Dissident Minorities Defined

A “dissident minority” is a person who is him or herself in the minority of a marginalized group with respect to some issue that the group takes to be important to its survival or equal standing in the larger society. It is a political and ideological category, demarcated by a sincere divergence in opinion regarding these critical issues.Footnote ¹ Prominent examples might include Black conservatives or Jewish anti-Zionists (or, for that matter, American Jewish Trump supporters).Footnote ² Importantly, the criteria for an issue being one “that the group takes to be important to its survival or equal standing” is meant to be practical, not essentialist. Indeed, it makes no difference whether the issue actually is one that has these high stakes, let alone whether such rarefied status is essential to the very nature of the group-qua-group. After all, one suspects that a frequent basis for the dissident minority’s dissenting outlook is precisely that they contest their group compatriots’ assessment of the importance or centrality of this supposedly core issue. But what makes these issues important, for our purposes, is their phenomenological character—the role they play in group discourse based on their perceived importance, without registering an opinion as to whether that view is ultimately warranted.

Most of the literature exploring “minorities within minorities” focuses on what we can call “internal minorities”: circumstances where a person is a member of a minority identity-category that is in turn nestled inside another minority identity-category (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1989; Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev Reference Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev2005; Pinto Reference Pinto2015).Footnote ³ The LGBT member of a small religious sect would provide one such example. Then the question is to what extent and by what means the internal minority, as a (sub)group, can make out rights claims against the larger minority group. This problem is what motivates, for example, Susan Moller Okin’s well-known article “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?,” and the many other interventions on the issue (Okin Reference Okin, Cohen, Howard and Nussbaum1999; Shachar Reference Shachar2000; Song Reference Song2005). By contrast, the category of “dissident minority” is predominantly an ideological, not identity-based, marker. While an internal minority’s differentiated identity may track ideological cleavages, it is nonetheless conceptually distinct from a dissident minority. If “internal minorities” raise the question of the rights of “women”Footnote ⁴ within various cultural, social, or national minority groups, the “dissident minority” frame asks instead about the status of “feminists” (who may or may not be women) within those groups (assuming that the majority of that group is ideologically opposed to feminism).

Certainly, these projects are not wholly disassociated from each other—women are, one suspects, most likely to be raising ideological objections to putatively misogynist practices in their communities, including in their minority racial, religious, or cultural communities (Pinto Reference Pinto2015). But there are ideological divides within minority groups that do not appear to correspond to identity-based cleavages (as in both the Black conservative or Jewish anti-Zionist cases, neither of which is particularly associated with or thought to generate from membership in subminority groupings). The ideological frame, in turn, centers a different set of questions than those typically pursued within the branch of the multiculturalism literature considering internal minorities. Problems surrounding secession, public accommodation, group autonomy, exemption, and the ability to exit—issues often (though not always) framed as questions of “rights”—diminish in importance. Instead, the problems posed by ideological dissident minorities sound in more deliberative, epistemic, and interpretive registers. If the internal minorities frame asks what substantive entitlements members of minorities (within minorities) ought to receive, the dissident minorities project explores how a particular sort of minority—the ideological dissenter—is situated within and can alter the trajectory of political discourse about those entitlements.

On an ideological level, arguments around political rights or entitlements that take groups seriously often seem at least superficially premised on perceived unanimity of the group—at least around certain key issues. When a given policy or practice is objected to on the grounds that it is harmful to a particular group—that it is “antisemitic” or “racist,” for example—it is easy to respond by noting that “not all Jews” or “not all Blacks” agree with the assessment. The discourse of groups, insofar as it purports to speak on the entirety of the groups, always carries this vulnerability. Yet falsifying this purported unanimity is a less compelling rejoinder than it appears, in part because it proves far too much. Simply put, statements of the form “not all Xs believe Y” will be true for any group X of nontrivial size regarding any issue Y of nontrivial contestability, where X is not defined by belief in Y. And “nontrivial contestability,” it turns out, is an incredibly low bar to meet. It is possible to find dissenting group members on a raft of issues and political choices that almost all observers might suspect would spark a unified front. Exit polls suggest one in eight American Muslims voted for Donald Trump in 2016; a similar proportion of British Jews identified as backers of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn (Rosenberg Reference Rosenberg2017). White supremacist groups have non-white members and supporters: a Black New York City taxi driver spotted wearing a Nazi armband told an incredulous reporter “Who says you have to be white to be a National Socialist?” (Gupta Reference Gupta2018; Politi Reference Politi2014) Stretching back further into history, one finds Black opponents of the civil rights movement and German Jewish supporters of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party (Gordon Reference Gordon1984, 47; Schuyler Reference Schulyer and Leak2001).

These are contentious examples, but they illustrate a larger point: if there is to be any value in “group” or “identity politics” at all, merely noting that there is not unanimity on a given issue does not alone suffice as a retort. Even sharply hierarchical social groups typically have internal dissent, though sometimes empowered traditionalists are good at masking or suppressing it such that the dissident opinions are largely obscured to external observers (Deveaux Reference Deveaux, Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev2005). Instead of either ignoring the existence of the dissident faction or treating it as though it obliterates any useful analysis of group-qua-group normative theory, it is instead useful to explore more closely what role these dissidents play in political debates and practices.

In reality, it is likely that no member of any group—majority or minority—agrees with the consensus position of their group mates on each and every issue. Were the category of “dissident minority” to apply to all of those cases, it would become a trivial and uninteresting concept. The caveat—that the relevant issue must be one that the group takes to be important to its survival or equal standing—restricts the dissident minority concept to a core set of cases. It is here where both the debilitating and empowering dimensions of dissident minority identity are most likely to manifest, and here where the distinctive political obligations discussed in Part IV are most pressing in their demands.

