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Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Moral Education Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjme20 In the name of morality: moral responsibility, whiteness and social justice education Barbara Applebaum a a Syracuse University Published online: 15 Aug 2006. To cite this article: Barbara Applebaum (2005) In the name of morality: moral responsibility, whiteness and social justice education, Journal of Moral Education, 34:3, 277-290, DOI: 10.1080/03057240500206089 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057240500206089 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions In the name of morality: moral responsibility, whiteness and social justice education Barbara Applebaum * Syracuse University, USA This paper argues that the traditional conception of moral responsibility authorizes and supports denials of white complicity. First, what is meant by the traditional conception of moral responsibility is delineated and the enabling and disenabling characteristics of this view are highlighted. Then, three seemingly good, antiracist discourses that white students often engage in are discussed the discourse of colour-blindness, the discourse of meritocracy and the discourse of individual choice and analysed to show how they are all grounded in the traditional conception of moral responsibility. The limitations of these discourses are drawn and how these discourses work to conceal white complicity is established. Finally, implications for social justice education are discussed. It was my passion for correcting injustice that made it so difficult for me to accept my white privilege. (Jane, student journal) In a course on schooling and diversity, the topic for the week was different meanings of racism. I asked my students, Who comes to your mind when you think of white people who are complicit in sustaining racism? Most of my white students gave examples of overtly prejudiced people or groups the Klu Klux Klan, the television sitcom character Archie Bunker, someone they happened to know. Significantly, they mentioned anyone except themselves. One student, however, meekly responded, all of us. When challenged, this student explained that whereas racism in the past was all about organizations like the Klu Klux Klan, Archie Bunker types and Jim Crow laws, today racism is more subtle and often not seen by those who do not have to experience it. This opened up a heated exchange in which I attempted to explain the different meanings of racism, accentuating what certain understandings of social injustice they make available and what they keep hidden. Rather than being willing to engage in the different meanings of racism and their implications, many of these predominantly white students were obstinately focused on denying their complicity. *Syracuse University, School of Education, 354 Huntington Hall, Syracuse, New York, 13244, USA. Email: bappleba@syr.edu Journal of Moral Education Vol. 34, No. 3, September 2005, pp. 277290 ISSN 0305-7240 (print)/ISSN 1465-3877 (online)/05/030277-14 # 2005 Journal of Moral Education Ltd DOI: 10.1080/03057240500206089 D o w n l o a d e d
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They were more concerned with proving how they were good antiracist whites than they were in trying to understand how systemic oppression works and the possibility that they might have a role in sustaining such systems. In his journal, a white student wrote, In any situation you cannot be held responsible for something that you did not do. Even on the smallest scale, if you dont think that youve done anything wrong, then you will be reluctant to change or to try and examine the problem. In their study of how white subjects perceive civil rights and equal opportunity, Nancy Ditomaso and her colleagues (2003) attempt to demonstrate that one of the ironic characteristics of white privilege is that white people do not have to think of themselves as racist for racial inequality to be reproduced (p. 189). The intimated irony underlying what these researchers found is not that blatant, overt racism can be implemented without the perpetrators awareness, but rather that the subtle but lethal types of covert racism can be maintained even when whites believe themselves to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Indeed, it is my contention that it is especially when white people believe themselves to be good and moral antiracist citizens that they may be contributing to the perpetuation of systemic injustice. Although what I will refer to as the traditional conception of moral responsibility has many enabling features that ground such values as autonomy, respect for persons and equality, such a conception of moral responsibility can also authorize denials of complicity on the part of my white students. In what follows, I first describe what I mean by the traditional conception of moral responsibility. This is not to imply that any particular moral philosopher or theorist holds this view, but rather the point is to emphasize that it is a view widely assumed by my students and that aspects of this view are implied and tacitly supported in the many debates around the meaning of moral responsibility taken up by moral theorists. These both enabling and disenabling features of the traditional conception of moral responsibility are evident in moral theorizing about moral responsibility, not so much in debates around what it means to be a moral agent but, more conspicuously, in discussions around the criteria that make one morally accountable for particular actions. Then I will turn to three seemingly good, antiracist discourses that my white students engage in around issues of difference and inequality the discourse of colour-blindness, the