Boxed in

Our lives take shape around identities. Race, religion, sexual orientation, and other collective identities impose scripts that dictate how we should think, act, and associate. African Americans should support reparations and affirmative action. Evangelical Christians should associate with true believers and feel outraged by same sex-marriage. Gays and lesbians should come out and engage in LBGTQ+ activism. When identities are scripted too tightly, we get boxed in and democracy suffers.

In Boxed In, philosophers Derrick Darby and Eduardo J. Martinez diagnose the profound challenge that inflexible identities pose for democracy and offer a novel prescription that involves taking up civic responsibilities to search for, make visible, and attend to group differences in background, perspective, and empowerment.

Collective action to pursue common projects under an identity--an abiding feature of democratic life--requires that we break free from tight scripts. Skeptics worry that the pervasive influence of identities on political reasoning and action make them unsafe for democracy. Optimists find identities too valuable in mobilizing political action to do without. Taking lessons from both sides, Darby and Martinez contend that optimists must qualify their acceptance of identity by mitigating the dangers that tightly-scripted collective identities pose for democratic collective action when group heterogeneity is disregarded.

Using a wide range of examples from fútbol fans to Jay-Z’s beef with Oprah, to literal box-checking on the U. S. Census, Darby and Martinez illustrate how scripting identities too tightly can box us in and they tell us what we can do to mitigate it. Weaving philosophical analysis with empirical research on identities, coalitions, and social movements, Boxed In prescribes making identities safe for democracy by undertaking responsibilities that help us break free from tight scripts that box us in and work together while taking our differences seriously.

Derrick Darby is Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He discovered his passion for philosophy growing up in the Queensbridge public housing projects in NYC. For the backstory, see his TEDx talk, ＂Doing the Knowledge.＂ He writes about rights, race, inequality, and democracy. He has been profiled in The Atlantic and published in The New York Times and other outlets. His most recent book is A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight. For more information, go to derrickdarby.com.

Eduardo J. Martinez is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. His research is in democratic theory and focuses on institutions and practices such as administrative agencies, civic education, representation, and political partisanship.