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Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Solidarity

DAVID A. HOLLINGER

W. E. B. Du Bois was surely right to declare that “the problem of the color line” was “the problem of the 20th century.”1 If Du Bois were alive today, I believe he would join those of us who are now saying that the problem of the twenty-first century is that of solidarity. Thanks to the struggles led by Du Bois and other men and women who shared his antiracist commitments, the color line is now more contested than at any other time in modern history. As late as 1963, when Du Bois died, Americans had yet to enact the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act, and the U.S. Supreme Court had yet to invalidate state laws prohibiting marriages across the color line. One does not have to exaggerate the significance of the election of a black man as president of the United States to observe that the color line today does not control as much of American life as it did during most of the twentieth century. And one does not have to exaggerate the significance of the global migrations of recent decades to observe that long-standing links between ethnoracial groups and political authority have weakened considerably.

Solidarity is an experience of willed affiliation. Just who belongs together with whom, for what purposes, and on what authority? Where and why do the claims of descent, religion, nationality, economic position, ideology, gender, and “civilization” trump one another in the competition for the loyalties of individuals in an epoch of increased global integration? How much do we owe “to our own kind”—whatever that may mean—and how much to “strangers,” the rest of humankind? To confront these questions is to engage the problem of solidarity. The problem of solidarity thus emerges when there is at least some opportunity for choice, when people can exercise some influence over what “we” they help constitute.2

Ascribed and taken-for-granted identities are being disrupted by a multitude of social transformations throughout the world, especially in the United States. The question of who “we” are is not new, but it now arises with some urgency. The “we” question does not press itself on individuals who are supremely confident about the groups to which they belong and to which they are the most deeply committed. Such people know their basic “identity,” even if only because they have been told repeatedly what it is. They may never have had cause to question it and may never have been allowed any choice in the matter. Uncontested ascription has always been a powerful adhesive, and still is. If Du Bois were alive now, he would surely be among those who would remind us the most vigorously that even today, the darker one’s skin, the less choice one has about with whom one can affiliate. But all this is a matter of degree. For millions in many parts of the globe today, a multitude of events, some of which are world-historical in scope, have destabilized old identities. Our most discerning social observers often conclude that “the boundaries of responsibility are increasingly contested.”3

How should one respond to the problem of solidarity? No single formula will apply in every situation where the allocation of energies amid a variety of overlapping and sometimes competing affiliations is at issue. The problem of solidarity has to be addressed differently depending on the specific constitutional and cultural circumstances in which it arises. Wide solidarities are obviously demanded by our historical situation, but universalist projects neglect at their peril the demands for belonging and intimacy that fuel particularist movements. A determination to balance the wide and the narrow lies behind the prodigious flowering of programs and proposals recently advanced as “cosmopolitan,” all of which can be construed as a family of responses to the problem of solidarity.4

The cosmopolitan family of responses to the problem of solidarity recognizes that there are fewer places to hide from forces that operate in a global arena. “There’s no hiding place down there,” warned an old gospel song. Nor is there a hiding place “up here.” If we do not take on as much of the world as we can, the world will come to us, and on terms over which we will have even less control than we do now. Cosmopolitanism, rightly understood, at least recognizes this challenge.

Cosmopolitanism has a great deal of work ahead of it, including in the United States, which inherits an elaborate, deeply entrenched, but increasingly anachronistic intellectual and institutional apparatus for dealing with diversity. This apparatus conflates the circumstances of the various minority groups while homogenizing each of them. One might compare this apparatus to a Mercator projection map of the world, in which Greenland, Patagonia, and Spitsbergen are huge, while Nigeria, Indonesia, and Ecuador are tiny. Just as a Mercator projection of the globe served the specific and valuable purpose of enabling a flat wall hanging, so too did the multiculturalist programs organized around the color-coded ethnoracial pentagon—everybody is either white, black, yellow, brown, or red—serve the specific and valuable purpose of supporting affirmative action as put into effect in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But for some purposes, we want maps of the world other than the Mercator projection: maps that give us the actual geographical proportions of various parts of the globe. For some purposes, we want an intellectual and institutional apparatus for dealing with cultural diversity that is not written onto the top of affirmative action as understood at the time of its first institutionalization, but one that is based on the deepest and most comprehensive analysis we can develop of actual diversity and its dynamics today.

