Carol Moeller

How can persons shaped by oppression grow into members of what Martin Luther King Jr.’s1 envisioned as “beloved community”2? We may be shaped – or even constituted -- by relations of domination (and/or resistance to domination), regardless of our explicit values about the value about all human beings. Given how legacies of oppression that can leave deep traces upon us, how can we learn to build and embody “beloved community“? To borrow Sara Ahmed’s words, how can we learn “not to reproduce what we inherit?”3 in the way of oppressive “forms of life.”4 In what follows, I consider these issues in relation to character (though not in a strictly Aristotelian moral framework), showing how issues of oppression (focusing upon racism in particular) may be thus framed. I relate work on “attention”- derived in part by Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil, drawing upon Bridget Clarke’s framing of this idea. I read Minnie Bruce Pratt’s auto-biographical narrative on racism in terms of such “moral attention,” pointing toward what I call “critical moral attention” as embodying the sort of development of “white self-criticality”5 that can inform ongoing reflection and practices from oppressive to liberatory ones. However, as Pratt’s account shows, there is no simple “before” and “after” or triumphant arrival of a once-and-done or new-and-improved anti-racist self. As Chandra Mohanty and Biddy Martin write (reflecting on this same essay by Pratt) “There is no linear progression based on ‘that old view,’ no developmental notion of her own identity or self.”6 I suggest this notion of “critical moral attention” highlights the process orientation of such work. It is not, however, merely an individual effort. It requires critical interaction with others, specifically in working for social change along these lines. Further, such work consists of “immanent critique” (done from within the messy world in which one lives, without recourse to an external standard by which one may assess and guide one’s development).7