ARC Seminar: Juliet Hooker: Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of Black Politics: From Democratic Sacrifice to Democratic Repair

This presentation will explore the complex response to the current Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, which pose deeper questions about the forms of politics that black citizens—who are experiencing a defining moment of racial terror in the U.S. in the twenty-first century—can and should pursue. When other citizens and state institutions betray a lack of empathy for black suffering, which in turn makes it impossible for those wrongs to be redressed, is it fair to ask blacks to enact ‘appropriate’ democratic politics? These questions are explored via a reading of Danielle Allen and Ralph Ellison’s meditations on the problem of democratic loss and Hannah Arendt’s critique of school desegregation battles in the 1960s. I suggest that there is a conceptual trap in romantic historical narratives of black politics, especially the way the 1960s civil rights movement is remembered, that recast peaceful acquiescence to loss as a form of democratic exemplarity.

Juliet Hooker is an Associate Professor of Government and of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Hooker served as Associate Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at UT-Austin from 2009 to 2014, and as co-Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Social Class Inequalities in the Americas (2014-2015). She is a political theorist specializing in comparative political theory, political solidarity, and multiculturalism, and has also published widely on Afro-descendant and indigenous politics and multicultural rights in Latin America. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2009). Her current book project, Hybrid Traditions, juxtaposes the accounts of race formulated by prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. African-American and Latin American political thinker. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2001. She will be with CUNY for the Spring 2016 term.