The Difference States Make: Democracy, Identity, and the American City

Most contemporary theorizing that addresses questions of democracy and difference is framed by broadly constructivist claims. Yet when it comes to thinking about democratic state intervention into social relations of difference, political theorists tend to stress reactive strategies, overlooking the role that democratic states play in helping shape and reinforce social definitions of difference. Exploring the case of the construction of racialized difference in the American city, the author makes the case that arguments for tolerating, for recognizing, and for deliberating across extant differences are insufficiently attentive to the role states play in making difference. Institutional efforts to deal with difference democratically should target the points at which it gets produced, aiming not simply to modify the effects of social definitions of identity and difference—but to democratize the processes through which these are defined and redefined.