Advocates of black progress typically assume that black Americans have some special responsibility to other blacks, in the US and perhaps elsewhere. This is not so obvious to me. What, after all, is the basis for such a responsibility?
Sometimes it is claimed that successful black Americans must "give back to the community." Generally, individuals who have benefited from the support of others may well have a duty to reciprocate. But in many cases, individual black success hardly seems due in any significant measure to a broader black community within which violence, aversion to education, and resentment of mainstream black success is overrepresented.
Maybe we owe a debt, say, to a historical black community. This community includes those - Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and many others, along with innumerable ordinary black folk - who greatly struggled and sacrificed in pursuit of the rights and opportunities some of us now enjoy. Still, it remains unclear how the efforts of these people in the past necessarily impose on black Americans today any special responsibility to our contemporaries.
These remarks are bound to seem provocative, even reactionary. So let me affirm that I do believe that I and other black Americans can have a special responsibility to other blacks. However, I do not believe this responsibility flows naturally or necessarily from the non-biological fact of blackness. (And race is a sociological, not biological, fact.)
Black Americans - when we as individuals identify with others in our sociological race and share a sense of historical community -take on a special commitment of concern for black progress. This concern reaches beyond us as individuals with the aim of helping to improve the quality of life or experience of other blacks. Let us say that racial solidarity of this kind represents substantive racial identification.
Clarence Thomas, the reactionary Supreme Court justice, and Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative crusader, might not share this sense of racial solidarity. Nor should they be viewed as having any special commitment to black America just because they are black, or whatever label they choose for themselves as persons with identifiable African ancestry. Non-identifying African-Americans nonetheless have a general responsibility to black America. Everyone has reason to be concerned about entrenched racial inequity.
In this context, whites have an even greater responsibility. Many white Americans, while not themselves perpetrators of racial injustice, have certainly been beneficiaries of it. The relative lack of property and wealth in black America has a history, and the associated suppression of black competition for resources and opportunities has meant, in effect, an affirmative preference system for whites.
Of course, non-identifying African-Americans, like many whites, are most likely to shirk this general responsibility. Thus the task of forwarding black progress will, in fact, fall more heavily on those blacks who do feel a sense of racial solidarity, as well as on any whites and others who would make common cause with us.
This finally brings me to the subject of diversity. We can distinguish two models of diversity. The first holds that minority representation is good in itself. The second holds that the value of minority representation lies in its promoting not merely a particular individual's interests but, rather, the progress of the group's individuals.
The second model is the one African-Americans should care about. Otherwise, we, too, easily become trapped in racial, group-undermining thinking. It is hard realistically to imagine, for example, black progress doing worse than having Clarence Thomas occupy a seat on the Supreme Court. The hope that Thomas, being black himself, would "reconnect with his roots" has proven false and was always foolish.
Blacks hostile or indifferent to black progress are correct in one sense - we shouldn't care that they're black. Yet they often embody hypocrisy, using their blackness - claiming both righteous independence and martyrdom as black rightists - to advance their own ambitions, even at the expense of black interests.
My criticism of non-identifying African-Americans is not driven by a litmus test of political correctness. The criticism is based on some plausible notion of what black progress consists of and how best to achieve it. Blacks are no less entitled as individuals to be self-serving, profiteering, mediocre, or confused. But this is hardly worth fighting for.
Diversity for diversity's sake is as empty as token black representation. That African-Americans have no inherent special responsibility to care about the lives of black folk only supports this view. Everyone, though, has reason to be committed to diversity that would help lift those less advantaged or more subject to discrimination. This moves both black America and the country as a whole toward a better, more fairsociety.
Lionel K. McPherson is an assistant professor of philosophy.
