Notes from the fourth session (Adam Ferner)

Week four was facilitated by Judith Suissa, who gave us an insightful overview of chapter 6 ('Rearticulating White Moral Responsibility'). We had a good turn-out – a dozen or so people in the room, and 9 online (with a much more active online discussion than previously). We also generated a fair few questions:

Q1: Dean objects that Butler's 'ethics of nonviolence' may run the risk of leaving no space for condemnation (mentioned p. 172). Does it not?

Q2: Is there unhelpful slippage between 'being responsible' and 'taking responsibility' in this chapter?

Q3: Do norms differ from habits/practices?
(Prompted by p. 168: "... for those who fit comfortably within norms, norms do not appear to be norms but just 'what is'.")
(I think standardly norms, but not habits/practices would be understood to have an 'ought' to them, as setting some sort of standard)

(If norms = habits/practices and vice versa, then that suggests all habits (all repeated practices) would have normative force to them)

Q4: what's going on here with the relationship b/w unknowability, responsibility & ethics of vigilance? (Especially as, again, various literatures cotemporaneous with this text and subsequent to it which frame concepts or analysis around importance of e.g. 'loving ignorance', but absent here)

Q5: if I'm honest, is a little bit of an "Oh is that it?" response. Is this attempted combination of Young & Butler sufficient to get Applebaum the conception of responsibility she's after?

Q6: Is there a way in which responsibility converts into liability once some of the unconscious has become conscious!

Q7: What would an awareness of the intersectional aspects of subjectivity in the elevator example do to the analysis that follows?

Q8: Can Butler’s notions of the dangers of condemnation and her ethics of non-violence lead to actual action?

Q9: Why does the book focus on how adult white people enact racist norms, without focussing on how these norms are transmitted to white children (via rewards and punishments)? 

Q10: Why is it that the racism perpetrated by “good” whites is more lethal or more destructive than overt acts of violence? How do we understand this idea?

We will reconvene next week in room 834 for the final chapter, 'White Complicity Pedagogy'.