Political Theory · 2016 · 73 citations · 0 references
HumanitiesAfrican American StudiesCriminologyDiscriminationTheory Of JusticeWhiteness StudiesPhilosophy Of Anti-black RacismPhilosophy Of Racial JusticeRacismWhite SupremacyBlack ExistenceInterrogations Of WhitenessPolice OrdersRacial Injustice
The article situates the concept of “soul blindness”—the failure to see others as human—within the broader critique of racialized police orders and the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that such blindness constitutes a fundamental injustice. The study aims to analyze soul blindness as a basic injustice, examining how it manifests in white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matter movement. The authors employ philosophical frameworks from Cavell, Wittgenstein, and Rancière to define and analyze soul blindness as a distinct form of injustice.
What does it mean to see someone as human, as a member of humankind? What kind of call for justice is it to demand that a group be seen as human beings? This article explores a fundamental kind of injustice: one of perception and how we respond to our perceptions. Drawing on Cavell, Wittgenstein and Rancière, we elucidate “soul blindness” as a distinct and basic form of injustice. Rancière’s police orders and Cavell’s soul blindness are mutually constitutive; the undoing of police orders entails a politics of soul dawning. Soul dawning entails acknowledging the humanity of others without erasing difference. In the concluding section, we consider white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matters (BLM) movement as a case of soul blindness. Part of the political import of BLM is its capacity to illustrate how practices of soul blindness in the United States constitute whiteness in a racialized police order.