White psychodrama

Abstract

One might hope that philosophy could reconcile us to our social world and each other. To entertain this as plausible is to think there is some perspective one could reach via philosophical enquiry that shows our life and society to be as they are for good reason, allows us to see it all as in some sense rational. Hegel is no doubt the great exponent of this ideal, his system promising to trace history's patterns and conceptual development, while he is so optimistic as to believe that, at its end, we would achieve the perspective whereby every agent's own actions and situation can be made intelligible to themselves and others. This was meant to be true for us the readers, so we would be able to see for ourselves how what we do makes sense, given our circumstances, and is plausibly tending towards a good end.1

Of course, the problem is that there may not be such a perspective. Perhaps to see the world aright is to recognize it as a jumbled mess, with no progressive tendency towards greater coherence, and no satisfaction to be had in achieving superior insight. Perhaps there is no good end we are collaboratively working towards, no possible reconciliation with each other; maybe we are perpetually on the brink of descending once more into a Hobbesian nightmare. Hegel hoped to reassure us that the existence of that clarificatory perspective is guaranteed; as free agents, once we achieve self-awareness we necessarily mutually recognize one another as engaged in a fundamentally cooperative project tending towards justified ends.2 But, alas, not all of us have been convinced, and a kind of existential anomie can befall a thoughtful person who surveys our present socio-cultural situation.3 What if there really just is no excuse for how things are, and no good reason for me to carry on?

We ought then to make the social world worthy of reconciliation. The guiding idea here is that the ideal of reconciliation underlying Hegelian social thought is desirable, and if it is not yet possible given present social arrangements, we are called upon to change those arrangements until the ideal can be attained. To be clear, this is not a disagreement with Hegel's system at its deepest level; he may have jumped the gun on what a rationally reconcilable social order looks like, but in some sense that is a mere detail compared to his deeper point that we proactively seek a coherence that we can be reconciled to. Social and political philosophy can then play a dual role of identifying points at which our social order will throw up obstacles to attaining a coherent and reconcilable view of one's life, and suggesting means by which these obstacles can be removed.4

I shall illustrate these rather abstract ideas by constructing and analysing a narrative of the historical situation leading up to the current culture war; especially as it plays out concerning race, and black–white relations even more especially, among the middle class of the USA. The US being a culturally dominant global hegemon, the terms and structure of its culture war tend to be exported, so they are worth understanding even for those of us who are not US citizens. The pastime of the chattering classes, the culture war can be understood as a set of symbolic and political conflicts over emotionally highly charged issues du jour. Even if the particular topic of discussion is fleeting, the ultimate resolution to these debates can have drastic effects on the lives of citizens. How we decide to understand and enforce norms around gender and sexuality, for instance, touch upon some of the most intimate and important aspects of our lives.

Here I am interested in how our peculiar socio-economic conditions shape the contours and possible points of resolution in the cultural debate around issues of race. We shall see that characteristic responses to our social order, which I shall describe through stylized character archetypes, make it impossible for participants in the culture war to achieve any lasting reconciliation. Instead, our responses both generate and constitute a kind of racialized psychopathology that I describe as white psychodrama. Given this analysis of the social order and its sources of psychic incoherence, I will suggest a way forward. My hope is that this will at least help people of colour caught in the midst of this to work towards a world we can live in and, by seeing ourselves as so working, to reconcile ourselves to our actual present social activities. We cannot, and ought not to, reconcile ourselves to a society wrapped up in its own contradictions, any more than we should seek to integrate into a burning house. But we can come to see ourselves as knowingly and self-consciously working to resolve those contradictions, quenching that fire, and laying the foundations for a better structure wherein we may all live comfortably.

