Liberal democratic justice and identity politics in education: the structural theory of obligation as an approach to anti-racist education

Abstract

Introduction

The successes of identity politics in bringing about a more egalitarian society are indisputable, both in history and at present. Identity movements, including the feminist and civil rights movements, can be credited with historical triumphs such as women’s gaining the right to vote and the abolition of apartheid laws. More recently, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have played a central role in bringing awareness to some of the deep, structural injustices in contemporary democratic societies. Despite these merits, identity politics has been a topic of intensifying political debate in recent years, which has brought to light internal tensions, concerning both liberal democratic societies and the ideal of liberal democracy itself. Some liberal authors (e.g. Fukuyama 2018; Lilla 2018), have expressed concerns about the influence of recent forms of identity politics on liberal democratic culture. Similarly, educational reforms deriving from identity-political movements, such as anti-racist and LGBTQIA+ awareness education, have been met with rigorous criticism in public discussion. Among other things, critics have argued that social justice education constitutes a form of political indoctrination, and prevents the kinds of patriotic attachment needed to support a democratic society.

With these discussions in the background, this article examines identity politics in relation to liberal democratic justice and liberal democratic education. Identity politics and liberal democratic justice stand in tension due to their reliance on two very different logics. The latter derives from respect for citizens as free and equal, and the associated assumption that liberal institutions in a just society should adhere to principles that are reciprocally justifiable to all citizens, and not just to a particular group (Gutmann 2004; Rawls 2005). Meanwhile, identity politics begins from the premise that there are particular identities that should be recognized by the state through group-specific rights and benefits (Taylor 1992; Gutmann 2004).

This tension is also reflected in liberal democratic education. While there are different interpretations of such education, one of the most prominent, deriving from Rawlsian (2005) political liberalism, is that public education should practise restraint concerning the comprehensive values it conveys to students (e.g. Macedo 1995; Brighouse 1998; Costa 2004). From the perspective of ‘liberal neutrality’, openly political education, such as anti-racist education, raises the question of what authorizes public education to inculcate anti-racist values, while the teaching of other comprehensive values is unjustifiable? The idea of ‘liberal neutrality’ has encountered sharp criticism, particularly from feminists and critical race theorists, for its failure to adequately respond to systemic forms of injustice that students might encounter throughout their schooling primarily because of their identities (e.g. Applebaum 1997; Thompson 1997; Gillborn 2006; Zamudio et al. 2010; Gillborn et al. 2017).

In this article, we propose a novel interpretation of the relationship between liberal democratic justice and identity politics and employ it in the justification of an anti-racist curriculum in the context of liberal democratic education. We use the structural theory of obligation developed by political theorist Courtney Jung (2008) to argue that the liberal state has an obligation to improve the status of certain identity groups in society in so far as the state itself has played a central role in the formation of their identities through historical and continuing structural injustices. Hence, rather than viewing the claims of identity movements as contradictory to liberal democratic justice, we propose that these claims should be interpreted as signalling the failure of the liberal state to provide for all citizens the type of equal treatment that liberal democratic justice requires. Accordingly, the liberal state is responsible for compensating identity-related injustices that stem from this failure. Drawing on Jung’s theory, we outline a form of anti-racist curriculum that provides students with a relevant understanding of historical and continuing forms of structural injustice affecting the identity groups to whom the state has obligations. Furthermore, we argue that this form of anti-racist education is broadly compatible with the primary goals of liberal democratic education: that is, fostering the personal and political autonomy of students.

The article is structured as follows. In the next section, we discuss the relationship between identity politics and liberal democratic justice, highlight some problems associated with using identity as the ‘metric’ of justice in a democratic society, and provide our defence of a universalist conception of liberal democratic justice. We then introduce Jung’s (2008) structural theory of obligation, which we argue is helpful for reforming the understanding of the relationship between identity politics and liberal democratic justice. In the section that follows, we offer our defence of an anti-racist curriculum in the context of liberal democratic education and discuss some potential objections to our proposal. The last section is for concluding remarks.

