Structural Racism and the Failure of Empathetic Imagination: A Comment on Lawrence Blum  

Oleh:

Silliman, Mathew R.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Theory and Research in Education vol. 1 no. 3 (Nov. 2003), page 303–313.
Topik: empathetic imagination; global white supremacy; intention; morality; racism; sociality
Fulltext: 303TRE13.pdf (49.75KB)

Isi artikel

Blum’s generally admirable discussion of racism suffers from a problem of scale; that is, his analysis is limited in its ability to confront racism as a structural, rather than essentially a personal, moral problem. I argue, however, that Blum comes by this difficulty honestly, as it grows out of his well-founded intuition that morality is at root a matter of intention, which is also to say it is deontic, hence nonconsequentialist, in nature. While not disagreeing, I argue that this approach to moral theory is generally conceived too restrictively: that there is room in a deontic ethics for robust consideration of the morality of consequences, as well as an understanding of the grounding of personal intentions in a rich complex of social structures. Seeking a wider moral framework for confronting racism as a structural problem, I consider Charles W. Mills's thesis of a racial contract inherently constituting global white supremacy, concluding that it is limited for some of the same reasons as Blum's project. Mills's critique of the order of the modern world, however, in light of Blum's brief history of racism, suggests one reason both structural and personal racism have proven so durable: a systematic undermining of our capacity for empathetic imagination.

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