The books by Jack Turner, Alex Zamalin, and Stephen Eric Bronner are all recognizable products of the Obama era. Each rejects the false idea that President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 signaled the dawn of a postracial America; and each seeks to place contemporary U.S. racism and bigotry in a larger historical and sociopolitical context. In so doing, these books exemplify two modes of critical theorizing about racism and bigotry that engage people’s lived experiences differently.

Turner’s Awakening to Race and Zamalin’s African American Political Thought and American Culture examine closely the work of several (mostly black) American writers who have drawn on their experiences of antiblack racism in the United States to critique key aspects of American life and ideology. Bronner The Bigot, in contrast, is a senior scholar’s effort to sketch a “new critical public philosophy” (p. 177) of bigotry as a phenomenon that encompasses, but reaches beyond, racism. Rather than paying close attention to bigots’ understandings of their lives, Bronner offers a critical social psychological account of bigotry. Taken together, the three books expose the strengths and limitations of these two approaches to developing a critical perspective on racism and bigotry.

Turner mines the American liberal tradition to suggest how democratic liberal individualism offers vital resources for an antiracist, democratic-egalitarian America. He retrieves notions of self-reliance, self-help, and creative individuality advanced by white and black writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin to clarify the social and economic conditions for “democratic individuality.” This view contrasts with the atomistic individualism and self-help notions that have been championed by “rugged individualist,” racist, and supposedly “color-blind” strains of American individualism. Turner contends that to appreciate adequately the social and political conditions for and barriers to individual flourishing, we need to comprehend how systemic racism has shaped unequally the life chances of different racialized groups in the United States. Such an “awakened” view of American racism challenges how white Americans commonly have conceived of self-reliance, equal opportunity, and freedom.

Turner provides a judicious intellectual history. Tellingly, he explains that even Emerson’s notion of “self-reliance” and Douglass’s notion of “self-help” involved awareness of necessary social and material conditions for all Americans to exercise freedom meaningfully. I wonder, however, about a few aspects of his story of American “democratic individualism.” First, his appeal to this notion may force too many thinkers into this mold, including Baldwin, a radical thinker whose “African American individualism”—as Turner recognizes—was not conventionally “liberal” (p. 173 n. 135). Second, while Turner turns “the force of individualist rhetoric against those enlisting it on behalf of color-blind, atomistic individualism” (p. 120) and highlights the historical resonance of self-help among African Americans, his continuing use of notions like “self-help” and “self-sufficiency” (pp. 120–21) may invite confusion given the realities of historical racial injustice and social power.

Third, Turner offers a compelling Baldwin-inspired notion of “democratic reconstitution” tied to “an ethics of democratic conversation” as the path toward racial justice. But he may be too sanguine regarding the obstacles that Baldwin identified. As Turner says, there is a paradox in Baldwin’s goal: “self-examination must be social, dialogical, for our perspectives on the world are partial, and our perspectives on ourselves are riddled with obscurity… . [F]or citizens to recognize that reconstitution is necessary, they must be better than they presently are” (p. 105). Baldwin also recognized that given the legacy of white racism, a democratic reconstitution cannot be achieved through a “democratic” conversation in which all opinions are regarded as equally valid. He once said, “If you don’t know what Ray Charles is singing about, then it is entirely possible that you can’t help me.” Today, a Black Lives Matter analog might be, “If you don’t know what we mean by ‘Black Lives Matter,’ then you’re not ready to treat us as democratic equals.” How, then, do we “awaken” and sustain a democratic majority committed to overcoming the country’s racial injustice?

Zamalin addresses this question by exploring the ways that Baldwin, Ellison, and Toni Morrison worked to show “how a revolutionary change in Americans’ private, everyday self-perceptions and, in their judgment, communication and sense of collective responsibility, was essential for developing a racially just society” (p. 4). They reimagined American civic culture by insisting that “everyday thinking and ethical behavior” were as important, if not more so, than crafting good laws and policies (p. 4).

