What is the incentive to choose justice, even at the expense of one’s own privilege?
Over the weekend, I published a thought experiment: something we try on in our minds—often something that can’t actually be accomplished in real life, e.g., Schrodinger’s cat or Searle’s Chinese Room are two classics—to reveal something new.
My thought experiment turned on abolishing the police as they now exist and replacing them with something that would not have the mission James Baldwin characterized thusly in 1966: “to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests.” I excerpted arguments that have come from key figures such as Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza, then asked this: “Reading the last few paragraphs, what was your response to the idea of drastically cutting—even abolishing—policing as it now exists? Did you think, “That’s crazy! Who will protect me?” If so, there is a colonizer in your head making you believe it is in your interests to perpetuate the system.”
The person who has this specific thought is on the other side of the line from the person who fears the police. Do I see myself as someone whose interests the police are here to protect, or someone who is in danger from the police? That seems like a pivotal and illuminating question in this moment, a powerful shot of self-knowledge and social knowledge. The balance of the essay advocated separating “from a system of white supremacy through word and deed.”
A reader responded this way:
I appreciate your honest appeal, though I feel it is lacking. Black people in America have been pleading with white people to accept us as dignified human beings for 400 years or longer, yet the ongoing police brutality against us is horrific evidence that white people are too vested in their own privilege to change their thinking toward us. Your final plea that whites have the “simple choice” to “[s]eparate yourself from a system of white supremacy through word and deed,” fails to acknowledge the simple truth that white people have no incentive to change their thinking about their privilege. While holding hands and singing “Kum Ba Ya” together has incentivized black people for centuries to forgive, believe the best of white people, go the extra mile to get along with white people, and (God forgive us), make ourselves more acceptable to white people, this ideal of living in harmony has never moved Whites to deny themselves of their privilege.
Perhaps your next piece on white privilege should be a confession that an internal incentive for Whites to give up their privilege in a racist society just does not exist — as well as a thoughtful consideration of what could possibly constitute such an incentive.
Let us take a moment to feel the reality of the moment in which this question must be asked.
I will try to take up the challenge.
It is rooted in a deep and ancient argument. Some philosophers espouse a doctrine of “rational egoism,” in which self-interest is the only valid basis for action. In this worldview, “What’s in it for me?” is more or less the only relevant question. It posits that human beings calculate the benefits to themselves of a particular action, then act to maximize them. In this frame, the suffering of others is negligible in comparison to the benefits the rational egotist derives from white skin privilege.
The alternative model can be summed up by reference to the Golden Rule (I’m citing Hillel’s version here): “Do not unto others that which is hateful to yourself.” The appeal to empathy is pretty pervasive, transcending all cultural barriers; here’s a link to an essay I wrote about it back in 2010 for an exhibit of artist Beth Grossman’s work that highlighted a dozen versions of this principle from as many faith and cultural traditions.
I can’t say “that an internal incentive for Whites to give up their privilege in a racist society just does not exist,” as the reader who commented believes, because the Golden Rule is a powerful incentive for me, one that speaks to me each day in a way I cannot ignore. Every Shabbat, we Jews are reminded that we were slaves in Egypt, that we must love our neighbors, that we must welcome and care for the other as we were others ourselves.
Of course, not everyone partakes of a spiritual practice. But, history demonstrates clearly that the passionate appeal to virtue by those who do has enough power to create a tipping-point. The Quakers are widely acknowledged as a catalytic force in the 18th and 19th centuries against slave-holding in Britain, France, and the U.S. In the mid-18th century, moral arguments for the rightness of slavery were common, and a hundred years later, the idea was repugnant enough to a huge percentage of the white population to provoke emancipation, even at the cost of civil war.
From a purely material calculation, white slave-owners could have gone on buying, selling, and torturing Black human beings forever. The incentive to stop? Empathy, decency, the fear of hellfire, the desire for heaven, the ability to look at oneself in the mirror and sleep at night. Or as the abolitionist Quaker preacher John Woolman put it, quoting Isaiah 17:11:
Wealth is attended with power, by which bargains and proceedings, contrary to universal righteousness, are supported; and hence oppression, carried on with worldly policy and order, clothes itself with the name of justice and becomes like a seed of discord in the soul. And as this spirit which wanders from the pure habitation prevails, so the seeds of war swell and sprout, and grow, and become strong, until much fruit is ripened. Then cometh the harvest spoken of by the prophet, which “is a heap, in the day of grief and desperate sorrows.”
The same moral arguments animated vast white support for ending legal segregation. When Dr. Martin Luther King drew on the words of the prophets in his remarkable call to moral justice, enough white people were also listening to bring about the end of legal segregation with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
If self-interest were the only incentive, I doubt the Act would ever have been passed. We certainly know enough about the history of resistance to its implementation to see how long and hard rabid white supremacists will fight to keep from having to sit, eat, swim, and ride alongside Black people. But their desires did not prevail.
I do not cite these moments of history to say “look at all the progress, be patient,” as I have heard some others say. A quotation from the writer Adrienne Maree Brown is making the rounds. It states a truth I find irrefutable: “Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight & continue to pull back the veil.” One of the things I want to help pull back the veil from is the idea that white people have no incentive to embrace justice at the cost of privilege.