Identity politics and liberal democratic justice

Identity politics is an umbrella term that has been used since the 1970s in political and academic discussions to refer to movements that base their political claims on the idea of a shared identity of the members of a particular group (Heyes 2002; Bernstein 2005). The term is usually associated with movements that derive from marginalized, neglected, or suppressed social locations and are driven by the values of equality and social justice (Heyes 2002; Drerup 2022a).¹ The shared ‘identity’ of these groups may include, but is not limited to, race, ethnicity, culture, gender, disability, sexuality, and sexual orientation (e.g. Kruks 1996; Heyes 2002; Bernstein 2005). The core idea of identity politics is that some individuals are vulnerable to marginalization, oppression, or violence in society primarily because of their identity; ‘qua woman, qua black, qua lesbian or gay’ (Kruks 1996: 123). The aim of these movements is to shed light on the mechanisms of oppression directed at the group in question, and to replace the stigmatizing accounts of their identity with self-determined understandings (Heyes 2002).

Sonja Kruks (1996) characterizes identity politics as a new version of Taylor’s (1992) ‘politics of recognition’, in which membership in a particular collective identity forms the basis for rights claims in a liberal state.² However, contemporary identity politics does not solely or primarily focus on cultural identity; according to many identitarian theorists, what becomes the most deeply felt aspect of an individual’s identity depends on which identity features are the most significant in determining the individual’s life chances and social location (e.g. Jung 2008). In this sense, most contemporary identity theories are rooted in a constructivist understanding of identity (e.g. Butler 1990; Hekman 2004; Jung 2008; for a constructivist analysis of ‘race’, see Haslanger 2008), according to which identity does not derive from an ‘authentic’ inner self, a set of biological characteristics, or a fixed cultural essence, but is to a large degree an effect of particular social, historical, and cultural conditions.³

From the viewpoint of this article, a decisive feature of identity politics is that it employs a justificatory logic that contrasts with that of liberal democratic justice. The latter assumes that liberal institutions in a just society should rely on principles that are reciprocally justifiable to all citizens, not only to a particular group, and that do not appeal to any comprehensive doctrine (Rawls 2005). Liberal theories are typically committed to the idea that citizens have a right to justification in matters that concern them, flowing from the moral principle of equal respect for persons (e.g. Forst 2013). To put this in more practical terms, citizens should be able to live autonomously and choose their own ends without either the state or other citizens imposing particular values or ways of life upon them, against their will. Because of these commitments, liberal theorists hold that a conception of justice that transcends particularistic identities is required for the justificatory basis of liberal democracy (Benhabib 1998; Gutmann 2004).

One of the most criticized implications of liberal democratic justice for education, which is associated especially with John Rawls’s (2005) political liberalism, is the requirement of ‘liberal neutrality’—that is, the idea that the state is not authorized to intervene in the comprehensive doctrines of citizens beyond the overlapping consensus on shared principles of justice which informs the public sphere (Rawls 2005). While there are contrasting interpretations of the implications of Rawlsian liberalism for liberal democratic education, one is that educational institutions should only intervene in the political or moral education of children to the degree that is required by the political conception of justice (Macedo 1995; Costa 2004). Education thus ought to practise restraint with respect to the comprehensive values it seeks to inculcate in students, limiting itself to the goal of enabling peaceful coexistence between citizens from diverse backgrounds through the development of their political autonomy (Rawls 2005; see also Macedo 1995; Costa 2004).

