The Moral High Ground is Not Enough, as We are Still Not Thinking Well Enough about What Affects Us (as with Race)

Comment published on New York Times on-line blog in response to Times columnist Charles Blow, “On Race: The Moral High Ground,” May 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/opinion/roseanne-valerie-jarrett-race-trump.html?comments#commentsContainer

There is a lesson here about affect. Most common are either a childish, naive, passionate enthusiasm, often expressed in “radical” politics, or a self-control rejecting or limiting the affect. (Romanticism vs. Stoicism/Protestant asceticism/Descartes/Kant). Differently, in writers like Shakespeare and Racine characters conceptualize while staging their affect, now formed and articulated as a thought.

It is not moral judgment, even unexpressed, that is needed, so much as a reflective state of mind that asks itself questions, rather than just asserting one’s will while indulging affective intensity.

This is possible where discourse is. It depends on some measure of a democratic ethos. That is important because to change America we need to talk honestly and even argue with each other while building lines of alliance. 

Black people can change America, but not alone. Speak to non-blacks about their interests that you share or that could make them your allies. Guilty moralisms are inhibiting; most often we just need to figure out what is to be done. White people with racist sentiments fear crime. Yet, unlike during the Civil Rights Movement, the injustices that face black people today affect many others too. Though I am white, I could be killed be a cop for no reason, imprisoned without a fair trial, or suffer other horrors, and I rightly fear them.

An authoritarian society needs the thinking citizens it seem not to want.