Seeing injustice is an ethical obligation

As ethical humanists, we talk about injustice and its many faces and the choices we have to correct it.  As humans, we bog down on priorities and strategies and "getting it."

In the past weeks, I have been much involved in these discussions--observing, listening, talking, and writing.  My correspondence has grown substantially, and now it is time to come back home to the Hoedown to work it out in my own mind, at my keyboard.  The weeks have been full.  St. Louis for the 101st AEU Assembly. The Mountain near Highlands, NC, for the AEU's 2016 Lay Leadership School. Family.  Adventures in travel.  Making connections with other ethical societies and with the roots of the movement.  Throughout all this busy-ness have run the threads of social justice--specifically racial justice, criminal justice, and the occasional stray mention of feminism/womanism.

Where do we start to act?  Why, indeed, must we act at all, especially when our own lives are not affected by these conflicts but rather by others, perhaps based on economics or age or some other damned thing?   Here's a thought:

As ethical humanists, we commit to making the world a better place so that in and by that process we make ourselves better humans.  We are, then, obliged to look at the world around us--our home, our neighborhood, our community, our country, our world--with eyes that appreciate what is good and just but also identify what is corrupt and unjust. 

The first step in fighting injustice, I would say, is first to see it.

We often wear blinders in our daily lives, protecting ourselves from pain, getting in ruts with our comfortable routines, not seeing the suffering of others unless we are slapped with one of those late night commercials about hunger or animal abuse.  I change the channel, so much do I resist feeling that pain. But there is injustice all around us, begging to be seen. 

• Why does my neighbor keep having broken bones, falls, bruises, depression? 
• What does this article I am reading about black people being shot by police mean for my community?  Does it happen here?  
• If water scarcity and drought is a root cause of the violence in Syria, can such a thing happen here?  
• I am doing a good thing by serving meals at the homeless shelter, but why are these people homeless?

Simply being aware of the signals that something might be wrong can be a start.  If we cannot see injustice, then we can do nothing to overcome it. Seeing the signals and recognizing them as signals, we can then begin learn more about it and the problems that are being signaled.

"Black Lives Matter"--tee shirt, button, statement--is a signal that something is wrong--not only in the black community but in the white community that surrounds it.  When someone cannot understand that signal, cannot see that it is communicating something important, that too is a signal of something wrong.  It becomes a problem ignored, a wrong unrighted.  Worse, it becomes a problem prolonged and increased.  

How do we see?

Well, we look.  We scan our environment for threats--this isn't safe, that could be hurtful.  We look for anomalies--something is out of place, not right. We look for balance--the fairness that may be the most fundamental of all human values. Maybe we should expand our search beyond ourselves and our families to others in our community/world, even including strangers in our protective vision?

We interpret what we see.  That's the part about "getting it."  We tend to interpret the signals around us in personal terms.  Personal would include ourselves, our family, our friends--and moving out beyond the circle of known persons to larger entities, still "circles" to which we "belong."  We use familiar words and concepts and experiences and knowledge to interpret the signals we get so that we can read them in terms that we understand.  Not everyone uses those words or shares those experiences.  Seeing injustice will sometimes include a new perspective on what we are looking at.  That new perspective may include active study of an issue to learn more or something as simple as listening so that we can see things better.

Here's a fairly mundane example.  It's about wallpaper, but "wallpaper" eventually became a code word with my late husband that stopped a budding conflict because one of us remembered what happened when we shopped for wallpaper for the bathroom.  Well, it was a matter of taste.  I wanted the foil with butterflies (this was in the 80's!) and he wanted the stripes.  Things got tense.  We were starting to get a little more heated and a little louder and realized that our "discussion" not going well in the wallpaper/paint store.  We decided to take it over to the McDonald's across the street and try to work it out with some ice cream. And so we did, finally reaching the dumbfounding realization that he was talking about the master bath and I was talking about the guest bathroom.   We were arguing over nothing, since I was fine with stripes in the master, and he was fine with butterflies for the guests. From then on, for more than thirty years, one of us could say "wallpaper," and the other would stop to make sure that we were actually talking about the same subject. 

The point of the wallpaper story is that interpretation of data, including signals about injustice, can depend upon point of view.  "Getting it" always includes knowing the point of view from which you are "seeing."  It usually includes recognizing that more than one point of view is looking at the problem.  It should include sharing points of view until everyone can really see the same thing.

Seeing injustice, I have said, is an ethical obligation.  I also think that it is an ethical action.

What are you seeing?