The autonomous-citizen ideal renders group-based injustice and reparations invisible

Evidence

The idea of a monocultural, secular state works to consolidate who is understood to be the ideal citizen. Since the ideal citizen is an individual without any sort of group-based identity, a non-citizen is someone who remains trapped within group-based identities. The terrible danger of the autonomous individual as citizen is the closing down of the possibility of acknowledging group-based harm, as well as group-based privilege. If, as Lauren Berlant has shown, property, privacy, and individuality become ‘the only ground for the true practice of nationhood’ and the ideal citizen is unanchored in history and concrete social relations, then specific harms such as colonialism and racism cannot be acknowledged. Conversely, the specific entitlements enjoyed by colonizers (in this case, the right to be seen as normative citizens) become invisible. Reparations or strategies designed for specific groups come to seem like ‘catering to the unique sensitivity of a small group’ and not as part of an answer to a highly structured inequality. It is this logic that enables so many to easily dismiss Black-focused schools and affirmative action as encouraging narrow tribal identities rather than the redressing of contemporary and historical injustice. Why don’t we all just assimilate is the plaintive response to historical injustice increasingly heard whenever racial minorities press their claims for justice. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 381

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to racial formation/whiteness scholarship and colorblindness critiques, and to the complaints-about-immodesty genealogy since both show how universal-individual frames mask group privilege. — connects to: Modern individuals demand self-determination while being treated as invisible ciphers — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 140; National development narratives require actively rendering some citizen communities invisible — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 424; Participatory justice links individual empowerment to collective achievement rather than liberal individualism — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 254
• SEED: The ‘why don’t we all just assimilate’ response treated as a structural logic rather than a naive question — angle for an essay on how universal-citizen discourse preemptively forecloses reparations claims.