On Moral Judgment and White Supremacism (August 2017)

I grew up in a fervently religious home. My conservative Holiness-Pentecostal faith came outfitted with its own moralizing and judgmental tendencies, high-tech features of the believer’s toolkit for navigating the world. Nearly every situation — even the most mundane — likely had some moral dilemma lurking within it. And almost every moral dilemma had an easy and clear-cut answer. The job of believers was not only to apply that decisive morality to themselves; they were to impose it on everyone else as well. In the name of helping others see the light, it was a believer’s job to make you aware of your potential pitfalls and apparent failures.

In my teenage years, I became wary of the parochialism of my faith’s morality. Must we condemn everything and everyone? Must we readily dismiss every perspective that is not our own? My questioning only intensified during my college years, as my awareness of ideological, religious, and cultural difference was wondrously expanded. Other moral and ethical systems of reasoning existed. And they were indeed systems. To my chagrin, these systems had logic. Structure. Connections. Flow. Some of my collegiate compatriots made different choices than I, having been shaped by a certain religiosity and accompanying religious anxiety, would have made, and they had reasons for doing so. Welp! There went my stereotype that religion had a monopoly on moral reasoning and ethical thinking. I could no longer easily reduce, as I had been wont to do, other people’s decisions to their animalistic, carnal natures unredeemed by Christ’s refiner’s fire and winnowing fan.

Quite naturally, though with hesitation and no small amount of worry, I began exploring intellectual, cultural, and even religious landscapes that before then either existed for me in a hellish, Godforsaken dungeon … or not at all. On that latter point, there were things I didn’t know I didn’t know. And I was surprised! I assumed there was no there there. Abundant in intellectual and spiritual arrogance, I was perspectivally impoverished and therefore morally anemic.

As the floodgate of information burst in on me, so did even more questions. And in my attempt to learn and understand perspectives that were different than mine, I became a kind of moral wanderer. I began to see the logic in almost every perspective. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. Yes, I could see that. Yes. Yes. Yes.” It became increasingly difficult to reject any perspective. I soon found myself sinking into the quicksand of utter cultural and moral relativism. Add to that my almost natural proclivity toward people pleasing. I wanted to affirm the authority and veracity of nearly everyone’s perspective. I found myself placating and being tossed to and fro like a rootless tree or a disconnected branch.

I also felt a fair amount of disgust at the judgmental character of the faith of my youth. I learned that being judgmental was implicated in a wider history of religious intolerance, ethnocentrism, racism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, and patriarchy. Historically speaking, moralism has been a quick step from supremacism — a sense of self-superiority that supposedly authorizes one’s domination of another. Ancient Christian scripture, however paradoxically given the history of the tradition to which it has given rise, is right on this front. To attempt to remove the mote from my eye, when, in fact, a log sits comfortably in your own, clearly unbeknownst to you, is hypocritical. Nevermind the fact that obstructed vision, if we are keeping with this metaphor, will not serve you well in your quest to be my moral ophthalmologist.

I found myself, then, in a bit of a quagmire. A large part of me associated moral evaluation and clear, consistent moral standards with a religiosity that was intolerant of many forms of human difference. I found that religiosity increasingly reprehensible in its ability to discard people so readily or to so easily identify them as vessels in dire need of ceramic intervention. Simultaneously, however, I began to feel torn apart by my inability to make up my mind, to come to a solid decision, on most moral issues. What is right? Could we ever know? Is it reasonable for me to make any sort of moral judgment if I cannot be reassured from the outset that I am right? Isn’t indecision better than a careless, wrong decision? I felt adrift, without an anchor that, whatever its slack, could still ground me.

I read, pondered, prayed, and discussed my conundrum with friends and mentors. The process, painstaking. Then light slowly broke in, and with it, the learning.

What, precisely, did he learn? — you may be wondering. And here’s my answer:

There are matters that are so inconsequential — though not meaningless — on the scale of human existence that culturally and morally relativistic stances make logical sense. Your wanting the toilet paper to roll a different way than I want it to roll will not — and should not — ruin me. That you desire blueberries and I raspberries should not send me into a philosophical tailspin with cosmic implications. You like jam. And I like butter. Big deal.

However, some matters, in fact, do exist which require clear moral judgment, in which case it would be perfectly reasonable for you to decide that some practice or idea is unequivocally right or wrong. Doing otherwise, remaining indecisive, would be unreasonable. I learned that not everything fit into that latter decision-making category of moral necessity, but some things definitely and rightfully did. Slavery. Genocide. Rape. Domination. Inequity. In fact, in some instances, I learned, not to have any moral standard for evaluation could lead me to accept and therefore support the very intolerance of human difference that I had hoped to avoid. If I didn’t have a standard, I might accept just about anything. I might even accept my own subjugation and the rule of my oppressors. Enter the comedic specter of the Black white supremacist. (Thanks, Chappelle.)

I also learned that some moral matters so urgently required a moral response that indecision would be downright immoral. Relativism, whatever integrity it had, would just degrade into an abyss of unprincipled irresolution.

Indecision at its best is ambivalence — holding at least two, polarizing perspectives which equally captivate one’s moral imagination. Ambivalence at least suggests emotional and intellectual activity. But at its worst, indecision is the exact opposite. It’s too closely linked to indifference and therefore apathy. You end up not making a decision, not because you have a principled ambivalence, but because you don’t care enough about the issue at stake to bother doing the work of thinking through it. When this kind of indecision manifests in situations of injustice, it’s because unnamed and uninterrogated privilege is at work. The person who is least negatively affected by the injustice or who has the most to gain from keeping it in place often won’t say a damn thing. They retreat into what they presume will be the safety of silence. They’re the type that doesn’t want to be called a bigot, claims not to be racist or anti-Semitic, but nevertheless regularly deep dives in the pool of bigotry and hate. The kind that will soft pedal white supremacist ideology and try to disguise it as post-racial rational thinking. Kanye West, a sometimes astute observer of power relations and human hierarchies, has words for these kinds of people who are indifferent to human suffering. You remember what he said back in 2005 about then-President George Bush, don’t you? “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” Sadly, George is not alone. We will come back to this point.

