Racing to Justice

john a powell

Description

New paths to racial and social justice for Americans

Watch the book trailer for Racing to Justice Read an excerpt from the book Listen to an On Being podcast with the author: "Opening the Question of Race to the Question of Belonging"

Renowned social justice advocate john a. powell persuasively argues that we have not achieved a post-racial society and that there is much work to do to redeem the American promise of inclusive democracy. Culled from a decade of writing about social justice and spirituality, these meditations on race, identity, and social policy provide an outline for laying claim to our shared humanity and a way toward healing ourselves and securing our future. Racing to Justice challenges us to replace attitudes and institutions that promote and perpetuate social suffering with those that foster relationships and a way of being that transcends disconnection and separation.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Moving Beyond the Isolated Self
I. Race and Racialization
1. Post-Racialism or Targeted Universalism?
2. The Colorblind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered
3. The Racing of American Society: Race Functioning as a Verb Before Signifying as a Noun
II. White Privilege
4. Whites Will Be Whites: The Failure to Interrogate Racial Privilege
5. White Innocence and the Courts: Jurisprudential Devices that Obscure Privilege
III. The Racialized Self
6. Dreaming of a Self Beyond Whiteness and Isolation
7. The Multiple Self: Implications for Law and Social Justice
IV. Engagement
8. Lessons from Suffering: How Social Justice Informs Spirituality
Afterword
References
Index

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Civil Rights
• Social Science
• Droit et juridique
• América
• Civil and political rights
• Social class
• Social sciences
• LAW
• American

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 06 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253007353
• Langue: English

Extrait

Racing to Justice
RACING TO JUSTICE
TRANSFORMING OUR CONCEPTIONS OF SELF AND OTHER TO BUILD AN INCLUSIVE SOCIETY
john a. powell
Foreword by David R. Roediger
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
First paperback edition 2015
2012 by john a. powell
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the
United States of America
The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:
Powell, John A. (John Anthony)
Racing to justice: transforming our conceptions of self and other to build an inclusive society / John A. Powell; foreword by David R. Roediger.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00629-5 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00735-3 (eb) 1. Racism - United States. 2. Equality - United States. 3. Social justice - United States. 4. United States - Social policy. I. Title.
E 184. A 1 P 6637 2012
305.800973 - dc23
2012018655
ISBN 978-0-253-01771-0 (pbk)
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
To my children, Saneta and Fon DeVuono-powell and Travis and Caitlin Vorland, to everyone else s children, and to Ray, my recently deceased brother .
Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God s universe is made; this is the way it is structured .
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR .,
Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution
CONTENTS

Foreword by David R. Roediger

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Moving beyond the Isolated Self
PART ONE
RACE AND RACIALIZATION
1
Post-Racialism or Targeted Universalism?
2
The Color-Blind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered
3
The Racing of American Society: Race Functioning as a Verb before Signifying as a Noun
PART TWO
WHITE PRIVILEGE
4
Interrogating Privilege, Transforming Whiteness
5
White Innocence and the Courts: Jurisprudential Devices That Obscure Privilege
PART THREE
THE RACIALIZED SELF
6
Dreaming of a Self beyond Whiteness and Isolation
7
The Multiple Self: Implications for Law and Social Justice
PART FOUR
ENGAGEMENT
8
Lessons from Suffering: How Social Justice Informs Spirituality

