A Tail of Whiteness

World Problems and Human Potential

Engaging white people around whiteness is a challenge. Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, and Krista Tippett suggest white people may need to do work among ourselves before we’re fit to be successful doing interracial work that tears down the institutional structures of white savagery.

I’d like to learn, in collaboration with engineers, climate scientists, and interpreters with varied language profiles how we can host the quality of conversation required to disentangle webs of politics and social policy from the evolutionary imperative to change the fuel economy. Changing the fuel economy means changing the economy, full stop. Which means anyone invested in business right now, at all levels but obviously of course especially the managerial classes, has to be making moral decisions about perpetuating the rate of increasing-likelihood of catastrophic disaster or slamming on the brakes.

Jonathan Haidt (see Moral Foundation Theory) speaks of how the five moral foundations of homo sapiens are culturally-conditioned and differentially distributed across the conservative-liberal spectrum. He don’t seem to be optimistic about our chances of pulling up from this nosedive, but he seeks to be inspirational through appealing to the known liberal penchant for truth. Basically, his perspective is that we — liberals and especially progressive activists — are the ones who are messing up. He doesn’t mention the fact that the ‘we’ is composed mostly of white people, but who else would it be?