Freddie Gray, Citizen?

In media accounts of his death and life, Freddie Gray was referred to in a variety of ways—identified by his race, his rap sheet, his place of residence (the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in West Baltimore), or his personality traits. Gray has also now been identified as a martyr and as a symbol (of social disrepair, or of mistrust between poor communities and the police force employed to protect them). Yet few commentators referred to Gray as “a democratic citizen,” and this omission is revealing. By “citizen” here, I mean less the legal relationship of civic status and more the moral idea of citizenship as, in the terms of Jeffrey Stout, those “individuals who have a share of responsibility for the arrangements and policies undertaken by a republic.”⁸ Citizenship in this sense is predicated on both an internalized feeling of agency and social recognition of this agency. Citizens are those who see themselves as entitled, in Stout’s words, to “having a say” in their society, but they also must have this feeling of civic entitlement acknowledged by others around them. “To be a citizen,” Stout argues, “is to be recognized by others as such.”⁹ If this recognition is withheld, then the internalized sense of civic entitlement is under threat, and although the power of democratic citizens can only be actualized through association—the organized gathering of individual capacity—the feeling that such efforts are both possible and potentially impactful rests on a belief of ordinary citizens that they have the capacity to act and to effect change in their communities, through associational life itself or in concert with formal authorities and institutions. If citizenship as an internalized and socially recognized sense of generalized agency and capacity evaporates—if the moral idea of citizenship is no longer a widely held assumption or a viable standard—then democratic societies become more open to domination by perpetually organized and self-interested elites.

Citizenship is often overidentified with the idea of “rights,” yet as Axel Honneth has argued, “rights” should themselves be understood as artifacts of social recognition. To possess political rights is to be recognized as “being able to raise socially accepted claims”; they are a “way of making clear to oneself that one is respected by everyone else.”¹⁰ The struggle for rights is therefore a struggle over such “depersonalized symbols of social respect.”¹¹ Respect, for Honneth, is not a question of empathy or sympathy; the question of citizenship is not necessarily linked to feelings of affection or social esteem. However, the absence of respect or the destruction of its symbols inevitably has psychological and interpersonal significance.¹² In other words, impersonal or abstract attributions of membership and civic capacity have deeply personal stakes. The implication is that the sociopolitical struggle for recognition as a citizen is an important aspect of an individual’s psychological development within self-described democratic societies. If the denial of recognition in such contexts can lead to a “crippling feeling of social shame,” then feelings of self-respect, agency, and capacity are necessarily tied to positive, mutualistic relations of recognition.¹³ The ideals of democratic societies prescribe norms of generalized political capacity. Therefore, to not be recognized (by one’s self or by others) as an actual or potential participant within collective life is to suffer a social injury, which can only be repaired through a shift in norms and patterns of civic efficacy and agency. In this respect, the language of citizenship, or of rights—while symbolically important—is by itself insufficient. To think of oneself or to be described as a citizen without the supporting circuitry of social recognition in place is to delude oneself or to be deluded. Appropriate institutions of mutual recognition, in Honneth’s words, “are needed to promote the actual realization of individuals’ reflexive freedom.”¹⁴

In democratic societies, citizenship is what Sheldon Wolin refers to as a “birthright.” Citizenship is a birthright because it is something that precedes our arrival and exists in potentia as an object of investment and attachment. To assert the birthright of citizenship is to assume what Wolin calls our “politicalness,” or our “capacity for developing into beings who know and value what it means to participate in and be responsible for the care and improvement of our common and collective life.”¹⁵ A birthright is an inheritance that has to be claimed; it does not arrive as a gift but has to be made consciously our own. As Wolin puts it, “it is something to which we are entitled … but we have to … mix it with our mental and physical labor, undertake risks on its behalf, and even make sacrifices.”¹⁶ The “we” here, though, has to be read in the intersubjective and social terms of recognition as defined by Honneth and Stout. The political birthright of citizenship requires a collective labor in order to be claimed and carried forward; it is not something that can be individually assumed in isolation from participatory norms, settings, and culture. Citizenship, for Wolin, lives within the “ebb-and-flow of everyday activities, responsibilities and relationships.”¹⁷ Ordinary, daily interactions, expectations, and modes of comportment either reinforce a circuitry of civic recognition or they do not, and civic capacity cannot stand for long in the absence of these intersecting lines of support.

With this normative understanding of citizenship as a backdrop, perhaps it is unsurprising that the language of democratic citizenship has been absent from the accounts of Freddie Gray’s life and death. There is no strong indication that Gray himself would have seen his life in terms of citizenship as defined by Stout, Honneth, or Wolin. Statistically speaking, the neighborhood in which he lived—Sandtown-Winchester—was, during Gray’s lifetime, civically impoverished relative to even its surrounding neighborhoods. In 2008, Sandtown-Winchester had twice the unemployment, poverty, and homicide rates of Baltimore as a whole, four times the rate of lead paint violations, and significant educational gaps among both the youth and adult populations.¹⁸ The structural economic, social, and political deficiencies in neighborhoods such as Gray’s amount to what Darryl Pinckney calls the “holy trinity of disenfranchisement and dispossession.”¹⁹ In this respect, Gray’s story reflects the experience of “millions of Americans who feel that they have no vested stake in this society.”²⁰ In fact, as a convicted felon who at the time of his death had two pending drug charges against him, Gray would have been barred from the basic act of voting under Maryland’s laws of felony disenfranchisement, which require offenders to complete their full sentences, including parole and probation, before they can reobtain the right to vote.²¹ To be denied this most basic democratic act is already to fall outside the circuitry of civic recognition that Stout and Honneth describe. In such a situation, the language of citizenship might do little more than provide ideological cover for a situation in which disenfranchisement is the norm.