Once upon a time the United States of America was a de jure racist society. As was much of the world beyond its borders, controlled as it was by racist European empires. There was a broadly understood and explicitly codified and enforced racial organization of who could live where, how individuals could interact, what sort of jobs were appropriate for whom, how law and order would operate—or wouldn't.5 The science,6 sport,7 and artistic culture8 of the day were largely carried out in conformity with, if not support of, racist norms. Gross or subtle as it may have been in any given instance, the colour line ran through everything and one crossed it only at great personal peril.9

But mountains crumble and rivers disappear, new roads replace the old, stones are buried and vanish in the earth. Time passes and the world changes. So it was that eventually this de jure racist system went the way of all things. The Civil War overthrew the slave regime. Racial immigration laws were repealed. The Civil Rights Act made various sorts of explicitly racist laws and practices impermissible. By the latter half of the twentieth century, it was clear an officially endorsed de jure racial caste system was no longer to hold sway in American life. Likewise abroad, the great European empires fell, and in their place sprang up a plethora of nations governed by formerly colonized peoples. All things considered, the twentieth century saw de jure racism suffer a world-historic defeat.

Along with these legal and institutional changes went cultural changes. Casual use of the most highly charged racial slurs became limited to the worst bigots, and nowadays one can hear the sentiment expressed that overt expressions of bigotry ought to disqualify someone from public office.10 Over the twentieth century, Americans steadily reported much less opposition to interracial marriage between blacks and whites.11 Careers which previously operated an absolute colour bar opened up to non-white people.12 Various of black Americans' artistic contributions came to define not just American, but much of the globe's popular culture.13 Mainstream right politicians ceased to explicitly identify as defending white dominance or white interests,14 a norm change which even President Trump made some nominal effort to respect.15 American social attitudes thus seemed to adjust in line with the twentieth century's legal changes.

But change was not total. The twentieth century kicked off with an economist lamenting the black middle class's merger access to capital.16 The twenty-first century began the same way, as the gap between total wealth and assets owned by black versus white Americans was once again increasing.17 Black assets were then hit especially hard by the 2008 crash.18 Even setting the crash aside, the fact that what black wealth exists is often tied up in housing property is its own source of racial vulnerability. Black property tends to be worth less19 amid continuing residential segregation.20 This segregation can concentrate social difficulties that further hinder black Americans' life chances.21 And the rarity of interracial contact induced is no doubt related to the persistently low rates of racial intermarriage.22 All of which compounds the fact that inheritance law allows for intergenerational wealth transfers that maintain economic segregation;23 thus intergenerational mobility from being propertyless into wealth is difficult and rare.24 What's more, finally, the backdrop for all this is a global economy where the ability to inherit wealth increasingly determines one's life chances.25 Whatever else changed, the people who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by.

In this way American domestic politics mirrored the broader global trends of a post-imperial world.26 The European empires despoiled and depopulated nations.27 What they left in their wake were often underdeveloped economies28 and institutional structures ripe to be taken over by local elites who could simply continue the pattern of authoritarian wealth extraction.29 But the end of formal colonization did not generally lead to reparations. For the most part, agents based in the former colonial metropoles retained ownership of key resources and even infrastructure,30 and, if anything, inefficiencies in the credit market have led to a net capital flow from the former colonies to the former colonizers.31 Neither domestically nor internationally did a change in cultural attitudes and legal permissions correlate with a change in racial patterns of ownership. As such, many of the material patterns of inequality from the bad old days of de jure racist regimes have survived the demise of their former ideological superstructure.

Returning to the US, these persistent material inequalities have consequences for occupational inequality. The legacy of de jure segregation plausibly goes a long way to explaining wealth and income gaps between black and white Americans.32 And contemporary de facto segregation generates social networks that concentrate access to opportunities for work and education among the already prosperous, further disadvantaging blacks.33 What's more, fulfilling and legal employment for ‘less skilled’ workers was already drying up by the early twenty-first century.34 In so far as there has been a coherent social response to this collapse in opportunity, what has stepped in to the place of those jobs has been the prison system.35 The rapid rise in the population of incarcerated persons has, of course, disproportionately affected black people,36 and despite mass incarceration being a persistent public concern, the American political establishment has been unable to effectively react.37

Finally, even if explicit appeal to white interests withered away, race continues to be in fact a powerful predictor of how Americans vote.38 The liberalization of social attitudes has not led to the total disappearance of overtly racist stereotypes.39 And the political intelligentsia are still largely white, which has arguably affected the content and focus of their work.40

