Tocqueville’s ‘habits of the heart’ wrongly excluded racial views from democracy.

Evidence

His talk of the habits of the heart—what he takes to be the cultural values and assumptions that make us who we are (the values, like individual initiative, that Paul Ryan talks about in Janesville, Wisconsin)—includes assumptions about the value of white people and black people that limit how we think about democracy in this country. White people, particularly propertied white men, actively participated in the political process in the 1830s and 1840s. Black people were either slaves or relegated to the margins of society. That position was justified by a host of beliefs about black people’s capacities for self-governance that shaped the daily lives of white Americans. Black people were meant to be servile; everything about our society reflected that fact. To talk of habits of the heart apart from the racial views of Americans is to miss completely one of the crucial blind spots of American democracy at the time. (Unless, of course, you too believed that white people mattered more than black people.) Tocqueville’s mistake, I tell my students, is our mistake. Americans often speak of freedom while giving little care to the great legacy of unfreedom at the heart of the American project. We continue to keep separate the American Idea and white supremacy. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 93

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth tracking how ‘racial habits’ as Glaude defines them later relate to and differ from Tocqueville’s ‘habits of the heart’.
• DEFINE: Sets up ‘racial habits’ by naming Tocqueville’s habits-of-the-heart concept as its ancestor, showing what habit means in this tradition.