/ 22 September 2011

Silence and the ethics of transformation

White people should reflect, privately, silently, and sincerely, on whether they are the solution or part of the problem, argues <b>Paul C Taylor</b>.

A great western philosopher once complained that his magnum opus, unnoticed at the time of its publication, “fell stillborn from the press”.

This has certainly not been the fate of Samantha Vice’s controversial essay on the ethics of white identity. Public discussion of the essay has been extraordinarily vibrant. It has also, however, been contentious and difficult.

The discussion of Vice’s article has been difficult primarily because of the subtlety of her positions, which makes them poor candidates for compression into soundbites. The best example of this may be her argument that a kind of public silence is ethically appropriate for white people.

This is a slippery thought, and our understanding of it has been greatly enhanced by Eusebius McKaiser’s clarifying but critical discussion in a recent issue of the Mail & Guardian. There is however a bit more to the thought than even McKaiser allows.

Seen in one way, Vice’s proposal seems to require a wholesale withdrawal from politics and public life. Seen somewhat differently, though, and more in the way I suspect she intended, the requirements are rather different, and eminently more defensible.

Vice’s aim, as I read her, is to make room in racial politics for the thought that the ethical life must have a private dimension. Being a good or virtuous person, she means to say, is not just about putting the self to work in the world, but is also about working on the self in solitude and stillness.

Insisting on the private dimension of the ethical life helps clarify the moral duties of people who cannot or otherwise do not stake their lives on political activism. There is ethical work for these people to do even if, and perhaps especially if, they are not marching, picketing, or organizing.

Insisting on this private dimension also reminds us that no one lives always and everywhere in public. Public actors prepare for public life in private. They weigh options, evaluate strategies, reevaluate goals, and, if they are thoughtful, occasionally question their own motivations and assumptions.

This sort of self-reflection is particularly important in racially charged societies like South Africa and the US,. where racism threatens to insinuate itself into every social interaction and public institution.

In Sidney Poitier’s postcolonial western, Buck and the Preacher, a freedwoman in the post-civil war US complains that racism is like “a poison that’s seeped into the ground”. This is an apt metaphor. Racism seems to saturate everything, and will eventually distort our social interactions in just the way that a spoiled environment leads to stunted flora and diseased fauna.

Racism has this effect because it seeps into our habits, our reflexes, and our impulses. More to the point for Vice, white supremacist racism saturates white selves, and is apt to surface, given the right provocations and opportunities, whether one wills it or not. White people of good will don’t (often) say that black people are incapable of self-government.

More often they just attribute the struggles in black-governed states entirely to internal conditions, as if these states are not also products of history and geopolitics. White people don’t typically tell themselves that blacks are mud people who can’t represent their own interests. Sometimes they just create charity ad campaigns for African schools featuring mud-smeared white children. (This actually happened.) White people don’t typically say that other people’s interests are not as important as theirs. They just tend to invoke non-racial considerations like property rights when asked to address the lingering harms of white supremacist policies by redistributing resources.

Vice’s original article recommended silence as a way of dealing with this side-effect of racism. She was concerned by, among other things, the systematic distortions that enter the processes of debate and deliberation in post-apartheid societies. (The heated response to her ideas has surely vindicated this concern.) Having infected the self, even the well-meaning self that consciously rejects white supremacy, racism does its work by systematically inviting us to get things badly wrong, even when we’re trying not to. Remaining silent prevents racism from working through the self in this way. And committing to an active silence, devoted to a regimen of self-questioning and self-reconstruction, can help one engage responsibly and productively with hard questions on returning to the public sphere.

(There is of course much to say about what all this requires of the majority of us who are not white. Vice did not undertake to say any of this, and needn’t have done so. There is plenty of ethical work for everyone to do, and white people have to do some of it. And ethicists ought to be able to tell them this without discussing every other thing that one can bring to mind.)

Seen in this way, Vice’s call for silence is not that radical a proposal. Judges recuse themselves from legal cases that affect them because their ability to remain impartial might be compromised. Even if they trust themselves to render a dispassionate verdict, they recuse themselves anyway, in part for reasons of appearance and public trust, but also in part because they might be wrong to trust themselves.

White people aspiring to virtue in a racially charged world can learn from this. They ought to recuse themselves occasionally, and step back from public debates in order to evaluate their ability to make a productive contribution. Something like this is surely true of all people, but white people in particular, Vice wants to say, ought to step back and consider the extent to which they have been made over in the image of apartheid. Instead of evading the work of anti-racist self-inventory and criticizing current leadership on putatively non-racial grounds, they ought to accept that they might unwittingly get things wrong in self-serving ways, and stay quiet at least long enough to weigh and prepare for this possibility. They should, in other words, reflect, privately, silently, and sincerely, on whether they are the solution or part of the problem.

Paul C Taylor teaches philosophy and African American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, where he also directs the Program on Philosophy After Apartheid.

Academic Samantha Vice has caused a storm of controversy with her thoughts on white shame in South Africa. Read the reactions on our special report.