Johanna Luttrell

This chapter theorizes Black Lives Matter in the vein of Hannah Arendt’s vision of political action and James Baldwin’s political philosophy on love. Drawing from Keeanga-Yahmhatta Taylor’s and Patrisse Khan-Cullor’s accounts of BLM, Luttrell claims that, like Arendtian political action, BLM is unprecedented, revelatory, and a meaning, freedom, and knowledge-creating activity, and the white public should respect it as such. Because social movements like BLM are essentially different from science or policy measurement, white people’s predictive claims about the movement’s efficacy are erroneous. The chapter concludes by addressing Arendt’s own failure to see the Civil Rights movement as political action and theorizing Baldwin’s discussion of morality and community in service of white self-love.

This chapter shows how white people in the United States tend to respond to expressions of black mourning by claiming it is unintelligible. The claim of unintelligibility often appears in the forms of: voyeurism (“let me look longer”), appropriation (“I will explain it for you”), gas-lighting (pathologizing), tone-policing (“I cannot hear you when you say it like that”), and militarization (repression). What these forms have in common is that they are ways of managing and suppressing mourning. Luttrell urges that white understanding of black mourning must evolve from victim creating, victim blaming, and respectability politics in general. Drawing from both the Abrahamic tradition, in the book of Jeremiah, and forms of Greek tragedy, she shows how mourning involves the whole range of human emotion and can be a source of agency.

This chapter first defines the book’s subject—white people responding to Black Lives Matter (BLM)—and gives a brief theory of whiteness as a category. It then addresses a common white objection to BLM: that we white people would be able to take BLM seriously if it were more like the Civil Rights Movement, meaning, if it were less divisive or impolite. Putting Martha Nussbaum and Audre Lorde in conversation, Luttrell distinguishes between hate and anger in social movements. As Carol Anderson argues, hate and rage characterized the hostile white reactions to the Civil Rights and African-American social gains. Anger, on the other hand, characterizes parts of both the Civil Rights Movement and BLM. Luttrell disagrees with Nussbaum’s account of anger as necessarily useless. White people need to allow space for black anger and not confuse it with hate.

This chapter considers white people’s empathetic responses, and lack thereof, to social movements like BLM and examines the consequences of such affects in terms of ideas of impartiality and justice. It analyzes objections to the use of empathy in large-scale problems of justice from Paul Bloom and Jesse Prinz and suggests an alternate idea of impartiality, drawn from Adam Smith and Ray Jasper that can respond to the social movements like BLM. Defining the phenomenon of colorblindness through research in epistemologies of ignorance, it argues that the idea of “just” impartiality as detached from empathy too closely resembles the harmful ideal of colorblindness to be useful to the aims of racial justice. Instead, white people’s responses to social movements require the hard, rare, but possible work of interaction and empathy, in order to work for justice.

American media is very quick to ask victims of anti-Black violence if they forgive their victimizers. The media’s nearly reflexive framing is a symptom of the broader, cultural demand that Black victims grant forgiveness for racist violence. Reading Juliet Hooker and Myisha Cherry, this paper links the current preponderance of such demand for forgiveness to a demand for apology in America’s lynching tradition. Drawing from Sonya Renee Taylor, Ida B. Wells, and Frederick Douglass, I give a history to both kinds of normative demands and show how, though they appear as seem­ing contraries, demands for forgiveness and apology function together as methods of anti-Black violence. I then draw from work in transformative justice to differentiate the perspectives of asking, giving, and demanding forgiveness. When understood through the perspective of victims, a certain kind of embodied forgiveness can have liberatory potential. However, observers’ demands for forgiveness too often function as a method of racial oppression.

Development literature on global gender empowerment devotes much attention to employment, a code word for the inclusion of women’s labor in the global market. Recent work in transnational feminisms shows that the emphasis on employment over assets may not prevent exploitation of labor and perpetuity of poverty. This paper first highlights research on how women are increasingly taking on too much responsibility, working in a confluence of survival-oriented activities that undermine their own well-being. I also address how women are increasingly able to get out of poverty: when they can labor in such a way that they are not merely working to survive but also working for accumulation of their own material assets, foremost of which is basic housing. Finally, I consider these transnational feminist insights about the importance of housing for women in light of philosophical concerns about property ownership, specifically Locke’s theory of property. In justifying property rights through labor, and arguing against the state’s right to usurp property, a Lockean can give a defense against forced evictions that still occur in some contexts and give support for a normative connection between women’s labor and assets.

This 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.

The language that global justice theorists use to characterize global poverty, the terms of duty and charity, are detached discourses that fail to capture the reality of poverty as most people currently experience it, as slum dwellers living on the outskirts of the world’s megacities. In contrast, the language of alienation better captures the experience of global, urban poverty. This article’s aim is to draw from Hannah Arendt to form a new idea of alienation that responds to the specific conditions of urban, global poverty. Arendt posits alienation in terms of the ‘loss of the world’: the deprivation of durable material structures and lasting institutions that are the preconditions for political speech and action. The language of alienation evidences how the problem of poverty is one of a lack of meaningful work, the kind of work that creates a livable world