CONTINUING WITH MY PROJECT

I am not sure when this paper was written but the internal evidence suggests that it must have been perhaps 55 years ago more.

THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL INJUSTICE

Robert Paul Wolff

1,.       

In recent years, two issues of social policy and morality have come to the fore in the United States, each of which poses in a vexing and controversial way the question whether it makes any sense to speak of a social as opposed to an individual injustice. The first issue is the disadvantaged position of American Blacks; the second is the disadvantaged position of women. No one, of course, disputes the claim that Blacks have been systematically oppressed in the past, and I do not think one needs to prove that significant discrimination operates against Blacks today. It is equally obvious that white women have been, and still are, discriminated against both in law and in fact, though for rather complicated emotional reasons it seems more difficult to get certain white men to acknowledge that fact, Black women, needless to say, have suffered, and continue to suffer, a double discrimination.

There is a very broad moral consensus in America that discrimination on the basis of color or sex is wrong. But there is no consensus at all on the nature of the legal or political steps that ought to be taken to eliminate such discrimination and to correct or counteract its effects, Several years ago, the disagreement focused on the emotionally charged demand by certain Black groups ·for "reparations" from white society, reparations to compensate Blacks for past wrongs, Today., the policy of "affirmative action" in employment and advancement triggers the same powerful feelings and raises the same difficult questions of principles and policy.

I propose to explore what I see as the central conceptual or philosophical problem in these disputes over reparations and affirmative action. I am not by philosophical persuasion a utopian optimist. I do not believe that all or even most genuine social conflicts arise out of conceptual misunderstandings, or that once the philosophical unclarities have been removed, men and women of good will must naturally settle upon a single harmonious social policy, Quite to the contrary, I suspect that social harmony is often achieved only by concealing from some segment of society the true shape of conflicting interests and that social progress often requires an intensification of conflict rather than its resolution. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that there is some value in clarifying the principles to which we appeal in making our judgments of social morality. If we cannot thereby win over our opponents, we may at least be able to strengthen our allies.

I begin, then, with a very common sort of philosophical difficulty, namely that a certain way of talking about social problems seems to me both perfectly appropriate and oddly confused. We are all familiar, particularly since the second world war, with attributions of collective guilt, assertions of collective suffering, claims of collective rights or collective duties. Whether we agree with any particular statement of this sort, at least we think we understand what it means. It is said, for example, that the Jews as a people have suffered greatly throughout history, particularly in this century. It is said, too, that the Germans as a nation are morally responsible for the Holocaust. So also, American whites are collectively accused of the sufferings of the Afro-Americans, and American society is described as racist. Western society generally is condemned as sexist, and some institutions, such as corporate .business and education, are said to support and condone sexism.

Does this way of talking make any sense? Never mind whether each particular charge is true -- do any of the charges mean anything? What can it possibly mean to say that an entire nation, or people, or sex, or race is responsible for, or has suffered, or deserves reparations for an injustice?

Traditionally, two totally opposed answers have been given to these and related questions. The taglines usually associated with the two positions are methodological collectivism, or idealism, and methodological individualism. The collectivist or idealist answer is that human groups-- ethnic collectivities, or religious groups, or states -- can develop a unity and being which is more than the sum of the individuals in the group. Properties can then be attributed to the group, which may not be attributable to any individual in the group or to the individuals taken merely in the aggregate. So we can speak of such a true or real group as suffering, acting, bearing responsibility, having rights or duties, and so forth. A classic statement of this view is found in Emile Durkheim's defense of Sociology as a science distinct from the psychology of the individual. "Indubitably for sociology to be possible," Durkheim wrote, "it must above- all have an object all its own. It must take cognizance of a reality which is not in the domain of the other sciences. But if no reality exists outside of individual consciousness, it wholly lacks any material of its own. In that case, the only possible subject of observation is the mental states of the individual, since nothing else exists... There can be no sociology unless societies exist, and ... societies cannot exist if there are only individuals."[1] Durkheim then
launches on a three-hundred page exploration of the social statistics of suicide in order to demonstrate that "collective tendencies" are at work in society, manifesting a regularity as strict as that of natural phenomena and governed by laws which cannot be reduced to the laws of individual consciousness. Here is the summary of his argument:

Collective tendencies have an existence of their own; they are forces as real as cosmic forces, though of another sort; they, likewise, affect the individual from without, though through other channels. The proof that the reality of collective tendencies is no less; than that of cosmic forces is that this reality is demonstrated in the same way, by the uniformity of effect .. , When we find that the number of deaths varies little from rear to year, we explain this regularity by saying that mortality depends on the climate, the temperature, the nature of the soil, in brief on a certain number of material forces which remain constant through changing generations because independent of individuals. Since, therefore, moral acts such as suicide are reproduced not merely with an equal but with a greater uniformity, we must likewise admit that they depend on forces external to individuals. Only, since these forces must be of a moral order and since, except for individual men, there is no other moral order of existence in the world but society, they must be social.[2]

This position is anathema to the methodological individualist, who insists that collective tendencies cannot have an existence of their own. To the individualist, Durkheim's position is a metaphysical absurdity. Since society is merely an aggregate of individuals, all acts of justice and injustice, all rights and duties, all sufferings and enjoyments, are individual acts, rights, duties, sufferings, or enjoyments. If an action is unjust, then it must be unjust to someone in particular -- and if it is an action, then it must have been done by someone in particular. Manifestly, all suffering is someone’s suffering, all joy someone's joy and only an individual agent can have a right or a duty.

To be sure, groups or aggregates of individuals can act, suffer, exercise rights and fulfill duties. But all collective action is a mere aggregation of individual actions, all suffering a summation of private miseries, all collective responsibility in the end the responsibility of particular individuals for things they have individually done, refrained from doing, or failed to do.

Therefore, those who speak of Black suffering are merely using a shorthand way of referring to this Black woman's suffering, that Black man's suffering, and so forth. There is no such thing as The Black, nor is the injustice suffered by Blacks different in kind from that suffered by any person who is deprived of his rights, or treated unequally, or denied the opportunity to satisfy his human needs and realize his human potential. By the same token, assertions of white racism in America are merely summary ways of asserting that this white American is a racist, that that white American is a racist, and so forth. On the methodologically individualist view, than, all injustices are individual injustices. There is no such thing as a social injustice per se.

I am not by nature a mugwump, but on this issue, I find myself evenly balanced on the fence between the two sides. More precisely, my moral and political sympathies are with those who charge collective responsibility and claim collective suffering, but my philosophical reason tells me that the individualist is right. Durkheim's "collective tendencies" seem to me no better than superstitions. Still, the collectivist has his finger on an important truth, however badly he may have expressed it. We need not accept Durkheim's "collective tendencies" governed by "cosmic forces" to agree that in some sense talk about society, about collective guilt or suffering, and about social injustice is meaningful. What we must do is to analyze such judgments more carefully, in order to discover exactly what it is that we mean to say when we employ them.

Despite my unwillingness to endorse Durkheim's philosophical position, I shall nonetheless follow his lead by reflecting for a bit on the use and meaning of the social statistics by which we so often strive to describe our collective condition.

2.       

             In small, face-to-face situations, our conception of social reality is grounded in the immediate data of perception and feeling. I know each of the persons in my family directly, and I know too the relationship of each to each, and of each to all. As I enlarge the scope of my attention, individuals begin to blur into a mass. Because I am unable to hold in my mind the burgeoning complexity of human interrelationships, I begin to categorize individuals, to interact with them in their character as occupiers of social roles or as possessors of social characteristics. The particularizing individuality of each person drains away, and the complicated network of relationships becomes opaque. Eventually, I am forced in my thinking about the countless individuals who comprise my social world either to rely upon a scattering of isolated examples which may be quite atypical of the whole, or else to organize my comprehension of social reality by the use of some different system of concepts. It is at this point that students of society appeal to numerical representations of the social world. Gradually, I find myself developing a conception of society which may be literally impossible for me to grasp in any way other than through the use of social statistics.

            I am aware of the United States as a nation of 210 million persons in which the birth rate is declining to the replacement level. And yet, among my friends, there has been this past year a brisk increase in births. No collection of individual experiences, however distributed, could suffice to tell me that the birth rate was falling rather than rising, and it goes without saying that I could never form a reasonable estimate of its actual numerical level merely by aggregating my personal observations. The facts of the distribution of wealth and income, the relations between income and race or income and sex, the average level of educational attainment for members of different religious groups, the connection between the stability of the family and the incidence of juvenile delinquency -- virtually everything one would want to know about a society can be cognized only statistically.

As our statistical grasp of society improves, we turn our attention to second-order facts which are totally devoid of affective or perceptual content, such as changes in rates of change of statistical indicators (an accelerating balance of payments gap, or a declining gap between the mean income of Black and white heads of families). Once we have learned to comprehend social reality in this manner, we begin to form moral judgments about the statistical facts -- judgments which are independent of our moral evaluations of the individual cases that go to make up those statistical facts.