Consider an alternative example: the anti-choice Jew. The Jewish community is overwhelmingly pro-choice—a full 83% think abortion should be legal “always” or “in most cases” compared with 57% of Americans generally (Masci Reference Masci2018). So in that sense, the individual Jew who is avowedly opposed to reproductive rights certainly seems to be occupying a dissident posture compared with the Jewish community as a whole. Yet, phenomenologically, this sort of “dissent” is not treated similarly to that of the anti-Zionist Jew. Anti-choice Jews are not usually referred to as “self-hating” or “kapos.” While they certainly come in for criticism, and that criticism may even be made with specific reference to “Jewish values” or other appeals to community norms, they are not typically viewed as traitors or imperiling any sort of cohesive narrative of solidaristic Jewish politics. This difference in the treatment of dissenters delineates a practical distinction between “consensus issues”—those which “are understood as … advancing the interests of the entire … community” and are “more likely to be ‘owned’ as community issues meriting group political mobilization,” versus “secondary” issues of marginalization—those concerns issues faced by discrete subsets of a disadvantaged group that do not typically register on the collective group agenda (Cohen Reference Cohen1999; Lopez Bunyasi and Smith Reference Lopez Bunyasi, Tehama and Smith2019).

The boundaries between “consensus” and “secondary” issues are not set in stone, and it is fair to wonder why any particular issue falls in one category versus the other. Secondary issues often are precisely those whose stakeholders are disdained or ostracized within the broader group (e.g., the Black poor). By the same token, that which is said to be common to the entirety of the group might in reality reflect the interests of a particular empowered class within the group. That the widespread Jewish consensus on abortion rights does not translate into the sort of contentious, often deeply hostile, treatment of those Jews carrying a dissident view that one often sees directed towards anti-Zionist Jews might reflect a general minimization of Jewish women’s interests seen as discrete, partial, and open to debate. There is, in short, a very live intersectional critique that might be leveled at the demarcation of issues deemed central to group survival or equality versus issues relegated to the margins.

I do not mean to skirt these important debates, but I do think they can be bracketed. The controversy over whether an issue is, or should be deemed, a “consensus” one for the group does not change the phenomenology regarding how deviation along that issue is treated. So going forward, I’ll leave aside the important question of how an issue comes to be viewed as “consensus” and instead stipulate that the cases explored below, Jewish anti-Zionism and Black conservatism, do indeed represent such issues. Using these as our examples, we can inquire into the distinctive status of dissident minorities generally: What are their distinctive powers and vulnerabilities, and what distinctive obligations accordingly flow to them?

Distinctive Vulnerability

There are two prominent and distinctive vulnerabilities dissident minorities often experience. The first is that they are subject to disciplining exclusion and vitriol, often including but not limited to having specific slurs lobbed at them, designed to denigrate their equal political participation. The second is that their broader group identity is authoritatively constructed by their peers in a fashion that may be alien or unrecognizable. We will consider each in turn.

Certainly, any member of a minority group—regardless of their political proclivities—may be targeted by a broad array of stereotypes, insults, burdens, or other forms of discriminatory treatment that afflict the group as a whole. But dissident minorities may additionally face particular slurs or maltreatment specifically based on their dissenting status—and these attacks often will come from their fellow group members. In social psychology, the “black sheep” hypothesis posits that group members have both more extreme positive and negative views of fellow members. That is, instead of just generally preferring members of their own group to non-members, they both like the likeable ones and dislike dislikeable ones more than comparable non-group members (Marques and Paez Reference Marques and Paez1994). A non-Jew who espouses anti-Zionism is not exactly likely to be welcomed by the Jewish Zionist majority, but their utterance may be viewed as expected or predictable—the sort of hostility (under the stipulated dominant perception of Zionism within the Jewish community, wherein Zionism is taken to be necessary for the Jewish survival, equal standing, or both) that explains why the group must rally together in the first place. A Jewish speaker who takes a substantively identical position may be viewed as far more dangerous—a traitor or fifth column, someone who has turned against his or her own people. It may be assumed that their opinions cannot possibly be genuine but rather are the product of illicit pay-offs or rank opportunism, and therefore they can be dismissed without further engagement. Slurs like “self-hating Jew,” “kapo,” “Uncle Tom,” or “house Negro” all have this effect: they leverage the dissident minority’s ideological divergence to present the dissident as contemptible, even treasonous.Footnote ⁵ Consequently, these terms when deployed are sometimes viewed as even more explosive and inflammatory even than the most vicious “generic” slurs targeting the group as a whole (such as the n-word) (Henderson Reference Henderson2003, 69–70). Stephen Carter spoke from painful personal experience as a target when he wrote that “traitors are much worse than adversaries; for every nation hates most the betrayer from within” (Carter Reference Carter1991, 102).

Consider how this tracks Tommie Shelby’s (Reference Shelby2005) argument for pragmatic Black solidarity centered around shared commitment to substantive equality given conditions of racial subordination. It prescribes unity based on a set of shared political commitments—albeit ones that are designed to be thinly described and thereby broadly acceptable to most if not all members of the group—this is meant as an alternative to essentializing notions of “thick” or “authentic” Blackness. Yet where this is the basis of political solidarity, it is highly likely that dissidents will be seen as especially treasonous: they will be seen as diverging not from a cultural tradition but against the very project of group equality. Shelby is clearly concerned with the possibility that this political form of solidarity will itself congeal into something too thick, urging that agreement on “basic principles and broad goals” must retain space for reasonable disagreement on “the precise content of political action and policy initiatives.” But against the possibility that deep political disagreements will ultimately fracture the very sense of bondedness upon which solidarity depends, he is left to plead for all to accept any “good-faith efforts” at promoting racial equality with an open mind (247–48).

