Movements and Membership
Post 3: 21 January 2025
Civil rights movements demand equality, but what does that really mean? I think it’s better to say it this way: Civil rights movements demand full membership, and the equality of status associated with full membership in the community. This requires that the formal civil and political rights of citizenship be fully recognized. This is what we usually think of when we think of Civil Rights movements—enactments like the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, or the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. But these aren’t enough. Full members of the community do not just possess equal formal rights, they have a capability to exercise these rights that is comparable to others. This means that everyone must have access to certain resources and personal capabilities. This is a messy idea, and one that we, as a society, have a hard time grasping, but the basic notion is intuitive, and it was not lost on civil rights leaders. They often included calls for substantive material equality, for things like fair pay and better working conditions, alongside demands for integration and voting rights. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, for example, pivoted strongly toward issues of economic justice when the campaign for formal rights finally achieved key legislative victories. At the time of his assassination, he was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike. We can’t understand the drive for “civil rights” without social rights. In addition, establishing the material prerequisites of full membership would benefit all Americans, not just those explicitly excluded; this opens the promise of broader coalitions and a less divisive politics overall.
Even though advocates routinely demand both equal formal rights and substantive material improvements, as a society, we tend to keep these two domains separate. When we talk about civil and political rights,1 we tend to use a language of absolute equality, a reflection of the deeply held belief in an axiomatic human equality enshrined in the Declaration. We are one another’s equals and are endowed with equal natural rights. What Civil Rights movements do is simply to demand recognition of these rights that, in stronger versions of liberal theory, exist prior to our membership in society. When we talk about material inequality, we are far more equivocal—we think there is too much inequality, but it is rare for anyone to demand anything like absolute material equality. This makes it hard for us to say how much inequality is too much, and exactly why. More important, we can be morally ambiguous about it: concentrations of wealth might be seen as an obscenity, unfair, a necessary evil, or even a marker of virtue. We also have a deeply ingrained tendency to blame the poor (and sometimes the sick) for their situations. These moral confusions make it hard for us to understand, much less address, the harms caused by material inequality. My claim here is that the most basic of these harms is to the integrity of our status as full and equal members of the community. At this level, the two languages of inequality cannot be separated: the equality that matters most has a material dimension. This is what social rights are about. Still, it is hard for us to accept that resources matter so much. We want to think that having the formal civil and political rights of membership is enough. It’s not.
Recasting movement politics in terms of membership makes clear what sort of equality these sorts of movements demand. This turns out to be the sort of equality we all should demand. Full membership in the community first requires that all persons have an equal package of formal rights: the same privacies and powers in their most private lives, the same basic rights and protections in their economic interactions, the same powers to free speech, assembly, petition, and the franchise, and the same access to the courts as private petitioners and the same protections as criminal defendants. Groups affected by discriminatory laws and practices are denied full membership at this formal level. This exclusion is necessarily the first target of Civil Rights movements. Since the exclusion is based on identity characteristics, the politics around these movements is necessarily a version of “identity” politics. This can’t be helped, but it is a kind of trap that makes completing the process of recognition or inclusion more difficult and provides conservative opponents—the real masters of identity politics—a powerful tool of political opposition.
Full members must also be able to participate fully in the community. Here’s where the two languages of equality connect. Participation requires exercising all of these civil and political rights effectively, but our ability to do so is limited by our access to resources as well as by barriers related to our racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, or gender identity. Real equality requires resources as well as formal powers. This is why Civil Rights agendas have to include themes of economic justice; they must ultimately include calls for social rights.
The point of social rights is to guarantee to each person access to the minimum set2 of resources that enable full participation in society; that is, that are connected to full membership. It is relatively easy to grasp this concept in the negative, especially when we think of the role of resources across the span of a complete life. For example, consider the effect of an inadequate education on your career choices. Or the devastating impact of a large family health expense on your retirement plans. In cases like these, some resource deficit limits our life choices in arbitrary ways; the risk alone makes us all worse off and less free. Not everyone faces these sorts of constraints and threats, but the poor experience them vividly, and almost all of us are vulnerable to them in some way. That suggests that most Americans ought to support social rights policies. Besides making the lives of most Americans better, these rights would also help complete the unfinished work of Civil Rights movements—that is, complete the job of recognizing the full membership of previously excluded groups.
It is more difficult to define the exact set of resources that ought to be guaranteed by the social rights of citizenship, and at what levels. I’ll write much more about these questions in later posts. For now, the key idea is that the set of guaranteed resources is connected to membership. Every full member of the community ought to have a set of life choices that are similar to those available to others and the capability to choose among them (regular readers should already be recognizing this as a mantra of sorts). The community as a whole must decide, through the democratic process, what sorts of life choices ought to be available to every person and, consequently, what sort of resources each person must have access to. For historically excluded populations, the core of this set of choices is easy to describe. For example: Black people ought to now have a set of life choices comparable to those long enjoyed by White people. When we zoom out and consider all the possibilities for the population as a whole, it gets more complicated. Which life options, now mostly available to the rich, should be universal? No one said this would be simple.
Happy (belated) MLK day.
Next Post: Real Freedom (28 January 2025)
<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>
Notes
Photo: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the picket line at the Scripto plant in Atlanta, Ga., December 1964. AP photo
1. I follow T.H. Marshall’s usage of the terms civil, political, and social rights. (See Post 2.) Civil rights cover protections of legitimate personal choices in the private sphere, political rights refer to personal protections in the domain of public action, including our direct interactions with the state as criminal defendants, and social rights are guarantees to the resources needed to use the other rights effectively. This clashes somewhat with the American concept of a “civil rights movement”, which is concerned with both the private and public domain. I hope that’s not too confusing. To be clearer, I will capitalize “Civil Rights” when I am referring to movement politics.
2. Social rights define minima; they are not directly concerned with the complete distribution of resources in society or with the problems associated with concentrations of wealth or income. Again, these themes will come up in later posts.
“Who be kind to,” Allen Ginsberg’s maxim -in-the-form-of-a-question is sometimes recast as “who be REAL to.” Steve suggests a further amendment, “Who be real WITH.”