discourse of meritocracy and the discourse of choice. I argue that the traditional conception of moral responsibility authorizes these discourses and contributes to camouflaging their limitations. By giving examples of how these discourses conceal systemic oppression, hinder the development of cross-racial understanding, veil the relational dimension of the social construction of race and promote a race to innocence, I illustrate how such ostensibly moral discourses work to conceal the very complicity that some social justice educators endeavour to expose. The traditional conception of moral responsibility While various ethical theories have been proposed and debated, there is a long history in Western philosophical thought of a conception of moral responsibility that forefronts, on the one hand, individual choice, fault and intentions, and, on the other 278 B. Applebaum D o w n l o a d e d
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hand, rational deliberation and the possibility of transcending lifes contingencies in order to achieve sufficient distance to deliberate about them objectively. Aristotle (382323 BCE), perhaps one of the earliest philosophers to explicitly discuss moral responsibility, conceives the capacity for rational and free decisions as the primary characteristic of moral responsibility. Such rational and voluntary actions have two distinctive features the control condition and the cognitive condition. For Aristotle (350 BCE/1985), two types of excusing conditions undermine moral responsibility coercion and ignorance. Regarding the former, for a person to be held morally responsible for a particular action, the action must have originated in the agent and not have been externally compelled. In terms of the latter condition, Aristotle maintained that moral responsibility requires that the agent must have been aware of what s/he was doing and intended to bring it about. Such a conception of moral responsibility matches ordinary intuitions regarding when agents are or are not morally responsible and demonstrates the tight connection between moral responsibility and moral accountability. One can only be attributed praise or blame if one is the origin of ones action (acts freely), knows or can be expected to know what one is doing and acts out of relevant sorts of beliefs and intentions (cognitive condition). One of the ways in which Aristotles conception of moral responsibility can be understood is to say it is a merit-based view of responsibility. According to this view, praise or blame is appropriate when the agent merits or deserves moral responses. In this sense merit is intimately related with moral responsibility. Most contemporary philosophers have directed their attention to the first condition as debates have generated around the question of free will and determinism. If praise and blame involve merit, how can anyone be held morally responsible if determinism is true? One line of thinking has been to focus on the ability or inability to do otherwise (PAP, or principle of alternate possibilities). Harry Frankfurt (1969), however, has moved this discussion in new directions when he challenged PAP and argued for a sense of free will and control that has more to do with internal psychological processes (and focuses on the cognitive condition) rather than a reliance on the ability or inability to do otherwise. Frankfurt derived a theory in which the source of control for actions emanates from the ability of one to choose to act from some desires but not others. In this sense, ones actions originate from ones real self and not something foreign to the person. There are problems raised by Frankfurts theory (Watson, 1975; Fischer & Ravizza, 1998) but two points remain constant throughout these discussions: 1) the focus has been on individual accountability; and 2) the type of actions about which one could be said to be responsible for were not the type of actions or inactions that are exemplified in my classroom. (Questions about collective moral responsibility and moral luck complicate this body of scholarship but are beyond the scope of this essay.) Moreover, all too often the understanding of subjectivity that is assumed in such accounts of responsibility is a subject that deliberates without regard to its social location, i.e., race, gender, sexual orientation, class and so on. For example, while he Moral responsibility, whiteness and social justice education 279 D o w n l o a d e d
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has revised his theory since its original conception, Rawls (1971) set out a process of hypothetical moral deliberation as represented in his original position. Based on the Kantian imperative to treat the other always as an end in itself and never solely as a means, Rawls original position is a hypothetical situation in which rational calculators would, under the veil of ignorance, not know contingent factors about their concrete lives that would be morally irrelevant to their choice of moral principles of justice. Information about ones race, sexual orientation or gender would be abstracted and so rational deliberators would, in theory, choose principles of social relations that they believe would be best for whatever social location anyone would be positioned in. Communitarians (for example, Sandel, 1981) have taken liberals, such as Rawls, to task for assuming humanity to be rootless, atomistic and detached from society. Instead, communitarians call for a conception of persons that is embedded or situated in social relationships. Whether liberals have adequately met this charge is an issue that will be not be addressed here. If, for the purposes of this discussion, we refer to this loosely tied group of ideas around moral responsibility as the traditional