Review: Jamal Greene’s “How Rights Went Wrong”

“Greene uses abortion jurisprudence as a real-world example of how American law’s approach to rights has gone wrong—and has helped split us up into warring tribes competing for a zero-sum rights pie.”

When viewed from space by impartial observers—say, aliens—American society would stand out for what it actually is: extremely pluralistic. Diverse people doing different things, advancing their different interests, and upholding their different principles. There would be conflict, yes; however, our society, as seen by the aliens, would resemble something akin to what James Madison theorized in Federalist No. 10: innumerable factions clashing, competing, cooperating, and coming together in the public square, the market place, and the halls of political power.

But we are not aliens, nor are we detached, impartial observers of our world. We are participants in our society and in our polity, and we tell ourselves stories about that society and its polity in order to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are increasingly simplistic. Binaries and blocs crowd out texture and nuance in the mental pictures of the world we construct in our heads. Whether it is race, class, or any other salient cultural, economic, or political marker, we speak of As and Bs when the whole alphabet—and then some—would be more suitable.

Terms like “people of color” (POC) are prime examples of our narratives’ turn towards binaries. We seem intent on cramming an increasingly multiracial and racially diverse America into our old, two-pronged white and black/non-white categories. As Boston College’s Peter Skerry recently wrote in National Affairs, the POC turn of phrase is often “unhelpful and misleading” when it comes to actually understanding American racial dynamics and advancing the cause of racial justice.

The binaries of our political discourse do not map well onto the messiness of our real world, but they have grown salient in our minds nevertheless. In terms of their short-term, practical political effects, the images of the world we construct in our heads are just as important, if not more so, than the world as it really is. Our narratives take on lives of their own.