Politically debilitating patterns of interaction, settings, and norms in the present emerge from particular histories, and these histories in the case of Freddie Gray’s neighborhood are intertwined with racial prejudice and discrimination written into America’s legal tradition and expressed in a variety of more or less violent ways. Politicalness, in other words, is not the only birthright in American democracy. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has argued, American’s political birthright is also marked by the “right to break the black body,” or, as he puts it, “In America it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”²² This heritage was expressed not only throughout the brutal centuries of forced labor and rape under slavery, but through a reign of terrorist violence in the former states of the Confederacy during which nearly four thousand African Americans were lynched between the years of 1880 and 1940.²³ In the latter half of the twentieth century, this heritage has found expression through more subtle means in racially coded housing, drug, police, and prison policies.²⁴ For Coates, then, incidents of police brutality or policies with differential racial impact should not be viewed primarily as violations of democratic norms. Instead, we should see these incidents as the expression of American democracy. Historically in America, norms of citizenship and whiteness have collapsed together in ways that have justified the violent exclusion of racialized others. Current criminal justice policies and the abuses of black bodies that have followed from these policies are not therefore deviations from but the “product of democratic will.”²⁵

Moreover, following from the normative concept of citizenship as expressed by Stout, Honneth, and Wolin, it is clear that the effects of a violent heritage of exclusion show up not only within stark experiences of disenfranchisement such as those experienced by convicted felons but also appear within everyday moments of disrespect or misrecognition. Such “microaggressions”—everyday slights or instances of disregard—reflect and carry forward historical patterns of exclusion while serving as more subtle reminders of the unconscious boundaries of political and social membership. Claudia Rankine’s lyric Citizen collects a numbing variety of these moments: mundane interactions with friends, cash register attendants, real estate agents, strangers in line and service professionals. As personally painful as these moments might be (or even if they were not experienced as painful), they also contain civic or political content. If citizenship, as Wolin sees it, exists in the ebb-and-flow of everyday activities, then everyday experiences of disrespect and misrecognition carry an implicit message: you are not a citizen. Or, as Rankine puts it, “this is how you are a citizen … let it go. Move on.”²⁶ Not to linger on these slights is an implicit clause within the contract of democratic citizenship, a clause that reinforces a circuitry of disrespect and disenfranchisement and that, in so doing, makes a mockery of stated democratic ideals.

If this view is accurate, then it should be asked what value the idea of citizenship could possibly have had for Freddie Gray, or what it might ever mean for the millions in similar social situations. As critical race scholars have shown, norms of “good” citizenship have often shielded assertions of racial, gender, and class privilege, which implies that individuals such as Gray have been structurally barred from such forms of recognition. This systemic exclusion also implies, however, that the very forms of civic recognition are an instantiation of privilege rather than a means of undoing or challenging it.²⁷ To be a “good citizen” is precisely to accede to norms of whiteness, regardless of the shade of one’s skin color. If this is the case, then an attachment to norms or ideals of democratic citizenship might be little more than what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.”²⁸ Berlant defines cruel optimism as a “desire [for] something that is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”²⁹ Akin to an addiction, cruel optimism is a structure of motivation and desire that locks the subject in pursuit of an object that cannot—and can never—fulfill the subject’s actual desires. The subject, tragically, thinks that if they just try harder, or find different or novel ways to approach the object, that “this time” their disappointment will end and that they will achieve the long-awaited goal.³⁰ Cruel optimism reflects and does nothing to address a sense of social stuckness or impasse; instead, it simply returns us to a fantastical object of desire that is itself part of the problem. Given its history of intimate association with racial privilege and exclusion, perhaps democratic citizenship is a form of cruel optimism. Democratic optimism is cruel because it keeps individuals circling around the fantasy of generalized agency when the structural conditions of contemporary life radically preclude the realization of this dream.

One answer to this vexed situation, then, would be to reject the “birthright” of democratic citizenship as a fixed star of political aspiration and to detach political desires from the system of broken promises and bad dreams altogether (Rankine: “let it go”). By this light, the fact that millions of individuals in the American context have no vested stake in democratic society might be viewed as less a symptom of social pathology than as a necessary step toward significant rupture—the heralding of what Berlant calls an dramatic “event” that “shocks being into a radically open situation” of “ethical sociality.”³¹ Systems of privilege and structural injustice might only be overturned if we forsake the self-defeating fantasy of democratic citizenship, an impossible and cruel vision that perpetually postpones the possibility of radical change.

On this reading, generalized feelings of disenfranchisement are not primarily a symptom of civic distress but represent instead a powerful opportunity to alter dominant systems of political and social life. For Jodi Dean, the key to mobilizing such discontent is to understand and maintain the difference between democratic “drive” and the “desire” for actual equality (which Dean defines in terms of the communist idea of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”).³² Borrowing this distinction from Jacques Lacan, Dean argues that appeals to democracy take the structure of “drive,” which “circle(s) around and around” the object of desire, and which receives small charges of enjoyment (jouissance) from doing so. We never reach our stated ends, but the small electric jolts of joy we get by our near misses distract and satisfy us just enough. Drive reflects “our stuckness in a circuit”—a ceding of our desire for the realization of our goal.³³ A will toward substantive equality gets splintered into a variety of microscopic democratic projects and dissipated through rhetorical bromides of citizenship. For Dean, the answer is not to fetishize or romanticize democracy, but to see through the fantasy of democracy as a goal or end in itself. We can do so by occupying “antagonism” as a “constitutive feature of human experience,” in order to press our demands for a significant break or rupture from a system that fails on its own terms yet whose failure is perversely taken as the normal workings of that system.³⁴ Calls for democracy—more democracy, better democracy—are in actuality calls “for what is already there,” when what is desperately needed is rupture, not continuity.³⁵ It follows, then, that the Freddie Grays of the world should not be distracted or taunted by the optimistic fantasy of democratic citizenship, but shaped instead into a collective mass of militant resistance. In other words, to quote Joe Hill, the activist leader of International Workers of the World, “Don’t mourn—organize!”³⁶

