Why We Need a New Morality

There are a lot of people in America who do not believe institutional racism is real. And there is no way we’re going have a real conversation about race until everyone acknowledges its existence.

Why are these people unwilling to accept that America’s racist legacy still shapes our world today? How can they can claim to hate racism and believe that structural racism doesn’t exist at the same time? Structural oppression simply does not fit within their moral framework of personal good and evil, of the racist and the anti-racist.

In fact, I think our nation’s longstanding moral system has robbed us of a language to describe good and evil on a grand scale. We need a new belief system that takes accounts for both personal responsibility and structural awareness, but this will require us all to completely rethink our moral world.

From Christianity to Judaism to Islam, it’s not surprising that structural oppression is hard to grasp by someone raised in this cultural soup. In this Western idea of morality, you are responsible for your own behavior because you are responsible for your own soul. But as the world has gotten larger, the things we built have begun to shape the world around us just as much as we shaped them. Entities out of the control of any one person have begun to control us. Farming industries and food lobbies directly influence the food we eat. A single search engine can influence what facts we see or don’t see. The language of individual responsibility we find in religion can’t adequately describe what’s wrong here, as laws and institutions have gained more power and influence on our lives than any individual ever could.

It makes sense that the Judeo-Christian moral code lacks a language to describe what’s going on in a newly global society: The dogma was already set a thousand years before capitalism or globalization existed. And Western religion never bothered to catch up with the culture shaped by capitalism (notice the Bible never updated “LORD” to “CEO”). And you don’t have to be religious to have been affected by this worldview — our legal system is based on it, which is why you can go to prison for murder but not for cannibalizing our global financial system. Who has done greater damage? We don’t have a god to tell us the answer. We simply haven’t made the right rules for this new world yet.

But now that we live in a world where we have little power to choose the food we eat, the clothes we wear, or even how we get to work, it’s nearly impossible not to find yourself as a passive participant in a harmful institution. There’s such a severe disconnect between our personal behavior and our participation in damaging structures that it’s no surprise that someone will say, “I’ve never said or done a racist thing in my life!” While also refusing to think about why they’re more likely to get a ticket than a felony conviction at a traffic stop. They simply don’t feel as though they have done anything personally that aligns with their idea of “racism,” but it’s important to remember that their perception of what racism is didn’t come out of nowhere.

Film and television has perpetuated the idea of the “bad apple” racist for years, where the one bad apple proves their inherent racism through overtly racist behavior, and the problem is resolved by simply punishing the bad apple (see The Help, or maybe, The Help). Sure, one bad guy makes a better antagonist over the vague idea of a corrupt system. But it’s this kind of narrative that keeps people thinking: “Just because one police officer made a grave mistake doesn’t make us ALL bad!” It reinforces punishing personal behavior instead of rooting out the cultural influences that informed it.

That notion isn’t inherently insane or illogical; the real problem is that it’s only half-right, and we rarely discuss the implications of that. People are ultimately responsible for their own decisions, but their environment, their upbringing, and worldview subtly shape those decisions as well. There can be bad apples, but those bad apples were grown in a diseased orchard. Whether we’re speaking of the criminal or the cop: We can’t make their decisions for them, but we as a society can create an environment that is more likely to produce results that are fair and just. The first step is acknowledging that that an environment exists in the first place. The second step is knowing that structural change will never eliminate every bad apple; and knowing that is not a valid excuse to resist change altogether.

After all, not everyone can feel when there is a 25% drop in crime or poverty. But just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Between 1999 and 2011, 2,151 white people and 1,130 black people were killed by police. Black people are 12% of the population, but make up 1/3 of the total people killed by police. The incarceration rate tells a similar story. If you truly believe that all men are born equal — if you are truly “post-race” — you should realize these numbers aren’t. But if you’re white, you probably can’t “feel” those numbers; you can’t really empathize with it unless it happened to you or someone you care about. That’s why we can’t rely on empathy alone to do what’s right; we have to believe in the data if we want justice in a globalized world.