conception of moral responsibility, it is clear that the traditional conception both takes discrete individuals as the primary unit of analysis and the definition of moral responsibility is construed entirely from the perpetrators perspective. This is significant because how we understand moral responsibility will greatly affect not only what we perceive we are morally responsible for but also what we perceive as morally wrong. For example, perceiving racial discrimination from a perpetrators rather than a victims perspective has enormous ramifications. In his discussion of antidiscrimination law, Alan David Freeman (1995) argues that the causation requirement in law, along with a strong reliance on fault, serves to draw attention away from the pattern of conditions that a victim perceives to be associated with discrimination. The concept of racial discrimination may be approached from the perspective of either its victim or its perpetrator. From the victims perspective, racial discrimination describes those conditions of actual social existence as a member of a perpetual underclass. This perspective includes both the objective conditions of life (lack of jobs, lack of money, lack of housing) and the consciousness associated with those objective conditions (lack of choice and lack of human individuality in being forever perceived as a member of a group rather than as an individual). The perpetrator perspective sees racial discrimination not as conditions but as actions, or series of actions, inflicted on the victim by the perpetrator. The focus is more on what particular perpetrators have done or are doing to some victim than on the overall life situation of the victim class. (p. 29) Similarly, Charles R. Lawrence III (1987) emphasizes that the perpetrator perspective, with its emphasis on intent, restricts discussions of discrimination and obscures the collective dynamics of systemic racism. When moral responsibility is perceived from the perpetrators perspective alone, what particular agents have intentionally done or are doing to victims is emphasized and the victims perspective is minimized. Moral responsibility from the perpetrators perspective is focused on the individual source of fault and, thus, ones complicity in systemic webs of 280 B. Applebaum D o w n l o a d e d
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oppression can be ignored. If one is not the direct cause, then one is not at fault and bears no personal responsibility for the act. Taking a victims perspective, however, is less focused on individual intention and more concerned with impact or outcomes and, thus, more able to spotlight patterns of behaviour that one may only indirectly or even unintentionally support. In a 1996 Journal of Moral Education article, Dwight Boyd developed a critique of the traditional conception of moral responsibility and the conception of personhood it relies upon that differs from the communitarian critique of liberalism. Boyd argued that contemporary approaches to moral education have focused on moral matters from the point of view of neutral individuals and ignored morally relevant relationships that are group-based, and into which individuals are thrown or constituted. This is not a mere oversight, according to Boyd: Exclusive concentration on the individual perspective on moral relationships does not only focus our attention in directions not very helpful for the really serious moral problems of our times. It does far worse. I want to suggest that it actively functions to occlude recognition of our own subject position within the systemic oppressive relationships between groups that we supposedly find morally problematic. In particular, I submit that for those with the advantaged position within such relationships it prevents us from seeing, acknowledging and struggling with how to change our embeddedness in, and identification with the interests of, the group(s) that contribute(s) to the oppression of another group (or groups). (Boyd, 1996, p. 28) This individual perspective protects the privileged by underpinning a sense of moral responsibility that works against the recognition of group-based moral problems and by absolving the privileged individual when that recognition is brought out in the open. More recently, in his 2004 Kohlberg Memorial Lecture, Boyd reiterates this provocative warning. The traditional conception of moral responsibility and, in particular, the conception of the subject the liberal individual as Boyd calls it upon which it is grounded, actively function to conceal group-based systemic harms and protect the privileged by stopping at the boundaries of individual intention. Boyd points to four characteristics of the liberal individual subject that together work to hide privileged individuals complicity in systemic oppression. Those four characteristics are: 1. Ontological uniqueness individuals are discrete and their boundaries do not overlap in their interactions (2004, p. 9). 2. Symmetrical positioning all individuals are equal and all positions are symmetrical. 3. Intentional rational agency all individuals share the same agentic potential (p. 10) and agency is the result of rational choice. All action is predicated only of individual subjective locations and only in so far as they engage in intentional behaviour to effect some desired state in the world (p. 10). 4. Capacity for transcendence autonomy is perceived as being able to overcome external constraints and entails the possibility of standing outside of any existing contingencies (p. 10). Moral responsibility, whiteness and social justice education 281 D o w n l o a d e d