James Baldwin is my ever-present guide in matters of love and justice. Despite the soul-crushing conditions he came up in—at war with his own powerful, persistent nature and vision, yet fearlessly speaking truth to power every day—he too believed the moral incentive was powerful and that love and connection could overcome. There are some amazing links in this essay I wrote about him in 2013, well worth clicking.
Baldwin’s righteous anger burned hotter as his too-short life unfolded. There’s an extended 1985 quote here that is mandatory reading. It ends with a powerful expression of the incentive for white people dismantling white supremacy: not only to right terrible wrongs to others, but to end the distortion and suppression of our own true humanity it has perpetuated:
The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white—: and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less. This incredibly limited not to say dimwitted ambition has choked many a human being to death here: and this, I contend, is because the white American has never accepted the real reasons for his journey. I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require of my captivity a song. They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own.
Bettye Lavette, “Worthy.”
Hi Arlene,
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my comment in a post. I have read the post once, have been busy, will read again and reply.
One way to look at the situation is whether we appreciate justice as a means or as an end in itself. If justice is meant to serve some other purpose, too often we imagine it serves our own interests. Injustice is almost always personal, and this complicates things. Injustice is suffered by real people. Addressing injustice HAS TO account for the effect on individual lives, and so justice often seems a solution to personal situations. It has to be for justice to work.
Unfortunately different peoples’ versions of justice can cancel each other out. On this view it becomes acceptable and even appropriate to discount the voices and dignity of other human beings and their interests. For justice to function it can’t always protect every interest involved. This, unfortunately, is the position we often find ourselves in. If justice serves ME, then unfortunately it may serve others less well……..
On the other hand, we can also look at justice as something we ourselves need to serve, that our commitment to ideals of justice is not self serving and may even bring personal difficulty. If justice is an end rather than a means it stands outside our personal situation, is true regardless of our own conditions. If certain things are right or wrong, not simply right for me or wrong for me, then justification lies in the notion of justice itself. Justice is the right thing to do no matter who is doing it.
Part of the difficulty our society faces seems to reside in the confusion between how we value ideas of things like justice. We are not sufficiently clear on the notion of values that are intrinsic, goods in themselves, because we too often are transfixed with those goods that serve our own interests and understanding. Its a huge hurdle to conquer, but it seems the only legitimate starting point.
Confusion about or simply mistaking means for ends is an issue in many walks of our lives, and can therefor possibly be seen as a general problem for how we confront the world. For instance, its the same confusion we have about the arts, that we often can’t accept them as a fundamental human good but conceive them as necessarily serving some extrinsic purpose. Justice serving our own needs is parallel to the arts serving the economy, cognitive development, etc.
Our predicament is that we seemingly have lost the ability to make claims for intrinsic goods across a broad spectrum of our interests. And this confusion has terrible consequences. We can’t find the home of justice that is not merely a servant but that we ourselves need to serve. Human life without the ideals of intrinsic goods becomes more divisive with every petty competing interest. Real justice is lost in the fight to make things right specifically for me. For justice to serve everyone it must serve no one in particular. It must do the right thing because the right thing stands outside us personally.
So how do injustices that are personal get addressed by justice that can’t take sides? Is it even possible? Is it the curse of a meaningless universe that in the human quest for ideals the idea itself is aspirational and never perfectly manifest? Can we live with that? We encounter injustice every day. That is a brute fact of our lives. I have yet to see justice carried out with as perfect and pervasive execution.
Can we have this conversation? It seems we must…..
Hi Arlene,
Fighting for changed legislation is a good thing to do; my parents, both lifelong civil rights activists did this. However, such a fight, without the oppressor group (Whites) continuing to challenge their most basic assumptions, does not fundamentally challenge the reality of white privilege (i.e., power). Yes, James Baldwin believed deeply in the power of Love, but he never assented to white people enjoying the luxury of time at our expense.
If an internal incentive for white people to give up their privilege in a racist society has to be coaxed and prodded and kicked in order to become an agent of change, such external pressure pretty much invalidates the notion of “internal”, don’t you think? It will be external forces rather than internal incentives that challenge white privilege (power) and usher in meaningful change.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has, and it never will.” — Frederick Douglass
Thanks for reading and replying, Diane. As a person society puts in the category “white,” I can attest to both internal and external incentives to dismantle white privilege and replace it with a social order of justice tempered by love (to quote James Lawson). I’m 100 percent certain I’m not the only one. I absolutely agree about the centrality of external pressure, which is why I try to help keep it up. But I can’t see it as an either/or. Both are essential and both are in play.
I have been catching up on some of your blog posts, and was drawn into your post about ‘The Boys Who Said NO!’ to the Vietnam War draft. There were some heroes of conscience. But I avoided the draft and for me and most of the people I knew — it was self interest. And then there was everything else.
The reason I mention this is that self interest and motivation are always complicated. As an example, I would like to see less income inequality within the USA because it would simply make it a nicer place to live. Copenhagen vs Chicago, for example.
Its important to have some altruism, but people can end up on the right side of history for a lot of reasons. I was listening to a recent presentation by Daniel Ellsberg and I consider him heroic. I’m glad we were on the same team.
And you too. You seem to end up on the right side of issues, and for well thought out, clearly articulated reasons. I could say more, but I don’t want to embarrass you.