Three Kinds of Race-Related Solidarity

Solidarity is akin to community. “Community,” of course, is a slippery notion that may be used in several different senses. It can name simply any collectivity— workers at Wal-Mart, sociologists, and students and faculty at a university. I will use it in a more restricted sense to mean a collectivity animated by a “sense of community” among its members. In this sense, both community and solidarity involve the following—meaningful bonds between members (of the solidarity group, and the community, respectively); a sense of belonging to a collectivity that is important to its individual members; some degree of mutual concern among the members greater than concern for human beings as such; a sense of mutual support among members; and a sense of linked fate, at least to some extent, or with respect to some specific characteristic. These features not only characterize communities and solidarity groups, but constitute goods realized by them; it is a human good to have meaningful relations with one’s fellow X’s, to have and receive support and concern, to have a sense of belonging to and mutually identify with a good collectivity. However, these goods can be put to bad uses (solidarity among pedophiles) and in some such contexts may not be goods at all. But solidarity and community are not the same. Solidarity seems political in a way that community need not be, in the sense that solidarity is something that responds to adversity, or at least perceived adversity, while community does not necessarily involve adversity. Solidarity is a kind of pulling together of a group in the face of perceived adversity, generally but not necessarily human-created adversity. Communities may exist entirely without a sense of adversity. Suppose a neighborhood is a community in the required sense; that is, it is not simply people living within a few blocks of each other, but the people who have a sense of community with one another. Such a community can go for long stretches without feeling a sense of adversity. The neighbors may help one another in various ways, and respond as a group to certain challenges to the neighborhood, for example, by pressing the city to put up a traffic light on a particular corner. Ethnic communities (whether geographically localized or not) may function similarly. The AsianAmerican students on a college campus, for example, may form a social grouping, a community whose members give one another support and which provides a