Hello! 

We are going to be doing something together! I have been so excited to share with you this series which I think will have an enduring and beneficial effect when it comes to the work we are doing together. 

You have heard me speak of ‘moral activism’. There are various ways to think about the term, and it’s usually spoken in the context of law or of philosophy or of theology. Yes, yes, and yes–and I myself would also make the case for sociology and psychology.

It’s in all of these connections–and sometimes even collisions–that we find ourselves when we consider both morality and activism, and the welding of both together, when we think about the overarching issue of racial justice. 

Let me amend what I said just now, just a bit. To say that ‘we weld’ morality and activism implies that it’s we who do the melding; that’s not how I see it. They are, in fact, and have always been, inextricably linked; to acknowledge and or develop a morality demands some kind of action–more of what is the good, and less of what is of the bad. It also strongly implies that the moral does not ‘just happen’ but that it takes choice and intentionality by a person or a group of persons to move the needle toward the just, the good, the ethical and the moral. 

Conversely, action by itself is not always moral, even when the catalyst, the driver, of the given action has a moral charge. 

These two elements–the morality of action, and the actionability of the moral, have deeply interested me, to the point of consuming me, even before I had the words to fully articulate what was fomenting in my head. 

That’s true for all of us, you know. We develop the beginnings, the underpinnings, the foundations of moral and ethical thought and conviction quite young. Children have a fundamental and often quite accurate understanding of what is good and right and fair, in a quite undiluted form, actually. This innate sense is influenced, for good or for ill, by outside forces. Best case scenario, the conditions are set for moral conviction and action, and good choices are both modeled and reinforced by both the micro societies children are in (families, neighbors) as well as the macro societies that they are in. 

This is the ideal. But as all of us know, that is not how it plays out, not for any of us really. As soon as we are in the throes of developing a moral life, however nascent, there are competing forces both overt and covert, that can serve to challenge, undermine, weaken and the like. 

I want to be clear here–a lot of that challenge is good. Children are not inherently perfectly moral creatures–there needs to be guidance and crafting–this is where formation comes in. Left to themselves, an unchecked and feral moral sensibility can easily become distorted. 

But the overarching point I want to make here holds, and it is this: that much of what we do as adults is sort of a ‘circling back’ to what we once were and what we once held before we were held in thrall and influenced and shaped by society. This is part of our core selves. 

Put another way–we got it right the first time. 

So then: what does all of this have to do with race?

Everything really. To talk about race is to talk about morality. To talk about white supremacy and whiteness–and how one is socialized into them, is to talk about morality. 

Thusly, to talk about confronting and critiquing and dismantling racism and white supremacy, we need to have a square and frank talk about *why* we would want to do that. And we need to have a common language; a common framework–and the possibility of a way forward. 

Enter the Good Place. I put it right up with the original Star Trek in that it tackled issues and concepts not confronted before on television. 

But as well as it does, we still have to have a conversation here. So we will. 

I am including three resources that are big bites of the apple; three texts we will be referring back to over the course of the 52 episodes. One is an overview of Western and Eastern moral and philosophical thought; what is glaringly absent (and the authors acknowledge this) is the utter lack of African and Indengenious thought (I look forward to your thoughts on this particularly galling omission); I rectified it with two overviews of African and Native American moral thought–which I want you to keep in your back pocket as we walk together in the series.

Queries: 

• Do you agree that consideration of morality and ethics are essential to thinking about racial justice? Why or why not?
• What are the differences between rules, morals, and ethics?
• What’s your ‘why’?
• On the ‘platonic ideal’ of shared values: I agree that there is, as stated in ‘Universal Values’ that there is a limited universality as well as significant overlap between and among belief systems–but the respective Venn diagrams do not overlap to become a perfect circle, and that’s a good thing. Why do I think that creates (potentially) more health than dissonance?
• How do you feel about the fact that when we consider these things, we, like The Good Place, focus on Western and Eastern philosophies and either minimize or ignore African and indigenious cultures; Native American (North, Central, South, Pacific Islander and the Caribbean), though by no means only these? Why are they mostly ignored, but even when they are not, they are glossed over, or idealized, or fetishized, or demonized? 
• How is activism a moral act, or set of acts? In areas such as social justice in general, and racial justice in particular, is conviction ever enough? 
• A tough one: can we even begin to come to the table for this discussion before first having a shared ethos and language?
• How does our North Star fit in with all of this?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/african-ethics/

https://firstpeoplesvoices.com/morality.htm

https://personal.tcu.edu/pwitt/Universal%20Values.pdf

Join in the Bistro discussion below.

https://laceonrace.com/groups/the-bistro/forum/discussion/welcome-to-the-good-place/