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The perspective of the liberal individual that forefronts rational choice, individual intentions and a capacity for transcendence not only does not accommodate group- based harms of systemic oppression but also works to conceal the complicity of individuals in the perpetuation of systemic injustice. But how does this translate into everyday life? My predominantly white students seem to remain steadfastly entrenched in the traditional conception of moral responsibility and its concomitant reliance on the concept of the liberal individual. I suggest that this encourages and authorizes their denials of complicity and I submit that it does so in two ways. First, because my white students believe they are taking a moral position (they have morality on their side) that is culturally sanctioned, they are less likely to be open to challenges to their views. Second, the notion of moral responsibility that they adhere to and the understanding of the subject it is grounded in allow them to continue to ignore their own social locatedness and its relationship to the perpetuation of systems of social injustice, intention notwithstanding. In order to illustrate this claim I turn to three common, seemingly good antiracist discourses that my white students engage in around issues of difference and inequality the discourse of colour-blindness, the discourse of meritocracy and the discourse of individual choice. I will briefly explain how the traditional conception of moral responsibility authorizes these discourses and then demonstrate how such ostensibly moral, antiracist discourses conspire to camouflage the very complicity that some social justice educators endeavour to expose. The discourse of colour-blindness 1 I treat all my students the same black, white, green or purple. I dont see their skin colour. According to the traditional conception of moral responsibility, this is a moral stance. The underlying assumption, most cogently expressed in Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.s (1986) dream that his children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character is appealing because, ideally, race should not be a disparaging factor in the way people are treated. Each person should be treated as an individual. Ignoring colour, thus, is like ignoring bias and from this perspective colour-blindness is a moral stance because people of colour are not treated differently. In fact, from this perspective, colour-consciousness becomes a manifestation of racism and taboo. The colour-blind perspective is the point of view in which racial group membership is considered irrelevant to the ways that individuals are treated. While in many everyday situations it seems plausible to believe that people of colour would not want to be treated differently because of the colour of their skin, colour- blindness is not always antiracist and may sometimes perpetuate racism. The discourse of colour-blindness stems in great part from an assumption that one can transcend ones social contingencies and that ones social location not only does not matter, but also should not matter in moral deliberations. Recent studies 282 B. Applebaum D o w n l o a d e d
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(Schofield, 1997; Lewis, 2001; Bonilla-Silva, 2003a, 2003b; Pollock, 2004) have shown, however, that not only is the colour-blind perspective not always inherently good, but such a framework may even be hazardous to the achievement of social justice. First, colour-blindness obscures the positive cultural contributions of race to individual identity and, as Charles Taylor (1992) so poignantly argues, ignores a potential vital need for recognition. Amanda Lewis (2001) ethnographic study of the hidden curriculum in a progressive school that prides itself on its colour-blind ideology demonstrates how teachers who downplayed the salience of race also limited the type of multicultural curriculum they implemented in their class, especially when there were only a few students of colour under their tutelage. In addition, many parents of the student in this school contested what little multicultural curriculum was incorporated with the justification, We should all be Americans, Talking about race is divisive, or Im so tired of Martin Luther King! (Lewis, 2001, p. 788). Second, colour-blindness not only ignores the positive contributions of racialized groups, but also ignores or denies the systemic harms that people of colour experience. In a world where race still matters, refusing to take race into consideration results in the dismissal of systemic oppression. As Audrey Thompson (1999) succinctly puts it, In a multicultural and racist society, whites refusal to acknowledge color will sometimes mean refusing to recognize the obstacles facing people of color or to see that, depending on the context, different ethnic and racial groups may have distinct needs and interests. (p. 143) For example, at the outset of her study, Lewis (2001) was warned by some of the teachers to ignore some of the complaints of racism that she might hear from one of the students of colour. One teacher told Lewis, You should know one thing. We have one mixed-race child Shes dealing with a lot of fourth-grade girl stuff but she tends to play the race card a lot (p. 785). Another teacher contended that there was no racism in her classes. She admitted to sometimes hearing certain remarks but these were more just kid put-downs than slurs with racist intentions. Yet when Lewis spoke to this girls mother, the racist complaints could not be so effortlessly glossed over. As the teachers and principal routinely interpreted these taunts as race-neutral fourth-grade girl stuff, the mother made clear that the victims grades began to suffer and her school experience deteriorated significantly. That the colour-blind perspective can obscure the systemic harms people of colour experience is clearly illustrated in a study by Jennifer Pierce (2003) with regard to attitudes around affirmative action in a predominantly white law firm. Pierce documents how a belief in colour-blindness and a focus on individual acts, rather than on the social pattern they form, prevented white middle-class attorneys from understanding why affirmative action policies in their law firm were not effective. Pierce contrasts the narratives of the few AfricanAmerican attorneys who were hired under affirmative action policies but then subsequently left the firm, with Moral responsibility, whiteness and social justice education 283 D o w n l o a d e d
