G. Snyder Writing Sample 2-Libre

Self-work and the Reproduction ofPrivilege: Reading Beloved againstAntigone

Greta Fowler Snyder

University of Virginia

Recently, normative theorists have stressed the importance of “self-work” to the

promotion of justice. This article demonstrates how actors’ phenomenological

limitations can blunt the capacity of one version of self-work—acknowledgment—

to effect greater justice in race relations in the United States. Toni Morrison’s novel

Beloved illuminates the ways inequality shapes the lives of the marginalized

and the privileged, and how these different lived experiences can inflect

acknowledgment. Morrison’s insight is used to unravel a paradox in U.S. public

opinion: while most white Americans endorse racial equality in theory, few support

the policies necessary to realize it in practice. Although acknowledgment does

not necessarily prefigure justice in identity relations, the article concludes that

acknowledgment has a progressive role to play as a supplement to the politics

of recognition.

Polity advance online publication, 22 August 2011; doi:10.1057/pol.2011.11

Keywords ethos; acknowledgment; recognition; racism; Toni

Morrison; phenomenology

When Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast in August of 2005, citizens

across the United States beheld images of the storm’s fury and of its victims.

Among the iconic pictures were those of residents of New Orleans wading

through flooded streets to find food and water; families standing atop their

homes—floodwaters up to their roofs—holding signs begging for help; survivors

who had gone days without adequate food, water, or medical supplies stranded

on overpasses in the unrelenting summer heat; grown men and women sobbing

in front of beyond-repair homes; and children without parents waiting in airports

to be relocated. These images of vulnerability and tragedy shocked the nation.

And importantly, the people in them were predominantly poor and black.

The author thanks the many people who generously gave their time and talent to improve this

article: Lawrie Balfour, Simon Stow, P.J. Brendese, George Shulman, Stephen White, Ben Snyder, Tristan

Bridges, Dave Novitsky, Will Umphres, Nadim Khoury, Justin Rose, Andrew Douglas, Sara Henary,

Christina Simko, and three anonymous reviewers for Polity.

Polity . 2011r 2011 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/11www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

After the storm, scholars discovered that differences in levels of sympathy

for those in the path of the waters and opinions about the appropriate level of

government assistance for the victims of Katrina fell along race lines. In a survey

of 507 Americans identified as “white” and 267 Americans identified as “black,”

Leonie Huddy and Stanley Feldman found that white respondents were

significantly more likely than black respondents to blame residents who stayed

in the city for their own suffering and for poor conditions after the flood.1 In

addition, white respondents, on the whole, expressed less sympathy for those

who remained in New Orleans than for evacuees, and expressed less sympathy

for those who weathered the storm than did black respondents.2 In light of these

findings, it is not surprising that black respondents were significantly more

supportive of government efforts to help hurricane victims and to rebuild

New Orleans than were white respondents, even after controlling for differences

in income and education.3 Even though white respondents in Huddy and

Feldman’s study accurately identified those left in the city as predominantly

poor, they greatly overestimated the options and resources available to those

who suffered one of the worst hurricanes in U.S. history.4 The difference in white

and black respondents’ opinions points to the difficulty we have understanding

how the world is experienced by others—what I call our “phenomenological

limitations.”

This article fleshes out the idea of phenomenological limitations and then

discusses how awareness of these limitations can change our assessment of a

political intervention that exemplifies an increasingly prominent genre in

contemporary political theory.5 Theorists like Michel Foucault, Stephen White,

William Connolly, and Patchen Markell have argued that moral and emotional

1. Leonie Huddy and Stanley Feldman, “Worlds Apart: Blacks and Whites React to Hurricane

Katrina,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 3.1 (2006): 108. The belief that the residents

“chose” to stay was oft heard in the wake of Katrina. Attributions of blame to the victims of the storm

were presumably encouraged by photographs of poor black Americans paired with stories about looting,

violence, and social disorder. Indeed, only 50 percent of white respondents believed that those who

remained in flooded New Orleans were looking for essential items (as compared with 80 percent of

African American respondents)—the other half believed that post-flood “scavengers” were looting

luxury items. See Ibid., 103–4. The historical association of black people with criminality surely

undergirded this opinion. See Cheryl Harris and Devon Carbado, “Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?” in After

the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina, ed. David Dante Troutt (New York:

The New Press, 2006), 98.

2. Huddy and Feldman, “Worlds Apart,” 103.

3. Ibid., 97.

4. Ibid., 105.

5. Today, political theorists often call for the development a particular ethos in democratic nations

(i.e. an ethos of critical responsiveness, a late-modern ethos, an ethos of democratic friendship). Each

ethos is to be realized through the self-work of democratic citizens. In its emphasis on contingency or

finitude, Markell’s notion of acknowledgment resonates with Stephen White’s “late-modern ethos,”

William Connolly’s “critical responsiveness,” and Judith Butler’s “unthreatened” bearings of the self. See

Stephen White, The Ethos of a Late-modern Citizen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); William

2 SELF-WORK AND THE REPRODUCTION OF PRIVILEGE

work on one’s self is a “crucial part of justice” in relations of identity and

difference.6 Prescribed forms of self-work include dampening one’s hostility to

the other, managing one’s will to power, developing moral restraint, nurturing a

sense of generosity/hospitality, and cultivating a critical responsiveness to the

new.7 Self-work, these theorists contend, prepares one to engage in political action

that promotes justice.

Among the several theories of self-work, Patchen Markell’s theory of

acknowledgment has been particularly influential.8 He contends that privileged

and vulnerable individuals alike should cultivate “acknowledgment,” defined as

the understanding that control over one’s identity is limited in a world defined by

contingency and a concomitant willingness to bear one’s share of the risk

inherent in social life.9 Markell develops and defends his position through a

reading of Antigone.10 According to him, tragedy provides firm ground for his

argument because “a lack of acknowledgment is a constitutive element of the

best tragedies.”11

In this article, a summary of Markell’s interpretation of Antigone is followed

with a reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved that problematizes the prescription

Markell recommends.12 Beloved is an ideal counterpoint to Antigone not only

because it is a tragedy, but also because Morrison’s third-person narration

provides insight into the comparative phenomenology of different characters in

Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Also see Judith

Butler’s work done after Gender Trouble (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

6. Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 180.

7. White, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen; Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization; Romand Coles,

Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1997); Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2000).

8. Markell borrows the concept of acknowledgment from Stanley Cavell, but his presentation differs

from the idea that Cavell develops in the essay “Knowing and Acknowledging” from Must We Mean What

We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Markell refers to the acknowledgment of

something specific (i.e. the ontological condition of contingency), while Cavell speaks about the

concept of acknowledgment more generally (my thanks to Geroge Shulman on this point).

9. William Connolly and Stephen White offer more bounded versions of the “ethos” argument in The

Ethos of Pluralization (1995) and The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen (2010), respectively. Connolly

understands “critical responsiveness” on the part of those members of enfranchized groups to be a

necessary complement to demands by disenfranchized groups for access to the pluralist arena. White

prescribes a “late modern ethos” for the middle classes in advanced industrial nations.

10. Markell’s work is an example of the recent revival of interest in Antigone among political

theorists. See, for example, Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002);

Mary Dietz’s Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2002);

and Bonnie Honig’s “Antigone’s Lament, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership and the Politics of

Exception,” Political Theory 37.1 (2009): 5–43.

11. Markell, Bound by Recognition, 63, 65–66.

12. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume of Penguin Putnam, Inc., 1988). Pagination may differ

from that of other Penguin editions.

Greta Fowler Snyder 3

the novel.13 Her novel makes the characters’ interpretations and experiences of

the world accessible in ways that non-fiction cannot. Indeed, Morrison observed

that with Beloved she wanted to “rip that veil and expose a truth about the

interior life of a people who didn’t write it,” to offer a window into the lived

experience of former slaves.14 While Markell’s reading of Antigone supports the

conclusion that equity in relations of identity and difference requires acknow-

ledgment, Morrison’s Beloved demonstrates how differences in experience (them-

selves a function of differences in power) inflect the practice of acknowledgment

and thereby render it unable to adequately prepare citizens to address injustice.

