The Communitarian State: Lawlessness or Law Reform for African-Americans?

Abstract

Two premises guide my exploration of a communitarian image of the state. First, the state has frequently acted in a lawless fashion toward African-Americans. The state has done so by failing, through both the abusive exercise of its power and the withholding of its laws, to protect people of African descent, beginning with slavery and continuing with the contemporary second-class citizenship experienced by many African- Americans. Second, only fundamental legal and political reforms designed to dismantle the structural causes of this lawlessness will ensure that racial subordination does not further divide America into a society of irreconcilable racial enclaves.

This Article explores the potential of communitarianism as a reform theory to eliminate state lawlessness toward African-Americans. Communitarianism describes a set of ideas centered around the issues of community, moral education, and shared values. Communitarianism also rests largely on the idea that, through the exercise of our mutual responsibility to each other as citizens, we will build a stable political community. Proponents of communitarianism believe that American society's preoccupation with individual rights has diminished the capacity of both the state and private institutions to solve effectively the problems that plague our communities and threaten the social order.Proponents further contend that American society has lost sight of the importance of civic duty and of the role of the family, the school, the church, and the community in identifying and inculcating shared moral values. Ultimately, I argue that communitarianism cannot change the relationship between African-Americans and the state without the sharing of power and the eradication, rather than the mere control, of racism. Therefore, communitarianism is deficient unless modified from a race-conscious perspective.

In evaluating communitarianism as an alternative to liberalism, I first substantiate in Part I the claim that African-Americans experience state lawlessness. In Part II, I describe the central tenets of communitarianism and use the claim of lawlessness to justify my critique of those tenets: communitarian theory perpetuates the practice of racial subordination in that it does not explicitly include African-Americans in the deliberative processes of defining community and values, which in turn may exclude African-Americans from participation in the state and ensure continued vulnerability of African-Americans to state lawlessness. In Part III, I offer revisions to communitarian theory to address the problems of subordination that continue to distort the relationship between African-Americans and the state. I conclude by asserting the need for fundamental personal and social change in order to avert potentially apocalyptic resolution of differences between dominant and subordinate communities.