We arrive, then, at a critical juncture. Whether it is worthwhile to maintain mourning as an “open dynamic” within a culture aspiring toward democracy depends on whether the terms of democratic citizenship might still apply to our current condition or whether they represent forms of cruel optimism and the unjust postponement of radical change. The democratic promise of Black Lives Matter or similar undertakings of public mourning hinges on whether democracy itself actually has any promise—whether it heralds the realization of substantive equality, or whether its ideals are mainly cover for privileges that dissipate political desire and keep us stuck in a circuitry of misrecognition. The heritage of American democracy is undeniably ambivalent; it is replete with murder and repair, brutality and sacrifice, oppression and emancipation—and neither side of these terms can fully cancel out the other. Norms of citizenship have often been a cover for privilege and a means of reinforcing that privilege, yet they have also served as the occasion for overcoming exclusion and challenging unjust inequalities. In order to take some measure of this ambivalence, I turn in the following section to a closer reading of Rankine’s Citizen and Coates’s Between the World and Me. In the context of the contemporary politics of race, Rankine and Coates each reflect eloquently on the sense of ambivalence attendant on the terms of American identity and the ideals of democratic citizenship, and while neither author resolves (or even seeks to resolve) this ambivalence, they provide a structure of encouragement for efforts at social repair and a means of understanding the cruelty within democratic optimism (and within all objects of attachment) without forsaking that optimism for some mysterious ruptural event. Connecting the work of Rankine and Coates to that of Klein and Honneth and reading the Black Lives Matter protests through the perspective of theories of mutualistic civic interaction can in turn allow us to identify means by which the generalized feeling of social impasse might be patiently and persistently worn away.

“A Conscious Citizen of this Terrible and Beautiful World”

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is written in the form of a letter to his son, but as a public rumination on histories of racial discrimination and disembodiment, its educative purpose is at the same time both intimate and social. The book identifies and works through the complexities of attachment to democratic ideals, while reflecting on the uneven experiences of recognition implied by those ideals. Coates is asking his audience to wrestle with the fact that norms and practices of American citizenship are deeply rooted in histories of exclusion whose lasting effects are still acutely felt. As he puts it, the question is “not whether Lincoln truly meant ‘government of the people’ but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term ‘people’ to actually mean.”³⁷ As Coates writes to his son, “in 1863 [the people] did not mean your mother or your grandmother, it did not mean you and me.”³⁸ These were not, of course, innocent omissions. The exclusion and violation of black bodies was not an unintended side effect of American democracy but “expressions” of democratic will.³⁹ The “Dream” of American democracy, therefore, historically and quite literally “rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.”⁴⁰ Moreover, current expressions of democratic will continue to have a differential racial impact even if they operate under a deracialized language of “fighting crime” or “safe communities.” Those who speak this language are those whom Coates calls “Dreamers,” who both experience and expect the security of social legibility and recognition but who live in denial of the radical insecurity of those excluded from this reality. Denial over this history and present is not the same crime as legal discrimination, but it is a necessary part of the same crime. The burden of the violent racial past that has not passed is intensified because it is disavowed. Civic forgetfulness or amnesia over America’s racial history and present is “habit … another necessary component of the Dream.”⁴¹ Dreamers disavow this history through myths of reinvention and rebirth (“morning in America”), but doing so only obscures the fact that their security is purchased at the cost of continual exclusion, marginalization, and misrecognition. American citizenship, Coates argues, is rooted in fantasies of innocence and the projective identification of various black bodies that remain outside the people, such as Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, or Eric Garner—who are described as criminals, demons, or nuisances but never identified as citizens. The ideals of citizenship are used as cover, in fact, for these crimes of misrecognition; they are myths that form part of a larger “apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.”⁴²

Despite all this, Coates does not find reason to relinquish the ideals of American democracy. While he insists that the “secret meaning of equality” has always been racial inequality—the right to “break the black body” in order to keep whole and secure the “Dream”—this secret meaning is not the only meaning of this ideal. Running through Coates’s book is a conviction that the norms of equality, respect, and recognition contained within the ideals of democratic citizenship also represent a birthright to which everyone is entitled, a conviction articulated in the face of and despite the obvious living legacies of brutality, inequality, and misrecognition that limn the democratic tradition. American democracy’s complex history of racial disrespect and disavowal does not, for Coates, defeat democratic aspirations. Instead, Coates assumes that these ideals have a motivating structure that exceeds their use as ideological cudgels. “Perhaps,” he writes, on the basis of these “national hopes,” the Dreamers “will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths.”⁴³

Coates, however, does not believe in any easy kind of civic reconciliation, nor does he have faith in the inevitable march of progress. The moral arc of the universe does not bend toward justice for Coates; it is “bent towards chaos.”⁴⁴ As such he does not offer panaceas for despair, nor does he even downplay reasons for despair. Coates seems to have been compelled to write the book in part because of his son’s reaction to the news that the killer of Michael Brown would not be indicted. Coates’s son had stayed up late in order to hear the announcement of an indictment, and “when instead it was announced that there was none you said, ‘I’ve got to go.’ ”⁴⁵ His son’s response on hearing the decision of the Ferguson grand jury—“I’ve got to go”—is repeated later in the book (it is the only time that Coates’s son is quoted directly), and it operates as a kind of standing challenge to which the entire book can be seen as a response, or as an elaboration of the initial response that Coates gave that night:

You said ‘I’ve got to go,’ and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay.… What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, and that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.⁴⁶

In effect, Coates’s response to his son is an affirmation of what Berlant might call impasse. “This is your country,” has a double-edged meaning in the context of the Michael Brown case. On the one hand, it is a brutal reminder of the seemingly unaccountable violence to which black bodies are especially vulnerable (this is your country); on the other hand, it is a claim of membership, an assurance of belonging (this is your country). It is a bold assurance of citizenship that is not meant to be reassuring. Instead, Coates implies that an acknowledgment of the lack of reassurance is the best means of awakening from the Dream of security and innocence. As Coates puts it, “I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed that it would be okay.”⁴⁷ Instead of feeding dreams of escape (“I’ve got to go”), Coates’s double-edged assurance serves to underscore intolerable realities while it undermines a fantastical flight from these realities. It is only by acknowledging this discomforting situation that Coates’s son might fulfill the author’s parental aspiration: “I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”⁴⁸