The article then brings social-science research to bear on the question of

whether acknowledgment orients people toward “transformative political action”

as Markell suggests it would.15 More specifically: Does acknowledgment pre-

dispose those who benefit from what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the wages of

whiteness” in the United States to promote racial justice through political action?

Even if a privileged white American is committed to acknowledgment in theory,

before this commitment guides action it must be filtered through the frameworks

or interpretive schemas that shape his or her phenomenology. In the United

States, white citizens tend to understand racial inequality as a byproduct of overt

racism and explicit violations of the norm of non-discrimination; experiences,

and relationships in an unequal and socially segregated society tend to reinforce,

or at least not trouble this view. When filtered through this way of seeing the

world, willingness to bear one’s share of the risk of social life translates into

abstention from racism and into non-discriminatory “colorblindness.” Given that

the vast majority of U.S. citizens adhere to the norm of colorblindness today,

most whites socialized into the dominant schema by which racial inequality and

racial equity is understood can claim in good faith to have engaged in

acknowledgment—even if it does not lead to further actions to promote social

and political change. Moreover, the proclamations of colorblindness should not

be thought of as insincere or half-hearted acknowledgment. More intense

13. Tragedy is a literary form that focuses on “improper action” (or action that has unintended and

often terrible consequences), recognition, and reversal of fortune. See Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. D.W. Lucas

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), Markell’s Bound by Recognition, and David Scott’s Conscripts of

Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Beloved

includes all these elements. The novel is centered on a single horrific event: the murder/sacrifice of the

baby girl named Beloved. Reversal of fortune occurs, for instance, when slave master Schoolteacher

arrives at Sethe’s new home to reclaim ex-slave Sethe and her children and in the final confrontation

between Sethe and the women of the community. Recognition is discussed in this article and is also a

central element of the final confrontation between Sethe and the women of the community, who had

shunned her because of her terrible act and her reaction to it.

14. As quoted in George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political

Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 195.

15. I understand this as action that would transform social and political life so that both become

more just.


acknowledgment would not yield a different political outcome. Far from

prepping people for transformative political action, acknowledgment can be

consistent with, and even perpetuate, unjust racial relations in the United States.

Discussing self-work theory in light of public opinion and social science research

that identifies white Americans’ phenomenological limitations brings into relief

important potential problems with this kind of prescription.

Awareness of phenomenological limitations and their political consequences

not only challenges currently popular theories of self-work, however. It also brings

the importance of collective demands for the recognition of identity into relief.

Demands for recognition of identity can disrupt the narratives that the privileged

use to justify their advantages – can puncture their phenomenological bubbles,

so to speak – and can introduce them to new understandings of how the world is

socially structured. Rather than concluding that acknowledgment has no value,

the final section of this article maintains that Markell overdraws the distinction

between acknowledgment and recognition. Once this shortcoming is taken into

account, one can imagine a more productive relationship between these two

concepts—for example, the self-work entailed in acknowledgment can protect a

politics of recognition from its excesses.

Although this article engages specifically with Markell’s theory of acknowl-

edgment, the argument has broader implications for the self-work genre. First,

it contributes to our understanding of some weaknesses of this particular brand

of political prescription. Second, it contributes to our appreciation of the value

of self-work. Other scholars have criticized self-work for its de-politicizing

effects—for, allegedly, encouraging timidity in political actors (especially those

on the left side of the political spectrum) and for undermining the collective

actions that are necessary for the realization of social change.16 This article

contends that self-work can, as its advocates claim, politicize citizens, but

self-work does not necessarily prompt individuals to “live the structures”17 that

constitute society in ways that will change them. Even though many self-work

theorists are concerned about racism, self-work is not an effective rejoinder to

racism inasmuch as dominant (conservative) ideologies shape privileged citi-

zens’ understandings of concepts like “contingency” and “generosity.” Still, in

contrast to political theorists who portray self-work and politics as oil and water,

I foresee a positive and complementary role for self-work in a progressive politics

that connects self-work with collective actions that promote greater equity in

identity relations.

16. Ella Meyers, “Resisting Foucauldian Ethics: Associative Politics and the Limits of the Care of the

Self,” Contemporary Political Theory 7 (2008): 125–46; Jodi Dean, “The Politics of Avoidance: The Limits

of Weak Ontology,” Hedgehog Review 7.2 (2005): 55–65; Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo, “Agonized Liberalism:

The Liberal Theory of William E. Connolly,” Radical Philosophy 127 (2004): 8–19.

17. White, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen, 17.


Antigone: Acknowledgment and the Dangers of Recognition

Markell offers acknowledgment as a prescription for injustice in relations of

identity and difference by way of a critique of the politics of recognition. The

politics of recognition—in which marginalized groups reconstruct their collective

identities as sources of pride rather than shame and assert their difference in

an effort to transmute what has traditionally been seized on by opponents as

weakness into strength—has resulted in demonstrable political victories for

marginalized groups. Yet Markell argues that this politics rests on a fundamental

misrecognition of our ontological condition and that this misrecognition has

proven to be costly for marginalized groups. Those engaged in the politics of

recognition, Markell claims, understand collective identity as already accom-

plished. Identity, having been “fixed,” can be recognized or known again.18

According to Markell, the ontological truth is just the opposite: identity is not a

pre-existing standard that guides action but, instead, is endlessly constructed by

human action. Because identity is a consequence rather than a cause of

action, the desire for recognition—to know and affirm oneself and to be

known and affirmed by others for who we “really” are—is a vain desire. Though

true mastery over identity and the way others perceive it cannot be achieved, the

illusion of mastery can be approximated by some (the privileged) at the expense

of others. The demand for recognition, Markell argues, is best understood then,

as a function of a desire that is complicit with injustice in relations of identity and

difference.

Markell’s reading of Antigone illustrates these problematic social and political

dynamics. According to him, the main characters—Antigone and Creon—“want

to be recognized, and have seduced many interpreters into indulging them.”19

Creon and Antigone present their acts as the logical outcome of fixed identities.

Their conduct, however, is at odds with the identities they want to project.

Antigone, demanding recognition for her identity as “sister,” transgresses norms

of femininity and renounces her living sister to carry out her familial duties

to her dead brother. Creon’s actions do not benefit Thebes, contrary to his

self-presentation as “protector of the city.” The understanding of identity as the

source of inexorable action makes the politics of recognition not only untenable,

but dangerous. Insisting on recognition of particular identities, Antigone and

18. This is what Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. refers to as an “archeological approach to Black identity.”

It “refers to a specific form of life that binds a group of individuals to one another—a sort of collective

true self. This form of life is distinct from that experienced by other peoples . . . [B]lack identity . . .

provide[s] us, as one people, with stable, unchanging, and continuous frames of reference and meaning,

beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history.” See Glaude, “Pragmatism and Black

Identity: An Alternative Approach,” Nepantla: Views from South 2.2 (2001): 295–316.

19. Markell, “Tragic Recognition: Action and Identity in Antigone and Aristotle,” Political Theory 31.1

(2003): 11.


Creon are blinded to more capacious understandings of their selves (in addition

to being, respectively, sister and protector of the city, Antigone and Creon are

also fiancee and father). Zealous commitment to proclaimed identities also

discourages the flexibility in perspective, the willingness to see the world from a

different point of view, and the willingness to negotiate or compromise that

democratic politics require. Finally, while both characters attempt to achieve

mastery, in the end, only one is able to do so. Creon asserts his will at the expense

of Antigone’s life.

Markell contends that both Antigone and Creon—along with those of us

committed to justice in relations of identity and difference—would be better

served by acknowledging the implicit source of injustice (our desire for mastery)

than by insisting that others recognize our “true” identities. Unlike demands for

recognition, acknowledgment is self-oriented. It involves admitting one’s identity

to be dependent on one’s situation, choices, and actions. Because identity is

inherently contingent, one cannot control one’s identity or consider it ever fully

and finally defined. Instead, one ought to accept the limits on control posed

by unavoidable unpredictability and willingly bear one’s share of the risks of

social life.20 Acknowledgment thus requires both a revision of the way one

perceives human possibility and change in the way one acts in the world. It

requires that all agents—both the powerful and the vulnerable, both Creon and

Antigone—try to dismantle or attenuate their own privileges and embrace the

contingency of identity and social interaction.

