My White Problem -- And Ours

>>>>> "stephen" == Stephen McRae <[email protected]> writes:

Stephen,

First, thanks for the feedback.

  stephen> I would agree with most of this article except for the basis of
  stephen> fighting white dominance.  " our love for the oppressed other"
  stephen> is not a strong enough basis to continue a struggle.  

I think that's a misreading of what I said.

I don't claim (or, rather, I don't want to be heard to claim) that the
only motivation to work for racial justice is "love for the oppressed
other". Rather, if you read what I said a bit more carefully, I was making
a point about the moral psychology of a particular group -- white men --
some of whom are unwittingly caught up in oppressive structures. That is
to say, as a white man I can do *very little* to avoid reaping the
benefits of both race and gender oppression. In that sense, I am trapped
against my best intentions.

That creates, in my view, a kind of weird moral psychology for white men
who want to resist these oppressive structures. Perhaps the most important
aspect of this psychology is a real inability to discern reality clearly,
particularly the oppressive structures in that reality. My point in the
piece was -- roughly following the moral psychology of Saint Augustine, by
whom I've been very influenced in this regard -- that by breaking and
reforming the patterns of our affective attachments, white men could learn
to discern reality properly, that is, by learning to attend to those from
whose oppression we benefit (even against our will), we could learn to see
the world in a new way.

In that new way of seeing the world, we might be able to, as I said in the
essay you quoted from, "form new attachments of justice and care and
concern" -- which, I suggest, are the enduring motivations to struggle for
racial justice.

But, stepping back, I'm less skeptical than you are about the persistence
of love (we're not talking about *romantic love*, after all) as a
motivation, I suppose. There are fairly canonical cases of human
willingness to sacrifice based on love of the other. I don't see why,
necessarily, that can't be a motive in the struggle for justice.

           First it
  stephen> victimises the other by infering that they need help as apposed
  stephen> to we need to change.  

Hmm, well, it might *imply* that the other needs help; and you have
certainly inferred that from what I said. But I don't agree. The import of
most of what I say in this essay is that I, as a white man, not only *need
and want* to change, but that needing and wanting may not be sufficient to
change, given the effective conditions of oppressive socialization.

I also disagree with your 2 unstated premisses: 

  1. Recognizing the needs of others just is taking up a condescending,
     paternalistic attitude vis-a-vis them.

  2. Paternalistic attitudes necessarily victimize their object.

(1) seems plainly wrong to me. Suppose my neighbor, who by every
socio-economic measure is more powerful than I am, is mugged by a third
party and beaten badly. If I recognize and act upon the needs of my
neighbor -- say, taking him to the hospital -- have I thereby adopted a
paternalistic attitude toward him? Or, let's vary it: suppose the
situation is reversed and I am mugged and beaten. Does my neighbor adopt
(or express) a paternalistic attitude toward me by helping me out in my
hour of need? It seems not. At least, not necessarily.

Further, *recognizing* and responding appropriately to the needs of others
is a fundamental aspect of human moral agency. (And the inability to
recognize the needs of oppressed others, or to recognize the causes of
their needfulness, is a major component of the oppressor's moral
psychology -- and part of what motivated me to write this essay.) That's
not to say that the work of achieving racial justice, for example, is
exhausted by recognition-and-response; but for white men, socialized to
take their place unquestioningly within oppressive institutions and
structures, it's a fairly good candidate for "the first step".

Re: (2) -- this may be true, it depends on what we mean by victimize,
which is plurally ambiguous. Let's assume it means, roughly, "to do
unjustifiable harm". So does it always do unjustifiable harm to the person
about whom one has a paternalistic attitude? 

I can think of at least two general cases where it does not: (1) we often
adopt paternalistic attitudes to those who cannot exercise autonomy fully:
some animals, some humans, including the very young and old, the very
infirm, those with some kinds of developmental disability; (2) people very
remote from us (that is, people who exist outside of the social networks
within which my attitudes find effective expression -- granted, this is an
increasingly abstract point, given the facts of globalization, my
particular social location as an American citizen, and so on).

So, it's not *necessarily* the case that paternalist attitudes do harm;
they may, but they may not. 

In this specific case, I think that you're right to suggest that white
men, for example, do unjustifiable harm to oppressed others by adopting
paternalistic attitudes toward them, at least inasmuch as those attitudes
make a public difference in their behavior (but maybe this last
qualification is wrong; it could be that merely having that attitude is
harmful to the other...but I'm unsure about this).

I would not want my claims about *my* (at some point) moral psychology to
be read as my urging others to adopt paternalistic attitudes toward, say,
women and people of color. But it's not clear to me that that's what I've
done.

           Second it does not give universal
  stephen> incentive for everyone to make a difference.  

I don't know that that is true; but let's assume that it is. So what? I
mean, I was writing specifically about my situation, trying to see if I
could make it more generally applicable to other people (mostly white men)
in the same situation. Thus, I wasn't aiming for universal motivations,
merely particular ones.

         What is happening
  stephen> is wrong not because it is happening to others.  It is wrong
  stephen> because you would not stand for it to happen to you.  

That's one way (I think) to see things. But there are many other ways,
some of which may be preferable to that way. At any rate, it's not the
kind of moral framework I typically employ, so it doesn't much interest
me. But, to repeat, part of my point is that *this* framework (the one by
which harms are harms with reference to one's own sense of moral
inviolability, say) does not motivate white men out of the moral
psychology of the oppressor, within which they simply cannot *see* harm to
others, at all. If you don't *see* the harm being done, systematically, to
others, it won't motivate you to think about whether you would "stand for
[that harm] to happen to you". That becomes a perfectly moot point,
vis-a-vis moral motivation.

And we see this feature of the situation in racist discourse all the
time. White people don't see the life chances of people of color as being
structured by unjustifiable harm, but, rather, as a result of some
property (or missing property) of people of color: they're lazy, unlucky,
stupid, alien, whatever. There's no chance for the 'it's wrong in their
case because it would be wrong in mine' move to get deployed because they
don't *see harm*. The see inferior genes, inferior cultures, inferior
people. Until or unless *that* inability to recognize the other is
altered, I think moral moves like the one you suggest don't have a chance
to motivate.

Thanks for writing.

Best,
Kendall Clark
-- 
Jazz is only what you are. -- Louis Armstrong
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