This, then, is where history has placed us. The maddening ambiguity of our position is what leads to the titular white psychodrama. One cannot reconcile oneself to this society because it constantly pulls in two directions—it presents one with an ideological narrative that speaks of equality, and a material structure that witnesses rank inequality. At some level, this society just does not make sense to itself, its own ideology out of whack with the plain facts of its own existence. There are those who are tempted to focus only on the positives, and see in this a story of triumphant progress towards racial justice or a post-racial future. And there are those who are inclined to see in it a story of eternal recurrence, racism ever reinventing itself. But both of these perspectives are too tidy to capture the phenomenon. For this story is of a world and a nation in contradiction with itself.

After much struggle, this world has publicly declared, and in some sense sincerely come to believe, that racial hatred is a social failure and a horrid character defect. We now welcome forms of love, friendship, and cooperation that were once unthinkable. And yet we carefully divide up the pie to ensure former slaves are kept poor and ashamed. The inevitable social discord generated by this immiseration are dealt with by brutality and caging. And the lingering suspicion remains that all this is the former slaves' fault. How then do people respond to the facts relayed in this historical narrative, and what does it mean for their ability to reconcile themselves to their own social order?

The character archetypes are stylized representations of typical responses to the status quo. Each of the types below is assumed to be driven by some fairly normal psychological motivations—they do not wish to feel guilty, they would prefer to have more stuff rather than less—and respond accordingly to the evidence, incentives, and institutional structures their society presents them with. To that extent one can think of these as something like publicly available social roles which facilitate intentional action,41 or as agents for whose behaviour I am giving a structural explanation.42 In either case, allowing for the overly neat appearance of any stylized picture, what follows is meant to be a descriptively plausible picture of reactions by many actual politically switched-on agents to life in a society shaped by the circumstances of the historical narrative just relayed. They are caricatures for sure, but ones which I expect many readers will see resemblances to within their own lives.

The agents we discuss are highly polarized people fighting a culture war. There is empirical evidence available which lets us situate what sort of person this would be. Partisanship has largely been a phenomenon only among wealthier and more politically engaged voters.43 These are mutually reinforcing categories; home ownership, for instance, predicts being more politically involved.44 Polarization encompasses far more than just party or policy preference.45 It includes, significantly for us, what news media and commentariat figures people listen to and engage with.46 This association with media consumption and lifestyle differences makes the polarization highly affectively charged.47 White people are more likely to be politically engaged48—if anything, black voter turnout is systematically over-reported.49 And, as already discussed, whites are also more likely to be wealthy. So all this means that the culture war categories I focus on will primarily be elite agents, and will largely (though not entirely) focus on various white responses to the status quo.

Despite culture war polarization largely being a fight between whites, issues of race still turn out to be very important to how it plays out. Measures of racist attitudes still do a good job of predicting Americans' attitudes to candidates and policies.50 Since the 2008 election of Barack Obama, measures of white Americans' level of racial antagonism have spiked.51 And voters report racial issues as some of those on which they are most divided.52 Plausibly, at least some of the cultural divides now wracking this section of elite white America arose from differing responses to the changing social meaning of whiteness following the end of de jure racist regimes.53

So I shall rationally construct character types which allow one to appreciate how the sort of elite white agent engaged in a culture war revolving around race might behave and ideologically understand themselves.54 These responses may not always strike you as plausible or fully coherent. But I think that is to be expected in a situation where people are having to make sense of a society shaped by contradictory forces.55 That, after all, is why this is a story of psychodrama. The conflict between an ideology of racial egalitarianism and a material reality of strict hierarchy generates such a tension, and it is the desire to keep one's status atop that hierarchy (or make one's way within it) while avoiding guilt which thereby drives the culture war archetypes.