Citizenship, Coates implies, requires a consciousness of the ambivalence—the terror and beauty—of our democratic heritage. This consciousness is reminiscent of Wolin’s arguments about the birthright of politicalness. For Wolin, this birthright is replete with “ambiguous historical moments,” and in order to deal with these ambiguities “we need an interpretative mode of understanding that is able to reconnect past and present experience.”⁴⁹ Democratic citizenship requires practices and settings through which citizens can “interpret the present experience of the collectivity, reconnect it to past symbols, and carry it forward.”⁵⁰ Coates and Wolin seem to be calling for a kind of tragic, democratic consciousness, an emergence from the self-imposed immaturity of the “Dream” and from the fantasies of innocence or rebirth contained therein. As Coates puts it, “My education was a … process that would not award me any own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.”⁵¹

Coates’s formulation here echoes strongly with Melanie Klein’s concept of the depressive position and the work of mourning. For Klein, the depressive position was the setting from which the ambivalence of self and other is acknowledged and conflicts within the world and self are faced with a greater degree of honesty and understanding. By internalizing whole, ambivalent objects (“there was so much terrible out there, even among us”) and by coming to know and tolerate the ambivalence of the self (“Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent”),⁵² we can better face up to the ambivalence of the terrible, beautiful world. Doing so creates the possibility of an appreciation for what Eve Sedgwick calls the “middle ranges of agency—the notion that you can be relatively empowered or disempowered without annihilating someone else or being annihilated.”⁵³ On the other hand, the “Dreamers” are caught within a paranoid-schizoid fantasy of innocence and denial, pushed and pulled by intense anxieties of vulnerability that cannot be expressed and must be warded off through more or less violent means. Coates’s prescribed response to the Dreamers (and we are all, Coates argues, potential Dreamers) is “to awaken them” by revealing “that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible breakable humans.”⁵⁴ This prescription resembles nothing so much as what Sedgwick saw as the “threshold” to the depressive position—“the simple, foundational, authentically very difficult understanding that good and bad tend to be inseparable at every level.”⁵⁵ The search for what Coates calls “weaponized history” is the manic search for a way out of this depressive dilemma, but it only postpones the more difficult work of collaboratively building something more “noble” out of the rubble of our Dreams.

But perhaps Coates’s depressive counsel is just another, more subtle, instance of cruel optimism. Coates walks some distance toward a complete rejection of the Dream—which “rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies”—yet at the last moment he pulls back toward resignation, advising his son to “find some way to live in the all of it” rather than grooming him for militant resistance. In the words of Berlant, Coates is like a “subject who acknowledges the broken circuit of reciprocity between herself and her world but who, refusing to see that cleavage as an end as such, takes it as an opportunity to repair both herself and the world.”⁵⁶ The difficulty is that this (depressive) position seems to forsake a more radical, critical purchase on the object of attachment—it “attempts to sustain optimism for irreparable objects.”⁵⁷ In the face of undeniable and seemingly unrelenting cruelty, it might be better to “suspend ordinary notions of repair and flourishing to ask whether the survival scenarios we attach to those affects weren’t the problem in the first place.”⁵⁸ However, here Berlant’s analysis seems to assume the possibility of a simple causal attribution of harms, an easy determination that the survival scenarios available to us are the source of our problems and not an ambivalent (terrible and beautiful) birthright. More problematically, Berlant implies that there is somewhere else to go—another reality in which the problems of survival would be less acute and our attachments less cruel. Yet this seems to betray a fantasy of the perfect object, the hallucination of an all-giving “good breast.” The idea of a simple attribution of guilt or innocence and corollary fantasies of escape are themselves cruel dreams that keep citizens from the authentically difficult labors of recognition and repair.

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen drives home the difficulty of these labors. They are difficult because repair is not simply a matter of changes in public policy, such as ending felony disenfranchisement laws. While such actions might have a significant effect, Rankine shows how the circuitry of recognition and misrecognition reaches far beyond positive law and is reflected in everyday interactions that affirm one’s place within (or outside) “the people.” Rankine’s poetic rendering of these microaggressions reveals how political relationships of recognition are intertwined with personal interactions, and vice versa. Experiences of disrespect travel across these theoretically distinct yet practically intertwined spaces. As skillfully expressed by Rankine, these experiences are layered and complex; they involve not only the slight itself but also the response (or the lack of a response) and the reception (or lack thereof) to that response. Experiences of disrespect take place within and reflect the basic coordinates of social recognition patterns, which means that the thematization of these experiences risks being misunderstood by the terms of (mis)recognition to which they are addressed. How does one communicate that the forms of communication currently in use are actually a form of miscommunication, that they are a source of social injury? Rankine reflects on this difficulty on the third page of Citizen:

Certain moments send adrenaline to your heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs.… After it happened I was at a loss for words.… Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget.⁵⁹

There are many layers of experience represented here. Within the passage, we detect the pain and resentment of the disrespected (“you don’t forget”), the ways in which disrespect seeps into the everyday, and the difficulty of articulating any of this (“you never called her on it [why not?]”), even among friends. The uncertainty surrounding the author’s reaction—“haven’t you said this … ?” versus “you never called her on it”—reflects not only the humiliation of the slight but the painful difficulty of a response.

Even in those vignettes in Citizen where voice is found, or where witness to the slight is given, the subsequent interactions are often clipped and stunted, ending in silence or unanswered questions; for instance,

Despite the fact that you have the same sabbatical schedule as everyone else, he says, you are always on sabbatical. You are friends so you respond, easy.

What do you mean?

Exactly, what do you mean?⁶⁰

The responses, when they are given, are seen as a necessary form of confrontation: “The voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.”⁶¹ They are necessary because they seek to interrupt a circuitry of misrecognition, and they are necessarily a confrontation because they show how mundane modes of comportment and ways of speaking—forms of “getting along”—are themselves a source of social injury. Because of this, the energy required for a response—“to assert presence”—is often accompanied by “visceral disappointment: a disappointment in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived.”⁶² Responses to everyday instances of disrespect are necessary, difficult, and disappointing, and the “quotidian struggles against dehumanization” in turn give rise to understandable experiences of “anger.”⁶³ Anger itself, however, is both a source of hope and a trap. The expression of anger, it is offered, “might … snap … [us] back into focus,” getting us to pay attention to the concrete other with whom we are interacting, in part by calling attention to the racial projections that suffuse our quotidian lives and that have shaped our interactions heretofore.⁶⁴ Yet the cruelty of misrecognition can entrap anger in the very same circuitry of misunderstanding, where the reaction or response is siphoned into the category of the “angry black woman” who is seen to be acting out or “making a scene.”⁶⁵ One of the frequent images and metaphors in Citizen is the game of tennis, with the responses to disrespect framed as angry (and hopefully effective) returns of serve. However, these backhands do not always necessarily sustain the volley (nor are they intended to); they are heated conclusions to interactions within an ongoing field of interactions that, unlike a tennis match, “doesn’t have an ending.”⁶⁶ The expression of anger is humanizing when it acts as a form of resistance against everyday acts of dehumanization and disrespect.