Open-mindedness certainly is a virtue, but friction between the group majority and dissident minorities is probably not simply a matter of indulgence in illiberal vices. It is structural to the discrete social position of marginalized groups. In his chapter “Internal Minorities and Their Rights,” Leslie Green observes that “the circumstances of [minority] lives simply make it extremely prudent to strive for unity. Inasmuch as there is strength in numbers, the minority will seek to avoid costly internal dissent” (Green Reference Green and Kymlicka1995, 268). Visible fractures in public articulations of minority group preferences and demands can weaken an already precarious bargaining position. More instinctually, “If one has learned to expect that one will be attacked from above, it is natural to fear that one may also be assaulted from below and to strike preemptively” (267). Consequently, Margaret Moore argues, “there is a tendency for minority groups in the state to exaggerate the extent of solidarity behind their particular political program, because any dissent from it is likely to be interpreted by the majority group as a sign of weakness, as a sign that compromise is unnecessary, that the elites are not representative of everyone, and so on” (Moore Reference Moore, Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev2005, 273). This embellishment is likely to be paired with concerted efforts to tamp down on or even extirpate what dissent does exist. And the more the broader minority group perceives itself to be marginalized or under threat, the more forceful its attempts to silence critical dissenters within the group are likely to be (Penic, Eleheroth, and Reicher Reference Penic, Elcheroth and Reicher2016).

Furthermore, it would not be fair to assume that attempts to intervene against dissident minority opinions could only be motivated by an unadorned repressive instinct curable by the cultivation of good liberal values. The fear of opportunism is a genuine one; one strategy for achieving status as a subordinated group member in a hierarchical society is “making oneself useful to the dominant group at the expense of one’s own group in exchange for personal benefits” (Starkey Reference Starkey2015, 19). Individual incentives to “defect” from communal norms have real effects, and while monitoring sanctions and shaming can in turn police these defections, such sanctions can also squelch sincere expressions of self-interest where the communal norm is not inclusive of particular subgroup experiences (White, Laird, and Allen Reference White, Laird and Allen2014, 799). As Green puts it, “Institutions and practices that promote solidarity, unanimity, and so on keep both majorities and internal minorities in check, whether that is their intention or not” (Green Reference Green and Kymlicka1995, 268).

There is a further vulnerability distinctive to the dissident minority experience that may be less tangible, but is no less real: the lived experience of having one’s identity authoritatively constructed in a manner that casts one as a heretic or outsider. Seyla Benhabib (Reference Benhabib2002, 15) observes that we are all “thrown” into cultural, familial, linguistic, and other collective identities that we do not choose. Our efforts to converse with those narratives and create a life story that is genuinely our own occur as an interaction with those narrative codes. While we always have options in how we choose to tell our stories, “There are only so many ways in which a cultural code may be varied; beyond them, one may run the risk of becoming an outcast or a convert, a marginal figure or a deserter of the tribe” (Benhabib Reference Benhabib2002, 15). It is probably true that all minority group members experience, to one degree or another, this form of alienation—particular insofar as the stories told about them in service of dominating agendas (i.e., they are thugs, barbaric, backwards, and so on) do not reflect the stories they tell about themselves. But they can take solace—however small—in knowing that such stories are inauthentic: they are imposed from the outside, not generated organically from within the group itself. Dissident minorities, by contrast, experience the distinctive pain of having their experiences and outlook rejected from the inside, by processes and narratives that they at least in some respects value and recognize as authoritative.

Distinctive Power

Alongside these vulnerabilities, however, dissident minorities also possess distinctive—and significant—social power, wielding influence in majority society far in excess of what one might predict from their numbers. Their membership in the minority group, coupled with their public iconoclasm, may give them heightened credibility and legitimacy to speak on issues relevant to that group that exceeds that of both majority and non-dissident minority speakers. This effect can be further compounded insofar as majority group actors sometimes have a well-intentioned practice of deferring to minority voices, while being unable to reliably distinguish between dissident and non-dissident opinions. In some cases dissident minorities can ironically leverage this deference to further facilitate the marginalization of the broader (non-dissident) minority position.

Dating back at least to Hannah Arendt, and continuing through contemporary scholars like Derrick Bell and Nancy Leong, theorists have long recognized that minority group members can gain significant power by publicly endorsing dissident opinions atypical within their group but popular with non-group members. They will often be viewed and present themselves as “independent” or “free thinkers,” perceptions that are often expressly linked to their supposedly exceptional status within their group (think terms like “off the plantation”). In On the Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt discusses the phenomenon of “exceptional Jews,” writing that Jews who fell into this category “knew quite well that it was this very ambiguity—that they were Jews and yet presumably not like Jews—which opened the doors of society to them. If they desired this kind of intercourse, they tried, therefore, ‘to be and yet not to be Jews’” (Reference Arendt1994, 56). Under this framework, “Jews were exhorted to become educated enough not to behave like ordinary Jews, but they were, on the other hand, accepted only because they were Jews, because of their foreign, exotic appeal” (57). The demand for exceptional Jews came predominantly from non-Jews. They wanted Jews to be exemplars of a universal humanity, which required that they simultaneously be distinctively Jewish (alien, other, so as to confirm that humanity transcended such divides) and yet not Jewish (that is, not embodying the distinctive parochial and tribalist concerns that supposedly characterized Jews).

More recently, Nancy Leong has written of “racial (or identity) capitalism,” systems whereby society assigns value to out-group identity status (at least in certain circumstances) and members of said out-groups are accordingly able to leverage their social position in order to reap social or political gains (Leong Reference Leong2013). Preoccupation with “diversity,” in particular, “lends value to nonwhiteness, and white individuals and institutions capture the value of that nonwhiteness through relationships with nonwhite individuals’” (Leong Reference Leong2013, 2176). For example, in seeking to defend against a charge of racism, one often sees white actors appeal to their friendship with or (better yet) endorsement from nonwhites who share their point of view (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2010, 57–58; Leong Reference Leong2013, 2178–82). In a similar vein, one critic assailed Jewish Voice for Peace—a small but prominent anti-Zionist Jewish organization—as existing “largely to declare anyone accused of anti-Jewish bias ‘not guilty’ (with a Jewish accent)” (Haber Reference Haber2008). People occupying this role gain power from being, in Arendt’s terms, “exceptional.” Their influence stems from being members of the out-group, but simultaneously not like members of the out-group.

