A post by Yunqing/Isaac Han

In this post, I discuss how we might use our social imaginings to advance social equality. Social imaginings are representations or reconstructions of an aspect of a society’s past, present, or future, e.g., class relations, inclusivity, event, an individual’s feelings and motivations (adapted from Medina 252). I focus here on social imaginings of the past that aim at past realities.[1] For example, when one imagines that there was actually no racial inequality in the past in the U.S. as part of a process of historical reconstruction one aims at reality (even if, in this case, one misses one’s aim), whereas when one entertains counterfactually the idea that there was no racial inequality in the past in the U.S. and then imagines how one might act in that alternate past, one is not aiming at reality. I focus on the former, reality-aiming imaginings (hereon just “social imaginings”) and discuss whether any such imaginings should be discouraged in social discourse.