One hears within Rankine’s sharp and angry responses (when they are offered) what Judith Butler has called the “carefully crafted ‘fuck you.’ ”⁶⁷ Yet, once again, as Citizen makes clear, often the sharpest of these returns are misunderstood—ruled out of bounds—as the utterance gets waylaid among the circuitry of social misrecognition. The “lessons” on offer are not taken up by the world: “To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets.”⁶⁸

In the face of these ordinary experiences of disrespect, the world only offers an impossible counsel: “Feel good. Feel better. Move forward. Let it go. Come on. Come on. Come on.”⁶⁹ The counsel of letting go or forgetting, however, cannot be followed, in part because “the body has memory”⁷⁰ that is not susceptible to conscious erasure and in part because “the past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.”⁷¹ However, the edict to feel better and move on is also impossible because the counsel of forgetting is itself an injury—a fresh reminder of what is to be left behind.

It does not seem promising, then, that the price of being the “citizen” of Rankine’s title is itself a similar commitment to impossible forgetting: “and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.”⁷² Perhaps here Rankine is signaling that citizenship is a form of cruel optimism, a possibility that Rankine explicitly entertained in a 2014 interview:

A year or two ago I read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. That’s a book that gave me a kind of language to think about ideas like “the non-relation in the relation,” which is a rephrasing of Berlant, for example. When I read phrases like that in Berlant’s work, it gives me a vocabulary to understand incoherency.… In Cruel Optimism, Berlant talks about things that we’re invested in, despite the fact that they are not good for us and place us in a non-sovereign relationship to our own lives. And I thought, on a certain level, that thing that I am invested in that is hurting me would be this country [laughs].⁷³

Rankine’s laughter at the end of her reply could be interpreted as either a way of carrying the burden of cruel optimism or as a way of indicating that cruelty is not all that exists within this attachment. If it is the latter, we might go back to the passage “and this is how you are a citizen” and see it as an attempt to challenge dominant norms of recognition while operating within them. For instance, we might at first blush read the “come on” that follows as an incitation (perhaps impatient) to short memory and easy civic reconciliation (come on … let it go). Norms of citizenship encourage or require short memories in the name of civic reconciliation, but if this is the case then clearly these norms are an obstacle to our flourishing in a situation where our bodies carry the burden of memories and the “past is a life sentence.” But we might also read the “come on” as an aggressive sarcastic backhand (“this is what it means to be a citizen[?] Come on”). On this reading, all the returns of serve that fight against the “furious erasures” within dominant patterns of social recognition are not instances of cruel optimism but an exhausting, often angry means of giving witness to the needs for recognition and respect that are being denied.⁷⁴

Rankine clearly expresses this desire for recognition located within the ideal of citizenship. As she puts it, amid all the endless interactions, the countless volleys, “you want the days to add up to something more than you came in out of the sun and drank the potable water of your developed world.”⁷⁵ The potable water image is telling because it shows that the struggle for recognition exceeds the struggle for material well-being, that the creature comforts of advanced industrial society—refrigerators, flat-screen televisions, or air conditioning—are ersatz substitutes for actual relations of recognition.⁷⁶ In fact, the passage following directly from “this is how you are a citizen” testifies to the insufficiencies of material comforts while lamenting the withholding of recognition: “Despite the air conditioning you pull the button back and the window slides down into its door-sleeve. A breeze touches your cheek. As something should.”⁷⁷

Once again, to attack compromised democratic ideals is an exercise of these ideals; it is the search for the “something more” than the current embodiment of those norms and an opposition to their location in circuitry of social misrecognition that furiously erases so many bodies. Perhaps then we can read the “come on” in a third way—as an invitation toward something more than what is currently being offered. In Citizen, this “something more” is expressed by the idea of a “truce”:

Because words hang in the air like pollen, the throat closes. You hack away … a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe you have to create a truce—a truce with the patience of a stethoscope.⁷⁸

In the same 2014 interview quoted earlier, Rankine expanded on this idea:

Truce … goes back to this idea of connection, community, and citizenship. You want to belong, you want to be here … you’re constantly waiting to see that they recognize that you’re a human being … and that together you will live—you will live together. The truce is that.⁷⁹

Given the tennis metaphors in Citizen, it is tempting to read truce as the situation of deuce—not the end of a match, but a moment when the score has drawn even and each side’s prowess has been recognized. Truce/deuce implies the creation of terms of interaction that are not predicated on the erasures of projective identification and stereotyping, but that are more open, honest, and collaborative. It does not imply the end of the match, but a continuation of social life in ways that affirm norms of connection, community, and citizenship amid ongoing and endless struggles for recognition.

Rankine’s idea of truce reflects what Honneth might see as the anticipation of appropriate institutions and relationships caused by the friction of misrecognition or disrespect. Borrowing a distinction between “I” and “me” from the work of George Herbert Mead, Honneth argues that there exists an inner friction between a social self (the “me”)—which is legible from within the dominant patterns of social recognition—and a “spontaneous reaction formation” (the “I”) that cannot be grasped cognitively or contained within existing networks of recognition and modes of interaction.⁸⁰ Similarly, in Citizen, Rankine describes a battle between “the ‘historical self’ and the ‘self-self.’ ” The historical self “arrive(s) with the full force of your American positioning,” whereas the self-self interacts on the basis of “mutual interest” and open exploration.⁸¹ For Honneth, “I” cannot realize—or even fully articulate—its desires by itself, yet by virtue of its existence it “anticipates a community in which one is entitled to have those desires satisfied.”⁸² A breeze touches your cheek—as something should. The “self-self” cannot fully articulate itself, but it reaches outward in anticipation of a community of reception in which it could be brought into being.