Afterword

Notes

References

Index
FOREWORD
DAVID R. ROEDIGER
In the late 1990s, partly because john powell and I were consulting at Macalester College on their curriculum on racial justice, I attended a keynote lecture on that campus by the late literary critic and theorist Edward Said. His health already failing, Said spoke with even more than usual grandeur and in passages with a particularly spare eloquence. Nobody, he said at one point, is only one thing. This insight, so simple but so hard won, is a central subject of the book you hold. Pushing not only toward an analysis of the intersectional matrices in which race, class, gender, sexuality, and more collide and collude, powell shows that even a single category compounds the others in ways defying claims to purity. Indeed powell s challenging concluding sections recall the insistence of his and my former University of Minnesota colleague, the sociologist Rose Brewer, that not only intersectionality but also simultaneity characterize the ways in which we are more than one thing.
Thinking about Said s words over the years, I have often been tempted to add addenda, two of which particularly apply to powell s work. The first would hold that while we are never one thing, we often and tragically try to suppose that we are. Thus multiplicity and its denial, even repression, are both facts of modern life. In making whiteness central to his analysis, powell names what is in his country and much of the overdeveloped world the most powerful false universal, one implying an ersatz unity not only among whites of different classes but also within individual white psyches. Thus for powell the problematic and isolated white self constitutes a backbone of resistance to a changed world.
To thus indict whiteness is about as far as imaginable from playing the race card. Indeed, as a particularly brilliant chapter below suggests, powell struggles to make us see race as a verb always being made structurally, not as a noun capable of being invoked to separate enlightened and unenlightened. In 1998, when he and I designed a questionnaire on whiteness for a special issue of the journal Hungry Mind Review on that theme, powell included the searching question, When are you white? - one meant to be answered by people of color as well as those categorized as white. Indeed, he got the African American mixed-race writer Walter Mosley to tackle that question in a response in the special issue. When are you white? Mosley offered, is a Black person s question.
Said s aphorism secondly suggests a way to explain his, and powell s, extraordinary insight. To be consciously and militantly many things - in Said s case to be immersed in music, literature, history, theory, nationalist politics, and a dissent from nationalist politics based on aspirations toward humanism - enables (if it can never ensure) a critical positioning interested in the here-and-now of social change and the largest questions of life and meaning.
I cannot imagine that john powell, or anyone, would fail to be humbled by comparisons with Edward Said. But the soaring intellectual curiosity, the willingness to challenge even himself, and the ability to do the work of learning about everything from neuroscience to urban sprawl, so present in powell, does matter in accounting for the very unusual, indeed marvelous, shape of Racing to Justice .
My own friendship with powell has seldom failed to produce surprises regarding his breathtaking range of interests. Like the polymath historian C. L. R. James, john s passion for beauty and ideas sometimes took the form of a literal generosity. That is, he (and James) would get so excited about a work that it was given to friends, so that it could be discussed and enthused over together. My first Cassandra Wilson CD came to me that way. It was at john s insistence that I came to see Genghis Blues , a stirring film on U.S. blues and throat singing in central Asia. Nor was the street one-way. Constant requests from john for references to historical work on all manner of subjects have been a regular part of our relationship, as have follow-up conversations. I long regarded such habits on john s part as atypical of people whose day job is to teach about contracts or torts, but through him I came to know a broad set of almost equally inquisitive legal scholars.
My most vivid memory of powell s commitment to being adventure-some comes from the Making and Unmaking of Whiteness conference at Berkeley in 1997. This first major conference on critical whiteness studies drew over a thousand participants, attracting interest far beyond academia. Press attention ran high, in part because major media outlets misunderstood the event and ran pieces implying that disgruntled whites were finally claiming a place denied them in the rainbow of multiculturalism. The atmosphere was electric, and almost all speakers, myself included, responded as professors do, by clinging even more closely to the reading of a written text. In contrast, powell pushed his prepared remarks aside, saying it seemed more urgent to discuss dreams and why his law students reported (as he discusses in the pages below) often dreaming that they were another species, sometimes of another gender, and almost never of another race.
One further necessarily embarrassing comparison deserves to be made - indeed the most humbling one possible for a writer in these areas of inquiry. In its structure, Racing to Justice calls to mind the great James Baldwin collection The Price of the Ticket (1986). That massive volume shows how much of Baldwin s work, published in many venues over many years, was unified around a profound appreciation of the costs of being white - a price exacted across the color line. In particular, the price of whiteness for working class Europeans adapting to the U.S. racial system is relentlessly reckoned by Baldwin. This ability to convincingly connect whiteness and misery, including misery for whites, is shared by powell and by very few writers, notably the novelist Toni Morrison, the theologian Thandeka, the historian George Rawick, and the political scientist