While Markell portrays acknowledgment as positive through and through,

he hedges on the question of recognition’s value. At times he says that even

if we could eliminate the desire for recognition, we may not want to because

of its positive political and social effects.21 In Bound by Recognition, however,

he most often portrays recognition as in tension with acknowledgment.

Acknowledgment, he claims, requires us to forgo recognition understood

as the affirmation of an already-accomplished identity. In his opinion, the

pursuit of this type of recognition represents a failure to acknowledge the lack

of control we have over our own identity and the identity of others.22

Further, the politics of recognition reproduce the desires for mastery that

sustain injustice, because exhibitions of the desire for mastery stoke similar

desires in political actors and onlookers.23 It is hard to resist the conclusion that

for Markell, it would be difficult if not impossible to cultivate acknowledgment if

people are already engaged in a politics of recognition. The logic of his argument

20. Markell, Bound by Recognition, 35–38.

21. Ibid., 5, 188.

22. Ibid., 113.

23. Ibid., 88–89. See also Markell, “Tragic Recognition,” 30.


leads us toward the conclusion that recognition and acknowledgment are

mutually exclusive.24

Through his reading of Antigone, Markell issues a warning to those who would

champion the politics of recognition. But do other tragedies support his con-

clusions? Is “willful blindness or sovereign hostility to contingency even more

disastrous than contingency itself” for both the privileged and the marginalized?25

Does acknowledgment prepare us to engage in transformative political action?

Are demands for recognition rightly understood as a practice of willful blindness

and/or sovereign hostility to contingency? To answer these questions, let us turn

to Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Beloved: Racial Inequality and Acknowledgment

Morrison’s novel focuses on members of a fictional family who try to rebuild

their lives after escaping from slavery.26 At the center of the story are the events

leading to and following from the decision of Sethe (a fugitive slave) to kill her

daughter, known only as Beloved, and from her attempts to kill her other

daughter, Denver, her two sons, Howard and Buglar, and herself. While the

actions in the novel occur primarily during Reconstruction, slavery’s long shadow

looms over the story. It is crystal clear that under slavery, the illusion of sovereign

mastery is bought for some at the expense of others. Morrison illustrates this

asymmetry in power and its effects on individuals’ experiences of the world,

paying special attention to the deep and painful effects that the experience of

utter vulnerability has on the subjectivities of slaves and former slaves. Mr. Garner,

who is the first master at the plantation called “Sweet Home” where Sethe was

enslaved, perceives the world as a toy.27 Meanwhile, one of the ex-slaves, Paul D.,

describes himself as coming to feel “less than a chicken sitting in the sun or

tub.”28

Beloved’s plot is propelled by the second plantation master’s arrival at 124,

the home Sethe fled to upon her escape from slavery. “Schoolteacher” has come

to reclaim Sethe and her children. Sethe intimately understands that “definitions

24. The logic goes as follows:

1. We cannot hope to achieve justice through a politics of recognition.

2. By sustaining the desire for sovereign mastery, the politics of recognition undermines an ethos

and politics that can address the root of the problem.

3. Therefore, although recognition has done good work in the past, looking toward the future,

we—the privileged and marginalized alike—should accept acknowledgment as a superior

means of promoting a more just society.

25. Markell, Bound by Recognition, 69.

26. Morrison loosely based Sethe’s character on Margaret Garner—a slave who killed her daughter

rather than see her returned to slavery. In the story, Sethe first lives on a plantation owned by the Garners.

27. Morrison, Beloved, 147.

28. Ibid., 77.


belong to the definers—not the defined” and that these definitions have

consequences for how she sees herself :29

Worse than [death by Sethe’s hands]—far worse—was. . .[t]hat anybody

white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just

work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like

yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t

think it up.30

Sethe did not want to allow Schoolteacher to sully her children: “[S]he could

never let it happen to her own. . . Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best

thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean.”31 In a

desperate attempt to keep them clean, she opts for death over a return to slavery.

Sethe’s assertion of a particular identity differs from Antigone’s or Creon’s

attempts. She is trying to exert control over the terms of her children’s identities,

to take away other people’s power to define them; but she is also trying to control

the terms of her own identity. She does not see her children as separate and

distinct people, but as part of her. She protects her sense of self, and her children’s

senses of self, by exercising the ultimate control: the power over life and death. As

Markell notes, suicide expresses the desire to control the terms of one’s identity.

Through suicide, one attempts to “write one’s own end.”32 In the world Morrison

constructs, the instigating illusion of mastery (on the part of Schoolteacher)

begets a subsequent desire for mastery (on the part of Sethe) and the necessarily

unsuccessful acts that follow from her desire.

Sethe’s attempt to control the terms of her children’s identity comes into

opposition with the identity she envisions for herself. Her children fear her rather

than seeing her as a protector. White members of the general public, meanwhile,

interpret events to be “testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom

imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep

them from the cannibal life they preferred.”33 Despite Sethe’s efforts, she cannot

force her surviving children, the child Beloved returned from the grave, or the

white public to accept her interpretation of the world. Just as “the movement of

the Antigone cuts against Antigone’s and Creon’s pursuits of sovereignty,” so do

Sethe’s failed efforts to control her identity in Beloved highlight the impossibility

of mastering identity.34

29. Ibid., 199.

30. Ibid., 264.

31. Ibid.



34. Markell, “Tragic Recognition,” 11.


In addition to dramatizing the futility and negative consequences of

attempting to control others’ perceptions of one’s identity, Beloved also depicts

Sethe’s tragic resistance to acknowledgment, even after her attempted suicide,

attempted murders, and murder. Morrison writes that Ella, a representative of

community opinion among the former slaves, “understood Sethe’s rage in the

shed [where Sethe’s murder of her daughter took place] twenty years ago.”35

Nonetheless, Ella thought that Sethe’s reaction to the murder “was prideful,

misdirected, and Sethe herself too complicated.”36 Sethe insists that she was

right in killing her child and trying to kill her other children and herself,

even though her view alienates her from both the community and her lover,

Paul D., and prevents her from moving past this event.

To maintain this position, Sethe tries to master memory. Whereas Markell’s

notion of acknowledgment involves openness to the unpredictability of the

future, Sethe spends the first part of the book (unsuccessfully) trying to keep

the past at bay.37 She spends the second part of the book in the “timeless

present,”38 and the third “paying for her actions in the past.”39 She countenances

the future only twice in the book. The possibility of the future that Paul D.

promises is foreclosed by the arrival of Beloved—Sethe’s dead daughter returned

from the grave. The second moment occurs in one of the closing lines, uttered by

Paul D.: “We need some kind of tomorrow.”40

Meanwhile, daughter Denver’s story arc can be understood as involving initial

resistance to and then finally a triumph of acknowledgment. Learning the lesson

of utter contingency (that even one’s mother can act in unpredictable, and unpre-

dictably terrifying, ways) inspires Denver to exact control by shunning society for

years. However, as Beloved draws the life from Sethe, Denver overcomes her

desire to master the future. Recognizing that the world can be cruel, she goes into

it with the intention of saving her mother. She “go[es] on out the yard” ready to

accept whatever good and bad the future holds in store for her.41

Throughout the story, the characters’ attempts to control how they are

perceived are doomed. Assertions of mastery by some set off attempts at mastery

by others, resulting in tragedy. The novel thus suggests that our potential for

connection with others is foreclosed by our failure to acknowledge that we

cannot control the terms of our identity or how others perceive it. Moreover, it

illustrates how structural inequality insulates some at the expense of others. Yet,


36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., 45.

38. Ibid., 193.

39. Ibid., 263.

40. Ibid., 288.

41. Ibid., 257.


while the story provides us with grounds for criticizing efforts at mastery, it does

not “place acknowledgment in the foreground” in the way that Markell claims

Antigone does.

Morrison powerfully paints the radical vulnerability of the life of a slave.

