ABSTRACT
The year 2020 saw a rise in anti-racist protests globally in the face of unflinching police brutality against Blacks in the United States especially. Following the path of the long fight for civil rights, activists in the United States mobilized millions of people to demonstrate for weeks in order to highlight and ultimately dismantle the systemic racism embedded in US institutions and that find their roots in slavery. This was echoed in France and the United Kingdom, two former major slaveholding and slave-trading countries. Part of these protests includes demanding reparations and has also led to removing statues of historical figures who were known to own slaves or to make profit from their trade. These protests have led to counter-protests and violence that reflect the recent normalization of extreme racist factions of society: noose hangings of Black men in the United States, citizen groups protecting targeted monument with the threat of violence, and generally a rejection of the claims of the descendants of slaves and of their allies. There are resources within Habermas’s theory of democracy and of the public sphere to help us shed light on how best to navigate the moral aspirations as they are embedded within power struggles – but they haven’t been exploited to date. In this chapter, we will take a slightly different approach to the previous chapters and step outside of Habermasian scholarship in order to explore what it can learn from critical race theory. We will build a bridge with this vast field of scholarship by interviewing Lorenzo Simpson in the hopes of first, bringing a critical tool to Habermas’s own works and examining whether their own structure upholds some barriers to an appropriate relationship with the past, and second, how Habermasian scholarship can be strengthened by taking this kind of criticism seriously.