The power of Rankine’s social criticism and the direction of social desire in her text rely on an attachment to recognition contained within the ideal of her lyric’s title: Citizen. Ultimately, it does not seem as if Rankine could endorse Berlant’s account of cruel optimism, nor would she seemingly welcome the kinds of militant discipline and politics on offer in Dean’s Communist Horizon. Citizenship is more like a Kleinian good object, which holds idealizing presuppositions that in turn license a critical work of deidealization that challenges the ways in which social ideals are currently, and problematically, embodied (“come on”). For Rankine, all human attachments contain an aspect of cruelty: “We are invested in being together. In having friends. In joining our lives. And yet these are the people who also fail you.”⁸³ If ambivalent humans are constitutionally capable of cruelty and replete with flaws, then the proper political task is not to imagine an absolute liberation from cruelty but to find ways of making the existing cruelty within patterns of social recognition conscious, communicable, and hence (potentially) reparable. As Rankine puts it, “Let’s be flawed differently.”⁸⁴

If these readings of Rankine and Coates are plausible, then the challenge issuing from both of their books is the location of particular settings and viable practices of historical acknowledgment and social repair.⁸⁵ For Rankine, this is precisely the promise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which, for her “can be read as an attempt to keep mourning as an open dynamic in our culture.”⁸⁶ Black Lives Matter, unlike “earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservations … aligns with the dead, continues the mourning and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.”⁸⁷ An open dynamic of mourning is a “mode of intervention and interruption,” but it can also be seen as an American democratic tradition, in line with Mamie Till Mobley’s refusal to keep private the grief over her slain son, Emmitt Till. By openly showing the brutal disfigurement of her son, Mobley sought “to make mourning enter our day-to-day world” by “refram[ing] mourning as a method of acknowledgment.”⁸⁸ “Acknowledgment” here means not only to avow the disproportionate vulnerability of black bodies, but more importantly to recognize the circuitry of misrecognition that serves to disavow this vulnerability. It is to acknowledge the paranoid-schizoid defenses of splitting, denial, idealization, and demonization that circulate amid patterns of social recognition and poison social interactions. In other words, it is a Kleinian work of mourning, the collective pursuit of a social depressive position. As Rankine puts it, “the legacy of black bodies as property … continues to pollute the white imagination. To inhabit our citizenry fully, we have to not only understand this, but also to grasp it.”⁸⁹ Grasping it, of course, means not simply achieving cognitive understanding of discomforting historical truths, but to wrestle with the dominant norms of recognition and the anxieties and defenses that limn the circuitry of social interaction. This, in shorthand, is the democratic work of mourning.

Reflexive Social Interaction and the Democratic Work of Mourning

Rankine’s Citizen is a landmark in the exploration of America’s contemporary racial topography, and Rankine herself is clearly a “poet” in the sense that James Baldwin used the term—as someone who reflects and refines experience in such a way that we can locate ourselves within it and wrest some fractious coherence out of incoherency. Yet interactions over the timing of sabbaticals and tennis metaphors might not speak directly to the experience of those—such as Freddie Gray—for whom Black Lives Matter is attempting to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture. So thinking more concretely, what are the settings, norms, and practices that might respond to the feelings of discontent and impasse expressed in the protests for Freddie Gray or Eric Garner? If there is no choice but to pursue a flawed American democracy, how might we be “flawed differently”—where and how might citizens erode the democratically corrosive forms of disrespect and disavowal that limn relations of social recognition?

Social criticism and aesthetic illumination, however incisive, are not enough. As Axel Honneth argues in Freedom’s Right, the only response to political “disenchantment”—owing to the “increasing decoupling of the political system from democratic will-formation”—would be to “bundle the public power of organizations, social movements and civil associations in order to put coordinated and massive pressure on the parliamentary legislature.”⁹⁰ Civic and political “bundling,” however, depends on sources of solidarity that were traditionally provided by a steadily dissipating “common background culture” and for which no viable alternative sources have been found.⁹¹ The “load bearing structures” for a democratic culture of resistance and generalized agency, are the “practices, customs, and social roles” found within the everyday lifeworld.⁹² And yet of course these are the same customs and modes of interaction that continue to produce the everyday experiences of disrespect, disenfranchisement, and disavowal noted by Coates and Rankine.

The inherent cruelty of democratic stuckness, then, requires building civic relationships that can simultaneously address concrete social problems while extending relations of mutual recognition across intransigent social divides, and to do so from within cultures and customs of misrecognition. Such forms of social togetherness are difficult and chancy, even among groups that are explicitly motivated to pursue them. In the sociologist Paul Lichterman’s phrase, togetherness across social divides is “elusive,” even if it is obtainable under the right conditions.⁹³ Groups that successfully reach outward to build crosscutting relationships display certain social customs and styles of interaction. In particular, group-building groups (civic “bundlers”) develop norms and practices of what Lichterman calls “social reflexivity.” Groups are socially reflexive when “they talk reflectively, self-critically, about their relations with the wider social context—the people, groups, or institutions they see on their horizon. A group can practice social reflexivity when its customs welcome reflective talk about its concrete relationships in the wider social world.”⁹⁴ Communication about the communicative interactions that create social relationships matters greatly for the strength of those relationships. Social reflexivity in this sense is a more pluralistic, collective version of Rankine’s disrespect-and-response tennis matches. It draws attention not only to what is or has been said, but also to why and how those utterances either draw people together or push them apart. Social reflexivity is a more public working through of the pained episodes of monologue (or fraught dialogue) gathered in Citizen, such as the following:

The man at the cash register wants to know if you think your card will work. If this is routine, he didn’t use it on the friend who went before you.… You want her to say something—both as witness and as a friend. She is not you; her silence says so.… Come over here with me, your eyes say. Why on earth would she? … What is wrong with you? This question gets stuck in your dreams.⁹⁵

Being able to talk critically and self-reflectively about social interactions and the settings in which they take place would be the equivalent here of unpacking the silences and miscommunications intensifying this scene of disrespect. Rankine skillfully shows the clash of competing perceptual frameworks (“What is wrong with you?” and “Why on earth would she?”) that have short-circuited the desired communicative act. The chance for solidarity across differences is missed, and the opportunity for mutual recognition is relegated to one’s dreams. The civic and political challenge is to locate spaces and to cultivate norms that might allow citizens to reflect on such uncomfortable differences and to find voice to fill the present silences.