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the explanations that the white lawyers gave for why the AfricanAmerican lawyers were not retained. The white attorneys maintained that the African-American lawyers left the firm because they found a better job and/or because they just didnt fit in. Those who left, however, point to endless, everyday systemic patterns of bias that they experienced working for the firm. While the white lawyers did not deny that these incidents occurred, they saw them more as isolated acts that had no racist intention. Indeed, the discourse of colour-blindness infused their speech and served to exonerate them from racist practices. Pierce explains that what looked individual and isolated to members of a privileged group will often be experienced as part of the web of systemic oppression from the perspective of the marginalized (p. 211). This helps to explain, according to Pierce, why the white attorneys that she interviewed believed that they were innocent of racism. In another study, Janet Ward Schofield (1997), who investigates the many negative consequences of the colour-blind ideology in a school, finds that the suspension rates for students of colour were four times as high as for the white students. However, because the administrators claimed they did not notice colour, the discrepancy in suspension rates was never raised as an issue for investigation. When the discrepancy was brought to the attention of faculty, some mentioned that because they did not focus on the race of a child, the discrepancy was something they never noticed. Moreover, when students of colour lodged complaints, the teachers would dismiss the complaint stressing how discrimination was impossible because they never noticed race. Thus, the colour-blind perspective of the school was instrumental in preventing the examination of a possible racist policy. Third, in so far as the colour-blind framework obscures the dominant norms that pervade social interactions and institutions, it sustains the invisibility of such dominant norms. An AfricanAmerican father once told Beverly Tatum (2003), I hear teachers say all the time, Im not prejudiced. I dont notice differences and I treat these children all the same and what I want to know is the same as what? The colour-blind approach ignores the contemporary social reality of racism and obscures not only the race of the victims of racism but also dispenses with the need to interrogate whiteness as the invisible norm by which others are marginalized. In fact, the assumption that one can be colour-blind and transcend social contingencies is a privilege that only the experiences of the dominant group confirm. Research indicates that many white students have given little or no thought to what it means to be white (Frankenberg, 1993; Delpit, 1995; McIntosh, 1997; McIntyre, 1997; Levine-Rasky, 2000; Sleeter, 2001; Hytten & Warren, 2003). My white students can give an autobiography of their lives and their race hardly ever, if at all, factors into how they explain their achievements. Being white means rarely or never having to think about it. In the United States, for example, the police do not profile white people because of their race, yet young black males experience or live under the expectation that they could experience such discrimination on a daily basis. Such taken for granted privileges lead white people to believe that race can be ignored. In contrast, when I ask my students of colour to recount their autobiographies, their 284 B. Applebaum D o w n l o a d e d
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racial identities permeate their experiences and help to explain the obstacles that they have had to overcome to achieve their successes. If the perspective of the liberal individual entails that people be seen and treated as an individual and if in everyday experiences it is predominantly white people who enjoy this privilege, then taking up this perspective can give rise to ignoring the vast majority of subtle, unintentional and often unconscious racist practices that are pervasive in North American society today. The discourse of colour-blindness presupposes a world composed of atomistic individuals whose actions are outside of and apart from the social and historical contingencies from which they are constructed and, therefore, that race can be ignored. In a world where some people are not treated as individuals, either overtly or covertly, to perceive the individual without consideration of ones social group location functions to hide systemic oppression, to keep whiteness invisible and to obscure the complicity of whites in sustaining social injustice. Rather than being the opposite of racism, colour-blindness has become a new form of subtle racism that masquerades as a moral stance (Carr, 1997). The discourse of meritocracy If they deserve it, they should get it. According to the traditional conception of moral responsibility, this is a moral stance. Colour-blind racial ideology works with the discourse of meritocracy to support negative stereotypes rather than to challenge them. Meritocracy assumes that ones social location can and