Zamalin situates these writers in relation to broader debates in the United States of the 1950s through 1980s. This move has one drawback: When he identifies ways that Baldwin, Ellison, and Morrison “anticipate” ideas of others, he sometimes obscures their distinctiveness. Nonetheless, he fleshes out their contributions for rethinking freedom, democracy, and generosity with regard to the ethical “self-work” needed—especially among white Americans—to support a “democratic refounding” (p. 10). At this interface between the personal and political, this self-work is needed to overcome social-psychological barriers to racial justice and democratic mutuality rooted in “emotional vulnerability and hidden desires, fantasies and wishes” (p. 14).

Through Ellison, author of Invisible Man and numerous essays, Zamalin offers a fresh take on a basic problem for American democracy: What can American democracy mean or become, given how majority rule has substantially been white racial majority tyranny? Ellison offered a “spiritualized” understanding of democracy that encompasses ideals and practices, but he maintained that no movement could “finalize democracy’s immeasurable idealism” (p. 85). He insisted on the importance of citizens and leaders “listening to the needs of fellow citizens” (p. 77), while arguing that the Founding Fathers’ complicity in racial domination revealed “the ethical implications of democratic equality” as “tragic” (Ellison, quoted on p. 80). A democratic revolution thus required Americans to accept “the fear of instability, disorder,” “endless contestation over meanings,” and “antagonistic cooperation” (pp. 81, 88, 83).

This view highlights the challenges of democracy that narrower analytical approaches evade. Ellison hoped that artists might “shed light on [the] unbridgeable gap between democratic principles and their worldly existence” (p. 83). He sought to pierce the myths of whiteness by revealing how white Americans “are culturally part Negro American without even realizing it” (Ellison, quoted on p. 87). The success of this effort, however, seems dependent on the extent to which the country’s democratic citizens can manifest something like the “unconditional generosity” toward vulnerable human beings that Morrison has advocated in her novel Beloved (p. 128). Whether or not “generosity” is a proper basis for democratic reciprocity, the kind of “radical democratic citizenship” needed to redress U.S. racism seems to require sustained interpretive generosity among different groups: a willingness to listen, hear, and attend unconditionally to the needs and concerns of others, especially “those who are not granted recognition, justice, and rights” (p. 120).

That said, what forms of cultural politics might effectively foster interpretive generosity? For example, the black National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick, inspired by Black Lives Matter, refused to stand during the singing of the national anthem before professional football games, as has become customary, in order to spur others to address racial injustice, particularly police brutality against blacks. Of course, such cultural protests cannot elude the racial barrier that Baldwin related to Ray Charles’s singing. Here, it might be rearticulated as follows: “If you are unwilling to try to understand why Kaepernick refuses to stand during the anthem, then that you are not committed to mutually respectful democratic dialogue.” But what about those folks who do not care to understand?

The Bigot approaches such issues from a broader perspective. Bronner sketches a general critical perspective on different forms of bigotry: “Classic studies have … analyzed different prejudices, such as anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism, and religious intolerance. In practice, however, it makes little sense to compartmentalize: the bigot rarely has one target for his hatred… . Solidarity in combating such clusters of hatred requires illuminating what is shared by all yet reducible to none” (pp. 3–4). Bronner’s method echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s effort in Anti-Semite and Jew to develop an “etiology of hate” (p. 4). Indeed, Bronner contends that “Sartre’s approach to anti-Semitism is relevant for understanding not just the anti-Semite but the bigot in general” (p. 38).

Sartre analyzed French anti-Semitism through four representative characters—the anti-Semite, the democrat, the inauthentic Jew, and the authentic Jew—and without sustained ethnographic research on either anti-Semites or Jews. Like Sartre, Bronner says that bigots are most commonly found among “imperiled classes and groups … in nonurban settings and parochial communities among the lower middle class, low-level bureaucrats, small business owners, individual contractors, and farmers,” and may include some white industrial workers, among others (p. 21). They buttress themselves against social forces and groups that threaten their inherited status “by embracing ‘property, family, religion, and order’” (p. 20). Where Sartre spotlights four character types, Bronner unpacks bigotry through three characteristic roles that bigots play—true believer, elitist, and chauvinist.

