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Situating
the Self: [Published
in Pragmatism and Race, eds. Koch & Lawson
D. Micah Hester (University or Arkansas School of Medicine)
The very concept of race and its status in ethical deliberations opens the door to more general concerns about human nature and conduct, and attempts to ground ethical deliberations have traditionally been supported by particular accounts of human beings and their relationships to their surrounding environments. In particular, both liberal and communitarian positions argue for particular understandings of the self and, thereby, the status of the interests expressed by any particular self, and these positions, the understandings they put forth are, typically, diametrically opposed. In the face of these conflicting views on ethical deliberation and the place of race concepts in them, I would explore what John Dewey has termed, in another context, the “new individualism” and G. H. Mead has called “the self as social product” in light of the cultural aspects affecting the experience of race. Their pragmatic take on the self as not insular but situated requires an ethic different from the classical liberal’s, e.g., autonomy-based models. Contemporary liberals like John Rawls, for example, miss the point, for a non-situated “veil of ignorance” cannot ground a practical ethic, and racial interests, tensions, differences, issues, and bonds lost behind such a veil do an injustice to individuals qua social beings. To ignore cultural identity is to lose individuality and deep diversity. The communitarian corrective, on the other hand, threatens the same loss as well, where communal concerns ignore the novel individuality of expressed interests. Human “socialty,” in Mead’s terms, however, does not subsume the individuality of each person. Individuals are novel nexuses of communities, cultures, and perspectives; each one of us is unique in how s/he comes together and expresses interest in the world. Granting that the individuality of each person need not fracture us into atomic beings—our situatedness is part and parcel of who we are—and that being socially situated need not lose sight of individuality—each of us is unique—then what must ground an ethics of race or culture or in order to seriously both inextricable human conditions of differences and communality? I argue that, such an ethic must take culturally-based racial issues seriously without treating them as either fundamental or necessary. Any ethic of race, that recognizes socially situated selves, must confront racial experiences, analyzing their sources, projecting the consequences of the interests expressed through racially motivated claims. This is a deeply cultural process—I shall argue, a habit of culture. Ultimately, I believe the pragmatic position gives value to the importance of a critical analysis of race (or class), but only if such an analysis is situated within a larger socio-ethical inquiry, and punctuates the processive-transactional-functional character of such categories. In fact, ignoring race/ethnic analysis runs important social, political, and ethical dangers. A thorough-going ethic of race demands that neither (1) we ignore race nor (2) we jettison the concept; instead, a deeper ethic of race demands a sociology of what function race plays in our ethical deliberations and in what ways it hinders or helps a particular moral inquiry and its outcome(s). In turn, such inquiry changes the character of the function of race through the outcomes we develop, and its consequences may further render the entire category functionless at some point in the future.
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