Publication
This book examines how the social fact of race shapes the ethical-political orientations of citizens in diverse democracies. It develops the concept of racialized solidarity; explores its impact on current conceptions of racial justice, particularly as formulated in theories of multiculturalism; and suggests how it might begin to be addressed.
Political solidarity is the reciprocal relation of trust and obligation between members of a political community necessary for them to live together on terms of fairness, reciprocity, and mutual respect. The contours of political solidarity continue to be indelibly shaped by race, however. Racialized solidarity is thus an important obstacle to racial justice. Weaving together insights drawn from African American political philosophy, theories of multiculturalism, and the literature on solidarity in political theory, the book develops a distinctive approach to questions of racial justice. Against the prevailing tendency to claim that the best way to deal with racism is to abandon the concept of race altogether, the book suggests that one way to begin to confront the racialized politics of solidarity is to attempt to transform the ethical-historical perspectives of dominant groups by making whiteness visible. This requires confronting past collective injustices and transforming the content of the political community's public memory so that it reflects the ethical-political perspectives of both dominant and subordinated groups. The book provides a detailed analysis of Latin American models of multiculturalism, which are compared to those developed in the United States and Canada.