It’s hard to feel empathy for an abstract idea. If you’re a white person in Middle America, a dead black man could be an abstraction to you. If you’re a man who doesn’t listen to women, the patriarchy could remain an abstraction to you. If there is no evil or injustice to be felt, there is no resulting empathy. And if there is no empathy, there is no change. But as the fast-paced news cycle curses us with knowing too much of what’s going on in the world, what we do have to help guide our moral compass is data. Data tells us that police kill more black men than white men per capita. Data shows us how redlining and racist loan policies shape the ghettos we still have today. Data is hard to “feel” because is an abstraction as well, but if we ever want to put 21st century racism in concrete terms, we need to rely as much on it as we do on our own sense of empathy and personal responsibility.

The thing is, this shouldn’t be an intellectual leap. Awareness shouldn’t just be for the college educated or the elite. We need a belief system that can find a stain on the numbers as much as it can find a stain on one’s soul. And if we finally see the criminality in structural oppression, then maybe we can finally shift our assumptions that all crime must beget punishment, and focus on reform for the oppressed and the privileged alike.

So — is it our responsibility as a society to make these structures more just? It may seem like an obvious answer, but the answer doesn’t matter if people don’t agree to its existence in the first place. Data again is an abstraction, and it can be overwhelming enough to make you want to ignore it all and just focus on your own life. You know, just be a good person to those around you because it’s easier that way.

This is how a low-level Nazi could say he was “just following orders,” or how a good, churchgoing woman born into a slave-owning family could follow the teachings of Jesus while she benefits from the greatest structural evil of our nation’s history. If you had met these people in person, you might consider them kind, or caring, and they might even identify as such. They could be “good” people on an individual level, but that does not absolve them from a different kind of evil, one that was never described in the Bible.

In this new world, who is considered “good” and who is “evil”? One would have to believe that this is a new world that requires new definitions in order to even ask that question. This is not an inherently conservative mindset, and this is why many conservatives are stuck using old language to describe new ideas.

But we have all been hardwired to empathize with people, and not the abstract structures that govern their lives. Who are truly responsible to help, and more importantly — how? Are you morally equivalent to the corporation who uses child labor to make your shirt? Or is the corporation just another victim of globalization? Western religions and Western morality don’t give a clear answer to that.

Am I saying we should ignore the value of empathy and personal responsibility? No. But we need to find a way to agree that there is another empathetic muscle we can exercise — one of structural empathy. A kind of empathy that allows us to feel the impact of patterns across a large population. We need to find a way to understand people through the structures that maintain their oppression, not just the individuals who oppress them.

The Curse of Knowledge

What made this so hard in the age of social media is the curse of knowing. Empathy worked when we were only really aware about the people we interacted with day-to-day. Now the gift of global awareness brings the burden of global responsibility. It’s like so many more people are part of our lives, except they’re not. In this world of so much knowledge, there is a moral gray zone between the people in our lives and the people just beyond it.

Not unlike the idea of “personal responsibility”, we are so used to building our world based on personal, anecdotal evidence — the experiences we see, and the ones our friends tell us about. And while personal evidence has value, if it is incongruent with the data at large, it can make people believe things that are exceptions rather than the rule. I’m thinking specifically of the black veteran who got pulled over and managed to be treated respectfully, which went viral because the people who shared it wanted to believe it was the rule, not the exception. Progressives are also guilty of using anecdotes in place of proof. It’s a problem of too much information being available, and because of that overwhelming amount of data available, people pick and choose facts in order to reinforce their worldview rather than shape it. None of us should rely on personal anecdotes alone to shape our worldview; they should be used to put human emotion, human empathy behind the numbers, not to contradict them.

It’s hard to remember that an organized society at this scale is still an experiment. We’re still figuring out how to restructure our society after our middle class has all but disappeared. We still have to come to a consensus of what a society ought to do for its citizens, and if we don’t agree on that premise, it’s impossible to debate much of anything else. What is public policy and why is it a social good? Can data, and a new code of ethics make a slightly better world?. The only thing that can counteract a pure power or profit motive is an ethics based on real data, and a fundamental belief that we can make a better world through public policy. But first, we need to find a new way for people to acknowledge oppression in the form it exists today.

We need to start a new conversation so that everyone can be part of it. Even your racist uncle.