For example: In addition to judging that it is bad for people to be out of work or hungry or illiterate, we consider it a distinct social evil -- and an indication of a special sort of social injustice -- that a disproportionately large percentage of Black Americans are poor or hungry or uneducated. When social statistics reveal a skew along racial or sexual lines in employment or income, we judge that skew in and of itself to constitute a social injustice. Many of us begin to argue that the pattern of social statistics constitutes some justification for a reallocation of social resources so as to eliminate the imbalance, quite independently of any grounds for eliminating differences in income in general.

The methodological individualist rejects all such reasonings. He argues that a sexual or racial skew in the social statistics must be a consequence of widespread racial or sexual discrimination of the individual sort. That is to say, it must be a consequence of the fact that this employer here, that landlord there, in hiring or promoting or renting discriminated against this particular Black or that particular woman. The statistics are no more than summary numerical representations of large numbers of distinct, individual cases. If discrimination is stamped out, the figures will reflect the fact, either by disclosing no skew at all along racial or sexual lines, or else by exhibiting only such patterns as cannot be attributed to discrimination and treated as evidence of the existence of injustice.

A great deal of injustice can of course be eliminated in this way. When my wife was a graduate student at Harvard, the English Department did not give teaching assistantships to women. Not until many years later did she discover that it was that simple policy of discrimination, and not any failing on her part, that explained why she was never offered an assistantship.  But our experience in education, employment, and other fields suggests that the mere elimination of any further acts of discrimination may not, by itself, be enough to wipe out the effects of past injustices, Men and women may suffer today the burdens of discrimination practiced in the past against themselves, against their parents, or even against their more distant ancestors.

It would seem that complete social justice requires positive measures to eliminate these derivative or indirect consequences of injustice , Surely it is unfair to .ignore the historical conditions which give a middle-class white child so great an advantage over a Black slum child, The social statistics would seem to reveal two sorts of genuine injustices: those committed in the present against individuals, and those committed in the past, whose consequences appear in the statistics now. Thus, in addition to the elimination of further discrimination and the correction of particular acts of injustice committed in the recent past, we would appear to have an obligation to make some sort of restitution or reparation for the generations of past injustices whose consequences reveal themselves in the present. In short, the statistics reveal that entire groups in America have suffered injustices, and it is natural to conclude that policies of affirmative action or reparation be adopted, going beyond the mere correction of individual abuses, to adjust the social reality -- to eliminate the skew in the statistics, as it were.

But now a very curious problem arises to complicate our analysis and cast doubt on the conclusion to which I have just rather tentatively come. We have been talking as though America were easily and obviously decomposable into a small number of readily recognizable social groups, the identities of which are reflected in our social statistics. But in a nation of more than two hundred million people, there is an enormous number of different ways in which we may divide the population for purposes of collecting statistics. We are accustomed to using indices of sex, race, age, income, occupation, and religion to define social groups, but in fact, any finite group of entities has an indefinitely large number of characteristics in common, and there is
no end to the ways in which we may subdivide the population.

This fact would make no difference if there were only a small number of traits which could be correlated significantly with low income, or unemployment, or poor educational attainment. But there is no reason to assume that such is the case. If we adopt a sociological perspective, so to speak, rather than a moral perspective, then we must suppose that social or physical causes can be found for every social fact, not merely for those about which we have special moral concerns. To make this point clearer, let us compare two hypothetical cases: on the one hand, a young Black school drop-out from Harlem who shuns such social welfare programs as are offered in his community, shuttling back and forth between relief and low-paid unskilled jobs -- and on the other hand, a white middle-class boy from a stable home and neighborhood whose lack of ambition and college-orientation consign him to a postman's job at a salary far below that of his lawyer father. The white youth ends up much better than the Black youth, of course. But he has suffered -- if that is the correct word -- a significant downward mobility. We are all accustomed to say that such a Black youth is a victim of his history, of his neighborhood, even of a culture of poverty and despair into which he was born. And so he probably was. We suspect that the same youth, born into a different family with much greater opportunities, both material and cultural, would seize the chances available to him and become instead a much higher-paid member of the professional middle class. And so indeed he might. But exactly the same sorts of assertions and suspicions are justified in regard to the middle-class white youth. His attitude toward education, work, and status can also be traced to the influence of his family, his neighborhood, and his cultural background. He is no more responsible for the aspects of his environment that caused him to underuse his opportunities than the Black youth is for the totality of conditions that blocked him from seizing even such chances as society offered. And yet, though I and many other people consider the Black youth's career to be a clear case of social injustice, very rarely if ever do we form the analogous judgment about the countless cases or failed opportunities or downward mobility which resemble that of our young white lawyer's son.