should be ignored. The colour-blind framework makes it more likely that white students will see the opportunity structure as open and institutions as impartial or objective in their function. Everyone has the opportunity to succeed, one of my students argued. Similarly, one of the informants in a study of university students by Melanie Bush (2004), comments, People choose their own fate. If youre white, green, blue, whatever colour your eyes are or the texture of your hair, your intelligence and hard work makes or breaks you (p. 60). Bound by a colour-blind mentality, such students often end up explaining inequality by either blaming the individual or his/her subordinate group and its cultural characteristics for the resultant lower economic and academic achievement (Ryan, 1971). The conception of subjectivity that supports the belief in meritocracy also supports arguments against affirmative action. An argument my white students often proffer to justify the charge of reverse discrimination goes something like this: Look I am all for civil rights but why should I have to suffer for the sins of other white people who were racist? I am only second generation in this country and so my family never even owned slaves. I didnt have anything to do with that stuff and now I am being made to pay for those atrocities. Its not fair. These same white students often add that black beneficiaries of affirmative action are not even actual victims and they require, as in law, that such supposed victims prove the legitimacy of their victim status. Moral responsibility, whiteness and social justice education 285 D o w n l o a d e d
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These arguments gain their force on the grounds of a conception of self that ignores ones current social group location. The ability to deny the presence and power of current everyday racism and the undeserved benefits that some groups accrue at the expense of others is premised on the ability to see oneself as an individual and not to see oneself as white. To see oneself as white and to interrogate what that means would undermine the appeal of the innocent victim upon which arguments about reverse discrimination are based. Moreover, once subjects are not conceived as devoid of their social group location, systemic patterns of oppression become more apparent and the current victim status of people of colour today becomes undeniable. The discourse of meritocracy functions to marginalize certain groups of people by allowing whites to direct attention away from their own privilege and to ignore larger patterns of racial injustice. The assumption that people get ahead as a result of individual effort or merit conceals how social, economic and cultural privileges facilitate the success of some groups of people but not others. Moreover, it allows the privileged to see themselves as innocent bystanders rather than participants in a system that creates, maintains and reproduces social injustice. Finally, if one believes that everyones life outcomes are a result of individual merit, then it is easy to conclude that those who fail to achieve have only themselves to blame. In this way, the discourse of meritocracy contributes to the constitution of certain groups of people as Other. The discourse of individual choice If I didnt intend it, I shouldnt be responsible. According to the traditional conception of moral responsibility, this is a moral stance. One way in which the relational dimension of race is obscured by the traditional conception of moral responsibility involves the discourse of individual choice. Peggy McIntosh alludes to this when she notes that, as a white person, I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. (1997, p. 292). When whites assume that moral responsibility hinges only on what one chooses to do, the relationship between their own lives and the lives of blacks and other non-whites can be ignored. Let me give an illustration. In their ethnographic study about how whiteness gets reified in courses that teach about social justice, Kathy Hytten and John Warren (2003) record the reflections of one of their subjects, Phillip, who in recounting his efforts to remove the confederate flag from use by the rebel mascot of his former (high) school, tells how he and his black high school friend worked together to collect hundreds of protest signatures to present to the principal. Phillip is clearly aware how moral praise was differentially distributed to him and his friend. Hytten and Warren quote from Phillips journal, As word of the petition spread, articles began to appear in the school and local papers. Many people regarded me as deserving praise. Few said the same about my friend. I, it seems, was treated as an individual, as a particular person engaging in specific acts 286 B. Applebaum D o w n l o a d e d
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meant to help others. My friend was regarded more as another underprivileged black kid spending more time rebelling against authority than taking care of his grades, getting a job, and so on. (p. 87) The important insight that Phillip offers involves a new way in which he interprets this event. Phillip was always aware of the racist ways in which his friend was treated. What he understands now after having taken a course on race and social injustice is the ways in which he was privileged in this situation. As Hytten and Warren explain, Through reconsidering this personal experience, Phillip uncovers what he calls the interlocking oppressions of active, visible forms, as well as invisible, embedded ones. He offers, prior to this reflection, I had failed to note that the racism in this experience came not just in the guise of individual acts of negative regard of my friend, but also in widespread