In particular, members of minority groups who are willing to shield non-group members from claims being made by their minority compatriots can be and often are highly valued and therefore can in the right circumstances leverage considerable political power. In his “rules of racial standing,” Derrick Bell thus identifies an exception to the general principle that Black testimony on racial issues is systematically derided or dismissed by the white majority: a “[B]lack person who publicly disparages or criticizes other [B]lacks who are speaking or acting in ways that upset whites” is not dismissed but rather “granted ‘enhanced standing’” (Bell Reference Bell1992, 114). Recent research suggests that whites, especially white conservatives, prefer Black conservatives who explicitly racialize their appeals over Blacks who adopt a still conservative, but deracialized, political posture—a phenomenon dubbed the “Ben Carson effect” (Leslie, Stout, and Tolbert Reference Leslie, Stout and Tolbert2019). While dissident minorities have a legitimate grievance in being presumed to be motivated by careerism or disloyalty, it also is simply true that in many cases “defection is rewarded” (Starkey Reference Starkey2015, 38).

Figures such as William H. Hastie thus bemoaned the particular challenges posed by Black segregation supporters to civil rights activists in the mid-twentieth century: their presence allowed whites to “validate their racism by pointing to like-minded [B]lacks” (Starkey Reference Starkey2015, 51). The Chicago Defender likewise wrote mournfully of how white supremacists leveraged Black supporters of school segregation: they take “our own and hurls them against us to frustrate our plans and put us to the bad” (56). If one recalls the naïve view, critiqued above, whereby “not all Xs believe Y” is thought to serve as a decisive rebuttal of any sort of political claim that hinges on an identity-association, then the presence of dissident minorities can effectively “refute” a host of claims made by minority members that rely on such an association. Instead, the presence or encouragement of the dissident minority can act as a form of moral licensing (“my Black friend says it’s okay”; “not all Jews … .”), validating political behaviors or practices that are, by and large, repulsive to most members of the minority group.

Why are dissident minorities given this heightened influence? I suggest it represents an idiosyncratic perversion of a perhaps laudable instinct to defer to out-groups regarding issues seen as central to their identity or equal standing. In-group members, it seems probable, are likely to have weak knowledge of out-group opinions, and are poorly positioned to differentiate between mainstream and outlier positions.Footnote ⁶ Particularly in insular, ideologically homogenous circles, it is possible that nonminorities may primarily or even solely associate with “dissident minorities,” and thereby gain a skewed perception of a given position’s relative popularity or marginality within the minority group. Majority members of the organization who have (or seek to cultivate) positive attitudes towards the minority may systematically overstate the similarities between their own beliefs and those they ascribe to the minority (as in the anti-Zionist who seeks to exhibit affability towards Jews by overemphasizing the proportion who share his anti-Zionist outlook) (see Brady and Sniderman Reference Brady and Sniderman1985). Even if they are not misled into believing that the dissident position actually represents a majority faction, they may nonetheless view the matter as at the very least one of considerable disagreement—not a “consensus issue” at all.

Consider, in this light, the case of the so-called “as-a-Jew.” As-a-Jews are Jews who publicly leverage their Jewish identity in order to undermine or discredit arguments or claims made by and associated with Jews writ large—frequently, but not always, arguments revolving around Zionism (the name comes from such persons’ tendency to preface statements with “As a Jew … .”). Speaking of this set, David Hirsh writes

Hirsh seems correct that the target of the “as a Jew” framing is non-Jews, and that the appeal represents a leveraging of Jewish identity to validate and legitimize political opinions. Given their small numbers among Jews and negligible sway within mainstream Jewish communal organizations, Jewish anti-Zionists have disproportionate influence outside of the Jewish community, including in setting or validating the political posture of predominantly non-Jewish organizations, associations, and social movements (224). The question of whether the “as a Jew” frame encourages non-Jews to “suspend their own political judgment” is more complex—in many cases, it may rather encourage them to indulge their preexisting political proclivities regarding Jews by giving them the backstop of Jewish affirmation. It takes from the tritely obvious point that there is not unanimity among Jews (on questions of Zionism or anything else), and extends it to the more contentious conclusion that therefore all opinions raised under a Jewish banner are equally representative and effectively cancel out—negating the need for (or, nominally, the coherence of) any deference.

Yet Hirsh is correct that in some cases dissident minorities do gain considerable power when non-minority individuals agree to suspend their own judgment and defer to members of the minority group—at least in those cases where the dissident minority is the only (or principal) minority presence in a political arena dominated by members of the majority. This power can even incentivize dissident minorities to promote practices that have the effect of excluding their (non-dissident) group-mates. My claim is not that dissident minorities would oppose more members of their minority group joining the “dissident” faction. Rather, the hypothesis is that when dissident minorities are the primary representatives of a minority group within a larger political organization, they may oppose entry of their non-dissident compatriots even where those prospective entrants would agree with most of the larger organization’s political goals. Footnote ⁷

A recent dispute regarding Jewish inclusion at the Chicago and DC “Dyke Marches”—more self-consciously left-wing alternatives to Pride marches—provides an example. In 2017, the Chicago Dyke March engendered controversy when it spontaneously ejected three Jewish marchers for waving a Jewish Pride flag, a banner that organizers claimed was too reminiscent of the Israeli flag and so conflicted with the Dyke March’s anti-Zionist commitments. This decision resulted in withering criticism and claims of antisemitic exclusion. Two years later, organizers of the DC Dyke March reignited the controversy by prohibiting Jewish Pride flags as a matter of policy. This decision was once again lambasted as creating a hostile and unwelcoming environment for Jewish marchers who might otherwise be aligned with the DCDM’s campaign. Yet it was actually Jewish anti-Zionist members of the DCDM community who took the lead in promoting and defending the ban (Chibbaro Reference Chibbaro2019). This struck many as surprising and perhaps inexplicable. Even if the deterred marchers were not themselves anti-Zionist, they presumably agreed with the DCDM on most other issues—hence why they wished to march. So why would the Jewish anti-Zionists take up a position they knew would be perceived as hostile and exclusionary towards many of their fellow Jews, including those sympathetic to at least most of the DCDM’s agenda?