This idea of liberal neutrality has been contested, especially by critical race theorists and feminist authors who view the recognition of particularistic identities as essential for carrying out a socially just education. Critical race theorists associate liberal theories with problematic ‘colour-blindness’, or the failure to acknowledge the way race continues to exist in liberal democracies as a structural category which permeates all areas of social life, including educational systems and institutions (Gillborn 2006; Zamudio et al. 2010; Merry 2013; Mills 2017; Chetty 2018). It is argued that in a racially structured society, a ‘colour-blind’ liberalism, which treats race as morally arbitrary with respect to justice, sustains racist structures in so far as it does not take an active role in their mitigation (Applebaum 1997; Thompson 1997). In contrast to this, critical race theorists propose an anti-racist education founded on the open acknowledgement and active challenging of racial hierarchies (e.g. Gillborn 2006; Zamudio et al. 2010). Similarly, feminist scholars argue that some of the basic commitments of liberalism result in its ignorance towards various types of structural and systemic injustice faced by women, and that these commitments also render identity irrelevant to considerations of justice and political agency in a way that runs counter to the basic assumptions of feminism (Pateman 1988; Okin 1989).

While we believe that these criticisms reveal the need for important revisions to (especially Rawlsian) theories of liberal education, we do not similarly conclude that recognizing these shortcomings requires the straightforward rejection of liberal democratic justice. The primary issue with such a rejection is that alternative sources of justification—in this case, a particularistic identity, or the recognition of such identity—give rise to justificatory problems of their own which seem at least as difficult to circumvent as those associated with the liberal conception of justice. Since our critique of identity-based justification is not a novel one, we will only briefly outline it here (for a more comprehensive discussion of such critique, see Gutmann 2004 or Martin 2020). Taking identity as the primary justificatory ground in a democratic society means accepting the consequence that various identity groups will have their own claims to be reckoned with. In cases of conflict, all identity groups will most likely argue that the inability of the state to recognize their identity (rather than the identity of the other) is unjust. As critics of identity politics point out, a political focus on particular identities alone can foster forms of political polarization that cannot easily be transcended or dissolved. Such a clash of identity-based claims may lead to political dead ends because it remains unclear how to negotiate and evaluate such conflicting claims in a way that is justifiable to all parties involved. The only way to determine whether and why the claims of one group might merit recognition while others’ do not is through recourse to a common principle of justice. As Martin (2020) points out, identity fails as a source of justification in a democratic society, as it leaves no standard by which the relative merit of different identity-based claims could be assessed, thereby jeopardizing the plausibility of the entire practice of justification.

In this sense, a universalist understanding of liberal democratic justice is not easily replaced by a particularistic alternative, such as identity. This may seem like a minor or merely practical matter; however, there are numerous, appalling examples from history that demonstrate what may follow from granting an identity—ethnic, national, religious, or other—the status of an ultimate source of justification. Importantly, our claim is not that democratic societies should be indifferent to identities. Rather, it is that the justification for the political claims of contemporary identity movements should flow not from the recognition of particularistic identities as such, but from the recognition of the failure of the liberal state to regard the individuals belonging to these groups as free and equal citizens in the manner demanded by liberal democratic justice itself.

The structural theory of obligation

Identity-related injustices in liberal democratic education systems are well recognized by research. Take race, for example: there is a vast amount of educational research supporting the claim that racist structures exist in education. In the UK education system, the Black/White achievement gap and its reproduction through educational policy-making has been a much-studied phenomenon since the 1980s (Gillborn et al. 2017). Moreover, in the USA, there is substantial evidence of an unequal distribution of resources between White and non-White school districts, which sustains racial inequalities in the labour market and in the country’s broader social configuration (Scott and Holme 2016; Diem and Welton 2020). Black students and their parents often lack choice and opportunities under free market policies, ending up at the lowest-performing and least-resourced schools (Diem and Welton 2020; see also Blum and Burkholder 2021). In Germany, a strongly segregated school system has resulted in students with an immigrant background being much more likely to wind up on the vocational schooling track rather than that of the Gymnasium, of which only the latter enables access to higher education (Giesinger 2017). Despite their lack of such steep structural segregation, Nordic education systems have produced similar statistics in relation to immigrant students (e.g. Nordin 2013).