Then-slave Paul D. sums up this inequitable pattern of interdependence, saying

of his former master, Mr. Garner, “[w]ithout his life each of theirs fell to pieces.”42

At the plantation ironically called “Sweet Home,” Sethe’s mother-in-law Baby

Suggs likewise learns the lesson that “nobody stopped playing checkers just

because the pieces included her children.”43 Circumstances remain dire after

emancipation: “Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose.

Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in

Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like

children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew, property

taken, necks broken.”44 Even after her freedom is bought, Baby Suggs realizes that

there are no firm boundaries, no protections against whites. “[T]hey came into

my yard,”45 she laments, and she has no way of stopping them. In this novel, the

risks inherent in social life have been, to put it mildly, unequally and inequitably

distributed between blacks and whites.

This radically unjust distribution of the risk of social life helps us imagine

the dangers acknowledgment might hold for the dominated. Under such unequal

conditions, what could embracing the unpredictability of one’s future and

acknowledging the risks of social life mean for those who are marginalized?

Morrison informs the reader that though Sethe at one point had tried to resist,

she is brought to the conclusion that helplessness was her destiny. Her first set

of plans for escaping Sweet Home “went awry so completely she never dared life

by making more.”46 She becomes so well acquainted with lack of control that

she relinquishes all control. At the end of the novel, shortly after Baby Suggs

dies in bed pondering harmless things, Sethe takes to bed. The scene is haunting,

and the reader senses a real emergency. Paul D., afraid, asks her: “What you

planning, Sethe?” To which she replies: “Oh, I don’t have no plans. No plans

at all.”47 Society offers her almost no protection from whites, whose wills are

systematically produced and reproduced according to staunchly held prejudices.

In circumstances of nearly complete impotence, embracing one’s lack of

control over one’s identity could result in a dangerous kind of fatalism.48 Both

42. Ibid., 231.

43. Ibid., 24.

44. Ibid., 189.

45. Ibid., 187.

46. Ibid., 40.

47. Ibid., 286.

48. I emphasize the word could because embracing contingency can also encourage one to contest

oppression. It can embolden rather than inhibit action by opening persons to the risk action entails. I am


poles—attempting to master the terms of identity and abdicating all control over

the terms of identity, wielding a handsaw against one’s children and going to bed

to ponder color—are problematic.

On the other side of the power relation, what might accepting one’s share of

social risk and the contingency of identity entail for those who benefit from

predominant notions of identity and difference? Beloved contains some

examples of “good” whites, such as Mr. Garner and the Bodwins. Yet while

Garner is a relatively kind master, he nonetheless treats the world as if it

were his toy and acts as if sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, and

brothers were, in Morrison’s term, “checkers.” The Bodwins—a brother and

sister who propound abolitionism—seem to practice acknowledgment, which,

Markell argues, involves “forgoing an advantage.”49 But we rightly wonder

about whether such acknowledgment prepares them to act in ways that

ultimately lead to racial justice, given their relative ease in the world, their

certainty of their own goodness, and their easy use of demeaning symbols,

such as the penny jar in the shape of a gaping-mouthed black boy.50 We,

furthermore, rightly ask how deep acknowledgment can go, when the share

and shape of the social “risk” confronting the Bodwins differs so drastically

from the social “risk” facing Sethe.

Perhaps one’s interpretation and practice of acknowledgment are shaped by

one’s lived experience and the interpretive frameworks through which one

engages the world. Given their different lived experiences of contingency and

their different habits of viewing the world—their “phenomenological limit-

ations”—racially privileged Americans may believe they are “acknowledging”

when they are, in fact, shouldering less than their share of the burdens of

social life while members of historically oppressed races who practice acknow-

ledgment bear more than their share.51

Beloved helps us to imagine how the fact of unequal recognition inflects the

interpretation and practice of acknowledgment, making it a boon to the status

quo rather than a radical politics. The novel assists us in envisioning how syste-

matic and deeply embedded social forces affect not only our identities, but also

grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., for instance, paints Baby Suggs and

Denver as pragmatists. He interprets Baby Suggs’ line “Know it, and Go on out the yard” as an exhortation

to act despite knowledge of the perils of a world shaped by white supremacy, and to act intelligently. See

Eddie Glaude, Jr., In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago, IL: University

of Chicago Press, 2007), 44. But even Glaude admits that while embracing contingency can be enabling,

it can also nurture fatalism (at 43).

49. Specifically, Markell says that acknowledgment demands that we “refuse something, restrain an

impulse, forgo an advantage, evade a recognition.” See Bound by Recognition, 182.


51. Danielle Allen eloquently argues that a healthy democracy requires an equal distribution of

sacrifice between the different groups that comprise the polity. See Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of

Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 134.


our proposed prescriptions for injustice. It provides us with reasons to be critical

of efforts by both the privileged and the marginalized to achieve sovereign

mastery. However, Beloved also suggests that acknowledgment may be riddled

with significant problems.

Inequality and Acknowledgment in Black and White

Despite advances toward racial equality and justice, the legacy of slavery

continues in the present.52 As Sethe says of her “rememories” (that is, the past that

she still experiences in tangible ways): “I was talking about time. It’s so hard for

me to believe in it. . . Some things just stay.”53 Among the things that have “just

stayed” is white privilege. In the words of George Lipsitz, whiteness continues to

be “a structured advantage that produced unfair gains and unearned rewards for

whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment,

housing, and health care for members of aggrieved racial groups.”54

Yet despite overwhelming evidence of racial inequality and the cachet of

whiteness, public-opinion studies indicate that a strong majority of white

Americans believe that racial equality has or will soon be achieved.55 While most

white Americans support the principle of racial equality, relatively few support

policies intended to bring about racial equality in practice.56 Scholars who

52. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New

York: Basic Civitas Books, 1998).


54. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity

Politics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007).

55. In an ABC News/Washington Post Poll of over 1,000 adults conducted in January 2010, 71 percent

of the white respondents indicated that they believe that racial equality has been achieved or will be

achieved in their lifetime as compared with 49 percent of black respondents (down from a 2009 survey

in which 56 percent of blacks believed racial equality has been achieved or will be achieved in their

lifetime). While 49 percent of blacks believe that racial equality will not be achieved in their lifetime or

will never be achieved (up from 41 percent in the 2009 survey), only 26 percent of whites agreed. See

“Race and Ethnicity” at PollingReport.com, accessed February 22, 2011, http://www.pollingreport.com/

race.htm.

56. “While a majority of whites in the twenty-first century embrace racial equality in principle and

believe in increasing the human capital characteristics of disadvantaged groups, their increasing

inclination to blame blacks themselves (or Latinos) for their disadvantaged status results in what we call

an implementation gap: whites are increasingly unwilling to support public policies such as affirmative

action that they believe offer unfair advantages to a group of people they believe are unwilling to help

themselves.” Lawrence D. Bobo and Camille Z. Charles, “Race in the American Mind: From the

Moynihan Report to the Obama Candidacy,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social

Science 621 (2009): 248. It should be noted that article presupposes that racially preferential policies will

in fact mitigate racial inequality. This is not an uncontroversial presupposition; Marx, for instance, would

have differed with supporters of affirmative action. (My thanks to Simon Stow for this point.) I adopt the

position because I am primarily concerned with the options that are available to citizens of a liberal

nation, the United States. I also believe that the reader can take racially preferential policies to be a

stand-in for any substantial political effort to mitigate racial inequality. The important point is not that


approach the problem as Markell does are likely to read white Americans’ beliefs

about racial equality and policy preferences as rooted in unwillingness to accept

their fair share of the burdens of social life. If true, acknowledgment would be

a crucial first step to the realization of racial justice. But social psychological

and sociological studies that map the contours of white phenomenology suggest

another possibility. They contest the idea that whites’ beliefs and policy pre-

ferences are best understood in terms of resistance to sharing risk equitably or

willful ignorance about social relations.57 Instead, disinterest in and opposition to

racially preferential policies can be interpreted as consistent with, and encou-

raged by, a successful practice of acknowledgment. This is why acknowledg-

ment is problematic. Even though it could prefigure transformative political

action, the meaning and political consequences of acknowledgment depend on

the interpretive frameworks of those doing the acknowledging. Just as in Beloved,

in contemporary America white and black Americans understand and

experience the world in very different ways. Even if white Americans acknowl-

edge social contingency and the need for fairly sharing social burdens, the

transformative capacity of acknowledgment can be blunted by their phenomen-

ological limitations. This problem with acknowledgment highlights the ideolo-

gical and structural forces reproducing racial inequality and compels us to

question whether self-work prescriptions like acknowledgment can effectively

address injustice at its “root,” as theorists like Markell claim.58

Numerous public-opinion studies have shown that black and white Americans

differ significantly in their understandings of racism and racial inequality. For

most white Americans, racism is synonymous with racial slurs and overt,

intentional acts of discrimination animated by strongly held beliefs about the

biological inferiority of certain groups. This kind of racism characterized the Jim

Crow South.59 Unjust racial inequality is understood as an outcome of such

racism.

racially preferential policies will effectively mitigate racial inequality, but that citizens today resist doing

more to mitigate racial inequality than has already been done.