We now have our narrative and our cast. America, mirroring global trends, has gone from a de jure racist state to one with a far more egalitarian ideology, but a racially stratified distribution of wealth. Inhabiting this contradictory land are Repenters, wracked with guilt about the ideology–reality mismatch and seeking to avoid making it worse themselves. Repressers, wanting to stave off rather than alleviate guilt, and worried that in all the concern over inequality we lose track of our progress, seek to instantiate a colour-blind meritocracy as the antithesis of de jure racism. And PoC intelligentsia, along for the ride, selling their ideological wares to either side as opportunity or inclination permits. I hope this is a somewhat recognizable picture of elements of our present ideological configuration in those bits of the world dominated by US culture.

But at the outset I promised that one could be reconciled to one's social role through all this. None of the above characters is entirely unsympathetic, yet in so far as one sees oneself in them it is probably with a profound sense of unease. Surely coming to recognize oneself in the characters as sketched above responding to our narrative cannot be a means of reconciling ourselves to the present situation?

Quite so, but it is not the passionate participants of the culture war among the whites that I hope to reconcile you to, nor the hustle and grind of the PoC intelligentsia. For there is another character archetype being depicted in all this—it is the ironic detachment of the narrator, in whom I hope to persuade readers, especially non-white readers, they may profitably see themselves. By analogy to the Cold War, let us call this the Non-Aligned character archetype.

The Non-Aligned person represents a kind of ideal, a character type to which one could be reconciled even amid a society as so described. The basic idea is borrowed and adapted from key ideas in Wiredu's philosophy of conceptual decolonization,71 so I will explain the big-picture strategy before giving more concrete illustrations. Broadly speaking, I have fulfilled half of the task I set for political philosophy in the introduction. I have outlined a cause which prevents people being able to reconcile themselves to their social order—the fact that the ideology they espouse and the material reality they live within fundamentally come apart, the one always generating problems for the other. And, at a high level, this immediately suggests a path to reconciliation—make the world better resemble the ideology, or the ideology better resemble the world. I will presume here that in some form or another a racially egalitarian ideology is to be maintained, and thus consider the more specific question: how can one earnestly work towards a more egalitarian social structure given the situation we now find ourselves in? As I will outline in a moment, epistemic features of the status quo make this a non-trivially difficult task to even attempt, and so it requires certain characterological virtues that I shall use to construct the Non-Aligned person's archetype.

And this is where the central idea from Wiredu comes in. The situation of the person of colour facing the contemporary culture war, recognizing it as doomed to incoherence, yet unsure of how to do better, shares certain features with the situation of any formerly colonized person trying to understand their present situation. Passing familiarity with the history leading up to now makes it clear that key concepts through which one understands the social world, the institutions charged with gathering and marshalling evidence about that world, and the bodies empowered to set the agenda in social discussion, have all been developed by powers indifferent or hostile to one's interests. And yet it would clearly be facile to simply reject whatever one inherits from this nexus.72 After all, this too lets those same forces set the agenda. It simply adds a negation sign before stating a preferred response to someone else's agenda. One must thus develop the skills and capacities to sift through the discourse space cautiously, weigh and evaluate what one finds, and synthesize what is best therein so that it serves ends one sets oneself. This is what Wiredu calls conceptual decolonization, and I shall more or less contract the Non-Aligned ideal to be an ideal practitioner of conceptual decolonization within the present culture war, working towards the end of a genuinely racially egalitarian socio-political order.

Let us then work through that abstract story as applied to our more concrete case. First, why is it that the Non-Aligned person is in a situation wherein they cannot trust their concepts, agenda-setting agencies, or evidence-gathering institutions? This follows from the way in which the culture war is sustained by a material inequality that no one is seriously trying to fix. Repenters and Repressers are both responding to discontent generated by an ideology–reality mismatch, but neither of them wishes to either ideologically justify the material inequality or give away their property and superior opportunities. But as long as such material inequalities exist, they can generate stable patterns of inegalitarian interaction in line with salient identity categories.73 These can compound one's disadvantage the more minoritized one is.74 And even if, per impossible, we could somehow persuade all the whites to adopt the right sort of inner attitude, the wrong sort of institutional structure can perpetuate racial inequality regardless.75

What's more, due attention to colonial history makes it apparent that regimes of stark and brutal racial inequality can last a long time despite a firm majority of the population thinking them entirely illegitimate.76 Participants in the culture war, organized as it is around responding to this situation, thus find themselves with endless new fodder with which to fuel their battles. The ideology–reality mismatch is forever asserting itself, ever directing their intellectual and practical attention. The Du Boisian social problem can be temporarily forgotten or the guilt from failing to solve it meliorated for a moment—but it will never stop generating new instances of itself, never stop reaffirming its own basic reality.

