Absolving Responsibility and Dampening Activism?: The Structural Racism Framework, Democratic Motivation, and the Complex Systems Alternative

Abstract

ABSTRACT Analytic power has always been a key consideration in adjudicating between analytic frameworks, but the political effects of frameworks have never been unimportant in assessing their relative value. This paper engages the question of whether the American Left’s dominant intellectual framework for understanding racial socio-political outcomes – the framework of “structural racism” – encourages a racial political pessimism that is disabling. Finding it at least plausible that this framework dampens democratic motivation, I then introduce an alternative framework for understanding racial stasis and change in the US and elsewhere – a “complex systems” framework. Even as it provides leverage on persistent racial inequality, I argue that this framework suggests the deep pessimism inspired by the structural racism framework is unwarranted. In addition to being analytically powerful, then, the framework can potentially have the particular political benefit of stoking democratic motivation.