Constructing Multiracial Democracy: To Deliberate or Not to Deliberate?

Deliberative democratic theorists have defended deliberation as a normative and procedural form of democracy that enables people with deep moral disagreements to engage each other across those differences. Recently, Robert GoodingWilliams has identified deliberative democracy as the most fruitful approach for establishing a race-conscious multicultural democracy. 1 For Gooding-Williams, the model of deliberative democracy that has hitherto been developed primarily as a way to establish a democratic politics in a morally plural society can be successfully applied to culturally and racially plural societies. However, Lynn Sanders worries that deliberative democracy is limited as a theory and practice of democracy given the deep racial and class divides that haunt the United States. 2