Such an analysis is one of the things people are looking for when the ideal of cosmopolitanism is invoked. Indeed, this ideal has become more current in the context of a quarrel within multiculturalism, broadly construed, between the people I call pluralist multiculturalists on the one hand, and those I call cosmopolitan multiculturalists on the other hand. In this way of framing the debate, the pluralists are more concerned to protect and perpetuate the cultures of groups already well established, whereas cosmopolitans are more inclined to encourage the voluntary formation of new communities of wider scope. Cosmopolitanism is, after all, more liberal in style, appreciating that individuals can be simultaneously affiliated with many groups, whereas pluralism is more conservative, oriented to preexisting groups and likely to ascribe identity to a single community of descent. Cosmopolitans are specialists in the creating of the new, while cautious about destroying the old; pluralists are specialists in the conservation of the old and are cautious about developing the new. By and large, the pluralists won the argument over what multiculturalism should be, so when reference is made to standardized or orthodox multiculturalism, it is decidedly the pluralist version—the version associated with “identity politics”—that takes center stage. Hence people like me who were pushing for the cosmopolitan side of the argument began about 1995 to talk about getting “beyond multiculturalism,” meaning beyond the pluralist kind.5

The situation in the United States, including the historic victory of the pluralists in the 1990s and the increasing credibility of the cosmopolitans in the new century, is worthy of attention simply because the United States is one of the most conspicuous of world-historical arenas for the interaction of different communities of descent in relation to a single, overarching state with democratic aspirations formally committed to equality of opportunity regardless of ethnoracial classification and burdened with a history of racism. Hence, what happens in the United States is important not only to those like me who are personally invested in the American project and eager to see it critically revised, but to the larger community of people who—with their eyes on Germany or India or Brazil or the Netherlands or wherever—are eager to discover the promises and pitfalls of various egalitarian policies and practices and strategies. The history, current state, and possible future of the American experience with diversity is potentially relevant even to decidedly global ventures like portal campuses of American universities abroad, designed to encourage cross-cultural understanding. I try to address the American case, then, with this larger panorama in mind.

The efforts now being made to get beyond the cultural equivalent of the Mercator projection were dramatized for me by a conversation I had on the floor of the convention of the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education.6 After I had delivered my address, a young African American woman whose job at a leading university is to organize and operate a “multicultural office, African American section,” rose from the audience. A dilemma she faces in carrying out her work, she explained to me at this conference of multicultural program officers and staff, is as follows. The senior administrators to whom she reports expect her to design and implement a program that would enable black students to feel more at home on campus and enable nonblack students and faculty to come to a greater appreciation of the special circumstances of black students. But the black students she works with are strikingly different from one another in cultural orientation, social experience, and campus-related needs, especially along two ancestral lines. The immigrants and children of immigrants from Caribbean countries and those from African countries, she observed, have very little in common with the students whose families experienced Jim Crow segregation and other forms of institutionalized debasement within the United States over many generations. The immigrant-based black populations of students she works with are also different from one another, those from Kenya and Nigeria having relatively little in common with those from Jamaica and Barbados, although the traditions of the British education system strikingly distinguish all of them from the students with a multigeneration ancestry in the United States. Yet this woman finds that when she takes this dilemma to her administrative superiors for counsel—what makes you think all black people are alike? she asks them—they are reluctant to listen because they have so much invested in multicultural approaches generated many years ago, emphasizing the centrality of color, the sharpness of color lines, and the close connection between color and culture. They are still using the Mercator projection.