We may conclude that the white youth is not to be blamed for what happened to him economically. We may also conclude that his fate is in some sense unfair. But it would be very strange indeed to indict society for what happened to him -- to demand that laws be passed to compensate him for the burdens imposed upon him by his parents or his grandparents. Even if we could collect social statistics showing that young middle-class whites of a certain religion, or geographical area, or family style and pattern of child-rearing showed a markedly higher rate of downward social mobility than the national average, it would seem very odd to label that fact a social injustice, and to call for a policy of affirmative action for children from families with ego-diffused mothers and sado-masochist1c fathers. And yet, it does not seem strange at all to indict society for what happened to the Black youth, and to the thousands like him whose separate lives make up the familiarly skewed social statistics. Wherein lies the difference?

One obvious difference, I suppose, is that the threads of social causation in the case of Blacks lead back to the actual, overt acts of brutality and injustice visited upon their fore-fathers by slave traders, slave owners, employers, and governments. The downward mobility of the white youth may very well be traceable to no such instances of injustice, but merely to factors over which he has no control, and for which he should not be made to suffer.

But that distinction is relevant only to the question of who should pay for the damages, not to the question of who has a right to such payment. The real reason, I think, for the difference in our moral evaluations of the two cases, is that Blacks form a social group which appears to have real, rather than merely nominal or statistical, existence. What is more, Blacks (and women) have been treated unjustly as a group in American society, whereas no such group injustice has operated in the statistically isolatable case of "children of ego-diffused mothers and sado-masochistic fathers''. In short, we come back to Durkheim's notion of the objective reality of social groups. We shall have to probe into the nature of social groups and collective tendencies.

3.       

            Let us begin with the familiar facts about relative rates of unemployment among Black and white workers. We assume that the especially high rate of Black unemployment is unjust. But to whom is it unjust? An absurd question; it is obviously unjust to Blacks. But to which Blacks? Presumably not to those Blacks who have jobs. They may very well be suffering on-the-job discrimination in salary or promotion, but they are by hypothesis not suffering an unjust deprivation of the right to work. Obviously, the injustice reflected in the unemployment figures is suffered by unemployed Blacks. But does that statement make any sense? Suppose that an able young Black man with a good high school education is refused membership in a building trades union because he is Black, while another young man, white, with the same qualifications is admitted to the union. Clearly, the Black has been treated unfairly. The union has failed to obey
the fundamental principle of formal or procedural justice, which is to treat as identical all cases which are identical in the relevant respect. Since color of skin is not relevant to the activities of
the union and its members, the admissions procedures of the union should be colorblind.

So we may agree that this Black man has suffered an injustice. But the injustice he has suffered is not the injustice we were originally discussing. What he has suffered is the denial of a job, not the disparity in unemployment between Blacks and whites in America. To be sure, the. single incident in which he was the victim is one of a great number of incidents whose cumulative effect is that statistical gap, but a state of affairs may be the consequence of a number of injustices without being in and of itself an injustice. It would, .after all, be very peculiar to· say that an American woman who lost her baby through inadequate obstetrical care had experienced a disparity between the rates of infant mortality in America and Sweden, or that a flourishing new business was experiencing a rise in the Gross National Product.

Suppose that the white applicant next in line after the Black at the union office is the son of an old personal enemy of the union official, who, out of spite, refuses to accept the young man's application. This too is an injustice, formally indistinguishable from the previous case. An individual has been treated as different from the general run of applicants although he is, in the relevant respects, identical. If anyone took the trouble to collect statistics on admission to unions of sons of enemies of admitting secretaries (as in fact people collected statistics on admission to unions of sons of union members), we would presumably discover a significant disparity between the percentage of admissions in that class as compared to the percentage of admissions among other applicants. How then, if at all, does the case of the Black man differ from the case of the white man who suffers the consequences of his father's feuds?

