Crisis Consciousness, Utopian Consciousness, and the Struggle for Racial Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The question of how to theorize the relationship between consciousness and the social transformation of racism remains vexed. Most critical theories agree that some form of critical consciousness is necessary for the transformation of social life, but disagree about whether this change is sufficient. Furthermore, they disagree about whether the content of this change is at the level of cognitive beliefs, active ignorance, or ideology. In this article, I describe most accounts of social transformation of racism as relying upon what I call awareness consciousness. I argue that the model of awareness consciousness in critical theory risks giving too much explanatory power to the role of self-knowledge in developing accounts of successful social transformation. In contrast, I defend an account of critical consciousness that emphasizes the primacy of social structures in constraining and enabling our practices. When social structures can no longer support our horizons of expectation there is the possibility for the development of what I call crisis consciousness and utopian consciousness. The materialist account I deploy locates the social transformation of racism in the experience of dysfunctional institutions and the consequent insight of how to collectively develop functional institutions that can enable new forms of social practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".