Hence as long as the material inequalities exist they will keep making racial hierarchy salient whatever the Repressers want, and keep generating reasons for guilt whatever the Repenters want. All of the institutions designed to respond to this culture war—which is essentially all of the epistemic institutions controlled by the white bourgeois, which is to say all of them—are thus fundamentally addressing the wrong questions from the point of view of the Non-Aligned person. They are concerned with managing the results of a tension they can never resolve, which the nature of the Repenter and Repressor conflict will not allow them to resolve. They are not arranged to produce information, or set an agenda, that will aid in resolving material inequality, and in fact will forever be supplied with more culture war flashpoints on which to focus and with which to distract.

Since that will no doubt strike many as a bleak situation, it is worth pausing here to address a temptation many have felt, which may indeed be the psychological basis of many becoming PoC intelligentsia. If this is all our society has to offer, why not give in to the overwhelming temptation for an educated person of colour and participate in the culture war, usually from a perspective much more friendly to the Repenters? Could we not win serious material change by persuading them to act as our agents? And even if we cannot, maybe pessimism is simply the proper response to this; and one may as well at least get paid for blunting the worst edges of oppression. It is easy to see why this tempts, not only for reasons of material interest mentioned above, but also in light of the sort of policies and social standing which the Repenters would seem to offer us. But earnestly trying to win the culture war in the sense of achieving victory for either Repenter or Represser is a fool's errand; if those are the teams, then the only winning move is not to play.

For one thing, it is impossible that we shall ever be so persuasive. The matters disputed are sufficiently complex, and the historical narrative sufficiently contradictory, that there will always be the possibility of reasonable disagreement. For another, many people benefit from the status quo. First, in the obvious sense in which both Represser and Repenter strategies do not involve surrendering white wealth and are thus relatively advantageous to white elites when compared to seriously redistributive policies that might actually advance the material welfare of black people. But even beyond that there are many, including both whites77 and the PoC intelligentsia outlined above, who materially benefit from the perpetuation of the culture war as it now exists. They will not be keen to let go of it without a fight. And in a highly interconnected and ideologically diverse society, everyone will always be able to find sympathetic intellectual spokespeople to bolster their faith in their preferred narrative. Under these conditions, we should not expect any coherent grand narrative to achieve consensus.78 Strategic participation on one side might seem like the pragmatic hard-nosed response of a realist, but it is doomed and in fact simply a waste of time.

Instead, we should bear in mind that some situations are simply beyond our control and can only do us harm by involving ourselves.79 As long as the material circumstances underlying the culture war remain the same, neither the Represser nor the Repenter archetype will reliably act for our good. That is not to counsel inaction, but rather to stress that our actions should be aimed at other ends. With that, let us return and ask ourselves: if the Non-Aligned person cannot trust the politico-epistemic institutions of the participants in the culture war, nor reasonably hope to turn one of their sides into an engine for change, what ought they to do instead?

Well, at a high level they ought to act in such a way that they can earnestly see themselves as sensibly working towards the eradication of the material inequalities between racial groups. While it is not the only way of advancing this goal, as a placeholder let us assume the Non-Aligned person seeks to remove the ideology–reality mismatch by securing the physical and cultural conditions necessary for non-white people to enjoy republican freedom.80 There is good reason to think that this cannot be achieved by mere change in people's attitudes or shifting interpersonal etiquette norms.81 For republican freedom to be attained, far-reaching modifications in the basic economic structure may well be required.82 The Non-Aligned character is therefore moved to seek out avenues for effective collective action that might realize the necessary changes. The question is then: what sort of attitudes and dispositions do they need to have to be effective at this?

