The Appeal of Innocence: Baldwin, Walzer, and the Bounds of Social Criticism

Abstract

Racial innocence persists not only in American public life but in its democratic theory as well. An unwillingness to confront the implications of American racial history diminishes theorists' capacity to respond to the exclusion and dehumanization of African Americans in the post-civil rights era. Reading James Baldwin's social critical essays against Michael Walzer's writings on the practice of social criticism, this essay shows how a theorist whose work equips him to grapple with questions of racial injustice nonetheless evades them by constructing three sorts of boundaries: between members and nonmembers, between social critics and certain relations of power, and between the “core” of a people's experience and the brutalities of their history.