The white man, we have supposed, is treated unjustly because of his particular relationship to the admitting secretary, He thereby becomes an instance of the general category, "Men denied admission to unions because of personal differences between their fathers and members of the union." But the admitting secretary is not motivated by that fact. He is motivated merely by his personal feelings for the applicant's father. The Black man, on the other hand, is denied admission solely because he possesses a certain characteristic which the admitting secretary thinks of as defining a social group. In that sense, the motive for the· unjust act is general rather than particular, and the injustice is visited on the victim qua instance of -- rather than qua individual. The secretary, we might say, is not rejecting this Black man; he is rejecting a Black man. Now, the nation-wide statistics for Black and white employment, and the disparity between the percentage of Blacks in the work force and the percentage of Blacks in the union, are both summary representations (we may for the moment suppose) of the consequences of large numbers of individual acts, all of which were initiated by the same generalized motive. Over and over again, an admitting secretary rejects applicants merely because they are Black. Since he makes no distinction in his action between one Black man and another, he is in effect rejecting the entire group of Black men. In this sense, he and the union might be said to be inflicting an injustice on Blacks as a group, rather than merely on a group of Blacks.

We begin to see that the reality of a social group inheres in men’s beliefs and attitudes rather than in the characteristics which define the group. In this respect, there is a fundamental difference between natural and social reality.

Nature consists of objects and events which we classify and categorize in keeping with our various purposes. Aristotle to the contrary notwithstanding, there are no real kinds, no objective distinctions between essential and accidental attributes on which one could base a theory of real as opposed to merely nominal species. Matters are quite different and a good deal more complicated when we come to the social world. There the groups or types of categories into which we imagine things to fall are both more real and less real than in the physical world. In order to see how this is so, we must remind ourselves that society is not really an independent entity at all, though we all think of it as though it were.

Society is a collective human product, or perhaps more accurately, a collective human projection. It is a mutual illusion, a folie a tous. Men conceive of their social world as a system of objectively existing roles (lawyer, fireman, mother) and institutions (church, corporation, government) and patterns of inter-personal behavior (deference, domination, intimacy) into which they fit themselves and in terms of which they live their lives. In reality, these roles and institutions and patterns are merely the summation of their own expectations and habits.

In one sense, social roles and groups are even less real than natural species, for they are mere human projections, while at least in the natural world the individual members which we group together are real enough. But in another sense, those same social roles are more real than natural species, for we consciously adjust our behavior to them, and thus make them real. This objectification of subjective categories takes place in two ways: first of all, we treat as similar a number of individuals among whom we might otherwise differentiate -- so I adopt standardized forms of behavior toward all students, or bus drivers, or policemen; and secondly, we adjust our behavior to conform to the categories into which the rest of society classifies us. Adults treat all teen-agers as alike, and teen-agers begin to think of themselves as united by their age. Employers treat all Black workers as identical -- .and Black workers define themselves as socially united by their color. There is, in principle, no set of characteristics that must be construed as defining a real social group, nor any set of characteristics that cannot become the basis for such a definition. In our society, skin color serves as the basis for social grouping, though as with all social classifications based on physical traits, the socially accepted criteria for applying the so-called color terms differ wildly from natural perceptual criteria. Whether a person is "Black" or "white", that is to say, has very little to do with the actual color of his skin. But there have been societies in which skin color, while nonetheless a fact of nature, was not taken up into the collective social conception of reality as a defining mark of membership in a socially significant group.

Sex, like skin color, is an objective natural fact, but it too does not define objectively necessary social groupings. Just as a color-blind society could function in which skin color differences existed but were not made the basis of social classification, so too societies could exist in which differences of sex, age, or size, of athletic ability, of strength, or of intelligence, either did or did not form the basis of social classification.

It is not my purpose to argue against all social classification -- an impossibility, in my judgment -- nor to propose that some bases be rejected and others adopted. I wish only to emphasize that social grouping is a collective human act, based perhaps on some objective physical distinction, but never reducible to or deducible from that distinction. To a very considerable extent, each of us construes himself as others define him, so that my answer to the question, "Who am I?" is itself very much a social, rather than an individual, product.

When a great many individual acts of injustice originate in what I have called a generalized motive -- that is to say, when individuals are treated unjustly again and again because of their membership in some social group rather than because of anything peculiar to them as individuals·-- the result is more than merely an aggregate of particular injustices. The victims come to think of themselves in the way that they have been thought of by others. A disadvantageous definition of social identity is inflicted on them, and they internalize it, adjusting their behavior and their self-images to fit. In the academic world, for example, women
are encouraged to believe that they will be rewarded, with jobs, raises, or promotions, entirely on the basis of merit. When they encounter rejection as a consequence of what is after all blatant discrimination, they often find it extremely difficult to reject this negative judgment on themselves as a true measure of their worth. Thus, at Harvard University, Radcliffe students are completely docile in the presence of Harvard's massive, overt, and unchanging sexual discrimination, despite the fact that the selection procedures for women at Radcliffe produce an undergraduate population more talented, on average, than its Harvard counterpart.