57. I grant that in certain cases whites’ failure to support more muscular efforts to address racial

inequality are best understood as a function of a lack of acknowledgment. Some white people continue

to harbor racist views, and some white people have been exposed to sophisticated explanations of racial

inequality without this theoretical knowledge affecting their behavior. But I want to challenge the idea

that lack of acknowledgment is the appropriate diagnosis—and acknowledgment the appropriate

prescription—for all whites, or even a majority of whites.


59. See, for instance, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the

Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.,

2006); Russell Robinson, “Perceptual Segregation,” Columbia Law Review 108 (2009): 1093–180; and

Laurie T. O’Brien, Alison Blodorn, AnGelica Alsbrooks, Reesa Dube, Glenn Adams and Jessica C. Nelson,

“Understanding White Americans’ Perceptions of Racism in Hurricane Katrina-Related Events,” Group

Processes & Intergroup Relations 12.4 (2009): 431–44.


Given this understanding of injustice in race relations, what does recognizing

one’s stake in an unjust racial system and picking up one’s fair share of the

burdens entail? For most white Americans, cultivating an ethos of colorblindness,

or treating all individuals the same way regardless of their race, seems the

obvious antidote to irrational racial prejudice and the overt, intentional acts that

follow from it. Driven by commitments to the ideals of racial equality and equality

of opportunity, the idea of meritocracy, and wariness of the social stigma attached

to racism, most white Americans today openly condemn Jim Crow-style racism

and consciously practice non-discrimination via a colorblindness framework.60

Yet seeing that Jim Crow-style racist behavior is clearly on the decline, many

white Americans who adhere to the colorblindness framework believe that they

no longer benefit from the “wages of whiteness” (or at least that the end of those

wages is in sight). From this perspective, then, no further action is necessary to

remedy the legacy of slavery. When filtered through the predominant interpretive

framework, that is, acknowledgment reinforces the status quo, suggesting that

non-discrimination and the condemnation of Jim Crow-style racism have inaugu-

rated a fair distribution of the burdens of social life.

It is thus unsurprising that many white Americans oppose racially preferential

policies, like affirmative-action, reparations, or busing. After all, according to

the hegemonic schema for understanding race and racial inequality, the end of

Jim Crow-style racism marks the end of unjust racial inequality. They see racially

preferential policies as asking whites to bear more than their fair share of the

burdens of social life.61 White Americans’ opposition to these policies is

grounded, in their minds, by the same ideal that Markell champions: a fair

distribution of the burdens of social life.62

Social science research has uncovered serious problems with the color-

blindness framework. Certainly, discrimination can be overt, intentional, and

motivated by beliefs about biological inferiority. But discrimination can be subtle

and unintentional as well. The assumption that racial inequality is primarily

an outcome of individual-level discrimination is also problematic. Institutions can

discriminate, too; and when overt racism declines, institutions, not individuals,

60. Bobo and Charles, “Race in the American Mind,” 245–46.

61. This relates to Joel D. Aberbach and Jack L. Walker’s important finding that while Black Power

meant “Black pride or fairness in the distribution of goods” to a majority of black respondents

interviewed at the height of the movement, for the strong majority of white respondents, it meant

“replacing White supremacy with Black supremacy.” While black respondents saw Black Power as trying

to equalize the amount of social risk borne by blacks and whites, white respondents, believing that this

risk had already been equalized by civil rights legislation, believed that those who promoted Black

Power wanted whites to bear the majority of the risks in social life. Joel D. Aberbach and Jack L. Walker,

“The Meanings of Black Power: A Comparison of White and Black Interpretations of a Political Slogan,”

The American Political Science Review 64.2 (1970): 367–88.

62. Larry J. Griffin and Kenneth A. Bollen, “What Do These Memories Do? Civil Rights Remembrance

and Racial Attitudes,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 600–1.


can be doing the bulk of the discriminatory work.63 Furthermore, many scholars

have argued that racial inequality today should be understood not in terms of

current discrimination, but in terms of legacies.64 Even though norms and

practices have changed considerably since the 1960s, the cumulative effects of

past discrimination persist into the present. Finally, as will be elaborated below,

racism is buoyed not just by beliefs about biological inferiority (which

increasingly are seen as illegitimate and are held by ever fewer people), but

also by tenacious and insidious beliefs about cultural pathologies.

Given these scholarly criticisms of the colorblindness framework, might

adherence to it be itself a failure of acknowledgment? Could it be that those

who read racial inequality as primarily a function of overt and intentional racism

and who assume colorblindness is sufficient to end racism are guilty of bad

faith—that is, of willful blindness to social conditions and of willfully evading

their fair share of the burdens of social life? While this charge may be true in

some cases, it often misses the mark. Most white Americans do not go out of

their way to avoid the upsetting social facts that would contradict and challenge

their colorblind framework. They can sincerely believe in the framework that

enables them to say that they are successfully shouldering their fair share of social

risk—because social forces obscure social facts that would challenge their way of

understanding the world.65

Most individuals in the United States are socialized into the colorblindness

framework. Prominent in the American cultural imaginary is a simplified and

reductive vision of the civil rights movement.66 According to the standard

account, the movement both accepted the “Creedal premise” of America—that it

is a nation conceived in liberty for all and dedicated to the proposition that all

men are created equal, that people should be judged by their individual merits

rather than the color of their skin—and pushed for its realization by fighting

against violations of the norm of colorblindness.67 This way of understanding the

63. Joe R. Feagin and Clairece Booher Feagin, Discrimination American Style: Institutional Racism

and Sexism (Malabar, FL: Kreiger Pub. Co., 1986); Paul Frymer, Dara Strolovitch and Dorian Warren, “New

Orleans is not the Exception: Re-politicizing the Study of Racial Inequality,” Du Bois Review 3.1 (2006):

37–57.

64. Robert C Lieberman, “Legacies of Slavery? Race and Causation” in Race and American Political

Development, ed. Joseph Lowndes, Julie Novkov and Dorian T. Warren (New York and London:

Routledge, 2008), 206–33; Lawrie Balfour, “Unreconstructed Democracy: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Case for

Reparations,” American Political Science Review 97.1 (2003): 33–44; Patterson, Rituals of Blood.

65. Indeed, “sincere fictions” is the term that Joe R. Feagin and Hernan Vera coined to refer to

whites’ understandings of race in contemporary America. See White Racism: The Basics (New York:

Routledge, 1995).

66. As Griffen and Bollen put it, “the frame must selectively magnify some aspects of the history of

the civil rights struggle—the inspirational lessons most consistent with the script of a Creedal America—

and exclude the more dissonant and jarring dimensions of that history.” Griffen and Bollen, “What Do

These Memories Do?” 600.