and unthinking positive reaction to me. (p. 87) This narrative poignantly illustrates Peter McLarens contention that, White identity serves implicitly as the positive mirror image to the explicit negative identities imposed upon non-whites (1999, p. 43). But it also demonstrates that a focus on individual choice functions to obscure the full understanding of how systemic privilege contributes to the marginalization of Others. To focus primarily on individual choice allows one to ignore how race is relational, how racial identity gets constructed and how one might be implicated in that construction, regardless of ones good intentions. Conclusion Stuart Hall (1990) defines ideology as a narrative that frames how we understand and make sense of our material and social existence. Ideologies are collective property (Lewis, 2001, p. 800) that work most effectively when they appear natural and one is least aware of them. If ideologies are widely available chains of meaning, stories, or narratives (p. 800), it would be essential to interrogate those ideologies that hide but also support social inequality. Moreover, because these ideologies are culturally sanctioned and can be taken for granted, they impede critical interrogation. When these ideologies are supported by a moral common sense, they become even more difficult to critique. It is important for social justice educators to acknowledge that what one thinks is morally good might be what keeps one from seeing systemic injustice and ones role in sustaining it. This is not to imply that whites should not want to be good, but rather that they must know that the ways they think are morally good may be working to obscure systemic injustice. I am calling for the need to rearticulate moral responsibility and moral agency in a way that moves the focus from a spotlight on the subject to an emphasis on relationships between social groups and from attending to individual intentions to considering outcomes that expose and conform with unjust social patterns. In addition, I offer two preliminary suggestions about the characteristics that would guide this re-articulation project vigilance and uncertainty. White people must always be open to the subtle ways they can be Moral responsibility, whiteness and social justice education 287 D o w n l o a d e d
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part of the problem, even when (and I want to emphasize especially when) they are passionately involved in antiracist activism. The students who take my course on schooling and diversity profess a fervent interest in the ways that schools can contribute to social justice. Yet when an AfricanAmerican student, new to our programme, walked into class clearly irate and disturbed because, as he explained, a peer in the hall asked him whether he was pursuing a Masters degree in this department, the predominantly white students were perplexed how this could anger him so. When he explained that his anger stemmed from the fact that he was not asked whether he was a doctoral student (which he was) or even just a graduate student, the white students focused on the intentions of the peer in the hall rather than the interlocking effects of systemic racism that this student of colour endures. They insisted that this was just an innocent question and that he should not be so sensitive. Not only could my white students not understand what all the fuss was about but also, according to their sense of moral responsibility, they did not conceive the white student who asked the question in any way culpable. In essence, their sense of moral responsibility contributed to the perpetuation of the very same systemic racism that so upset the student of colour because it discouraged the white students from asking the type of questions that would make visible the dynamics of systemic oppression and the possible role they might play in perpetuating it. When moral responsibility is primarily dependent upon fault, causality and accountability, on the one hand, and on assumptions that one can perceive oneself and others as standing outside of social, economic and historical contingencies, on the other, systemic oppression may be more difficult to discern and denials of complicity may be encouraged. By naming and acknowledging how traditional conceptions of moral responsibility conspire to hide the mechanisms of whiteness, we can begin to develop different ways for understanding how dominant group members are all involved in the dirty process of racializing others (Hurtado, 1999). But any re-articulation of moral responsibility must highlight vigilance and uncertainty. Vigilance does not imply moral paralysis instead what I am suggesting is that we hold on to a certain tentativeness about our moral judgements concerning racism and keep them open to critique, especially from marginalized perspectives. As Audrey Thompson so astutely maintains, Progressive whites must interrogate the very ways of being good for the moral framing that gives whites credit for being anti-racist is parasitic on the racism that it is meant to challenge. (2003, p. 7) Note 1. It should be noted that the term colour-blindness, while sometimes meant as a virtue, has become a pejorative term in much of the literature that critiques such a perspective. In as much as this attitude has acquired a critically negative character, I believe it is offensive and presumes ablest norms. I suggest that the term color ignore-ance be substituted. However, in 288 B. Applebaum D o w n l o a d e d
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Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Translated by Thomas Common with Introductions by Willard Huntington Wright and Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche and Notes by Anthony M. Ludovici)