Awakening to Race
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A01=Jack Turner
action
activism
ambition
american dream
Author_Jack Turner
Category=JBSL
Category=JHMC
Category=JPHV
Category=QDTS
citizenship
community
complicity
democracy
discrimination
emerson
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fraternity
frederick douglass
gender
henry david thoreau
individualism
inequality
james baldwin
justice
liberalism
love
nonfiction
personal responsibility
political science
politics
poverty
power
race
racism
ralph ellison
self reliance
self-help
social consciousness
success
white supremacy
Product details
- ISBN 9780226817125
- Weight: 312g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2012
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The election of America's first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In "Awakening to Race", Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them. Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when individualism is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness - consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America.
Turner's "new individualism" becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.
Jack Turner is assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington and a member of the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Sexuality. He is the editor of A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau.
