WHITE COMPLICITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION: CAN ONE BE CULPABLE WITHOUT BEING LIABLE?

摘要

In part of an ongoing study of white complicity, moral responsibility, and moral agency in social justice education, Barbara Applebaum asks in this essay what model or models of moral responsibility can help white students recognize their white complicity and which models of moral responsibility obscure such acknowledgment. To address this question, she explores the concept of white complicity and its relation to racism and raises some compelling conceptual and pedagogical questions. Then she reviews a recent analysis of the concept of "complicity" and shows it to be inadequate as a foundation for white complicity. Finally, Applebaum describes Iris Marion Young's conception of a Social Connection Model of Responsibility and shows it to be capable not only of elucidating white complicity but also, when incorporated in social justice pedagogy, of diminishing denials of white complicity by white students. We live in a morally flawed world, one full of regrets and reproaches. Some of the things we regret, or for which we are reproached, we bring about intentionally and on our own. But our lives are increasingly complicated by regrettable things brought about through our associations with other people or with the social, economic, and political institutions in which we live our lives and make our livings. Try as we might to live well, we find ourselves connected to harms and wrongs, albeit by relations that fall outside the paradigm of individual, intentional wrongdoing.'