Dismantling Racial Progress for Black Liberation

• Published date: 01 August 2018
• Date: 01 August 2018
• Author: Alex Zamalin
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717736830
• Subject Matter: Review Essays

736830PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717736830Political TheoryReview Essay
review-article2017
Review Essay
Political Theory
2018, Vol. 46(4) 650 –658
Dismantling Racial
© The Author(s) 2017
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Liberation
Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, by Joseph R.
Winters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2016, pp. 320.
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, by Christina Sharpe. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press. 2016, pp. 192.
Reviwed by: Alex Zamalin, University of Detroit Mercy
DOI: 10.1177/0090591717736830
Few notions in American culture have had as long and durable a life through-
out US history as the idea of racial progress. The view that citizens of color
would become freer and society more just over time has been widely assumed,
powerfully defended, and strategically used as a clarion call from the
Revolutionary War to the Civil War, from the Progressive Era to Civil Rights,
and the post–Civil Rights period today.1 Strikingly, however, virtually every
moment of optimism about the possibility of racial equality would be met
with the harsh reality about its glaring failure. The abolition of slavery gave
rise to the short-lived experiment of Reconstruction, but was soon abandoned
for the sake of Jim Crow segregation and its everyday terrors. De jure segre-
gation was rendered unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court with Brown
v. Board of Ed. (1954) and was followed by the antidiscrimination legislative
victories of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. But this was soon fol-
lowed by de facto segregation, racially based police brutality, and hyper-
incarceration where black lives were, and still are, subject to the unequal
threat of injustice and violence. And the election of the first black president,
Barack Obama, in 2008 and again in 2012, was followed by the election of
Republican Donald Trump in 2016, a candidate who began his political career
propagating the racist “birther myth,” which claimed that Obama was a
Kenyan Muslim. Trump’s successful campaign played on white supremacist
tropes of taking back America for authentic white Americans and his admin-
istration has been pushing for “tough-on-crime” and “law and order” policies
that disproportionately impact and punish people of color.
A survey of this racial history might lead critical observers to claim that
progress is a naïve and indefensible concept—a myth that only has currency

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Review Essay
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because of powerful American romantic fantasies of reconciliation and tri-
umph but one that is ultimately threatened by history. On this view—shared
by black political radicals like Martin Delany, Malcolm X, Huey Newton,
and Angela Davis—progress should be abandoned because it helps alleviate
white Americans from the collective, direct, and strenuous task of tackling
white supremacy. Others in the black political tradition like Frederick
Douglass, antilynching activists like Ida B. Wells, or Civil Rights activists
like Martin Luther King, Jr., disagreed. They would use the idea of progress
strategically, even if they did not always believe in its empirical validity. For
them, imagining a new world beyond one of racial domination and tyranny
required invoking a beloved community to come.2
These competing understandings of progress, central to the debate within
the long history of African American political thought, still matter today. If
progress should be abandoned, what view of political time and history should
take its place? Is there a way to articulate a horizon of political possibility
without progress? If the idea of progress confuses and obscures, providing
cover for continued injustice, what would a post-progress politics and form
of citizenship look like? Is there a way to reconfigure some of the organizing
ideas of progress—the transcendent desire of imagining a better place, a
more just polity, the hope for a more vibrant democracy—without its most
pernicious effects?
Two timely books take up these pressing questions. Written during the
Obama years by non-political scientists—Winters is a religious studies
scholar and Sharpe a literary and cultural theorist—their arguments are not
only of great significance for political theorists interested in the politics of
race and resistance during the Trump Era, but for those concerned with
expanding the vocabulary of political theory.
Over the past decade, a number of political theorists (Shulman, Balfour,
Turner, Roberts, Bromell, Lebron, Hooker), drawing on the tradition of
African American political thought, have tried to expose the centrality of
race—not simply showing it to be a socially constructed, politically salient
concept but as an institution and ideology that exposes the limits and anxiet-
ies of democratic life. In their work, race undermines the potential for a just
social contract and the potential for recognizing political claim-making; it
helps promote fantasies of individualism; it demarcates the boundaries of
citizenship and visions of equality and freedom. Although they do not con-
sciously reference this...