The HBS hosts discuss the meaning of citizenship in an era of protest.

This episode explores the political and ethical dimensions of the category of “citizen”. In anticipation of his soon-to-be-released book Beyond Civil Disobedience: Social Nullification and Black Citizenship (August, 2021), Charles takes the captain’s “hot” seat for this episode’s discussion of the limits of citizenship, the failure of the state, and the construction of new categories of political, social and civic identity. Millions of people have taken to the streets in protest over the last decade. What are the questions those citizens are asking about the failures of their government? What do these protests say about how we think about the relationship between individuals and their communities, and the relationship of those communities to the State? How can we develop a more robust conception of engaged, healthy, responsible, and critical citizenship?

“The people who are protesting have an amazing, although critical, view of the reality of citizenship, but they also have a very optimistic, idealistic sense of what citizenship should be. I think moving into the streets shows an amazing investment in what the society can be, an investment in trying to get the apparatuses of power to live up to the rhetoric of democracy and freedom and what it means to be a citizen in this type of state.”
= Charles F. Peterson

Check out the links below to learn more about thinkers and ideas referenced in this episode:

• Martin Luther King, Jr. ,“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963)
• Black Lives Matter movement
• Social contract theory
• voter turnout in the United States
• voter suppression in the United States
• Declaration of Independence (1776)
• The United States Constitution
• The history of citizenship
• Benefits and responsibilities of citizens of the United States (according to the United States)
• An explanation of John Rawls’ “original position” and “veil of ignorance”
• Global statistics on “stateless peoples” (2020)
• Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays
• Amelie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt (Eds.), Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide (2012)
• United Nations, Declaration on the Human Rights of Individuals Who are not Nationals of the Country in which They Live (1985)
• Jodi Dean, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (2019)
• Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1999)
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (1903)
• History and inception of the #metoo movement
• Jelani Cobb, “Derek Chauvin’s Trial and George Floyd’s City” (The New Yorker, 2021)
• Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved” (1996)