What are the grounds for the liberal state to intervene in these identity-specific injustices?⁴ Courtney Jung’s structural theory of obligation (Jung 2006, 2008) offers a promising starting point for demonstrating why the state might have obligations to improve the status of specific identity groups, despite its liberal commitments. Jung’s theory—which she also refers to as ‘critical liberalism’—suggests that the liberal state has an obligation to intervene in the structural injustices faced by marginalized groups in so far as the state itself has taken part in the construction of their identities through historical discrimination and exclusion (Jung 2008, our emphasis). Jung argues that this obligation does not derive from the recognition of cultural or other identity-specific difference as such, but is rooted in the groups’ structural origins: the forms of injustice that have led to the unequal allocation of rights, resources, and citizenship to group members.⁵ Jung’s theory thus builds on an idea of systemic, structural injustice which, over the course of generations, determines life chances and opportunities for some category of people, generating a common identity, such as that of an Indigenous people or of African Americans. Hence, Jung understands the identities underlying contemporary identity movements as products of social processes through which certain social markers and stereotypes (e.g. those associated with race, gender, sexual orientation) have been assigned to a group of citizens with the consequence that these features become decisive in determining their social position and life chances. From this perspective, contemporary identitarian movements signal the continued existence of historical forms of social and political exclusion that the state is obligated to ameliorate because it has been a central actor in social processes (granting citizenship rights, implementing educational and other policies, and executing segregation policies) through which particular identities have come into existence. Importantly, this does not mean that there could not be identities in the construction of which the state or state-run policies played no significant role; it simply means that the state does not have similar obligations to such groups as it has to those to whose formation it has contributed, either through enacting unjust laws and policies or through failing to intervene in injustices in an adequate way.

Jung’s position is fruitful for demonstrating that the obligations of the state to an identity group need not derive from the recognition of the identity as such. As noted above, for Jung, the legitimacy of an identity group’s claim is rooted in the structural origins of the group in question.⁶ In other words, there should be a direct link between the structural origins of an identity group, the concept of structural injustice, and compensations that are directed to the source of group identity.⁷ By focusing on the structural origins of identities, Jung’s account allows for the specification of the identity groups that merit compensation by the state and the design of adequate measures of compensation without relativizing the concept of justice. We can therefore circumvent one of the central problems of identity-based justification, and explain why the state is obliged to recognize and rectify the injustices faced by one group while treating another group without a similar history of oppression in a different way.

Moreover, Jung’s theory allows for the justification of more robust interventions by the state to improve the status of certain identity groups than has been traditionally permissible in liberal democratic thought. Understanding the state’s role in the construction of marginalized identities gives reason for the liberal state to promote practices, policies, and institutional designs that are aimed at improving the status of these groups even if this means departing from strict liberal neutrality. For instance, in Jung’s theory, the liberal state has an obligation to engage in anti-racist policy-making to improve the status of Blacks in the USA because ‘Black’ or ‘African American’ as a stigmatizing identity category would not have come into existence without the active role of the state in implementing racial segregation policies such as the Jim Crow laws.⁸

Importantly, while we accept Jung’s claim that the structural origins of a particular group ground the justification for state obligations to that group, we see the relationship between her structural theory of obligation and the conception of liberal democratic justice as a more complementary one than she does. Namely, Jung proposes that her position requires replacing the universalist stance of liberalism with a particularistic understanding of the historical experiences of marginalized identity groups. In our view, these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive: rather, the awareness of particular histories of oppression is necessary for understanding to which groups the state has specific obligations, while the liberal democratic notion of justice is crucial in responding to the question of why we should care about structural injustice in the first place. In other words, the normative core of liberal democratic justice—the idea that the state ought to treat all citizens as free and equal—is required for recognizing injustice as a moral wrong, whereas the acknowledgement of actual historical and continuing injustices is needed for understanding for whom and in which way the state has been unable to fulfil the requirements of justice. As Jung (2008: 235) herself points out, the actual promise of liberalism lies in its universal aspirations to ‘establish grounds for an immanent critique of liberalism with real emancipatory reach’. We take this to mean that, when complemented with an awareness of structural injustices, liberalism as a theoretical doctrine with a distinctly universalist normative core ­provides the means of immanent criticism directed at the institutional and structural configurations of existing liberal states, in so far as they fail to meet the moral and political obligations of liberal democratic justice.