67. Ibid.


movement implies that overt racism and explicit discrimination are responsible

for unjust racial inequalities, and that the colorblindness encouraged by the

movement is the solution to this problem. The historical narrative, and the

ideal of colorblindness it recommends, plays a dominant role in primary

and secondary education.68 As a collective memory that is deeply constitutive

of national identity, the civil rights movement has left an impression on every

American’s phenomenology—even those who did not directly experience it.69

Segregation reinforces the biases imprinted by education. As they grow up,

white children experience high levels of racial segregation; segregation

continues in college and the workplace.70 Along with physical segregation,

social segregation produces segregated ways of experiencing the world,71 or what

Russell K. Robinson calls “perceptual segregation.”72 A myriad of social dynamics

contribute to perceptual segregation, but chief among these are whites’ lack of

access to blacks’ “racialized conversations” or conversations about racial

inequity.73 In addition, black and white Americans typically obtain information

through different networks, resulting in racialized pools of knowledge.74 Eduardo

Bonilla-Silva argues that whites’ segregation from blacks helps create and

maintain a “white habitus” that conditions the way white Americans perceive

the world (their phenomenology).75 Segregation shields white Americans from

the inequitable racial realities of spaces that whites tend not to inhabit.

Meanwhile, perceptual segregation prevents whites from seeing discrimination,

even when it takes place directly in front them.76

68. Amanda E. Lewis, “There is No ‘Race’ in the Schoolyard: Color-Blind Ideology in an (Almost) All-

White School,” American Educational Research Journal 38.4 (2001): 781–811. See also Janet Ward

Schofield, “The Colorblind Perspective in School: Causes and Consequences” in Multicultural Education:

Issues and Perspectives, 7th ed., ed. James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee Banks, (Hoboken, NJ: John

Wiley & Sons, 2010), 259–84.

69. Griffen and Bollen, “What Do These Memories Do?” 596.

70. Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 124.

71. Michael C. Dawson finds the difference in black/white public opinion substantial enough to say

that white and black Americans occupy different lifeworlds. Michael C. Dawson, “After the Deluge:

Publics and Publicity in Katrina’s Wake,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 3.1 (2006):

243.

72. Robinson, “Perceptual Segregation,” 1093.

73. Ibid., 1121.

74. Ibid., 1120.


76. Robinson, “Perceptual Segregation,” 1118. In a study published recently in Psychological Science,

Evan Apfelbaum and his co-authors found that “[elementary-school] students exposed to a color-blind

mind set, as opposed to a value-diversity mind-set, were actually less likely both to detect overt instances

of racial discrimination and to describe such events in a manner that would prompt intervention by

certified teachers.” They conclude that “institutional messages of color blindness may therefore

artificially depress formal reporting of racial injustice. Color-blind messages may thus appear to function

effectively on the surface even as they allow explicit forms of bias to persist.” Evan P. Apfelbaum, Kristin

Pauker, Samuel R. Sommers and Nalini Ambady, “In Blind Pursuit of Racial Equality?” Psychological

Science 20.10 (2010): 1.


Interracial interaction, when it occurs, does not necessarily challenge

whites’ preconceptions. In fact, research on integrated workplaces and interracial

college roommates shows that social dynamics often reinforce perceptual

segregation. Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati conclude that whenever race

becomes an issue in the workplace, people of color often fear that their failure

to abide by the norm of colorblindness could lead to various disadvantages,

including lost credibility, retaliation, and alienation from white peers. The incen-

tive, then, is for people of color to provide “racial comfort” to white co-workers,

which reinforces white Americans’ view of the world.77 Likewise, in a study of

interracial college roommates, J. Nicole Shelton and her co-authors found that

minority students who anticipated discriminatory behavior from their white

roommates engaged in “compensatory strategies” designed to reduce the risk of

discrimination and strengthen the relationship.78

Given socialization into the colorblindness framework, ongoing segregation,

racialized pools of information, the relative dearth of cross-racial conversation

about racial inequality,79 and the motivation to reduce discomfort arising

from inter-racial interaction, it seems misleading to say that members of the

privileged racial group in America go out of their way to avoid troubling social

facts and alternative frameworks. If anything, such people have to go out of

their way to learn social facts that would prompt them to question the way

they perceive and respond to racial inequality. As Michael Eric Dyson said of

Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, “[W]e are immediately confronted with

another unsavory-truth: it is the exposure of the extremes not their existence

that stumps our national sense of decency.”80 White people do not have to be

willfully blind in order to hold the colorblindness framework. In this physically,

socially, and perceptually segregated nation, whites need to practice willful

resistance in order to reject the framework.

77. Devon W. Carbado and Mitu Gulati, “Working Identity,” Cornell Law Review 85 (2000): 1259–308.

78. J. Nicole Shelton, Jennifer A. Richeson and Jessica Salvatore, “Expecting to Be the Target of

Prejudice: Implications for Interethnic Interactions,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32 (2005):

1189–1202.

79. Jeaninine Bell, “The Personal, the Political, and Race,” Law and Society Review 44. 3/4 (2010):

487–93.

80. Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster

(Cambridge: Basic Civitas Books, 2006), 2–3 (emphasis added). One might say: Katrina did expose

whites to these upsetting social facts, and as the studies discussed in the introduction to this article

argue, the exposure did not transform whites. My response: one challenge is not enough to dislodge a

framework that has been developed and reinforced over a lifetime, especially if the event and its

outcomes are portrayed as exceptional. That Katrina was treated in public discussions as exceptional is

clear from the title of Paul Frymer, Dara Strolovitch, and Doran Warrren’s 2006 article in the Du Bois

Review: “New Orleans is Not the Exception” (emphasis added). In addition, white Americans have

developed explanations for inequalities that cast these inequalities as not unjust (see pg. 24 and footnote

xcvii).


Markell explains inequality in relations of identity and difference in terms of a

flaw of the self: people resist the ontological truth about human life and therefore

desire greater control than is possible. But social scientific discussions about

social dynamics and dominant cultural discourses suggest the opposite: whites’

ignorance of social facts and their hostility to more substantive political interven-

tions to promote racial equality are best understood not as flaws of individuals

but as cultural and structural phenomena. Bonilla-Silva writes, “most color-blind

whites who oppose (or have serious reservations about) affirmative action . . .

are good people.”81 He refers to modern racism as “racism without racists”

because modern racism is “not anchored in actors’ affective dispositions”82 but

instead is a function of views shaped by systemic location. In Bonilla-Silva’s

words, “these views form an inpregnable yet elastic wall that barricades whites

from the United States’ racial reality.”83 If Bonilla-Silva is correct and ignorance of

upsetting social facts and of hostility to others is not primarily a flaw of the self,84

then we should ask whether the self-work of acknowledgment can effectively

address the forces and dynamics perpetuating racial injustice.

The belief among most white Americans that racial equality has been or

soon will be achieved and their corresponding resistance to racially preferential

policies are not necessarily evidence that whites are hostile to contingency and

unwilling to accept their fair share of the burdens of social life. Their

commitment to sharing risk equitably is likely more widespread than Markell

assumes. Yet sincere efforts to engage in the practice of acknowledgment

do not necessarily lead to support for government actions that promote racial

justice. The political consequences of acknowledgment depend on how one

understands the current distribution of the burdens of social life, as well as how

one understands the actions that would need to be taken to make the

distribution more equitable. These understandings depend on the set of

educational and life experiences that have shaped one’s phenomenology. Given

dominant understandings of racial injustice in the United States, those whites

who do engage in acknowledgment are likely to behave so as to reinforce the

status quo. Even among “good whites”—the Bodwins in Beloved or white

Americans who today express high levels of sympathy for black Americans—the

practical effect of acknowledgment is likely to be blunted by phenomenological


82. Ibid., 7–8.

83. Ibid., 47.

84. Bonilla-Silva’s view of racism is distinct from other major conceptualizations (including Donald

Kinder and Lynn Sanders’s concept of racial resentment and Lawrence Bobo’s concept of laissez-faire

racism) in that “these authors are still snarled in the prejudice problematic and thus interpret actors’

racial views as individual psychological dispositions” (Ibid., 7). Rather than individual prejudices,

Bonilla-Silva’s materialist interpretation emphasizes social structures and ideology (Ibid., 8–9).


limitations.85 Social life shapes individual phenomenology so that privileged white

Americans uncritically hold and reproduce colorblind frameworks.86 They thereby

create the sort of phenomenological limits that caused majorities of surveyed

whites to blame blacks for the poor conditions in New Orleans after Katrina.