A second example of efforts to get beyond the cultural equivalent of the Mercator projection is the increasing pressure for diversity programs to pay attention to Arab Americans, Jewish Americans, religiously defined rather than color-defined cultures, and specific European-derived ethnic groups erased by orthodox multiculturalism. I illustrate this with the case of Jewish Americans.

Jews had long been prominent in discussions of American pluralism, as in Will Herberg’s famous book of 1955, Protestant Catholic Jew.7 But Jews were almost never counted as relevant to standard multiculturalism. Jews eager to be part of the multicultural conversation right down through the 1990s were surrounded by a discourse of group identity that systematically deemphasized religion, yet the religious component in Jewish history was vitally important. This pervasive discourse of identity privileged color, yet color did not distinguish most Jews from white people in general. This discourse downplayed the linguistic and historical particularity of the different descent communities within each of the color-coded segments of the ethnoracial pentagon, yet for Jews, linguistic and historical particularity was basic to group identity. This discourse nested issues of identity and culture in a matrix of unequally distributed power and often aspired to allocate social benefits on the basis of demographically proportional representation, yet Jews were the richest and most empowered of any of society’s prominently recognized ethnoracial groups. This discourse placed great emphasis on the barriers that minorities faced in the United States, yet the Jewish case constituted the most dramatic instance in all American history of a stigmatized descent group that had been discriminated against under the protection of law suddenly becoming overrepresented many times over in social spaces where its members’ progress had previously been seriously inhibited. A younger generation of specialists in Jewish history and Jewish studies more generally are now working to integrate the Jewish story into the larger story of cultural diversity.8

These cases exemplify something we are seeing more of today in the United States: an escalating tension between, on the one hand, a greater sensitivity to the particularity of the historical circumstances, economic condition, and cultural orientation of the various natal communities and, on the other hand, a conceptual and institutional apparatus inherited from the late 1960s and 1970s that assumed the ethnoracial groups relevant to antiracist initiatives to be clearly bounded, enduring, color-coded, analogically structured entities, each with its own culture and its own myth of diaspora.

This tension is not new. Throughout the 1990s and in the first decade of the twenty-first century a number of antiracist voices criticized the Old Religion inherited from the civil rights era. As late as 1998, President Bill Clinton’s initiative on race, One America in the 21st Century (the only presidential commission to deal with race since the Kerner Commission of thirty years before), resoundingly reinforced the inherited apparatus; systematically denied that there were salient differences between African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans; and offered fifty-three specific recommendations for multicultural programs and antidiscrimination remedies, not a single one of which dealt with the historically unique situation of the black Americans whose lives had been affected by centuries of legally sanctioned slavery, violently enforced discrimination, and cataclysmically inadequate educational opportunities.9 During the years following 1998, the tension has increased between those who still think in terms of the Old Religion and those who are trying to find approaches to structural inequality that take account of the shifting conditions under which the struggle against inequality is now carried out.

Central to these shifting conditions are the character and extent of immigration, which was almost never discussed when the Old Religion was young. The latest census figures show that immigrants respond to identity questions very differently than nonimmigrants, and both the numbers of immigrants and their different ways of identifying themselves are playing havoc with the Census Bureau’s inherited categories.10 Kenneth Prewitt, a former director of the Census Bureau, has recently proposed a radically changed “race question” for the 2020 census that reflects the reality so long denied.11 More than a quarter of all children under the age of six in this country are being raised by at least one foreign-born parent. I can report from my own university that 67 percent of our freshmen at Berkeley have at least one foreign-born parent.

One such immigration-related change has already been mentioned here. This is the appearance in the United States of dramatically increasing numbers of black-skinned people who came voluntarily from Africa and the Caribbean. By the 1990s, and especially since 2005, our social scientists and investigative journalists produced study after study showing that these immigrants and their children managed to overcome the barriers created by antiblack racism to a greater extent than nonimmigrant blacks.12 These studies imply that blackness itself is not enough to explain the enduringly weak class position of the bulk of American black people. Perhaps the educational and economic circumstances of the immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean make a difference? President Barack Obama himself is relevant here, because his blackness derives from a Kenyan immigrant and he has candidly suggested that his own daughters might not be appropriate targets for affirmative action.