The example of anti-racist education

Anti-racist education provides a topical example by which to illuminate the implications of Jung’s structural theory of obligation for liberal democratic education. While we recognize that Jung’s position is primarily a structural one—that is, one that points to structural measures of compensation—in this section, we will employ her theory primarily to discuss the content of liberal democratic education. This is partly due to the fact that the debate between liberal theories and identity politics has often focused on the contents of the curriculum (e.g. debates about established canons and their revision) rather than on the institutional or structural arrangements of schooling. This delineation, however, should not be interpreted to mean that we do not hold structural or systemic forms of discrimination to be important. On the contrary, we assume that the long-term success of programmes of anti-racist education (as one crucial aspect of liberal democratic education) essentially hinges on structural changes in schools as organizations, and in society as a whole. While the implications of the structural theory of obligation for the curriculum are certainly not self-evident, it should thus be clear that without battling structural injustices reproduced by the liberal state (e.g. in the form of institutional discrimination enacted by schools or racialized segregation between different schools), the best anti-racist education programme will remain toothless. Structural changes in the school system—such as the redistribution of educational and economic resources, reorganization of school districts, and urban planning to mitigate demographic segregation—must form the foundation for contesting racial injustice in education.⁹ However, given that it is not only institutional arrangements and policies but also stereotypes, ideological beliefs, historical narratives, and other discursive configurations which play a central role in shaping the social and political locations of agents, it is unlikely that structural changes alone will prevent these discourses from continuing to shape the realities of non-White students. Since it is concrete people who are educated and socialized to reproduce racist structures and also concrete people who can be educated to question and criticize them in the public sphere of liberal democracies, we require both educational and structural societal and institutional change (see e.g. Kitcher 2022).

Bearing in mind that liberal neutrality is a well-known requirement of liberal democratic education (Macedo 1995; Costa 2004), and given the openly political nature of anti-racist education, we focus first on the question of what it is that justifies anti-racist education in a liberal democratic society. Recall that, from the perspective of Jung’s theory, the justification of a state’s compensatory measures in general derives from that state’s obligations towards a particular identity group in the formation of which state-run policies and practices (or the lack thereof) have played a significant role. As a state-run institution, and considering the powerful influence it has in defining individuals’ life chances and identities, public basic education is one of the key institutions involved in compensating for structural injustice experienced by marginalized groups. However, in the justification of anti-racist education, it seems relevant that there exist criteria which connect the compensatory educational measures more directly to educational injustices experienced by marginalized groups—in this case, people of colour. Hence, we suggest that the fulfilment of the following criteria is required for the state to have specifically educational obligations towards the group in question:

1. There is a recognizable category of people (e.g. an ‘identity’).

2. This group has suffered from educational injustice.

3. The injustice has persisted over generations and continues to exist in the present or, in the case of relatively new groups, strongly affects their present social location.

4. The state has been a primary/central actor in either causing the harm to the group, in the form of deprivation of educational opportunities, or failing to address, through adequate interventions, an educationally unjust status quo that affects the group.

