White Moral Blindness
Meena Krishnamurthy, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan
The central problem for Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement was the inaction of the white moderates. According to King, they were unlikely to act because they were morally blind: they didn’t know what being victimized by racism was like. King believed that moral progress was possible. He believed that, if the white moderates could experience what it was like to be victimized by racism, then they would be more likely to act. This raises the question: how can those who are unlikely to be victims of racism experience what it is like? Building on King’s work, I argue that the white moderates could experience racism, even without being victimized by it. Indeed, this was the very purpose of King’s own speeches and writings during the Civil Rights Movement. They caused experiences of what racism was like in the white moderates, which made them more likely to end racial segregation. I argue that art - broadly understood to include literature, film, poetry, drama, and music – and social movements, especially when violent, can serve a similar purpose in the cause for racial justice.
At the most general level, Professor Krishnamurthy’s work addresses three questions: What are just political institutions? Why are current political institutions unjust? And, how ought we progress from unjust to just political institutions? Most of her research has focused on these questions as they relate to the practice of democracy both at the national and international level. Her early work argues that, because of the values of self-respect, autonomy, and ownership, just political institutions are those that are democratic. She also argues that current political institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, are unjust because they are undemocratic and also because they do not satisfy the basic demands of distributive justice. Her current work focuses on the question of what sorts of attitudes are necessary among citizens for the promotion of democracy. Building on the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and other radical political thinkers, she defends the non-standard view that distrust promotes (rather than undermines) democracy and, for this reason, is a morally valuable attitude.