On a related note, I learned that the urgent character of such decision-demanding matters would not allow for deliberation ad nauseum. The luxury of extensive debate could have already declared bankruptcy. Time for reflection could have already expired. Integrity could be at the door knocking at this very moment, begging you to decide where you stand and what you will do and who you are. Integrity is like a “monogamous relationship” sort who is thoroughly in love with you and has no problem letting you know what’s what: “I’m not going to sit around and just wait for you forever.” Queen Bey said it best when she sung “If you liked it, then you should have …” Yes, please do finish the line.

Then I learned — and this is what did it for me — that sometimes I would have to make a moral judgment about some pressing matter, and I may not be sure that I made precisely the right decision. However, if I was guided by basic humanitarian principles (not unrelated to the world’s great religious traditions) — such as, do no harm; respect human dignity and revere human freedom, equity for all; reject greed and narcissism; seek the flourishing of all life; when appropriate, embrace death, but never dole it out — I could make a decision that, though possibly imperfect, would still be principled. And notice the kinds of principles I listed — ones that foreground the honoring of life, that call us out of ourselves to attend compassionately to the other, that reject harmful hierarchies. Notice the emphasis on justice, freedom, and liberation as together constituting a guiding moral framework, a heuristic for delving into the moral messiness of human life.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, James Cone, Audre Lorde, and Cornel West taught me about moral courage. Courage requires us to abandon people pleasing, pandering, and placating. Courage requires us to let suffering speak, which is the very condition of truth, as West has said. But when we listen to suffering, it places a demand on us. It demands moral judgment. Will we allow the suffering to continue or will we work to end it? Is that suffering somehow justifiable or is it unjust? Suffering is the thing that calls us out of our apathy and indifference, our emotional ineptitude and moral laziness. Suffering is the thing that is always elevated to a level of such significance, such consequentiality, that indecision would be immoral and the sanctification of suffering would violate our best humanitarian principles.

And, my friends, it is on this front that Donald Trump utterly fails us, as he shirks away from his moral responsibility to unequivocally condemn white Christian supremacism, which created Black and Jewish suffering. He inspired barbarity in Charlottesville and ultimately aimed to justify it. How? — you might ask. The analytical toolkit that we used above to examine my experiences provides us with several interpretive possibilities: Perhaps Donald is lost in the sunken place of moral and cultural relativism, as I was. Perhaps he’s suddenly beholden to a politics of no judgment after being overwhelmed by the harmful results of a lifetime of being judgmental. Maybe he’s therefore become judgment-shy and judgment-ashamed. All right. You are allowed to laugh.

Alas, I don’t think Donald and I have that much in common. His mechanism for making a moral judgment is seriously impaired, but not altogether non-existent. It’s not as though he can’t make a claim about what he thinks is right or wrong. In fact, in the wake of Charlottesville, he immediately made two claims of moral judgment. He ended up declaring that there’s hate on “both sides” only eventually to take to task what he deemed to be the moral lapses and depravities of what he called — Lord save us! — the “alt-left.”

So, our boy can clearly make a decision about a moral matter, even if his decision is in fact immoral. He’s not struggling with indecisiveness. So what makes him essentially equate white nationalists and peaceful counter-protesters among whom Black folks are high in number?

We have two options left in our analytical toolkit: the man is a people pleaser (and let’s be clear, he’s only seeking to please those whom he considers to be people in the first place, namely white conservatives) or he’s wholly indifferent to Black and Jewish suffering because he benefits from it. I would say the answer is a combination of both; Donald is both placater to white conservatives of a certain ilk and happy beneficiary of human suffering clothed in Black skin, wearing a kippah, and speaking Spanish. Enter 2005 Kanye. Replace “George” with “Donald.” Expand “Black” to include a variety of oppressed peoples.

Donald will seemingly condemn white supremacism, white nationalism, and neo-Nazis, while rhetorically equating their ideologies and practices with those of modern-day liberationists and freedom fighters. The two just aren’t the same. Why does Donald engage in such rhetorical sleight of hand? Well, you can’t fully condemn what you secretly love. Now, before you object, let me say that it is not my normal practice to assign people identities that they do not openly claim. I usually avoid labelling people in unforgiving terms. I do not often claim to know the content of someone’s interiority. I am also aware that human beings have the capacity to grow and change, philosophically speaking. That said, I think there is sufficient evidence in the public record to wonder if Donald is a white supremacist. I wonder if he is anti-Semitic. I wonder if he’s the sort of person whose soul wears a white hood and dons a swastika, even though his body may not. He so regularly flirts with racism and bigotry, it’s hard not to imagine him married to them. It’s hard not to believe that his overtures of equality are gestures without substance — or perhaps gestures with insidious substance. As a friend reminded me recently, dissembling and double-speaking are wartime tactics. Even basic athletic strategy. Fake left and then go right. Oval Office by day; klansman by night. Donald seems to me to be duplicitous, misanthropic, unprincipled, and lacking in moral courage. But what I do not believe he is, is confused, ambivalent, indecisive, or relativistic. He’s chosen his side, in my view. And it feels supremacist through and through — a distorted version of white, male, cis-gender, heterosexual, Christian, and able-bodied identity.

Jason Craige Harris is a writer, minister, and educator who lives and works in New York City.

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Jason Craige Harris

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