If we use Blacks or African Americans as an example of the category in question, it can be argued, based on existing research, that this category fulfils the above criteria.¹⁰ For instance, research on racial inequality and school districts in the urban neighbourhoods of large metropolitan areas in the USA has illuminated the process through which highly segregated school districts have been established over the 20th century as a consequence of state-run educational, demographic, and socio-political policy-making (Scott and Holme 2016; Diem and Welton 2020). This policy-making openly discriminated against Blacks during the period of the Jim Crow laws and created a fertile ground for more subtle means of market-based racial discrimination in the later decades of the 20th century (Rury and Mirel 1997; Massey and Denton 1998). These socio-political developments have resulted in a state of educational hypersegregation, which is especially unfavourable to Blacks and people of colour. The least well-off Black students have been left with extremely scarce educational options and opportunities, and with significantly poorer access to such educational paths that could provide them with better positions in the labour market and society (Scott and Holme 2016; Diem and Welton 2020). Since state-run policies have played a central role in this process (Anderson 2010; Blum and Burkholder 2021), it follows that the state has an obligation to actively improve the status of the category of people in question.

How could an anti-racist curriculum do justice to this obligation? And how are its aims to be grounded in basic liberal democratic values, and aligned with basic requirements of liberal democratic education, such as personal and political autonomy? The latter question is of particular importance because one of the major critiques of anti-racist education programmes is that such an alignment is not possible (e.g. due to charges of indoctrination). Before addressing this question, we define the general contours of the aims of an anti-racist curriculum. Following Jung’s theory, such a curriculum should focus on:

• providing students with knowledge and understanding of histories of oppression, such as the history of slavery and the legacy of racism in the USA, apartheid, the subordination of Indigenous peoples, as well as colonial histories;¹¹

• fostering an understanding of how racialized constructions of difference between human beings are used to justify social hierarchies, in the past and the present (e.g. via scientifically dubious, racialized assumptions about differences in intelligence, or the ideologically driven misuse of liberal values in the justification of colonialism);

• encouraging open and critical discussion on the social, political, and economic repercussions of such historical developments for some groups of people in the present;

• enabling students to become aware of and question ‘collectively shared perceptual schemes and behaviors’ (Lepold and Mateo 2019: 579) as well as raising consciousness about the racist structures in which they are embedded (e.g. the ability to recognize different forms of racism in pictures, texts, and in social reality);

• cultivating the capacities, dispositions, and knowledge base necessary for critical reflection on self-, world- and other-relations (including identity constructions, and the social positions and hierarchies that go along with them) and for the justification of one’s views and positions based on appropriate reasons.¹²

As we argued above, we assume that these educational aims, which are broadly associated with personal and political autonomy and which serve as a basis for mutual respect between free and equal citizens, can be justified within a liberal democratic framework that takes historically grown structural injustices into account. Given the many different variants of anti-racist education, as well as associated types of identity politics, it is both implausible and unlikely, however, that we could assume each version of such education to be in line with liberal democratic values and the aims of liberal democratic education. Since the possibility of different forms of miseducation via anti-racist education programmes cannot be ruled out a priori, we will address two potential liberal objections to anti-racist curricula.

The first, concerning political autonomy and liberal neutrality, we have already mentioned: anti-racist education, with an explicitly political agenda, could be interpreted as breaching liberal neutrality. However, there are good reasons to question the plausibility of this objection. Namely, liberalism in the Rawlsian framework (and more generally speaking) aims to foster reasonable pluralism rather than pluralism as such, with reciprocity being the central criterion of reasonableness (e.g. Rawls 2005). Since racism violates the requirement of reciprocity in that it openly seeks to deprive some individuals of their status as free and equal members of the political community, it falls into the category of unreasonable doctrines and is incompatible with a just liberal order. Protecting unreasonable doctrines is by no means a duty of the liberal state.