Civic bridge building takes more than a will to associate or a shared sense of commitment to addressing particular social problems, and it does not hinge on the sharing of common values or cultural frameworks. It depends instead on styles and customs of interaction and whether these allow for and encourage open communication about group boundaries, goals, and concrete relationships in the wider social world.⁹⁶ Lichterman studied different civic networks in Wisconsin—all of them affiliated with religious organizations—for a period of three and half years. All of the groups within these networks were motivated to “make a difference” in their communities, and yet only one was able to effectively reach outward and build relationships beyond its original group of participants. What set this group—which Lichterman calls “Park Cluster”—apart from other, very similar groups was its ability to be flexible and critical about itself, its goals, the goals and orientations of others, and the social spaces in which it found itself and to which it ultimately traveled:

Park Cluster was a flexible group … the Cluster wondered what Park residents themselves thought about the proposed neighborhood school that had seemed like such a good idea at the outset. They mulled over the biweekly free meals that had seemed at the start like an unquestionably nice thing for the neighborhood. They became more and more uneasy about talking about the good of the neighborhood without neighbors at the table. It became increasingly urgent to figure out how they could work with Charmaine, the neighborhood center director, instead of bypassing her. Fitfully, the Cluster changed as a group. They transformed their own style of togetherness as they cultivated new relationships beyond the group.⁹⁷

As this example makes clear, customs of social reflexivity are not easy to practice. They lead to disappointment and cause self-doubt; they can be painful and embarrassing, as ideas and practices that seemed unquestionably beneficent take on a new light through engagements with those who had not been represented in their initial envisioning. Social reflexivity requires a comfort with uncertainty, ambiguity, and frustration. In fact, as Lichterman’s study shows, it is certainty that threatens civic bridge building, whereas perplexity can facilitate it.⁹⁸

The concepts and categories of object relations psychoanalysis seem a natural ally for this framework. Flexible, reflexive groups occupy a kind of collective depressive position—comfortable with ambivalence and uncertainty, tolerant of and even appreciative of difference, and less anxious about a lack of certain boundaries for the self and the group than they are about the damages that such boundaries can do. Bridge-building groups seem to exist within what Sedgwick calls the “middle ranges” of agency, in which power is seen as fluid, shared, and relational.⁹⁹ They have found ways to face down their own imperfections and to work through the complexities attendant to social interaction in a society with a terrible and beautiful democratic heritage.

On the other hand, the work of Melanie Klein and her successors sheds some light on why this kind of social togetherness is so elusive. Civic bridge building erodes psychologically easier sources of togetherness—stable group boundaries and clear lines of demarcation between inside/outside, good/evil. Reaching outward, as Lichterman notes, threatens “dominant definitions of good membership in the group. Reaching outward threatened the solidarity of the groups.”¹⁰⁰ Solidarity rooted in the ideal object—Klein’s “good breast”—cannot reach outward or build bridges because the group, under paranoid-schizoid pressures, cannot tolerate the pollution that occurs when the ideal is besmirched by the inclusion of “outsiders”—the resulting interactions are too uncomfortable, anxious, and painful. As Klein well knew, the shattering of projections associated with social reflexivity hurts, which is why the depressive position—the space from where this hurt can be experienced, rather than split off—requires that we work through the loss of these protective ideals and come to better terms with the perspectives and situations of others who had heretofore been one-sided, part objects in our psyche. The good object, by contrast, retains an aspect of idealization that bridges persecutory anxiety while preparing us for the unavoidable discomfort that limns communication across differences. Elusive togetherness requires what I have called “the work of mourning.” Lichterman, in effect, has described the concrete politics of the depressive position, a means of practicing acknowledgment and social repair in the name of the good object of democratic citizenship.

Settings of Social Reflexivity: TRCs and the Work of Mourning

Insights about socially reflexive groups do not, by themselves, address problems of political impasse or disenchantment, nor do they address the intense feelings of disregard and distrust articulated by protesters in Baltimore, Staten Island, and Ferguson. What, then, about the countless citizens who are not already engaged in the labor of civic bridge building (however unsuccessfully), or what about citizens who are organized into more insular groups? Are there settings or spaces that might instigate habits of social reflexivity and democratic mourning in such places where these styles of interaction and reflection are far from customary? Lichterman’s study shows how civic customs and expectations are important, but settings also matter. Communicative customs and interaction styles are powerfully shaped by the social spaces in which they take place, and American social life is suffused with social settings that deprivilege the kinds of exploratory, reflective, and outward-directed interactions that Lichterman has described.¹⁰¹ This occurs—ironically and tragically—even among civic groups explicitly motivated to address the pathologies associated with social misrecognition.¹⁰² Voluntary associations often actively police against difficult (or “controversial”) subjects of conversation, rarely interrogate the boundaries of the group, and avoid disagreements that are seen as threatening to the obvious good of “doing good” within the community. The result is a stunted and self-limited form of civic participation: “Without reflecting on politics, organizers could encourage volunteers to bring a can of tuna to feed the hungry, but they could not encourage them to ponder the problems’ sources.”¹⁰³ It is hard to develop customs of social reflexivity when questions that might inspire reflection are seen as threatening to the social setting in which they are asked.

Here, then, we come full circle to the experience of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, introduced in chapter 1 and described more fully in chapter 5. I have argued that TRCs—even when they are, unlike the GTRC, official or state-sponsored processes—provide opportunities for what Lichterman describes as social reflexivity: communication about styles of social communication and interaction and the various wrongs carried out within or disavowed by patterns of social recognition. TRCs can inspire social reflexivity because they can challenge and even overturn anxiety-fueled projections surrounding social others. TRCs cannot destroy the need for such projections, but they can reshape modes of social perception and interaction, creating the basis for new political relationships—a “bundling” of socially reflexive associations, organizations, groups, and citizens that would be better positioned to address civic disenchantment and distrust than any alternative on the horizon.