As with Sartre, Bronner illuminates underlying dynamics of bigotry. He discusses five psychological mechanisms and dispositions through which the bigot carries out mythical thinking to justify “his views of modernity” and draw “rigid distinctions between friend and enemy” (p. 57): stereotyping, double standards, projection, fanaticism, and conspiracy festishism. His analysis resonates in light of the Tea Party movement and Donald Trump’s bigoted Republican campaign for the U.S. presidency. Yet Bronner’s distance from the lived experiences and self-understandings of actual bigots raises questions about what might be lost by encompassing diverse forms of bigotry under a unifying framework and the extent to which most actual bigots fit his typology. (He presents a few prominent bigots, such as the anti-Muslim Norwegian fanatic Anders Breivik, as representative of the broader phenomenon.) Moreover, he juxtaposes the prejudiced bigot with the enlightened cosmopolitan in a way that arguably underestimates the degree to which even those of us who aspire to reflective cosmopolitanism often rely on “prereflective prejudices” (p. 102).

For example, discussing the “mythological thinking” of bigots, Bronner writes: “Interpreting the world through myth enables the bigot to concentrate on … what is already known… . Myth thereby provides him with a cognitive framework through which he can respond to new knowledge and information” (p. 57). He intimates that, by contrast, the “enlightened” cosmopolitan inhabits an Archimedean standpoint unsullied by prejudices or foremeanings that inform how they “respond to new knowledge and information.” He gestures toward a more subtle position when he contends that the bigot “finds himself in a revelatory world outside of language—or, at least, a notion of language capable of articulating the new” (p. 56). Elsewhere he says, “Each identity generates its own prejudices” (p. 51).

Bronner aptly calls for a “critical perspective on identity,” such that we do not prejudge the limits of human solidarity and mutual understanding (pp. 51, 191). Thus, he highlights the dangers of interpretations of the world through texts and traditions that fundamentalists regard as fixed and authoritative. A critical theory of identity arguably must go further than Bronner does, however, to address the pervasiveness of cultural identity. We need to appreciate how various social movements “structured around identity” are crucial means for addressing class inequalities (p. 193); but we also need to grasp the diverse ways that people make sense of the world through historically located discourses, traditions, and identities.

Relatedly, Bronner’s contrast between the bigot and the cosmopolitan (p. 182) arguably misconstrues the challenges of speaking across differences. He observes that the “chauvinist’s knowledge of the Other” is based on prejudice, and “[e]xperience of the Other is probably the best way to combat bigotry” (p. 151). Yet his bigot remains largely an inscrutable “other.” Bronner says that the bigot “is uninterested in dialogue with educated outsiders representing the subaltern … and who [are] unwilling to take his views seriously. A right-wing poster makes the bigot’s point perfectly: ‘It doesn’t matter what this sign says, you’ll call it racist anyway!’” (p. 22). I recently saw a related sign on a shop door responding to the Black Lives Matter movement: “All lives matter! Nuf said.” I assumed that I knew what the sign meant, but my confidence about “knowing” this troubled me. I thought about speaking to the shop owner(s), but did not do that, partly because “Nuf said” signaled that they were “uninterested in dialogue.” Was I any better?

These considerations might complicate Bronner’s insight into a “cosmopolitan education” that would cultivate genuine mutual respect across cultures and identities (pp. 181–82). “Any new approach,” he says, “will need to navigate and integrate … cultural practices that foster a cosmopolitan sensibility; political action that provides recognition for the disenfranchised and the outsider,” while recognizing how class differences “cut across identity constructions” (p. 186). Here we arrive at a conclusion supported by all three books: Achieving racial justice and a “democratic refounding” in the United States cannot be left to existing political practices. Working toward these goals will require multifaceted cultural politics, along with “self-work” among American citizens, for a solid majority to become more deeply “awakened” to racism and bigotry.