Exploring Consciousness and Good Faith in 21st Century Governance
Lindsay Plott & Berhanu Mengistu
Old Dominion University – June 24, 2018
Abstract
This paper revisits the key themes of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement, exploring what it means to govern consciously and in good faith in the 21st century. Even though the context for Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement was apartheid and its many deleterious impacts on the African people, post-apartheid South Africa, and indeed, the global community, is still facing ever growing inequality and social and economic injustices.
This paper examines both the possibilities and limitations of applying Biko’s wisdom to policymaking and good governance in addressing the growing global challenges. To this end, the first section of this paper explores ideas of consciousness and complicity, particularly in terms of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, in comparison to Biko’s philosophy. The second section highlights the profound ideas associated with Biko’s Black Consciousness movement, and the third section examines the possibilities of translating his ideas into practice in this new millennium. We begin by proposing five practices that public institutions might implement to create a more just and responsive government: (1) commitment to personal, organizational, and institutional change; (2) honoring difference without striving for its erasure; (3) the institutionalization of epistemic justice; (4) power sharing; and, (5) a commitment to engage in practices grounded in good faith. We conclude by acknowledging the challenges and pressures, particularly from the global political environment, which might pose limitations to such practices, and we suggest potential methods for engaging in fruitful dialogue as to how nations might carry on Biko’s legacy in the struggle for social justice and economic equality in 2018 and beyond.
Exploring Consciousness and Good Faith in 21st Century Governance
Introduction
At the 16th annual Steve Biko Memorial lecture in Pretoria, South Africa, Davis (2016), speaking about Black Lives Matter and other global resistance movements, admonished activists and South African dignitaries alike to resist what she deemed “the tyranny of the universal.” The tyranny she spoke of is the tendency of the universal to erase difference, context and particularity; it is to promote assimilation over cultural distinctness, and to favor abstract notions of political ontology over the historically situated political subject. In this age of divisive politics, group protest, violence, and police militarization, the erasure of the historically situated subject signals a postmodern age in which it seems that democracy is deconstructing itself.
Historically, the idea of consciousness has been the linchpin of revolution and the perceived antidote to cultural hegemony. From Marxist thought to the Black Power movement, the decolonization of African nations, and the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa, consciousness has played a key role in Black social movements. The implications of solidarity movements rooted in notions of critical consciousness on governance, however, are not always well understood by individuals on the outside of these movements looking in. This is particularly so for government officials and street level bureaucrats who interact with members of these movements as they take to the streets in protest. Misunderstandings abound and, in the United States, conversations about #blacklivesmatter are reduced to a battle of hashtags with many outside of the movement issuing the popular rejoinder of Black Lives Matter. What is needed is a more informed and nuanced understanding of consciousness – of what it means to “stay woke” in the age of Black Lives Matter and of the implications of Black solidarity for 21st Century governance. Not all movements are identical. Not all possess the same philosophical roots. For example, in the case of the Black power movement in the United States, Diouf and Woodard (2016) note how many organizations of the 1960s and 1970s had ideological commitments that varied between “Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, territorial nationalism, and cultural nationalism” (p. XII). However, there is always the potential for solidarity across social movements even as the contexts and histories from which these movements are born differ from nation to nation. With the understanding that Black social movements vary across space and time, Martin and West (2009) speak of black internationalism as “…a product of consciousness…the conscious interconnection and interlocution of black struggles across man-made and natural boundaries—including the boundaries of nations, empires, continents, oceans, and seas” (p. 1). The concept of Black internationalism is an important one for understanding the historical and collective impact of diverse Black social movements rooted in notions of critical consciousness as it allows us to examine the ways in which such movements impact contemporary governance practices within and across nations. The work of Steve Biko, the founder of the South African Students’ Organization (SASO), an anti-apartheid student organization that promoted Black Consciousness, provides an interesting case study with regard to the impact of solidarity movements on governance.
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