The psychological virtues necessary to work towards this under the present situation are difficult to attain. As noted, most of the venues wherein intellectual work and cultural media are produced are controlled by either Repenters or Repressers, with whom Non-Aligned people are, well, not aligned. In so far as people of colour have found a voice there, they have been highly vulnerable to elite capture.83 Yet, at least until counter-institutions have been built which have sufficient reach, these are the spaces many of us must exist in, and persons whose work we must draw from, if we are to plan and coordinate working out how to collectively build a better world. What is more, all the while those institutions will be humming to the rhythm of the perpetual Repenter versus Represser conflict, as the world we inhabit continues inevitably to defy their preferred ideologies. We will thus be bombarded with messaging which claims that their culture war flashpoints are supremely important and worthy of our immediate attention. The Non-Aligned person must learn to tune out the culture war noise, while being attentive to what is of value given their distinctive projects. What sort of projects would these be, and what sort of psychological dispositions would aid their completion?

It is unfortunately rather difficult to say what those distinctive projects will be at this point, precisely because the present author is one subject to all the epistemic disadvantages outlined. But we can say a bit. Before we engage in the project of trying to refine and disseminate racial etiquette codes,84 Non-Aligned persons will want some evidence that improved civility norms would actually generate material redistribution. Where there is some reason to think they will not, we will simply set aside such research projects and reallocate our attention elsewhere. That is simply an example of a broader point; an immediate project for a non-aligned intellectual would be the re-evaluation of projects which are ostensibly for the good of black people and presently taking up much time, attention, and resources—such as racial etiquette training85—and see which of these projects are premised on in fact serving Repenter or Represser goals. Where examples of misallocated resources are identified, as is the case for etiquette training,86 we will siphon off resources and prevent people sympathetic to our cause from casting their pearls here.

For a more positive example of a project we could engage in that has both intellectual and more directly material elements, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has recently advocated for a forward-looking vision of climate reparations, concerned with what sort of world we can make together, in a fashion that very much mirrors the concerns of the Non-Aligned person.87 What is more, he argues that, due to many of the factors discussed in my narrative earlier, any hope for a decent world for the vast majority of the world's non-white population requires (among other things) the provision of resources and technology to counteract the ecological and political effects of climate change. This is a form of climate reparations. To this we would perhaps wish to add research on ways in which such people could become independent of the generosity and good behaviour of the world's wealthy, in light of our adopted republican ideals. But in any case, redirecting the conversation, practices, and ultimately resources, involved in how we deal with reparations towards specific climate ends requires powers we do not presently have, and a mixture of skills and dispositions that are rare. Indeed, even thinking about things this way is often very contentious.88 However, it is exactly the sort of shift in mindset and practice we will need if we are to carry out the Non-Aligned project of striving to actually resolve our material inequalities.

With our examples of Non-Aligned scholar-activist projects before us, we can think about what psychological virtues they require. And since both require shifting focus quite dramatically within already established areas of enquiry, we have our first characterological requirement of the Non-Aligned person. By whatever psychological means necessary we must stop granting the white bourgeoisie agenda-setting power over our own concerns. That is to say, the Non-Aligned person must cultivate mental self-determination in order to ensure we are pursuing lines of thought and action pertinent to our projects and responsive to our concerns.89 For guidance in this we can look to outsider political traditions that have also had to develop within the confines of social forms they could not control.90 This requires of us a kind of self-conscious autonomy in formulating and setting sub-goals towards our ultimate end; and a stance of reflective irony towards what is being proffered as important by institutions we cannot trust is essential to remaining Non-Aligned.

