Social Identities and Social Justice

Western democracies are being remade under the banner of "woke," and the argument has stalled. Both sides now insist that who we are decides what we may say — and the more sharply identities are drawn, the less we can hear one another. William Franke, a philosopher of literature and religion at Vanderbilt, proposes an unexpected way out. Drawing on the tradition of negative theology, which reaches truth by unsaying our certainties about it, he argues that every identity rests on something prior and shared: an undelimited human potential that belongs to no group. Social justice movements are right that we must reconceive our life together. But identity cannot be the ground of that reconception; non-identity can. What emerges is a genuinely relational vision of public discourse, in which recognizing another person does not require agreeing about categories — and disagreement need not end the conversation.