The Virtuous Citizens: Who Can Speak Up?

• In Event: Truth and Force

Abstract

Standing up for democracy requires speaking up. Both in scholarly work and everyday speech, virtuous citizens are portrayed as those willing to engage in practices of contestation to resist governmental abuse. In this paper, I argue that political virtue is more costly and riskier to some people than others, and, in particular, it is more onerous for those already marginalized. I examine three ways in which the expectation of standing up for democracy can have worrisome implications by: 1) entrenching socio-economic disparities and reifying power structures, 2) raising questions about private domination, and 3) unwittingly reproducing stereotypes about who can embody the ideal of the virtuous citizen. In so doing, I do not mean to argue against the many merits of contestation but to think critically about how we narrate the expectation that others protest and resist with us.

Author

• Yuna Blajer de la Garza, Loyola University, Chicago