The unique incentives—upon the DCDM as a whole and on its Jewish anti-Zionist members specifically—created by out-group deference may offer an answer. Even restricted to those Jews who largely share the DCDM’s politics (on matters like gentrification, queer liberation, police violence, and more), most potential Jewish Dyke March participants are still likely not anti-Zionists.Footnote ⁸ Hence, an influx of more Jews would probably proportionally shift the march’s politics away from anti-Zionism and towards, if not philo-Zionism, then at least neutrality. One could fairly rejoin that this effect applies to any group of potential entrants who agree with an organization on most issues but disagree on one. Yet insofar as dissident minorities gain distinctive power from organizational deference around “their” issues, the arrival of fellow Jews disproportionately imperils the particular arena where anti-Zionist Jews are likely to hold the most institutional leverage and influence. Without disparaging the sincerity of the Jewish DCDM members’ ideological belief that the Jewish Pride flag should be banned, it surely matters that the foreseeable effect of this position—deterring other, non-dissident Jews from joining the march—aligned with the dissident minority’s institutional interest in preserving their power and leverage with the DCDM.

In short, where a majoritarian organization’s primary existing points of contact with a minority group are with its dissident members, organizational deference to the minority group may exacerbate the tendency towards erecting hostile barriers to discouraging the broader minority group from joining. In these circumstances, deference accentuates both the stakes for and influence of dissident minorities surrounding the prospect of other non-dissident minorities joining the group. On the one hand, where an organization exhibits deference, then the influx of non-dissident minorities (who also would benefit from such deference) is far more likely to actually alter the broader organizations’ orientation to issues seen as important to the minority group, and hence poses an even greater threat to the power and influence of the dissident minorities already embedded in the group. And on the other hand, if deference includes deferring to existing minority group members in the organization regarding how the organization ought to relate to the minority group in society as a whole (including on questions about welcoming or soliciting potential new members), then the dissident minority faction may be especially well positioned to orient the group towards an exclusionary posture. It is the degree to which dissident minorities can use their status to obstruct engagement with the broader group that presages the problem of tokenization.

Dissident Minorities and the Anti-Tokenization Principle

As we’ve seen, dissident minorities occupy a distinctive and in some ways unique status within political society. They can be the targets of especial scorn or slurs targeting their political participation. Yet they also often exercise outsized power—able to gain political influence far beyond what their numbers would predict by leveraging their identity to curry favor with non-group members. These are descriptive properties of dissident minorities. Do they generate any distinctive political obligations? I conclude that one such obligation, which I term the anti-tokenization principle, applies both to dissident minorities and to majority group members relating to dissident minorities: dissident minorities cannot hold themselves out, or be used, as valid mechanisms for discharging any general deliberative obligation that might exist to consider the perspective of the minority group writ large.Footnote ⁹ This obligation is narrower in scope than what some advocates of group solidarity might desire; in particular, it insists that the dissident minority must be free to publicly advocate for its viewpoint even on issues where most of their compatriots feel that the dissident minority is betraying the group on matters central to their survival and equal standing as a group (recall that it is dissent along this axis that makes out a dissident minority in the first place). However, the anti-tokenization principle does impose practical limits on the manner in which dissident minorities can leverage their identity to pursue their political ends—and, by implication, it likewise levies a reflexive requirement on majorities not to tokenize dissident minority allies as a means of evading an obligation to deliberate with and consider the perspective of the broader minority group.

Consider two poles that might exist in terms of how we might think of distinctive obligations relating to dissident minorities. Strong advocates of group solidarity may suggest that the dissident outlook can and perhaps should be silenced or squelched. Dissident minorities would, under this strong solidarity view, have an obligation to keep silent or even change their outlook outright to correspond to the views of the group majority. On the other side, we can imagine a pure “pluralist” position,Footnote ¹⁰ which effectively voids the dissident-minority category of any particular political obligations. Under this perspective, dissident minorities would essentially be viewed as yet another interest group among many—free to leverage whatever tools and powers it has at its disposal in pursuit of its political agenda.

Both of these poles, however, are inadequate. I take as my starting point Seyla Benhabib’s principle of “Egalitarian reciprocity”: “Members of cultural, religious, linguistic and other minorities must not, in virtue of their membership status, be entitled to lesser degrees of civil, political, economic, and cultural rights than the majority” (Benhabib Reference Benhabib2002, 19). This immediately suggests that the strong solidarity position cannot be correct, for it would significantly diminish minority group members’ rights to equal participation compared with the majority insofar as they were especially precluded from taking up certain political positions. Note that—because we are focusing on distinctive obligations imposed upon dissident minorities—this does not speak to any general obligation, shared by the majority and minority alike, that may exist not to hold or promote wrong or harmful ideologies. Recall the example, bemoaned by William Hastie and the Chicago Defender, of Black segregation supporters. It may be wrong to support racial segregation, but under the view advanced here there cannot be a special blanket prohibition on Black persons supporting segregation beyond the duties that fall upon people of any race to come to the morally correct position regarding that issue.