Relatedly, we must cultivate dispassion towards culture war flashpoints.91 Repenters, Repressers, and many of the PoC intelligentsia, will insist we ought to care deeply about these issues. And there are genuinely good arguments for affective engagement with political injustices.92 But, where our own agenda of securing republican freedom by changes to the material base does not independently confirm their concerns to be of interest, these affectively charged flashpoints are nothing more than a distraction. Yet, Non-Aligned people are psychologically formed in the environment of our narrative. Our ill-considered passions are hence likely to align with the spurious concerns of the Repressers and Repenters, and this can be very hard to break free from.93 Hopefully, the very act of coming to appreciate one's place in the narrative will help denaturalize its concerns and allow one to better liberate oneself from being swept along by the affective salience regime it brings with it.94 This allows one to focus on what matters to one's own project and better cooperate with others to those ends.95

Of course, this will not mean that we are always unconcerned with whatever Repressers or Repenters care about—the ability of the police to engage in extra-judicial killing certainly affects poor black people's republican freedom! And even where our indifference is maintained, this should not be understood as being simply unfeeling.96 But we must none the less strive to maintain our own inner seat of judgement apart from the concerns the dominant culture attempts to foist upon us.97 With our own assessments given primacy, the superior wealth and access to media of the Repenters and Repressers will be unable to cajole or bribe us away from our task.98 In this way, we can carry out Wireduite conceptual decolonization, having put ourselves in a position to sift through what our epistemic environment offers us and select only what we need.

Cultivating this inner space is hence no mere personal retreat from the world. It is vital to achieving the Non-Aligned person's goal. By ensuring one is able to effectively work towards real change, one may help create a political community and material circumstance where all, now properly inclusive of non-white people, may freely exercise and live according to their own considered judgements.99 This, then, is the ideal of the Non-Aligned character archetype. Someone who can see themselves as genuinely pursuing a reasoned approach to creating a better society, dispassionate enough and at enough ironic distance not to get torn away from their tasks by the raging of the Repenters and the Repressors, reconciled to a project of genuinely resolving social incoherences rather than just eternally responding anew to each successive dramatic demonstration of this incoherence.

Confusion is characteristic of a transitional society. This is a society that has undergone sufficiently rapid changes in its mode of life and ideological superstructure that the two have not yet had time to properly adjust to each other.100 The case of race relationships is especially fraught, because one effect of all these changes has been to call the concept itself into question. Since the close of the twentieth century, we have not even really agreed whether or not there is a ‘there’ there to race at all101—and this is no consequence-free metaphysical disagreement; our technological practices embody (often confused) notions of race.102 It is hence no surprise, and no reason for shame, that we as a culture have had a hard time thinking through this. The USA and the broader postcolonial world have not yet found a way of making sense of themselves after de jure racist regimes. It is natural enough that the narratives we have available are unsatisfying, and the character archetypes available are not appealing roles.

I have offered as a more attractive character archetype the Non-Aligned person. They seek to eliminate the mismatch between ideological aspiration and material reality. This they do by rendering material circumstances more akin to what one might expect given a racially egalitarian ideology. That is to say, rather than solve the Du Boisian social problem by trying to better manage its fallout, they wish to simply eliminate the circumstances that gave rise to it. Since they have to operate amid the present society with all its confusions and distractions, I argued that the Non-Aligned person needs to develop a habit of considering issues with Stoical dispassion, while maintaining ironic detachment from the concerns of the other character archetypes. In this way, they can focus on achieving their goals, rather than be distracted by the pervasive and highly affectively charged white psychodramas that constitute the mainstay of Repenters and Repressers battling it out in the culture war. I hope this also illustrates how the ideal of reconciliation can still guide political philosophers even in non-ideal societies; we can think about what sort of person and project would constitute a rationally satisfying mode of working towards the better world, and work out how to create conditions that facilitate occupying such a role.

But whether my vision of the Non-Aligned as character archetype with which one could be reconciled is appealing or not, it is imperative that we cease investing our psychic energy in the white bourgeoisie's culture war. It will never get better, and only makes us worse.

Too many people assisted in the creation of this article to offer full thanks. But you know who you are and you have my gratitude.

None relevant.

There are no potential conflicts of interest relevant to this article.

All relevant data are included in the article.

The author declares human ethics approval was not needed for this study.