Report on PDA, Spring 2013
Sharon Stanley, Associate Professor of Political Science
During my PDA, I made substantial progress on my new project, critically
examining the concept of racial integration as it has been invoked in legal decisions,
social movements, academic analysis, and political discourse. The ultimate goal of the
project is to produce a new book manuscript for publication with an academic press, and I
was able to draft three full chapters of this MS, as well as a brief introduction, during my
PDA. I also published a paper based on one of these chapters in Contemporary Political
Theory, entitled “Toward a Reconciliation of Integration and Racial Solidarity,” and
delivered an invited talk about my project at the University of Sydney, in Australia, in
April, entitled “Confronting the Impossible: Racial Integration in the United States.”
This project was originally motivated by my sense that neither critics nor
defenders of integration as an imperative of racial justice provided adequate accounts of
what exactly integration is. Thus, although it may appear superficially that these two
groups are intransigently opposed to each other, a careful reading of their arguments
demonstrates that integration’s critics, ranging from famed black nationalists from the
1960s such as Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X to moderate academic
multiculturalists such as Iris Young, often conflate it with compulsory assimilation, while
its defenders, from iconic figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. to
contemporary scholars such as john a. powell and Elizabeth Anderson, insist that true
integration entails a process of mutual transformation. While arch-Afrocentrists would
likely continue to reject any ideal of integration, even one understood as mutual
transformation, this conception does appear to answer the concerns of many critics of
integration, provided we can theorize what integration-as-mutual-transformation actually
looks like. This is the task I set for myself in my book manuscript.
The first three chapters of my book, written while on PDA, therefore offer a
theory of a non-assimilatory, mutually transformative model of integration. The first
chapter, “How Not to Integrate,” demonstrates how theories of integration derived from
famous desegregation court cases were vulnerable to the conventional critiques of
integration because they essentially treat the goal and prize of integration as proximity-towhiteness, depicting majority-black spaces and institutions as intrinsically problematic.
Rather than seeing the primary wrong of segregation as subordination, such a model of
integration sees racial imbalance itself as the wrong to be remedied by integration. This
model would indeed threaten cherished black institutions and the bonds of solidarity
forged within them.
The second chapter, “How To Integrate,” seeks to remedy these problems by
treating black subordination and white supremacy as the primary wrongs of segregation
to be remedied by integration. It offers two essential components to a mutually
transformative integration that cannot simply be achieved by moving bodies around in
space to achieve racially-balanced institutions: a process of internal, psychic conversion
and a redistribution of power. While black subordination can endure in racially mixed
spaces, it is genuinely threatened by the emergence of new subjectivities and new
structures of power. This chapter closely examines what kind of subjectivities, and what
kind of power redistribution, would be required to secure integration as mutual
transformation.
The third chapter, “Reconciling Integration and Racial Solidarity,” the basis of
my article in Contemporary Political Theory, argues that such a model of integration
does not require the dissolution of proud black identities, or black-identified spaces,
neighborhoods, or institutions. In contrast to models of integration as an even
distribution of racial differences through an area, I argue that there is nothing intrinsically
wrong with racialized space so long as all spaces are hospitable and welcome to
outsiders, and there is not a vast difference in the resources and opportunities available in
different geographic locations. Thus, rather than seeing racial solidarity and integration
as antithetical, I reconceptualize integration as a process unfolding in time that can
incorporate deeply felt racial solidarities within it.
In the course of drafting these chapters, however, I became increasingly aware of
the challenges that confront any attempt to implement this model of integration in the
contemporary United States. I came to realize that it was not a sufficient answer to the
critics of integration merely to show that it is possible to conceptualize a mutually
transformative ideal of integration. Rather, it is also necessary to examine the road that
would take us from our still-segregated present to that ideal, and to fully consider the
likely detours, toll booths, and even landmines that we would encounter. This is the stillremaining task for the last two chapters of the book, which I am presently working on.
These chapters examine the difficulty of implementing a comprehensive integration plan
across multiple dimensions (i.e. economic, political, residential, social, etc)
simultaneously, and that temporal paradox that the experience of integration forges the
very interracial bonds that are necessary as a precondition of an effective political
movement for integration. My talk at the University of Sydney addressed these obstacles
and argued that integration pessimism, though perhaps not fully vindicated, is a
defensible position in the face of such an uncertain road forward. I am presently revising
the talk for submission as a stand-alone article to a journal, while continuing my work on
the book manuscript.
On another note, apart from a month in Sydney to deliver my talk, I spent my
PDA in Argentina, where I took an intensive Spanish class. Prior to my time in
Argentina I had no Spanish whatsoever, and I now read, write, and speak advanced
Spanish. I believe this will be very useful as I build upon my current project to consider
the meaning of integration in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic context. It will enable me to
read many immigrant publications and consider the meaning of “integration” for the
Latino/a population.
In short, I had a very productive PDA and am grateful to the University for the
opportunity to focus on my research.