Minorities, as much as majorities, have the right to take dissident views in opposition to even the consensus of their own community. One reason for this is straightforward: the prevailing sentiment of historically oppressed minority groups can be wrong, and it can be wrong even regarding the dynamics of that group’s own oppression. Randall Kennedy contends that “Many prosecutors of alleged sellouts proceed as if determining which policies best advance the interests of ‘the [B]lack community’ is so easy that those who disagree with a supposed consensus are clearly either stupid, negligent, psychopathological, or traitorous” (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2008, 72–73). But this confidence may paper over legitimate differences of opinions or tactics. In many cases, positions or practices once thought to be outrageous or absurd by a minority group eventually become legitimate subjects of debate or even conventional wisdom within that group. Moreover, among both minority and majority groups, debate and contestation serve important functions as a means of testing, strengthening, and refining ideas. Where individuals feel constrained or chilled from deviating from group consensus, damaging paralysis or ossification can result, and the group may find itself unable to deliberate freely and creatively in the face of entrenched social problems (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2008, 69–70; Loury Reference Loury1995, 190). Michael Dawson thus identifies “[p]erhaps the most obvious example of a nonliberal (some would say antiliberal) political tradition within Black politics” as being “the consistent demand that individual African Americans take political stands that are perceived by the community as not harming the Black community” (Dawson Reference Dawson1995, 206).

A weaker version of the solidaristic position thus might permit dissident minorities to air their opinions within the group, but ask that they not project them in the public sphere or to outsiders (“don’t air dirty laundry”). For example, when Terry Smith, a Black law professor, defended in print (against Black student protesters) a white colleague who had used the n-word repeatedly to illustrate a classroom example of unlawful harassment,Footnote ¹¹ one commenter responded by saying that while “Professor Smith is entitled to his opinion about how educators should conduct themselves… having an opinion and putting that opinion in the newspaper are two different things” (Patrice Reference Patrice2018). The idea here seems to be that while it would have been appropriate for Professor Smith to raise his concerns privately within the Black community or in conversation with Black students, he acted unjustifiably in going “public” with his views. Bell himself experienced something similar upon publication of his famous “Serving Two Masters” article—a searing critique of the NAACP’s desegregation strategy which, he argued, ran roughshod over the interests of the very Black families it purported to advocate for (Bell Reference Bell1976). The backlash Bell endured, he later wrote, stemmed from his violation of “the unwritten civil rights Commandment: Thou shalt not publicly criticize” (Bell Reference Bell1980, ix).

Yet this position is not satisfactory either. To begin, it is almost impossible to police. In many circumstances, spaces that might be thought of as “internal” or “private” to a given group are nonetheless perfectly accessible to outsiders. Consider a Jewish anti-Zionist writer who pens a column defending her beliefs for the Jewish Daily Forward. Writing in the Forward is a means of participating in an intracommunal Jewish conversation, but there is nonetheless no firewall preventing non-Jews from reading the essay. And the losses inherent when dissident ideas aren’t allowed into the fires of public debate carry here too—how much worse off would we be if “Serving Two Masters,” a foundational text in Critical Race Theory, had never been published? More broadly, equal political participation cannot be said to exist where members of minority groups are prevented from publicly advocating their preferred policy priorities in majoritarian spaces (spaces which, almost by definition, will often be decisive in terms of practically determining the outcomes of contested political issues). To tell an anti-Zionist American Jew that they are free to advocate cutting U.S. aid to Israel in their synagogue, but not in Congress, is a nugatory concession: synagogues do not set America’s foreign aid budget. Moreover, as Shelby observes, in many cases the opportunity to “defect” away from minority-only groups and instead organize with non-group members offers a potentially important check on the group majority which might otherwise be tempted to impose too heavy or censorial a hand on its dissident members (Shelby Reference Shelby2005, 128). Once again, by specially constraining minority group members’ ability to advocate politically to nonpublic or intragroup spaces in a manner that sees no obvious parallel constraint imposed upon majority group members, this form of solidaristic demand fails Benhabib’s condition of egalitarian reciprocity.

At this point, we might suspect that the pure pluralists are correct, and there are no distinctive obligations relating to dissident minorities that could satisfy the egalitarian reciprocity criteria. I will suggest, however, that one such obligation—narrow, but not meaningless—can be identified. Dissident minorities are free to adopt dissident views, and equally free to promote those views in public debate. What they cannot (or ought not) do is hold themselves out as a valid substitute for engaging critically with the larger minority group on the issue under contestation. This is the anti-tokenization principle.

Some might immediately find an “anti-tokenization” obligation odd, at least as imposed upon dissident minorities. To instruct majorities not to tokenize minorities (dissident or otherwise) may sound intuitive enough. But being tokenized by others is generally thought of as a negative experience. So to create an “obligation” upon dissident minorities to not willingly be tokenized might sound like “an obligation to not willingly be abused.” Good advice, but who needs the instruction? To answer that, consider why being tokenized is generally a negative experience. Tokenization, under my framework, involves the use of a minority group member to further the project of a majority group actor. In many if not most cases of tokenization, the minority group member has no intrinsic interest in this project; they are being used in a wholly instrumental or transactional fashion. The paradigm case might be a student, one of the few members of her racial group at a predominantly white university, who finds her face plastered on all the college’s brochures. The college is using her in an attempt to discharge an obligation it has vis-à-vis the minority community (e.g., to be a diverse institution). From the vantage of the college, this attempt is malformed: spotlighting one of its few minority students should not suffice to discharge the obligation; they are in fact trying to circumvent it. From the vantage of the student, it rankles: she does not share the college’s ambition to (falsely) present itself as diverse, and she may feel that her presence at the university is primarily attributable to their desire to use her in this way. In the paradigm case tokenization is, and is felt as, exploitation.

Dissident minorities, however, may often find themselves in a different posture. In many cases, dissident minorities will share the project of the majority actor who is tokenizing them. The anti-Zionist Jew independently desires that anti-Zionism be more popular and legitimated in the public sphere; to the extent a non-Jew relies on her to further that ambition, it is a case of overlapping interest—more likely to be felt as collaboration than exploitation. If one of the distinctive powers of dissident minorities is to legitimize arguments and positions in majority spaces, dissident minorities may often be tempted by tokenization as a potent means of advancing their own ideological agenda.

