Black insurgency reveals fundamental limits of US democracy

Evidence

The Great Transformation was the second great assault, the second anti-racist uprising. It revealed and called into question the fundamental limits of democracy in the United States.’ The issues that were posed by the movement had deep and sustained reverberations throughout the world, not only in regard to race and racism but much more broadly. The black movement and its allies confronted not only the state but the nation iself- “the American people."" The movement sought not only equality but also community. Equality could possibly, though by no means definitively, be enhanced through state-based reform policies. But to create community required to incorporate movement demands bore a striking resemblance to state action undertaken a century before during the Reconstruction period. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 179

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between equality (achievable via state reform) and community (requiring something beyond state action) is a genuinely deep structural insight about the limits of liberal reform.