In Democracy and the Death of Shame: Political Equality and Social Disturbance (Cambridge University Press, January 2016), I provide a historical tracing of a phenomenon I call The Lament that Shame is Dead. The Lament, I argue, is a nostalgic story of an imagined past in which shame regulated social and political life. It emerges at a fevered pitch as political and social outsiders invoke democratic ideas of political equality to disturb the social order, especially along axes of race, class, and sex/gender. The book shows how The Lament obscures and pathologizes the radically democratic work of the ancient Cynics, literary outsiders in pre-Revolutionary France, US President Andrew Jackson’s populism, the mid-20th century effort to desegregate US public schools, and the sexual revolution launched by late-20th century feminists and gay liberationists. I term many of these radical outsiders “unashamed citizens.”
Whereas the book focuses primarily on The Lament, this paper further sharpens and develops the concepts of unashamed citizens and unashamed citizenship. Unashamed citizens, I argue, self-consciously disavow the terms of shame and shaming and link the silence and self-negation associated with shame to broader political questions of their particular historical moment. Martin Luther King Jr.’s plea—after the passage of the US Civil Rights Act—that “we must no longer be ashamed of being black” captures the ways in which unashamed citizens link the experience of shame to broader questions of political and social equality. More specifically, unashamed citizens track the social change and social equality that is necessary in order to make political equality (as evidenced in the Civil Rights Act) meaningful.
Shame is often celebrated as a “negative emotion” that links people to each other through their common vulnerability and humanity. Accordingly, The Lament and other defenses of shame’s value cast the person who disavows shame or performs “shamelessness” as highly-individualistic and lacking in regard for a common humanity or common world. The self-consciously “shameless” person or the person who publicly argues against the value of shame is characterized as caring only for a world suited to him or herself. Against this view, this paper shows how unashamed citizens call into question the value of shame in ways that in fact support intersubjective relationships and friendships as well as the plurality (in the Arendtian sense) necessary for a vibrant and diverse political world.
This paper develops the concept of unashamed citizenship through case studies of the early-twentieth-century US reformer and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells and the eighteenth-century French feminist writer and playwright Olympe de Gouges. These case studies illuminate how actually-existing people politicize the terms of shame and shaming as part of a radically democratic civic practice. In so doing, they complicate the polarized and de-contextualized environment in which most theoretical work on shame exists.