Social-science research teaches us that whites tend to espouse the principle of

racial equality; whites tend to condemn a certain kind of racism; whites tend to

believe that racial equality has been or is close to being realized; and whites tend

to see stronger interventions like affirmative action as unfairly disadvantaging

whites. Contrary to the view that stymied racial progress is motivated by whites’

willful and wanton resistance to sharing social risk equitably, resistance to

stronger interventions is here portrayed as the result of a particular way of

interpreting and responding to racial inequality. Rather than reading those whites

who espouse racial equality in principle but reject it in practice as deceitful

Machiavellians, this article argues that the disjunction between avowed principles

and tepid political actions arises from a phenomenological outlook that is shaped

through the interaction of ideology and social structures.

If this thesis is correct, then racial inequality becomes all the more difficult to

address. Whites believe that they have already seriously engaged questions of

racism and have jettisoned unjust privileges. Further sacrifice is unwarranted.

Thus, the problem is not that individual whites refuse to acknowledge that social

life involves contingency and risk and that contingency and risk should be shared

fairly. The problem is that social dynamics ingrain and reinforce a dominant

cultural framework through which whites understand the meaning of “risk” and

“fair share.” A change in this framework requires revising the dominant under-

standing of the civil rights movement, changing educational curricula, facilitating

more inter-racial conversation about racial inequality, and renewing past com-

mitments to integration. In a deeply unequal and segregated society, self-work is

unlikely to prefigure such action.

The Value of Recognition

In addition to offering insight into the phenomenological differences of

blacks and whites, Morrison’s novel offers insight into the importance of

recognition.87 Denver remains at home while the few people she knows in the

85. As Bonilla-Silva found, “whites with differing levels of sympathy toward minorities resort to the

same frames when constructing their account of racial matters” Ibid., 30.

86. A lack of reflexivity about race among whites is one of Bonilla-Silva’s primary findings. Ibid., 114.

87. While his focus does not coincide with mine, George Shulman’s essay on Beloved supports the

view that Morrison’s novel underscores the value of recognition. He states: “To the enslaved, servitude

means that both milk and labor are ‘stolen’; they are forced to provide a nurturance and recognition they

lack the power to demand and the right to receive.” See “American Political Culture, Prophetic Narration,


world—her brothers, Baby Suggs, her mother—either leave, die, or age. She feels

her “self” disappearing. Morrison implies that without the recognition of others

we cannot substantiate even our own existence. That is to say, we lack a self.

Hannah Arendt puts it this way: “a life without speech and without action [in

public] . . . is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because

it is no longer lived among men.”88 This idea—that the self dissolves without

the recognition of others—resonates strongly with Charles Taylor’s depiction of

recognition as “a vital human need.”89

In what I have interpreted above as a triumph of acknowledgment, Denver

decides to leave the house and encounters a peer in her community named

Nelson Lord. The meeting illustrates the vital importance of recognition. Nelson

Lord effectively excommunicated Denver from society outside her mother’s home

by asking “the question”: whether her mother murdered her sister and attempted

to kill her and her brothers. When Denver goes to work in order to save her

mother and herself, she re-encounters Nelson Lord. Morrison writes:

It was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve. And it might

not have occurred to her if she hadn’t met Nelson Lord leaving his

grandmother’s house . . . . All he did was smile and say, “Take care of

yourself, Denver,” but she heard it as though it were what language were made

for. The last time he spoke to her his words blocked up her ears. Now they

opened her mind.90

Nelson Lord’s small act of recognition reinforced Denver’s budding sense of

self and that symbolically reintegrated her with the community. She needed

the recognition in order for the thinness of her sense of self to thicken. The

encounter suggests that acknowledgment alone would not have sustained

Denver—recognition was also needed.

Subaltern communities and publics can encourage new conceptions of

self and revised understandings of worth.91 Still, transformation of the larger

society is needed to relieve historically disadvantaged people, including those

who suffer from the legacy of slavery today, from the disproportionate risk they

bear. Legal protections of person and property are undoubtedly important—for

and Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Political Theory 24.2 (1996): 307. Shulman not only interprets Morrison’s

novel in the terms of recognition; he suggests that an imbalance in recognition lies at the heart of the

injustice done to the characters.

88. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998),

176.

89. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in his Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of

Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 26.


91. Melvin L. Rogers, “Rereading Honneth: Exodus Politics and the Paradox of Recognition,”

European Journal of Political Theory 8.2 (2009): 185.


example, empowering blacks to prevent whites from coming “into the yard.”

Yet even with such laws in place, further social transformation—and cultural

change, in particular—is needed.92

During Reconstruction, white Americans justified their race-based privileges

through narratives that painted blacks as invariably and universally inferior.

In Beloved, the white public views Sethe’s successful and unsuccessful attempts

to murder her children as typical of black (cannibal) identity. Members of the

white public assume, that is, that violence is something any black person would

do given the chance, and the attribution is offered as justification for white

paternalism.93 Legal reforms have helped to undermine this derogatory view

of blacks. Nevertheless, its legacy persists. In 2009, Lawrence Bobo and Camille

Charles reported that “although the proportion of whites who negatively

stereotype blacks and other minorities has declined significantly, negative racial

stereotypes remain the norm in white America. Between half and three-quarters

of whites in the United States still express some degree of negative stereotyping of

blacks and Latinos.”94

Today, whites justify inequalities between blacks and whites on grounds of

either alleged intellectual inferiority of African Americans or a pathological

“black culture” that purportedly diverges from middle-class norms.95 Whether

biological, cultural, or both, these arguments paint blacks as deficient and

imply that in a merit-based economy and society, blacks are less likely to succeed

than whites.96 The expectation that blacks will fail salves the consciences of

92. The recent scandal involving the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. by

white police officers on suspicion of attempted “breaking and entering” what was his own home is just

one of a long line of incidents in which “colorblind” laws are enforced in a way that reproduces racial

inequality. The case illustrates how negative cultural representations have persisted since slavery and

have contributed to racial inequality in a nation committed to formal equality. Political theorists have

been attentive to the role that the meanings and symbols attributed to or associated with marginalized

groups play in their oppression. For discussions of culture’s role in the oppression of identity groups, see

Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth’s exchange in Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical

Exchange (London: Verso, 2003); Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1990); and Iris Young, “Structural Injustice and the Politics of Difference” in Contempo-

rary Debates in Political Philosophy ed. Thomas Christiano and John Christman (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,

2009).


94. Bobo and Charles, “Race in the American Mind,” 246.

95. See Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in

American Life, 1st ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American

Social Policy, 1950–1980, 2nd ed. (New York: BasicBooks, 1994). The ghetto-culture thesis was

developed long before the publication of Losing Ground, but Murray returned the thesis to scholarly

prominence in the late 1990s.

96. Murray’s work is the quintessential example of this ideological vision within the academy. In

terms of public opinion, Thomas McCarthy has studied the transformation of biological racism into a

kind of ethical racism expressed in psychological and cultural stereotypes. As he says, “The view that

blacks suffer disproportionately from character defects of various sorts seems to be quite widespread


whites while simultaneously bolstering their life chances at the expense of

blacks.97

An adequate response to race-based injustice, then, requires challenging

demeaning images of black identity, which both reinforce white privilege

and render it invisible. Current demands by black Americans for recognition of

new understandings of blackness disrupt the ways in which the privileged

view the world, upend narratives and stereotypes that the privileged tell about

those who are oppressed, and enable privilege to be identified as privilege.98

Those who demand such recognition declare that the world as it is experienced

by the privileged (the world of the “level-playing field” and “success by effort

and merit alone”) is not the world as it is. They disturb the privileged from its

cultural insularity, which reproduces inequality by systematically disadvantaging

some and systematically advantaging others.

Acknowledgment as Complement to Recognition

In and of itself, acknowledgment does not prepare citizens for transformative

political action. Yet it is politically valuable. As mentioned earlier, Markell finds

a latent tension between acknowledgment and recognition, and implies that

an ethos of acknowledgment would be difficult, if not impossible, to cultivate

once people are engaged in a politics of recognition. But perhaps there is not

a fundamental opposition between the goals of recognition and the practice

of acknowledgment. Perhaps the conflict is an artifact of Markell’s unique under-

standing of the politics of recognition.