TRCs can inspire social reflexivity because they challenge easy projections rooted in persecutory or paranoid fantasies. Both by allowing public space for a fuller and more open examination of public history and by commissioning an investigation of the past in ways that trace its subtle ramifications, TRCs can challenge stereotypes and projections that fuel social misunderstanding. For instance, as described in chapter 5, one of the effects of the GTRC was to challenge the widely circulated belief that the CWP were “outside agitators.” Follow-up studies in Greensboro have shown that these effects have reached beyond individuals directly involved in the GTRC process. Elite-driven, institutional accounts of the Greensboro Massacre are increasingly contested in the city, and previously polarized narratives of the event have been weakened.¹⁰⁴ The GTRC, then, effectively shifted the narrative surrounding the events of 1979 and their aftermath in ways that clearly have improved the chances for social reflexivity. TRCs can have this effect because, by taking into account the broader context of social interaction that surrounds traumatic events, they facilitate communication about social communication and reflection on normal patterns of social interaction.

The effects of these efforts may be fleeting. The work of social acknowledgment and repair is difficult and chancy, in part because it requires an overhaul of the very circuitry of social recognition through which interactions are filtered—less akin to repairing the boat while on the high seas and more like jumping over our shadow. Yet just as we know that civic bridge building is possible, so too do we have evidence that the work of social acknowledgment taking place in TRCs can provide the basis for new social relationships in ways that dramatically erode patterns of misrecognition and maldistribution. Perhaps the most impressive example is that of the Solms-Delta wine estate, discussed in chapter 5. The owner of the estate, Mark Solms, whose family had been landowners in the area for six generations, was in a similar position to many of the civic organizations in our era of democratic disenchantment: he was dissatisfied with the current arrangements of power and powerlessness, yet his first attempts to address this situation met with abject failure and frustration. Solms wanted to build bridges, but his offers of dialogue and discussion were met with incredulity and antipathy. The workers on the estate would not engage with Solms or even look at him during these first, clearly uncomfortable, meetings. In response Solms effectively set up his own (very local) truth and reconciliation commission: along with the workers and a local archaeologist, Solms literally dug up the past of his estate, and the work of historical excavation proved to be only the first step in an still-unfolding process of social rearrangement at Solms-Delta.

Solms described the difficult and painful work of excavation and dialogue as “get[ing] your mind back.”¹⁰⁵ On its face, this is a curious phrase, but it makes perfect sense from within the framework of object relations psychoanalysis that has guided this project. For the Kleinian analyst Hanna Segal, the depressive position is a state of mind in which the anxious, defensive projections of the paranoid-schizoid are withdrawn—“a state of mind where you know yourself and don’t project, so that you can assess reality and know what can be achieved and what can’t.”¹⁰⁶ The withdrawal of outsized projections forces individuals “to face their own destructiveness, their inner conflicts and guilt, their internal realities.”¹⁰⁷ The need to “face … the reality of history … exposes us to what is most unbearable.”¹⁰⁸ Yet these painful and even humiliating examinations can, as they did for Solms and the estate workers, make social reflexivity possible—they can clarify the history of particular social positions and styles of interaction. The work of acknowledgment does not alter the past, but it can create new space for negotiations about power relationships going forward.

Conclusion: Black Lives Matter and the Work of Mourning

This brings us back to the case of Black Lives Matter and mourning as (ideally) an ongoing and open dynamic in American democracy. One of the weaknesses and inherent limitations of the TRC model as it is currently imagined and practiced is its temporary nature. However, if an open dynamic of mourning is indeed necessary in our time of democratic disenchantment, impasse, and suffering, then the most promising features of TRCs will have to be incorporated into ongoing associations, civic customs, and institutions. The developing Black Lives Matter social movement seemingly represents such an opportunity for the politics of mourning to become a broader form of democratic pedagogy. At the time of this writing, this opportunity is just that—an opportunity. It remains unclear in what directions Black Lives Matter will develop and what repertoires of agency it might manage to cultivate.

What is clear is that Black Lives Matter reveals the ongoing and intimate connection between mourning and politics. The movement began in a moment of grief, not just over the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 but also over the acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman, in 2013. Alicia Garza, a social activist with the Black Organization for Leadership and Dignity, described the Zimmerman acquittal as “a gut punch”—an intolerable signal that black lives did not seem to matter. In resistance to this idea, Garza and others created a virtual space in order that people could “share grief, share rage, [and] collaborate together.”¹⁰⁹ Activists consciously drew connections between grief, mourning, and political action, following a familiar pattern that we have explored in this book.

As it developed over the summer and fall of 2015, however, Black Lives Matter increasingly came to be filtered through a framework of war and survival and corresponding tactics of militant resistance. In the wake of Michael Brown’s death, Garza describes her realization that only direct action (such as shutting down a BART commuter train in San Francisco) could “stop the wheels” of the “war on black communities.”¹¹⁰ In light of the deaths of Brown, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and many, many others, this framework of war and militant resistance is understandable. Yet as this book has attempted to show, the democratic challenge is to avoid reducing the politics of mourning to either its angry, agonistic moments or to consensualist discourses or rituals. Grief and rage can be democratically generative, but they can also shut down social reflexivity and make coalitional politics and civic labors less likely. For these reasons, then, Black Lives Matter activists would have much to gain from a close examination and imitation of the pluralistic and dialogical work of efforts such as the GTRC. Such efforts can contextualize rage and grief within the social circuitry of recognition and misrecognition and make resistance more legible and successful. They also have the advantage of mitigating rigid moralism and acknowledging the complexity of our democratic political heritage in ways that instigate social reflexivity and labors of social repair.

The democratic work of mourning is an ongoing, difficult labor of building and rebuilding commonwealth. It presumes that democratic citizenship is a good object that, while inevitably idealized, enables the salutary work of deidealization. It seeks out the spaces and practices that enable reflexivity, recognition, and repair, and it does so amid living legacies of violence and bitter mistrust. It is an invitation: this is how we might be citizens. Don’t let it go.