A New Story of the Civil Rights Movement

My partial take on Brandon Terry's forthcoming book

Mary Jane Eyre

and I will be live on Substack next Friday, May 23 at noon CST to talk about our shared obsession with

Andrew Sullivan

. We’ll do our best to respond to questions and comments in the chat, so would really appreciate you joining us if you can. -Dan

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I’m only about a third of the way through Brandon Terry’s forthcoming book, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement, but I can feel it starting to accumulate force. If it lands the way I expect it will, it’s a book that we should all be reading and discussing when it comes out in October.

Blake Smith

should write about Terry’s thoughts on Hannah Arendt, judgement, and Kant.

Corey Robin

should write about the implications of Terry’s perspective for the future of the left.

Ross Barkan

,

Sam Kahn

,

Jon Baskin

,

Mark Oppenheimer

, and

Geoff Shullenberger

should assign reviews of it for their respective magazines.

Glenn Loury

and

John McWhorter

should have Terry on the podcast.

Ross Douthat

should write an op-ed riffing on it. Etc. Etc.

I doubt this will happen. Terry is a pretty big deal in his small world, and a small but real deal out in the big world, but he isn’t someone who has so much juice that potential reviewers and commenters will be inclined to work their way through a text that as theoretically complex and stylistically methodical as Shattered Dreams.

The style is a surprise to me, and provisionally a bit of a disappointment. I’ve been closely following Terry’s career since at least since 2015, when he wrote a long and brilliant essay, “After Ferguson,” for The Point, and over that time I have come to the firm belief that he is the most interesting thinker we have right now on on issues of race, democracy, activism, and the meaning of the Civil Rights Movement.

He’s also an exceptional writer of prose, so when I saw the news of the forthcoming book, I was expecting that it would be his effort to make his mark as a crossover public intellectual. It would be his version of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, Isabelle Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, etc.—not a dumbing down of his ideas, but a book that is willing to balance academic comprehensiveness and conventions with narrative drive and accessibility to the lay educated reader. The kind of book that could win both the (grudging) admiration of his academic peers and also the National Book Award.

Shattered Dreams isn’t that. Instead (and again, I’m only a third of the way through), it’s a more traditional work of academic political theory, one that painstakingly builds its arguments, methodically details its influences and the relevant debates within the field, and is frequently willing to sacrifice the oomph of the prose in the interests of covering all its bases and covering its flanks from potential criticisms.

None of this is to say that the book isn’t ambitious. The opposite. I think Terry is shooting for the fences. He’s hoping to shift not only how we imagine and narrativize the Civil Rights Movement but how we conceptualize black political life going forward. And I think he’s hoping, in the process, to stake his claim as one of the major political theorists of his generation. But the strategy is an academic one, and it’s a gamble whose success will be evident not in sales, reviews in high profile magazines and newspapers, or symposia on Subtack, but rather in the ways that powerful scholarly books exert influence—slowly, cumulatively, by way of syllabi, footnotes, endowed lectures, and downstream dissertations. If it achieves its ambitions, it will eventually seep into the broader cultural and intellectual groundwater, but it will take a while. We’ll see it referenced in The New Yorker not this fall, in a review essay by Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, but in a decade or two (or three).

This is fine, of course. We don’t criticize John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, or Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, for not going easier on the educated lay reader, and if Shattered Dreams proves important enough, we won’t criticize Terry for it either. And to be clear — it’s a very well written book, within the constraints that Terry has set for himself. His facility with language hasn’t abandoned him. It’s not hard to read,; it’s just not (or at least not yet) literary in the way that many of his essays are.

Here he is, for instance, on Arendt on the question of political judgment and rules in the aftermath of the Holocaust:

Arendt thought that totalitarianism revealed that morality was experienced by all too many as a kind of external rule, or law-like imperative. For such persons, moral life requires little in the way of judgment: just the apprehension of rules and the sterility of obedience.

But in the horrific world opened up by Nazism (and, one might add, in the Jim Crow regime that inspired it), disobedience was the authentic enactment of moral judgment and action. Thus, Arendt became fascinated with those individuals who, in contrast to Eichmann, “never doubted that crimes remained crimes even if legalized by the government . . . [and] acted according to something which was self-evident to them even though it was no longer self-evident to those around them.” Or, as Martin Luther King Jr. put the point, narrating a tradition of civil disobedience, “We must never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal.’ It was illegal to add and comfort a Jew. . . . But I believe that if I had the same attitude then as I have now I would publicly aid and comfort my Jewish Brothers in Germany if Hitler were alive today calling this an illegal process. . . . So I think these [sit-in] students are in good company, and they feel that by practicing civil disobedience they are in line with men and women through the ages who have stood up for something that is morally right.”

But if morally responsible action required not just rule following but the personal exercise of judgment (and action) against existing rules, from where might we expect such judgments? “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content,” Arendt wondered, “be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?” What stock of experience, evaluative claims, or styles of attention to the world could guide us in such contexts? For Arendt, this was a question of orientation, understanding, and imagination and it pointed to a profound connection between judgment and the world constituting role of examples. Exemplary validity, she argued, channeling Kant, could produce the common sense through which individuals might resist the “erosion of Common Sense” and the loss of the “world conditions” through which judgments discover a shared character. But what, without rules or shared standards, could make these judgments and their constitutive interpretations of experience valid or even exemplary enough to matter?

Here he is on the influence of the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah on the question of whether race can continue to serve as the focal point of a black political identity in the way that it did in the 20th century:

Perhaps no single individual has been more influential in the intellectual project of injecting a crippling doubt into the authority of race and ethnicity in black political life than the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Born in Ghana to a British mother and a Ghanian father active in the various PanAfricanist movements of mid-twentieth-century West Africa, Appiah was educated in England before leaving for the United States to join his friend and collaborator, Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I draw attention to Appiah’s unusually cosmopolitan background largely because he himself draws attention to it when advancing his arguments against race. His international jaunts and culturally diverse family, unremarkable features of his childhood as they were, led him to see the world as “a network of points of affinity” and to be skeptical of familiar claims of “insuperable cultural distance.”

Appiah pushed the most explosive intervention in the philosophy of race of the late twentieth century by rejecting the use of race altogether—for science, politics, culture, and identity. “The truth,” he argued, “is that there are no races,” and “there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us.”

…Appiah, who advocated the abandonment of racial identities earlier in his career, has since moderated his position, arguing that “the importance of an identity in social life is not automatically reduced by the discovery that one has importantly false beliefs about it.” We might justifiably act as black people to combat white supremacy, for example, but this need not also require that we listen only to jazz or see ourselves as committed to propagating an imagined normative “black family.” Yet the foundational impact of this deconstruction of the idea of race, the demand for a flexibility in identity, and a general uncertainty concerning precisely how race matters if, as Appiah maintains, race isn’t “real,” reflects the erosion of the authority of conventional race realisms as pillars of black political life.

These are pretty typical passages in the book. Rich, lucid, logical, somewhat overloaded with quotations. Brilliant but optimized to exert academic rather than literary or journalistic influence.

I point this out because it’s interesting on its own terms, to think about different (and perhaps mutually exclusive) rhetorical strategies for exerting influence. Also, though, because I don’t want to have to wait 20 years to talk or listen to other people about the book. I want people in my world to read it now. Because I’m selfish, of course, but also because I think it may be a genuinely important book that could have a salutary influence on contemporary debates around race and racism that too often feel rote, exhausted, masturbatory, performative, etc.

So get on it.