The patterns of unjust treatment crystallize into institutions, sometimes even into legal statuses. The injustices of one time or place are felt indirectly at other times and places, so that we can after all speak of a social group as having a continuing identity over generations.

When such a state of affairs exists -- as it does, for example, in the United States with regard to Black men and women -- then it is both meaningful and true to say that the injustices inflicted in one century continue to be suffered in another century. Individual Blacks may be said to participate in the suffering inflicted upon Blacks collectively by the institutionalized practices of white society. In this sense, there is something which we may speak of as a distinctively social injustice, independently of the many individual injustices suffered in a society.

Three observations need to be made about social injustice:

[l] Not all injustice is of this collective nature. Hence, even a society which eliminated social injustices might still have a problem of other sorts of injustice.

[2] Once the processes of social injustice become institutionalized, they may be perpetuated despite the fact that many particular individuals feel nothing like a generalized motive of discrimination. But this point should not be made too much of -- social injustice arises out of collective or generalized discriminatory motives, and it flourishes on such motives. Where they genuinely disappear, it becomes a great deal easier to eliminate the injustice itself.

[3] Active participation in an institution which embodies or fosters social injustice imposes upon the participant a share of the responsibility for the injustice, whether he· desires that injustice or not. For example, academic communities cooperate in the widespread discrimination against women in our society. The negative self-image internalized by women academics subjectively complements the objective impediments to their careers. Male academics frequently keep the pattern of discrimination alive by their contemptuous and dismissive attitude toward female candidates or colleagues, but even those men who do not share the attitudes share some of the responsibility insofar. as they cooperate in the institutional arrangements which create and maintain the injustices.

Thus, the answer to our question about the reality of social groups, to paraphrase Pirandello, is: Real you are if you think you are. Or, somewhat more prosaically, a group of persons are a genuine social group if they are treated as such by the rest of society -- through the-adoption of "generalized motives" -- and if they perceive themselves as such and adjust their behavior accordingly.

4.       

            We now are in a position to attempt an answer to our original question: What is social injustice, and in what way does it differ from a mere aggregate of individual injustices?

I suggest that social injustice is injustice visited upon a real social group because of its group characteristics. Such injustice strengthens the social definition of the group as a group, and leads thereby very frequently to such destructive consequences as the internalization of negative self-images by members of the victim group. Insofar as the group identity is rooted in a common position in the social relationships of production and distribution, it will be powerfully reinforced by institutional arrangements which serve the interests of the dominant groups.

The elimination of social injustices is a task that cannot be reduced to the elimination of large numbers of individual injustices. Some way must be found to alter the social definition
of reality itself, so that negative and destructive group identities cease to be elements in the psychic self-determination of members of the victim groups. This is one of the principal purposes of what is now called affirmative action. But collective acts may be required to alter collectively oppressive practices. An individual's identification with a group must not be a means either of his oppression by others nor of his oppression of others.

We can see a certain paradox, or dialectical truth, in this analysis. One of the social injustices visited upon Blacks and women in America is society's definition of them as an inferior group. Ideally, Black men and women, and women in general, ought to be able to think of themselves as persons, not in the first instance as Black or female. But the first step in the destruction of that socially-imposed self-definition may be a reversal of it -- what Nietzsche called a transvaluation of values -- through an increased consciousness of. blackness or womanhood, through a positive concentration on the myths, history, and defining characteristics of group identity, through an intensification of the group identity. Perhaps, only through a voluntary acceptance, reversal, and celebration of the group identity can it finally be overcome and allowed to dissolve.

As a philosopher, my concerns are always partly methodological, so I shall conclude, by returning to my opening remarks about the dispute between the collectivist, or idealist, conception of social reality and the individualist insistence on the unreality of anything save individuals. If my analysis is correct, then in this case, as in so many others, the liberal individualist undermines

 

(At this point the rest of the original manuscript seems to have been lost)

 

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[1] Emile Durkheim, Suicide, transl. by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, 1951 (Glencoe, I11. Free Press). P. 38. Italics in the original.

[2] Ibid., p. 309