According to Markell, demands for recognition are manifestations of a will to

mastery.99 Such demands are animated by a desire to create a world in which

among whites. And this fits with the equally widespread view that black socioeconomic disadvantages

are largely the result of their possessing too little of the crucial economic-individualistic virtues . . . that

enabled Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and other minorities to overcome prejudice and work their ways

up . . . . There is no doubt that, overall, what George M. Frederickson called ‘the black image in the white

mind’ is still a major determinant of views on racial policies.” See “Vergangenheitsbewaltigung in the

U.S.A.: On the Politics of the Memory of Slavery,” Political Theory 30.5 (2002): 638–39. In Black Identities,

Mary Waters discusses the sociological consequences of this vision for West Indian immigrants. See

Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities, 4th ed. (New York: Russell

Sage Foundation, 2004).

97. Axel Honneth has made a similar argument. But I would not want to follow him in reducing all

problems of redistribution to problems of recognition. See Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser,

“Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser” in Redistribution or Recognition?:

A Political Philosophical Exchange (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 110–97.

98. Lee Ann Bell, Storytelling for Social Justice: Connecting Narrative and the Arts in Antiracist

Teaching (London: Routledge, 2010).

99. While Markell directs his critique at theories of the politics of recognition, he extends this

critique to the actual practice of recognition politics in the chapter on Jewish emancipation in Germany

in Bound by Recognition.


each sees and knows the other for who he or she “really” is, and a desire to

remove risk, unpredictability, and incompleteness from social life. The politics of

recognition, on Markell’s account, assumes that we know our identity, that it is

uncontroversial, and that it has already been firmly established. We demand that

others affirm this particular, definitive, already-accomplished identity.

Markell is correct that this view of identity has played a prominent role in the

politics of recognition. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., for example, has discerned such a view

during the Black Power era, when many black Americans defined themselves as

essentially African.100 Amy Abugo Ongiri likewise has discovered and documented a

competing vision during that era, when other black Americans insisted that authen-

tic blackness resided with the (urban) “brother on the block.”101

But marginalized groups have also participated in versions of the politics of

recognition that do not involve the excavation and celebration of an essential

or authentic identity. For instance, leaders of the gay pride movement consciously

attempted to prevent it from becoming “uniform and monolithic.”102 To prevent

intra-movement struggles over the “authentic meaning of gay identity,” the slogan

“unity through diversity” was adopted. The celebration of multiple gay identities

was viewed as a positive good that would dismantle stereotypes about gays.

Through Gay Freedom Day parades, gay people demanded public recognition of

their numbers, public recognition of their pride in being “out,” and, significantly,

public recognition of the diversity of identities within the gay community.

Demands for recognition of a fixed and monolithic identity do seem to aim

toward a kind of impossible transparency that will guarantee affirming social

interaction, as Markell argues. But demands for recognition of plural ways of realiz-

ing an identity do not imply a desire for certainty in social life. The goal of this kind

of politics of recognition is to not to overcome all risk inherent in social interaction,

but instead to positively re-value a currently debased identity so that the varied

individuals associated with it might escape the opprobrium and oppression that

walks hand-in-hand with misrecognition. In other words, one can—and should—

differentiate between kinds of the politics of recognition; while one kind is driven

by a desire for mastery, the other is compatible with, and perhaps even integral to

promoting acknowledgment of the fundamental contingency of our identities.

The latter kind of politics of recognition involves demands for “multivalent

recognition”—that is, demands for recognition of the multiple ways of realizing a

particular collective identity. Demands for multivalent recognition challenge

not just negative stereotypes, but also the positive—yet reactive, reductive, and

100. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue, 47–65.

101. Amy Abugo Ongiri, Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement

and the Search for a Black Aesthetic (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010): 95.

102. Elizabeth Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994

(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002): 105.


reified—visions of identity that perpetuate injustice through misrecognition. The

conditions under which individuals can be recognized and affirmed are

promoted while the identity category itself becomes indeterminate, bringing

the human condition of contingency to the fore.

Many political actors and political theorists have assumed that marginalized

groups must adopt a monolithic identity if they are to be effective in fighting

identity-based injustice. A “collective black identity is [thought] essential for

an effective black solidarity whose aim is liberation from racial oppression;

therefore, [it is assumed that] blacks who are committed to emancipatory group

solidarity must embrace and preserve their distinctive black identity.”103 But a

static and homogeneous group identity can actually work against the goal of

racial justice by encouraging the perception that, for instance, all black people

are alike—a belief central to racist logic. Further, as Tommie Shelby argues, the

insistence that members of an identity group share and enact their “authentic”

collective identity will inevitably cause disputes over the content of that identity.104

Such in-group fighting can be self-defeating because those who lose these defini-

tional struggles will be alienated from the group.

If a politics of multivalent recognition is indeed essential to an effective res-

ponse to injustice, we can see an important political role for acknowledgment in

a progressive politics. By attuning individuals to the open-endedness and malleabi-

lity of both collective and individual identities, and by opening individuals to being

surprised both by others and themselves, acknowledgment enables individuals to

understand that their posture vis-a-vis a collective identity is but one of many. While

this undermines the idea of a strong, substantive shared identity, it does not

undermine the ability of those who have been marginalized to respond as a group

to common oppression.105 Acknowledgment thus can encourage individuals to

move away from a conventional politics of recognition that Markell rightly identifies

as problematic and toward a more promising politics of multivalent recognition.

Further, acknowledgment can help those engaged in the politics of recog-

nition practice what Danielle Allen refers to as a “healthy form of democratic

citizenship.” In Talking to Strangers, Allen criticizes the polity for requiring blacks

to sacrifice disproportionately for its good. At the same time, she argues

that African Americans must not “take” sacrifices from whites.106 The ethos of

acknowledgment encourages members of marginalized groups to strive for a

world not where the tables are turned and they become the masters, but where

103. Tommie Shelby, “Foundations of Black Solidarity: Collective Identity or Common Oppression?”

Ethics 112 (2002): 233.

104. Ibid., 249.

105. Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity

(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005).

106. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 108.


all bear their own share of the burdens of social life. Presumably, this outlook

would encourage other citizens to be more receptive to the demands of the

marginalized, as the demand for a world in which all share burdens equally is

more palatable and more morally defensible than a demand for a world in which

the vulnerable take the place of the privileged. This is essential to the effecti-

veness of the politics of recognition, which is “a process of re-education [invol-

ving] an alteration of our cognitive orientations and normative expectations.”107

In short, the viability and success of a politics of multivalent recognition

depend on the cultivation of the ethos of acknowledgment. Self-work like

acknowledgment, by encouraging the collective pursuit of multivalent recogni-

tion over conventional (monolithic) recognition, has an important role to play in

furthering justice in relations of identity and difference.

Conclusion

As a result of structural inequality, black Americans and white Americans

interpret and experience the world differently. In as much as power shapes human

subjectivity, without encouragement and extensive training the privileged will

seldom understand how those identified as “other” experience the world. This has

important implications for political prescriptions. Because unequal power relations

affect the lives of the privileged and the marginalized in fundamentally different

ways, “self-work” prescriptions like acknowledgment may serve an inequitable

status quo. Conversely, the cultural consequences of structured power imbalances

make the desirability of a politics of recognition more apparent.

As Markell rightly points out, it is impossible for all members of a society to

achieve a false sense of mastery. A person always runs the risk of having his or her

actions understood in unexpected, unanticipated ways. Still, it is incumbent

upon those committed to racial justice to try to decrease the disproportionate risk

unjustly borne by the vulnerable, and to encourage the privileged who generally

do not carry their share to bear more. There are good reasons to question

acknowledgment’s purported effectiveness in prompting citizens to act in ways

that promote racial justice. But as a supplement to a politics of recognition,

acknowledgment has an important role to play.

Greta Fowler Snyder is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia. This

article is based on a chapter in her dissertation, “Reviving Recognition: Toward

Equity in the Politics of Identities.” Another chapter of the dissertation is forthcoming

in the Journal of Politics. She can be reached at [email protected].

107. Nikolas Kompridis, “Struggling over the Meaning of Recognition: A Matter of Identity, Justice, or

Freedom?” European Journal of Political Theory 6.3 (2007): 285.


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