Evidently, this still leaves open the question to what extent education should actively engage in dismantling racist inequalities in education—should liberal education trust that fostering basic liberal justice will eventually result in the elimination of such inequalities? According to feminist or feminist-inspired critiques such as that of Susan Okin (1989) and, more recently, Elizabeth Edenberg (2018), children cannot be expected to develop a liberal sense of justice if they grow up in a society that fails to respect citizens as free and equal. If children grow up to learn, through more or less explicit social patterns and cultural discourses, that race is the determining category for which individuals live in good or bad neighbourhoods, go to different schools in different school districts, and eventually end up having very different educational paths and positions in the labour market and society at large—not to mention children being exposed to openly racist beliefs and stereotypes—it is difficult for them to develop a sense of justice that centres on the idea of respect for all citizens as free and equal.¹³ Hence, it could be argued that even within the framework of liberal neutrality (which is not something that all liberalisms share), liberal democratic justice requires education to take a more active role in challenging racist structures than has been traditionally thought permissible. Moreover, as we suggested above, the theory of structural obligation further highlights the political obligation of the state to do so because of its participation in the constitution of the identities in question.

A second and quite common objection to anti-racist education has to do with the development of personal autonomy, which many liberal thinkers, especially comprehensive or perfectionist liberals, take to be a crucial constituent of democratic citizenship, one that cannot plausibly be separated from political autonomy in educational contexts.¹⁴ From this perspective, the objection to anti-racist education is that it may unintentionally infringe upon the development of students’ personal autonomy. As is well recognized by identitarian theorists themselves, the danger of essentializing or homogenizing identities is present in identitarian politics. For Ann Phillips (2010), the irony of identity politics is that the movements that were created to combat sexist or racial stereotypes often invoke a collective that itself presumes a homogenous identity and assigns unifying or essentializing features to it. If such tendencies are widely recognized among adult members of a community, it is not difficult to see how they might prevail with children who are only just developing their capabilities as autonomous agents and who are not yet fully capable of critically examining the reasoning that underlies their education. Accordingly, a well-intentioned attempt to salvage agents from oppressive doctrines may deprive individuals of the opportunity to learn the capabilities required for making informed, autonomous choices. This resonates with many of the previous critiques of identity-political approaches: anti-racist education has been accused of being ideological, indoctrinative, or even downright propagandistic because of its strong political agenda (Thompson 1997; Bialystok 2014; see also the excellent overview in Thompson 2022).

Whether an anti-racist curriculum illegitimately interferes with students’ personal autonomy or not is largely a question of how that curriculum is implemented, and whether it enables students’ firsthand assessment and voluntary choice concerning the values and actions involved. As Lauren Bialystok (2014) points out, social justice education can take various forms, from pedagogies to social justice activism to full-blown affirmative action; and its justification therefore largely depends on the exact form. We share Bialystok’s view that, while education should provide students with information about different channels of political influencing and even allow their voluntary participation in some forms, education should not obligate students to take part in anti-racist activism or any other form of political activity if they feel uncomfortable in doing so because of their personal beliefs or comprehensive doctrines. In addition to potentially interfering with the personal autonomy of students, forcing students to take part in political activism would unfairly hold students accountable for fulfilling the obligations that the state has to racialized groups. Anti-racist education should be seen as forming part of the actions the state must take in order to meet the requirements of liberal justice, and not as a means of social transformation that places the responsibility on students as primary actors.

Despite these cautionary remarks, we have at least the four following reasons to support the argument that there are forms of anti-racist education that are not only broadly compatible with the goal of developing the personal and political autonomy of students, but might also significantly support this development. First, given the historical facts of slavery and colonialism, and their enduring influence in current social, political, and economic relations both in nation-states and globally, a curriculum that leaves such issues unaddressed can be argued to fail in providing for students the type of historical and socio-political awareness and understanding that they require to form a comprehensive view of the society and world in which they live. Thus, we must highlight that living under oppressive structures also jeopardizes the development of personal autonomy: if a person is assigned an identity that signifies social inferiority, their development into an autonomous agent is endangered (Young 2006; Merry 2013). This is one of the reasons why an adequate conception of anti-racist education should enable students to question established identity constructions and social hierarchies that go along with them. Rather than consolidating existing racialized identities or reducing students to one aspect of their identity (as some forms of identity politics and some forms of anti-racist education seem to entail, according to critics), respecting the developing autonomy of students means helping them to understand and critically access the complexity, plurality, and mutability of their own evolving identities (Sen 2007). Raising awareness of the historical, contemporary, individual, and collective processes and power relations that shape identities may evidently, itself, result in shifts in the identities of students.

