Description
Book SynopsisThis book interrogates white responses to black-led movements for racial justice. It is a philosophical self-reflection on the ways in which ‘white’ reactions to Black Lives Matter stand in the way of the movement’s important work. It probes reactions which often prevent white people from according to black activists the full range of human emotion and expression, including joy, anger, mourning, and political action. Johanna C. Luttrell encourages different conceptions of empathy and impartiality specific to social movements for racial justice, and addresses objections to identity politics.
Table of ContentsChapter 1: Getting my People
1.1 Whiteness and Self-Reflection
1.2 “We” White People: On the Possibility of Collective Identity
1.3 The Hate that we see Might be our Own: Distinguishing Black Anger from White Hate
Chapter 2: Empathy and Racial Justice: Redefining Impartiality in Response to Social Movements
2.1 White Empathy and Black Lives Matter
2.2 Perspectives Against ‘Just Empathy’
2.3 Managing Empathy Through Colorblindness
2.4 Empathy and Racial Justice: A Different Idea of Impartiality
Chapter 3: How White People Refuse to Understand Black Mourning
3.1 White Responses to Black-led Political Mourning
3.2 Conservative Responses to Black Mourning: Militarization, Gas-lighting, Tone-policing
3.3 Liberal Responses to Black Mourning: Voyeurism and Appropriation
3.4 Recognizing Agency, Giving up the Idealized Victim
3.5 Mourning’s Potential: Undoing the Political Order in Antigone and the Book of Jeremiah
Chapter 4: Respecting Black Lives Matter as Arendtian Political Action
4.1 How Political Action is Different from Scientific Inquiry
4.2 Political Action as Unprecedented
4.3 Political Action as Revelatory
4.4 Political Action as Knowledge-Creating
4.5 Arendt’s Failure to Respect Black-Led Social Movements as Political Action
Chapter 5: Conclusion
5.1 Interrogating Allyship
5.2 Answering Objections to Identity Politics
5.3 White Feminism and Allyship
5.4 A Positive Prescription for Empathy?