If we are going to go down the road of distinguishing between various kinds of black people, we will have to revise a system that is based on treating all blacks who get jobs or get admitted to college as displaying the same statistical meaning. If immigrants and the children of immigrants are overrepresented by hundreds of percentage points among the blacks who get into Ivy League colleges, where does that leave us? If facts of that order do not mean that blackness is less relevant than historically different social circumstances, what do such facts mean?

What would be the implications for Hispanic Americans if officials suddenly decided that not all black people are equally eligible for diversity programs? This question about Hispanics is a crucial question because the overwhelming majority of the Hispanic population in the United States is an immigrant-derived population. Are we going to say that brown immigrants are more eligible for special attention than black immigrants are? If so, on the basis of what theory? The Old Religion was based on the idea that Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and American Indians were all “like blacks” in their relation to U.S. society and were thus covered by the same theory. But if we are now going to say that even some blacks are not “like blacks,” how can Hispanics be? Or Cambodians? Or Filipinos? The Old Religion and its various interpreters have almost never discussed the issue of immigrant eligibility for the programs developed in the late 1960s and 1970s; even today, mere mention of it makes many people nervous. I raised it at a meeting of the diversity committee on my own campus, and got the impression that everyone wanted to run from the room.

The presence of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean is not the only pertinent aspect of this new immigration since the 1970s. Another is the presence of people from China, Japan, Korea, India, and other countries in Asia, who have done well by conventional economic and educational indicators. The historic experience of Asian Americans is too often put aside rather than analyzed in relation to the dynamics of racism, inequality, and incorporation into a society of predominantly European origins. The great majority of the adult immigrants from Korea are college graduates, and a substantial segment of the immigrants from several other Asian countries are highly skilled and literate in English when they arrive, which is not the case with most immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, and the other Latin American countries that provide so much of the low-skilled labor force in the United States.

The juxtaposition of the pre-immigration social circumstances of migrants from Latin America with the pre-immigration social circumstances of migrants from several East and South Asian countries can remind us that attention to particular histories, especially to the educational and economic background of immigrants, presents us with a radically different picture of diversity than the picture inherited from the civil rights era. Do Hispanic Americans have a claim on special treatment? Perhaps they do, but the most plausible theory that would justify such special treatment would surely be economic, pivoting on the fact that the United States persistently encourages (indeed, demands) an underclass of workers who will do low-skilled work for relatively low wages and are not likely to join labor unions. Our system, however, deals with the Hispanic population in its capacity as an ethnoracial group. We use ethnorace as a proxy for economic inequality, designing programs targeted at an ethnoracially defined population, when the most salient property of that population is instead its economic status.13

Discrimination against Hispanic Americans as Hispanics does have a real history, including school segregation and exclusion from juries in several states until the 1950s, but unlike the immigrants from Mexico, those from East Asia and South Asia were not even able to achieve naturalized citizenship in 1952. We cannot remind ourselves often enough that Asian Americans were taken from their homes and thrown into internment camps in my own lifetime and within a few miles of where I now live in California. The different trajectories of Mexican Americans, on the one hand, and the several varieties of Asian Americans, on the other hand, should turn us away from the idea that the operative force is racism in the eye of the empowered white beholder. We do not have to claim that empowered whites have fully renounced racism to confront the fact that the power of this racism to damage its victims now varies enormously according to the economic and educational circumstances of the victims.