Second, when an anti-racist curriculum is implemented in a manner that does not merely impose the acceptance of pregiven political opinions, but rather encourages students to engage in reflection on, and firsthand evaluation and endorsement of, any given set of values, including anti-racist ones, it supports the acquisition of the same capabilities that are associated with education for personal autonomy. Education about historical and continuing injustices therefore can (and should) occur side by side with the teaching of such general capabilities of critical thinking and reflection, as well as social and political literacy that enable students’ independent assessment of different political and ideological views in a more general sense. Importantly, the development of these capabilities is crucial for the success of anti-racism and other anti-oppressive endeavours in the long run because if students’ endorsement of anti-oppressive values occurs in an unreflective rather than reflective and critical manner, it remains unclear to what extent they are equipped to evaluate other, less justified attempts at educational or political influencing in the future. From the perspective of the autonomy-based conception of anti-racist education that we support here, it is of pivotal importance that students are recognized as self-reflexive beings—as persons, not as mere carriers of fixed identities. This also implies that students need to learn that references to identity markers alone do not qualify as a valid argument in political debates. Instead, autonomy as an aim of education requires that students cultivate the capacity to critically reflect on their beliefs (also and especially those that they hold as important for their identity) and learn to provide reasons and justifications as to why they hold them.

Third, it seems to us that the fear that an anti-racist curriculum might prevent the formation of attachments to particular comprehensive doctrines in a way that violates personal autonomy—especially if such curriculum mainly encourages reflective learning about historical and present injustices—is broadly overestimated. Leaving racism and white supremacist ideologies aside as unreasonable doctrines, patriotism is one of the few examples that has been raised in public discussion as an example of a doctrine that might be jeopardized by anti-racist education. However, an uncritical form of patriotism that selectively focuses on historical triumphs and heroic figures of a nation without addressing historical wrongs or present injustices is hardly compatible with the development of such critical and reflective skills that are usually associated with personal and political autonomy.

Finally, from the perspective of Jung’s theory, the type of anti-racist curriculum that we propose is not only crucial for students’ developing sense of justice, but also helps to fulfil the obligation of the state to intervene in identity-related injustices in the context of education. Namely, such curriculum allows for the destabilizing of existing identity categories as it fosters students’ understanding of the way legislation and discriminative policies and practices have shaped and continue to shape the social locations of agents. Beliefs about racial superiority and inferiority are especially difficult to eliminate unless the connection of these beliefs to specific historical, social, and political processes is disclosed and properly addressed in education.

Conclusions

In this article, we developed a general framework for making sense of the contested relations between liberal democratic conceptions of justice, education, and identity politics. Drawing on Jung’s structural theory of obligation, we argued that specific state obligations towards particular groups can be justified in so far as the state has played a central (either active or passive) role in the formation of the identities of these groups through historical and continuing structural injustices. Based on this approach, we aimed to show that universalist conceptions of liberal democratic justice and certain forms of identity politics are compatible with each other. We discussed the case of anti-racist education as one example of what follows from this position in educational contexts. We are aware of the many complex theoretical and practical problems this position involves, and we acknowledge that it has to be refined and specified when applied to different socio-political and educational contexts. Nevertheless, we believe it is crucial to understand the historical reasons and contemporary rationales for many forms of identity politics, which—as we hope to have shown—should not be dismissed as merely grounded in contingent, subjective sensitivities of particular groups and individuals but, rather, acknowledged as a justified response to historical injustices that are not compatible with basic liberal democratic values.

References

Footnotes