Against Discourse: Why Eliminating Racial Disparities Requires Radical Politics, Not More Discussion

• Citation: Vol. 37 No. 4
• Publication year: 2021

Against Discourse: Why Eliminating Racial Disparities Requires Radical Politics, Not More Discussion

Robert Weber
Georgia State University, rweber@gsu.edu

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AGAINST DISCOURSE: WHY ELIMINATING RACIAL DISPARITIES REQUIRES RADICAL POLITICS, NOT MORE DISCUSSION

Robert F. Weber^*

Abstract

Racial disparity discourse is one of the main modalities through which we discuss and experience race and racism in the United States today—in discussions with colleagues and friends, in scholarly work, on cable news, on social media, and in lecture halls. Despite its ubiquity, racial disparity discourse is under-theorized: what, exactly, is its intended purpose? This Essay argues that most discussion about racial disparities is predicated on the faulty premise—grounded in the Habermasian concepts of discourse and communicative rationality—that antiracists will convince their interlocutors by engaging in a practice of rationalistic discourse among participants who share the objective and expectation of consensus. Drawing on the work of political philosopher Charles Mills and sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Moon-Kie Jung, the Essay explains why the pragmatic conditions of possibility for discourse of this sort concerning matters related to race in the United States are frequently absent.

Specifically, Mills theorizes that a "racial contract," saturated with racialized hierarchies and subordinating logics, has always underwritten the American social contract, leaving in its wake an "epistemology of ignorance" that is today responsible for localized and global cognitive dysfunctions. Jung develops Bourdieu's concept of doxa to explain how, when it comes to the politics of race in the

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United States, individual agency and actions are always mediated by a classificatory, schematic, and hierarchical social structure in which race frequently plays a decisive organizing role. This Essay concludes by recommending that those committed to redressing vulnerability, precarity, and disposability along racialized lines should not focus their efforts on cobbling together a transracial coalition of the discursively convinced. Instead, it is argued that attentional and financial resources are better directed to develop and reinvigorate a radical, oppositional politics dedicated to eradicating racialized hierarchies and those elements of the political economy that reciprocally nurture and feed off them. Political theorist Chantal Mouffe's model of "agonistic pluralism," which centers the irreducibly conflictual nature of modern politics and proposes a politics that aims to confront and convert rather than to convince, is offered as a fruitful theoretical model to underwrite this non-discursive, radical politics.

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CONTENTS

Introduction..............................................................................1180

I. The Muddled Politics of the Moment in Three Episodes......................................................................................................1186

II. Mainstream Racial Disparity Discourse As a Habermasian Project..........................................................1191

III. A Philosophical Explanation and a Sociological Explanation for the Present Impracticality of an Effective Anti-Disparitarian Politics Grounded in Discourse..............................................................................1200

IV. So, What Should We Do with Disparity Discourse?......1215

V. Chantal Mouffe's "Agonistic Pluralism" As an Alternative to Discourse Theory....................................1221

VI. On the "Real Utopia" of a Reinvigorated, Radical, and Agonistic Black Politics............................................1226

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Two considerations . . . broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing, as I had confidently assumed would be easily forthcoming. I regarded it as axiomatic that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the truth was sought with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the effort. This was, of course, but a young man's idealism, not by any means false, but also never universally true.¹

I began to realize that I had overworked a theory—that the cause of the problems was the ignorance of people; that the cure wasn't simply telling people the truth, it was inducing them to act on the truth. . . . It wasn't enough, in other words, simply to study the Negro problem and put the truth before people. . . . [Y]ou've got to do something about it.²

W.E.B. Du Bois

Introduction

The organizing theme of the Georgia State University Law Review's 2021 Symposium asked, "What's Next for Social Justice

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and Racial Equality?"³ This question has an august pedigree when it comes to America and race; it was on the forefront of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s mind in 1967, the year before his assassination: Where Do We Go from Here?, read the title of his final book.⁴ Following the convulsive protests in the summer of 2020, the importance of the question requires no further elaboration. What does require some reflection, though, is what the terms of the discussion should be. For instance, social justice and racial equality refer to distinct political objectives that are intrinsically interrelated, but in complicated ways. Further, the concept of racial justice straddles both social justice and racial equality, but is also easily distinguishable from both.

projecting the future trajectories of these concepts, as well as the future experiences of the real people whose material conditions will answer the Symposium's question, requires us to wrestle with the categories of race, class, justice, equality, and political strategy. For progressive legal scholars, the need to settle some of these interpretive questions is especially pressing. Law can be a problematic category in the context of race and class,⁵ and it might distract us from being able to provide real assistance to those engaged in organizing and other political work. We need to conceive of the role of law and legal reform in responding to racial and economic injustice as downstream of politics. In other words, lawyers who are committed to antiracist politics need to specify a racial politics before making the case for legal reform. Still, lawyers

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and legal theory play a pivotal role in constructing and navigating the institutions within which any such politics takes shape—in fostering the development of what Roberto Unger calls the "institutional imagination" of society, the sense for what practical institutional alternatives are possible.⁶ Lawyers objecting to the continued salience of race in the distribution of social resources, chances, and vulnerabilities should pick our partners judiciously.

One task that will help us begin to understand the sociopolitical significance of the present moment is to parse and map the deployment of racial disparities data in political discourse. The experience of Black Americans has often been articulated in the language of disparity, reflecting the reality that one of the bedrock features of American history has been the absolute and relative immiseration of the subset of the population ascriptively denoted as Black.⁷ For instance, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 that "[t]o be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships."⁸ A half-century later, Dr. King echoed the same sentiment: "Poverty is a glaring, notorious reality . . . . [I]t is poverty amid plenty. It is poverty in the midst of an affluent society, and I think this is what makes for great frustration and great despair in the black community and the poor community of our nation generally."⁹ And the sentiment is hardly limited to the economic realm of income and wealth in Du Bois's "land of dollars."¹⁰ In a

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remark frequently invoked today by public health practitioners, Dr. King also emphasized the moral outrage attending health disparities: "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman because it often results in physical death."¹¹

The political and rhetorical currency of disparity discourse and disparity data in modern societies, committed in principle to equality, is apparent on its face. With increasing regularity over the course of the past two decades, commentary on racial disparities has become ubiquitous in political and academic debate. Social scientists, journalists, public health practitioners, legal scholars, and the political commentariat routinely use race as an independent variable to track and discuss disparate outcomes with respect to police violence, criminal sentencing, health (including COVID-19), housing, employment, wealth, and income, just to name a few contexts. Disparity discourse is one of the truth-telling modes of our era; it is the primary language through which we analyze the concepts of race and racism today. The ubiquity of disparity discourse is one of the basic premises of this intervention, and I am interested in exploring the consequences and potential trajectories of that phenomenon rather than demonstrating the accuracy of any particular empirical or descriptive disparity claims.

For present purposes, it suffices to quote the pithy and tragic distillation of affairs from political scientists Rogers Smith and Desmond King: "The familiar, painful litany of the United States' continuing and severe racial gaps in material well-being encompasses virtually every dimension of life, from economic well-being to health to housing to education to the criminal justice system."¹² As such, disparity discourse arises out of real material depredations, and to that extent, it is hardly surprising to see its proliferation in overtly

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