Another big change, beyond those centering around immigration, is the increase of mixture, that is, the greater frequency of marriage and cohabitation and reproduction across the lines of the standardized groups. Black-white marriages are still rare in comparison with the statistics for out-marriage among Hispanic Americans, American Indians, and the various groups of Asian Americans, but the black-white case demands more attention because of the long and deep opposition to black-white marriages, lasting well beyond 1967, when the laws prohibiting such marriages still in effect in a dozen states were finally eliminated by the U.S. Supreme Court. Our demographers use a number of different statistical methods to determine the rate of black-white mixing, with slightly different results, but all agree on the reality of a steady increase over the past forty years. One of the most interesting studies was carried out by demographer Joshua Goldstein. The Goldstein study, as reported in the New York Times,14 calculates the percentage of families who had a mixed-race marriage within their extended kinship network. Goldstein found that among census-identified whites, by 2000 about 30 percent of white Americans had within their kinship network of ten marriages over three generations at least one white-nonwhite marriage, and in that same year, nearly two thirds of census-identified black Americans did. The percentage for Asian Americans with such families was 92 percent. These figures were up dramatically from 1990, and of course from earlier censuses. In 1960, only about 2 percent of census-identified whites had in their kinship network a single white-nonwhite marriage. In forty years, then, the number of white families with a black relative increased to fifteen times what it had been.

The significance of the increase in cross-group marriage has been exaggerated, I believe, especially by those who predict the end of standardized communities of descent within the next two or three generations. What is significant are not only the increases as measured statistically but the shift in cultural attitudes as measured by opinion polls and visible in popular culture. That is one reason I focus here on the Goldstein study rather than those by Mary Walters and Joel Perlmann and others:15 our social psychologists tell us that acceptance for mixed-race marriage, like acceptance of same-sex relationships, increases with intimate familiarity. That is, opposition to gay relationships, like opposition to mixed-race marriage, cohabitation, and reproduction, diminishes when someone in your own family is in one of these traditionally stigmatized relationships. The way this plays into the tension I have been discussing between the Old Religion and the struggles for a new dispensation is that group boundaries are simply less sharp than they were when our categories and their prescribed meaning were consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s.

A new dispensation? The cosmopolitan struggle for it continues, but we will not make much progress as long as we continue to believe that the basic problem is simply that of the color line. Cosmopolitans understand that we must now confront that problem in the context of the broader and deeper problem of solidarity.

NOTES

  1  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), p. 1.

  2  This paragraph and several others in this essay draw on my “From Identity to Solidarity,” Daedalus (Fall 2006): 23–31, in which I offer a more detailed account of the problem of solidarity.

  3  Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 65.

  4  Of the many recent collections of essays clarifying the varieties of cosmopolitanism, two are especially helpful: Steve Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and the special issue of Daedalus, “On Cosmopolitanism,” summer 2008. See also the vigorous manifestos by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), and Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

  5  For an extended, critical account in these terms of the multiculturalist movement of the United States, see my Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

  6  National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education (NCORE), San Diego, California.

  7  Will Herberg, Protestant Catholic Jew (New York: Doubleday, 1955).

  8  See the contributions by Hasia Diner, Paula Hyman, Alan Kraut, and Tony Michels in the symposium “American Jewish History and American Historical Writing,” American Jewish History (March 2009): 1–78.

  9  One American in the 21st Century: The President’s Initiative on Race (Washington, D.C.: President’s Initiative on Race, 1998).

10  New York Times, January 22, 2010.

11  Kenneth Prewitt, What Is Your Race? The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

12  One of the most widely publicized of these studies showed that among black students at Ivy League colleges, immigrants and the children of immigrants were greatly overrepresented. See Douglas Massey et al., American Journal of Education (February 2007).

13  This paragraph and several others draw upon my “Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future,” Callaloo 31, no. 4 (2008): 1033–1037.

14  “Nation’s Many Faces in Extended First Family,” New York Times, January 20, 2009. See also J. R. Goldstein, “Kinship Networks that Cross Racial Lines: The Exception or the Rule?” Demography 36 (1999): 399–407.

15  For example, Joel Perlmann and Mary C. Waters, “Intermarriage Then and Now: Race, Generation, and the Changing Meaning of Marriage,” in Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, ed. Nancy Foner and George Fredrickson (Washington, D.C.: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), p. 275.