Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience & the Civil Rights Movement
Oxford University Press 2021, ISBN: 9780197526439
Winner, 2022 Foundations of Political Theory Best First Book Prize, American Political Science Association
$29.95 paperback
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There are few movements more firmly associated with civil disobedience than the Civil Rights Movement. In the mainstream imagination, civil rights activists eschewed coercion, appealed to the majority's principles, and submitted willingly to legal punishment in order to demand necessary legislative reforms and facilitate the realization of core constitutional and democratic principles. Their fidelity to the spirit of the law, commitment to civility, and allegiance to American democracy set the normative standard for liberal philosophies of civil disobedience.
This narrative offers the civil disobedience of the Civil Rights Movement as a moral exemplar: a blueprint for activists who seek transformative change and racial justice within the bounds of democracy. Yet in this book, Erin R. Pineda shows how it more often functions as a disciplining example—a means of scolding activists and quieting dissent. As Pineda argues, the familiar account of Civil Rights disobedience not only misremembers history; it also distorts our political judgments about how civil disobedience might fit into democratic politics.
Seeing Like an Activist charts the emergence of this influential account of civil disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement, and demonstrates its reliance on a narrative about black protest that is itself entangled with white supremacy. Liberal political theorists whose work informed decades of scholarship saw civil disobedience "like a white state": taking for granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assuming as primary the ends of constitutional integrity and stability, centering the white citizen as the normative ideal, and figuring the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, and all-but-already solved. Instead, this book "sees" civil disobedience from the perspective of an activist, showing the consequences for ideas about how civil disobedience ought to unfold in the present. Building on historical and archival evidence, Pineda shows how civil rights activists, in concert with anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others, and in the process transform the racial order. Pineda recovers this powerful alternative account by adopting a different theoretical approach--one which sees activists as themselves engaged in the creative work of political theorizing.
Reviews
“A powerful account of how acts of courageous defiance can simultaneously assert freedom and expose structures of racial domination, Pineda’s incisive study recovers the genuine radicalism of the nonviolent activism of the Civil Rights Movement. Upending received wisdom about nonviolence as a peaceful, constitutional path to social progress, Pineda shows how activists conceived and enacted nonviolence as a decolonizing practice of self-liberation.”— Karuna Mantena, Columbia University
“Interweaving counter-history and political theory in a way that speaks to our present moment, Pineda’s book revolutionizes our understanding of one of the most invoked and iconic, but also most misunderstood examples of civil disobedience. With her remarkably profound, rigorous, and compelling study, Pineda manages to open up new theoretical and political possibilities beyond the unquestioned assumptions that constrain the mainstream understanding of protest and disobedience. Recovering the radical, indeed revolutionary potential of political contestation, her book should be read by anyone interested in building a new world.”— Robin Celikates, Free University of Berlin
“Seeing Like an Activist is a tour de force, and a joy to read. It is going to transform how political theorists see civil disobedience, and it offers a master class on how to do truly democratic political theory—theory that grows out of democratic actors' practices, rather than trying to fit those actors into existing theories. Political theorists, historians, philosophers, and really everyone else should all read it. If you want to think about what nonviolent direct action can mean for democracy, in the past, present, and/or future, you need to read Pineda’s book.”— Lida Maxwell, Boston University
"Seeing Like an Activist makes an important and original contribution to scholarship on civil disobedience by highlighting activists (in this case in the Civil Rights Movement in the US in the 1960s) as important political thinkers in their own right. Drawing on careful case studies of the 'jail, no bail' campaigns pioneered by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the 1963 Birmingham Campaign led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Pineda shows how the ideas and actions of civil rights activists powerfully contradict the most cherished premises of the philosophical literature on civil disobedience that purports to draw on their example." — Juliet Hooker, Brown University
“Erin Pineda’s luminous Seeing Like an Activist is a theoretical and tactical reexamination of the political meaning of civil disobedience as it was practiced in mid-twentieth-century Black civil rights movement. However, it is also much more. Pineda makes a major methodological and conceptual intervention by seeking to change the problem space of political theory’s engagement with politics. Pineda contends that political theorists must wrestle with the fact that theorizing does political work and that the ways that theorists approach problems of injustice can ‘perform racial power—lending racial states normative validity.’ In this book, Pineda offers the antidote: ‘seeing like activist[s].’ [Her] claim is at once bold and accurate, well supported in both her deft text and in the empirical world at large.”— Deva Woodly, The New School
"By demonstrating how the civil rights movement actively imagined its struggle in anticolonial terms, Pineda contends that political theorists should learn from the civil rights movement’s understanding of civil disobedience as a form of decolonizing praxis. By showing how the Birmingham campaign’s tactics succeeded less as an instance of Habermasian discourse ethics, and more as forms of crisis-generating coercion to “force the better argument,” Pineda indicates how disclosing white supremacy’s embedded violence was integral to this success. All of these strengths lead readers to more profound understandings of Rawls and Habermas, as well as the insights of civil rights activists."— Paul Passavant, William & Hobart Smith Colleges