But is this consensual and mutually desired use properly called tokenization? Yes. This is clear once one zooms back out to the vantage of the broader minority group: from their position, a nonrepresentative subgroup still is being used to discharge an obligation to engage with the group generally—that does not change just because some individual members may be content with the arrangement. It is true that, as I’ll argue below, the tokenization of dissident minorities often converts into the more readily recognizable exploitative form as soon as their opinions cease to align with their majority patrons. Nonetheless, the fact that dissident minorities at least initially occupy a potentially collaborative position vis-à-vis the phenomenon of tokenization appears distinctive—further underscoring the analytical importance of the category and how the distinctive features of dissident minorities cannot simply be subsumed under our general accounts of how to ethically relate to minority groups more broadly.

Of course, that an anti-tokenization obligation would not be redundant does not suffice to justify it. I take as a given that in any deliberative institution there is some obligation to attempt to consult and engage with diverse individuals affected by the matter under discussion and that the result of this engagement must at least include the possibility of participants changing the attitudes or positions they entered with at the inception of the dialogue (Young Reference Young2002, 38). Perhaps the validity of this obligation is contentious. But dissident minorities who seek to leverage their identities to gain “enhanced standing” or influence in public debates presuppose its existence. Their power emerges from some social agreement that having an endorsement or backing from members of these groups, in particular, is necessary or at least beneficial as a means of legitimating the ultimately arrived-upon conclusion. Brando Simeo Starkey observes that “Black skin, in race debates, is a commodity… . When a [B]lack person uses their racial identity to give authenticity to their positions, or fails to challenge others who vicariously do it for them, the use of that commodity affects the rest of the group” (Starkey Reference Starkey2015, 34). The leveraging of group membership in this fashion presupposes the importance of incorporating this sort of “knowledge through lived experience” into the public debate, and that in turn generates obligations to ensure that the duty to secure perspectival inclusion is not circumvented.

In Inclusion and Democracy, Iris Marion Young distinguishes between attempts to foster diverse representation along the axes of interests, opinions, and perspective. Interests relate to what is important or affects the prospects of a given individual or group. Opinions consist of the “principles, values, and priorities held by a person as these bear on and condition his or her judgment” on policy ends. Perspective represents the manner in which “differently positioned people have different experience, history, and social knowledge derived from that positioning” (Young Reference Young2002, 134–37). For Young, only the last of these, perspective, is entitled to special efforts to ensure it gains representation and hearing in deliberative institutions—an opinion can be unjust and an interest may be illegitimate, but there is no such thing as a wrong “perspective” (146).

Dissident minorities share the broader social position of their group compatriots—that is, share their perspective—but diverge along the axis of opinion. When dissident minorities either hold themselves out, or allow themselves to be used as, substitutes for engagement with the larger group, the effect is to substitute out the incorporation of diverse perspectives for the incorporation of already-shared opinions. Instead of engaging with the group as it is actually constituted, intergroup engagement becomes a matter of “looking over the crowd and picking out your friends”—and one can nearly always find a “friend” in any group to endorse the opinion one has already arrived at. At that point, the endeavor becomes superfluous—simply a means of validating the opinions or positions one had already taken prior to the attempt at cross-group engagement. Such acts of tokenization thus simultaneously assume and render moot the obligation to incorporate and fairly consider diverse perspectives in deliberation.

Understood in this way, the anti-tokenization obligation is distinctive to the case of dissident minorities. It emanates out of their specific political status and structural power to validate or give credence to particular positions or views under conditions of identity capitalism. Yet it does not fail Benhabib’s condition of “egalitarian reciprocity.” It does not preclude dissident minorities from engaging in political deliberation either internally within the group or in public settings, nor does it specially burden them by taking away a political resource otherwise available to either the majority or the majority of the minority.Footnote ¹²

Canvassing the examples of dissident minority power raised in the previous section, it is clear that while this distinctive power does not have to take the form of tokenization, it very often does. The “Black friend” enlisted to dispel a charge of racism, for instance, is valuable not because his is one view considered alongside his many peers who disagree. He is valuable precisely as a means of avoiding having to seriously reckon with the many peers who disagree. And the white observer who was motivated to seek out Black perspectives on racism without a prior bias towards validating a particular, already-arrived at opinion, would—if he encountered the dissident minority view at all—experience that opinion properly contextualized and proportionally situated alongside the broader set of opinions held in the Black community.

So what would it look like in practice to refuse tokenization? Starkey offers an intriguing example from 1942, when the federal Bureau of Engraving and Printing considered ending its segregated cafeteria seating policy. Most Black employees favored abolishing the practice, but some older workers disagreed. The Bureau leadership hosted meetings regarding the future of the seating policy and, aware of the divergent preferences among the Black workers, intentionally selected older, pro-segregation Black workers to serve as representatives at the meetings for the Black employee cohort writ large. But the selected representatives refused to play their role—they instead relayed the outlook of the group majority favoring integration. The Bureau eventually agreed to desegregate (Starkey Reference Starkey2015, 52).

This case is illustrative. The problem with the older Black workers is not (for our purposes) that they favored preserving the segregated seating arrangement. Nor is it that they did not sufficiently endeavor to keep their position secret from the agency’s white leadership. What would have been a problem is if they had allowed the Bureau to use them as cover for taking a position opposed by the majority of the Black employees.Footnote ¹³ The very act of choosing a group of Black workers as “representatives” indicates that the Bureau leadership understood that it needed Black perspectives to be represented in its deliberations in order for them to carry legitimacy. But it attempted to preload the outcome of those deliberations by cherry-picking those Black workers it believed already agreed with the position they favored. That typifies tokenization, and the anti-tokenization principle obligates the older Black workers to refuse to participate in it even though it would have redounded to their benefit—for the same reason why it was wrong for the Bureau itself to attempt the circumvention itself.

