) We are All Multiculturalists Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gooding-Williams, R. (2009) In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ford, R. (1994) The boundaries of race: Political geography in legal analysis. Harvard Law Review 107 (8): 1841–1921.
Frug, G. (1999) City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hamilton, C. and Ture, K. (1992) Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. New York: Vintage Books.
Hayward, C. (2003) The difference states make: Democracy, identity, and the American city. American Political Science Review 97 (4): 501–514.
Hayward, C. (2007) Binding problems, boundary problems: The trouble with ‘democratic citizenship’. In: S. Benhabib, D. Petranovich and I. Shapiro (eds.) Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Huntington, S. (2004) Who are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Vintage Books.
King, M. (1986) The ethical demands for integration. In: J. Washington (ed.) A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco.
Logan, J. and Stults, B. (2010) Racial and Ethnic Separation in Neighborhoods: Progress at a Standstill. http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Data/Report/report1.pdf, accessed 28 May 2013.
Marcuse, P. (1997) The enclave, the Citadel, and the Ghetto; what has changed in the post-fordist U.S. city. Urban Affairs Review 33 (2): 228–264.
powell, J. (2006) A new theory of integrated education: True integration. In: J. Borger and G. Orfield (eds.) School Segregation: Must the South Turn Back? Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Schlesinger, A. (1992) The Disuniting of America. New York: Norton.
Shelby, T. (2005) We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Valls, A. (2010) A liberal defense of black nationalism. American Political Science Review 104 (3): 467–481.
Young, I. (2000) Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank a number of people who read and offered insightful comments on earlier versions of this article: Elizabeth Anderson, Jimmy Casas Klausen, Julie Cooper, Yves Winter and Shalini Satkunanandan. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for Contemporary Political Theory whose comments greatly improved the final draft.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Stanley, S. Toward a reconciliation of integration and racial solidarity. Contemp Polit Theory 13, 46–63 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2013.13
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2013.13