Book Review: An Impossible Dream? Racial Integration in the United States, by Sharon A. Stanley

• Author: Inés Valdez
• Date: 01 August 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718797488
• Published date: 01 August 2019
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

594 Political Theory 47(4)

“white” Americans, in pieces such as “The New Negro” he shows awareness

of the need for a profound change in self-understanding on the part of many

African-Americans as well (Carson et al. 1997). In short, King saw that radi-

cal transformation in self-understandings was a prerequisite for radical trans-

formation of the economic, cultural, and legal–political conditions that kept

African-Americans in a condition of enslavement. He saw that no amount of

effort to expand democratic participation on the part of African-Americans

would suffice for the required sociopolitical change. A radical shift in moral

identity in the name of truth was also necessary. Furthermore, he evidently

understood truth as context-transcending in a universalist sense.

Scheuerman finds the vocabulary of universal, context-transcending truth

to be limiting, potentially elitist, and in general inappropriate for pluralist

societies. But without it, we may be unable either to give a phenomenologi-

cally convincing sociological account, or make philosophical sense, of the

kind of spiritual conversion that is at times required for radical transforma-

tion of the sociopolitical order. For this reason, the multiplicity of interpreta-

tions of truth and problems such as elitism should be seen as challenges for

contemporary theorizing about civil disobedience, not reasons to jettison the

concept of truth entirely. The way forward is not to eradicate this universal,

context-transcending idea of truth from the concept of civil disobedience, but

rather to conceptualize moral truth in such a way that it avoids the dangers

Scheuerman rightly discerns in the spiritual model.

References

Carson, Clayborne et al, eds. 1997. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume III:

Birth of a New Age, December 1955-December 1956. Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press.

Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap

Press.

An Impossible Dream? Racial Integration in the United States, by Sharon A. Stanley.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 224 pp.

Reviewed by: Inés Valdez, Political Science, Ohio State University, Columbus, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718797488

Sharon A. Stanley’s book An Impossible Dream? Racial Integration in the

United States is an exceptional intervention to a dynamic field of scholar-

ship. Stanley’s book advances a notion of integration that does not shy

away from the complexities and tensions involved in any such project. An