Introduction

• Date: 01 September 2011
• Author: John L. Jackson,David Kyuman Kim
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716211408277
• Published date: 01 September 2011

Keywords: race; religion; secularism; neoliberalism;
Introduction
public sphere; democracy
American Negro history . . . testifies to nothing
less than the perpetual achievement of the
impossible. . . . And here we are, at the center
of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valu-
able, and most improbable water wheel in our
Democracy’s
hands; we must have no right to assume other-
wise. If we—and now I mean the relatively
Anxious
conscious whites and the relatively conscious
blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or cre-
Returns
ate, the consciousness of the others—do not
falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful
that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and
achieve our country, and change the history of
the world. If we do not now dare everything,
By
the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created
DAVID KYUMAN KIM
from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us:
and
God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more
JOHN L. JACKSON Jr.
water, the fire next time!
—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1998)
How does democracy say “race” and “religion”?
In light of recent and not-so-recent political devel-
opments across the globe, one might proclaim,
David Kyuman Kim is an associate professor of reli-
gious studies and American studies at Connecticut
College; senior advisor at the Social Science Research
Council; editor-at-large of The Immanent Frame; and
coeditor, with John L. Jackson and Rudy Busto, of the
Stanford University Press series RaceReligion. He is the
author of Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit
of Politics (Oxford University Press 2007), and he is
currently writing The Public Life of Love.
John L. Jackson Jr. is Richard Perry University Professor
of Communication and Anthropology at the University of
Pennsylvania. He has published three books, most recently
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of
Political Correctness (Basic Civitas Books 2008). He is
completing a manuscript on global black Hebrewism and
an ethnographic film (codirected with Deborah

A. Thomas) on state violence against Rastafari in Jamaica.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716211408277
6 ANNALS,
AAPSS, 637, September 2011

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INTRODUCTION
7
in the spirit of Baldwin, that democracy does not dare to say “race” or “religion”
with ease or with pleasure. Given capitalism’s post-Soviet hubris and the rhetori-
cal scaffolding that surrounds and justifies the violence that is our global War on
Terror, democracy has become the quintessence of sociopolitical possibility. This
apotheosis of democracy as, increasingly, the global idiom of political legitimacy
par excellence represents a certain triumph of sorts. Who but the most stone-
hearted cynic could witness “the Jasmine Revolution” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and
not respond with awe and amazement at the democratic yearnings said to spur
such courageous actions?
For all of the anxious murmurings about the Muslim Brotherhood filling the
void left in the wake of Hosni Mubarak’s oligarchic regime, it was not religious
extremism that unequivocally won the day but rather an ethos as much in sync
with the legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi as in dialogue
with the reformist efforts of Muslim civil rights groups.1 For sure, how democracy
in Egypt will say (and do) race and religion is still to be determined, but it also
remains clear that much of what passes for contemporary democratic life around
the world has not been able to insist on or create what Baldwin (1998) called in
The Fire Next Time a “consciousness of others,” such that the institutional trap-
pings of democratic governance necessarily mean the end of white supremacy
or the realization of robust publics enlivened by radical and unflinching forms
of inclusivity. Whether it is Qadaffi’s brutal reaction to democratic movements in
Libya or the distressingly slow and uncertain response by the United States to the
Jasmine Revolution (or the Obama administration’s decision to reopen “courts”
at Guantanamo Bay), there is ample evidence that critical attention to democracy,
race, and religion as inextricably knotted is quite desperately needed. In consider-
ing Baldwin’s prophecy, one cannot help but wonder, given the overwhelming
examples of self-serving and impoverished forms of democracy operating today, if
it is now fire time.
Insofar as race and religion continue to haunt contemporary democracies as
potential threats, it may be apt to talk less about democratic possibilities and hopes
and more about the burdens of democratic failures and exhaustions.2 Jürgen
Habermas’s conception of “the public sphere” is but one contested story about the
origins of modern democratic possibility amid the potential for failure—a story
that extends from an Enlightenment inheritance that insists on the central impor-
tance of rationality to any and all legitimate and inclusive political projects.
Scholars from a host of disciplines continue to weigh in on the ostensible tensions
that pit rational public discourse and civic engagement against the purportedly
irrational and antidemocratic impulses that are considered to ground the cultural
logics of more “primitive” conceptions of collectivity and community—conceptions
often linked to people’s seemingly atavistic investments in domains such as religion
and race.3 In this Manichean version of things, these two domains are often thema-
tized as democracy’s quintessentially antimodern nemeses. Race and religion are,
so this story goes, thoroughly countermodern affairs. This volume readily troubles
such simplistic formulations by convening a group of scholars who consider democracy,
race, and religion not as “problems” to be solved but rather as a set of inextricably

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8
THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
interconnected social, cultural, moral, and political forces that are to be taken
up without the illusion that they represent mutually exclusive alternatives.
Notwithstanding its long line of enthusiasts, democracy has many critics these
days, not all of whom unapologetically champion antidemocratic alternatives
(though some certainly do). These multipronged critiques tend to fall into a few rec-
ognizable categories. There are those detractors who dismiss democracy as little
more than an “empty signifier.” (No doubt, the tie-choked politician’s invocation
of “middle-class Americans” demonstrates another version of such semantic emp-
tiness.) For these critics, “democracy” is a catchall phrase deployed as the unob-
jectionable gloss for any number of arguably objectionable policies. This is
“democracy” as a Trojan horse, trucked out to justify and euphemize Western
imperialisms and neoliberal orthodoxies (West 2004; Harvey 2003). Anytime
protestors take to the streets in places such as Iran or Libya with Twitter-captured
pleas for democracy, the regimes in power (themselves objects of these popular
protestations) are quick to delegitimize democratic energies as mere street the-
ater, manufactured propaganda in service to Western interests and fomented
by outside agitators.
Still, we are ever-drawn to the rhetorical luster that invocations of “the democratic”
provide, a mesmerizing sheen of potentially blinding opalescence. Political theorist
Jodi Dean (2009) recently described democracy as a “neoliberal fantasy,” one that
dupes the...