It is thus the case that the anti-tokenization principle can impose real political costs on dissident minorities. True, they can hold and publicly advocate for their position. But refusing tokenization sometimes may mean losing political contests they might otherwise win. That may well have been the case for the older Black workers in the example above. Had they pressed their pro-segregation opinions in the Bureau’s meetings, allowing the leadership to contend that retaining a segregated seating policy was in the interests of or desired by both whites and (at least some) Blacks, it is perhaps likely that this position would have won out.

However, even though tokenization might in some circumstances result in dissident minorities attaining political successes, the relationship forged through tokenization likely is not sufficiently robust so as to persevere in cases where the dissident minority does publicly diverge from the opinions of their majority allies. To the contrary, when they are tokenized, dissident minorities may find that their opinions are only valued transactionally—useful to the extent that they advance the goals of their non-group-member patrons and no further. Where the perspective isn’t what’s valued, dissident minorities will typically find that their “enhanced standing” falls apart the moment they express a view that diverges from their nominal allies.

Dissident minorities might contest this point. Specifically, they might suggest that their enhanced standing is not purely instrumental but rather reflects genuine respect by majority-group members regarding their substantive contributions—respect that will carry over to cases where they do find themselves forced to challenge the dominant group. By showing themselves to be “independent” or “exceptional,” the argument goes, dissident minorities earn credit with the majority that they then can redeem in cases where they do find it necessary to contest majority viewpoints. One often hears assertions of this sort by dissident minorities who agree with majority-group allies that claims of racism or antisemitism are exaggerated or deployed too freely. They contend that overzealous use of these charges—“crying wolf”—permits observers to stop taking the claims seriously, thus debilitating the struggle against “real” racism or “real” antisemitism (see Schraub Reference Schraub2016). By contrast, the dissident minorities who refrain from indulging in these false accusations retain their credibility and so will be trusted if they do raise a racism or antisemitism claim—even if that claim does cut against the case-specific preferences or judgments of the majority.

Unfortunately, in a great many cases the cynical prediction wins out, and the dissident minority finds that the chips they thought they had amassed are unable to be cashed. Consider the experience of the only Black Republican in the Senate, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. A reliable conservative vote, including on judicial nominations, Senator Scott nonetheless announced he would oppose the confirmation of Thomas Farr for a seat on the Fourth Circuit (which includes South Carolina). Scott specifically highlighted Farr’s record on race, which included a history of involvement on racial voter suppression efforts, as motivating his opposition.

In a sense, the stakes could not have been lower for Scott’s Republican colleagues. If Farr’s nomination was withdrawn, his replacement would still be nominated by President Trump and would almost certainly have essentially identical conservative views and judicial ideology. Nonetheless, 31 Republican leaders, including his Senate predecessor Jim DeMint, attacked Senator Scott as being complicit in a left-wing smear campaign against Farr. “In these difficult days, when allegations of racism are carelessly, and all too often deliberately, thrown about without foundation, the result is not racial healing, but greater racial polarization,” they wrote. “Joining with those who taunt every political opponent a ‘racist’ as a partisan political tactic to destroy their reputations is not helpful to the cause of reconciliation.” Scott stood his ground, replying that “the authors of this letter choose to ignore … facts, and instead implicate that I have been co-opted by the left and am incapable of my own decision making” (Dumain Reference Dumain2019). Ultimately, though, Scott’s criticisms had little sway among his Republican colleagues—only outgoing Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona ended up joining Scott in opposition to Farr’s nomination.

The “enhanced standing” Scott normally enjoyed by aligning with the Republican Party was a product of him being (per Arendt) an “exceptional” member of his minority group. But once he adopted (even temporarily) a critical posture towards his conservative allies, he ceased to be exceptional, and reverted to being just a regular member of the Black community. If the “earned credit” hypothesis held true, that shouldn’t have mattered—he should have been able to draw upon the well of credibility to attain a favorable reception upon raising a challenge. Yet this is not what happened: once Scott stopped being exceptional, he was treated the same as any other minority group member, and the way the GOP treats minority group members who challenge them is to dismiss them. While Scott’s patrons in the Republican Party had been happy to hold him up as proof that the GOP had Black supporters, they did not actually have any particular commitment to engaging with the Black community—even nominal “allies” in those communities—in any circumstance where it might generate challenge or change.

This conclusion does not depend on viewing Scott as being disingenuous regarding his avowed positions. We can assume that he was earnest in generally concurring with his party’s view of racism and was equally earnest when he encountered a particular case he decided required a different stance. But insofar as his opinions were valued by other conservatives not based on a genuine commitment to considering Black perspectives on matters of anti-Black racism but rather as an opportunistic means of discharging that perceived obligation by cherry-picking ideologically amenable representatives, it is unsurprising that he would be cut loose once he ceased to fill that role.

* * *

Much of the literature on internal minorities focuses on intersectional cases—women in dissident religious sects, LGBT members of racial minorities, and so on. The issues raised in such cases center around important questions of accommodation, carve-outs, and exit. Dissident minorities—differentiated from the majority of their group not by identity but by ideology—raise different questions, which tend to emerge more in the processes through which issues are deliberated than in the substantive outcomes ultimately arrived at. Dissident minorities face genuine points of vulnerability and exclusion and, rightly, can push back against aggressive solidarity-based demands that insist they suppress or hide their opinions in deference to the group majority. Yet they also have opportunities to leverage their dissident status, offering themselves out as substitutes by which non-group members can functionally evade their obligation to consider minority perspectives even as their political value trades directly upon the perceived obligation to engage with those groups. Members of the majority have an obligation to not tokenize dissident minorities in this way. And while dissident minorities can rightly object to efforts seeking to squelch their right to equal participation in the political realm, they nonetheless do have a parallel obligation to abjure the opportunities offered by tokenization.