What can we learn from reflecting on the fate of racial justice in the UK and elsewhere in the Global North? A 🧵on how my new book contributes a response to this question:
policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-cruel-opti… 1/
policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-cruel-opti… 1/
To begin with, and like many, I have struggled to keep up with the ledger of racial injustice. Even in the mere 6 years since Theresa May took office promising to tackle the UK’s ‘burning injustices’, an exemplary chapter almost writes itself. opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocra… 2/
From the 57,000 Black and minority ethnic Britons who may have been deported or stripped of their rights, to the Nationality and Borders Bill further strengthening powers to deprive racially minoritised Britons of their citizenship. 3/ transformingsociety.co.uk/2022/03/18/wha…
From the rising number of Black children in custody (28% of the population held in youth custody in Eng+Wales), to the Police, Crime, Sentencing & Courts Bill which even the Home Office admits may sanction difference in treatment on the grounds of race. 4/ transformingsociety.co.uk/2022/03/28/pod…
Or from the racial disparities in the labour market, with minorities less likely to be successful with their applications, even discounting differences in age and education, to the appalling disparities of the COVID-19 pandemic. theguardian.com/commentisfree/… 5/
I argue that it is in and across these spheres that racial injustice is co-constituted as part of our ‘crisis ordinariness’. To put it in these terms draws from Lauren Berlant’s account of how our view of progress can rest in ‘optimism’s double bind’. 6/ rsecovidcommission.org.uk/reflections-fo…
Here ‘an image of a better good life available’ creates an impasse that does not easily allow us to ‘detach from what is already not working’. For researchers, activists and policy makers committed to the pursuit of racial justice, there is something in this of the need 7/
to reckon with what we have long borne witness to, and often made a difficult peace with; something that comes not in a single event or episode that typically characterises a trauma, but which is something more akin to an undulating pain and discomfort. 8/
Some readers will recognise in themselves how we have routinely arrived at this impasse, and have perhaps even clung, in different ways, to the cruel optimism that racism in our societies can lessen, because some attitudes are less evidently less hostile. This is not naivety. 9/
As Hague put it, ‘one has to have an incredibly impoverished sense of political efficiency if one fails to see that “speaking truth to power” is not just one action but a whole strategic field that requires knowing when and how to do so’. It is instead to hold that 10/
what is morally unjust should not prosper in our societies. Yet the very idea of racial justice stood outside the promise of the good life that occupies Berlant’s account, and so cannot be understood through Berlant alone. 11/
*The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice* therefore turns to the late Charles Mills’ invitation to examine racial justice outside the realm of ideal theory. We might say that Mills turns John Rawls on his head to ask: 12/
‘not how you would create an ideal basic structure from ground zero but how you would dismantle an already existing unjust basic structure’. I follow this move but fold racial justice into a tradition rather than a single theory, 13/
to re-inscribe it with sociological content. Doing so shows us how racial injustice is often co-constituted across different social domains and ancillary social spheres, from education to the criminal justice system, from housing to public discourse. 14/
This also challenges Mills, specifically in his seeing racial justice as ‘primarily not pre-emptive measures to prevent racial injustice but corrective measures to rectify injustices that have already occurred’. 15/
I maintain that racial justice is multi-temporal in traversing that which has happened in the past, that which is manifest in the present, as well as that which will likely occur in the future. A core argument is that the burden of this labour is presently asymmetrical, 16/
landing disproportionately on racialised minorities who can see as self-evident these truths as they manifest across social systems. A fundamental rebalancing of this is only possible when the beneficiaries of the social production of moral indifference recognise that this 17/
is their load to bear as well. As a society we must reckon with the social and, of course, moral cost of racial injustice, but also support the necessary imagination that takes us through and beyond understandable despair. 18/
If this is the same motive that binds us into a cruel optimism presently, this need not be our future too.
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