The Surprising History of the Ideology of Choice
But as Rosenfeld notes in the epilogue of The Age of Choice, some thinkers and activists, especially Black feminists, have long argued that choice is a limited way to imagine liberation. The Black feminist legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, for example, describes how “black feminists at a 1994 pro-choice conference” developed the idea of “reproductive justice,” which demands not just individual choice about whether to have children, but also the socioeconomic resources to raise children “in safe, healthy, and supportive environments.” All choices occur “within a social context,” Roberts writes, “including inequalities of wealth and power.” Those inequalities determine who can afford to raise a child, or who can actually access abortion care. Roberts thus calls for a shift from a politics that emphasizes “choice” to one that emphasizes “social justice” by combating the “intersecting race, gender, and class oppressions” that limit people’s freedom.
Simply having the right to choose, in other words—especially consumer choice in the economic arena—doesn’t offer real self-determination without the financial resources and social and political power to make meaningful decisions about one’s life. All the consumer options on Amazon don’t make people free. Social structures and hierarchies set the boundaries for choice. For that reason, civil rights and anti-colonial activists across the twentieth century developed rich critiques of oppression and alternative visions of freedom that focused on socioeconomic equality, not just choice. Freedom, such activists insisted, depends on things like the power to form a labor union, the right to health care and housing, and the end of environmental racism. Those “freedom dreams,” in Robin D.G. Kelley’s resonant phrase, are worth remembering today.
Rosenfeld concludes by hoping that our narrow “attachment to choice” can expand to envision “new kinds of politics,” new forms of freedom. But we don’t necessarily need to invent entirely new ideas. Many past activists in the labor, civil rights, and feminist movements saw freedom as something that exists not only in individual choice, but in equality, solidarity, and the collective project of transforming the social, political, legal, and economic systems that subordinate some to others. As the Combahee River Collective put it: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” The challenge today, in the face of both ever-proliferating consumer choices and intensifying plutocracy, is to make the idea of equality—economic and political—central to a widely shared understanding of freedom.