Group Autonomy and Narrative Identity ...

“By a narrative, I mean a set of stories which defines values and entirely positive goals, which specifies a set of fixed values and entirely positive goals...

...Which specifies a set of fixed points of historical significance, and which defines a set of ennobling rituals to be regularly performed. 

“And if a common enemy —racism, in this instance —were a sufficient basis for cooperative endeavors, then one would have thought a practice analogous to the one that I have proposed (referring to the collective effort and action of Black people cooperatively funding a specific organization) would have been in place quite some time ago. 

I want to say that a lack of a narrative can explain the absence of cooperative practices of the sort sketched above. In order for a people in a hostile society to flourish as a people, their self- identity must be anchored by a conception of the good that is independent of the hostility that they wish to avoid. 

What prevents us from seeing this, I suspect is that there are times when eliminating a harm counts as an end in its own right, and it is irrelevant what other objectives a person might have. 

• To view struggling against oppression as the equivalent of eliminating an imminent life threatening harm is to make an egregious error. By its very nature, oppression is about being deprived of some options rather than others. The struggle of a people against oppression can only be properly understood in the context of what it means for them to get on with their lives as a people. And that requires a narrative which anchors their self identity. 

• Thus, we must distinguish between a racist society with overt structural inequality (such as American slavery and Jim Crow practices)and a society with structural equality that is coupled with widespread racist presuppositions of inferiority on the part of the powerful toward an identifiable group of individuals who are less well-off. 

• However, combating the former does not require a narrative, whereas combating the latter does. For in the first instance, there is a rigorously specifiable set of harms or wrongs the elimination of which is called for. Their elimination is called for regardless of the aims that a people might otherwise have in society. 

What is more, while elimination of the harms of overt structural inequality is no doubt a precondition for flourishing, their elimination does not constitute flourishing; nor does their elimination point to what a peoples flourishing might consist of, just a being alive does not. 

By contrast, eliminating the coupling of structural equity with widespread presuppositions of the others inferiority is a different matter entirely, of only because in such am instance there is no rigorously specifiable set of harms or wrong to be eliminated and there is no socially acceptable procedure for getting the dominant group to change their pejorative beliefs…. 

...What is wanted, rather, is for the beliefs of inferiority to be replaced by a positive set of beliefs about the people in question.” 

-Laurence M. Thomas 

Excerpt from Group Autonomy and Narrative Identity, Laurence M. Thomas

Reflections: An Anthology of African American Philosophy

Montmarquet, J. A., & Hardy, W. H. (2000). Reflections: An Anthology of African American Philosophy. Cengage Learning.