Personal responsibility and systemic problems by Ornaith O'Dowd, NYC

Lately, I've been having some thought-provoking conversations about the extent of personal moral responsibility in the context of vast, systemic problems, such as food injustice, global warming, corporate globalization, racism, and poverty, and in terms of more localized phenomena, such as gentrification and various urban environmental and local food movements, that are connected to these larger concerns. The question I'm left with is this: what is the role and extent of personal moral responsibility in these contexts? What is the significance of personal consciousness and action? What does it mean for me to do what I ought to with respect to global warming or gentrification? Does an emphasis on personal responsibility and action evade systemic questions?

My liberal and left-liberal friends tend to place great emphasis on individual action, arguing that it is indeed a moral obligation, and an important one at that, to make responsible consumer choices and lifestyle choices: for example, avoid buying products sold by corporations who use sweatshop labor, or buy less toxic cleaning products, or choose alternatives to the corporate food chain (grow your own food or buy local organic food), or simply reduce consumption altogether.

My Marxist friends tend to place great emphasis on the systemic nature of these problems, and consider the kinds of personal action just described a futile and perhaps naive exercise which wrongly places responsibility on individual shoulders rather than on the capitalist system (and the racist, patriarchal, heterosexist systems that accompany it). It's just not personal, they argue. The answer is revolutionary change (at the level of the whole system), not individual action (or even collective action on single issues).

My own feeling is that both sides have important insights, but the question of individual moral responsibility in the context of systemic problems is very complex. To make things more manageable, I shall concentrate on two clusters of issues: gentrification and racism, and urban environmentalism. In this part, I discuss the former; in four weeks' time, I shall discuss the latter.

I am a white, educationally privileged young woman living in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, Crown Heights (Brooklyn). The section of Crown Heights where I live has long been a black community, with many people of Caribbean origin. The neighborhood has had a history of poverty and associated problems; now it is seeing an influx of young, mostly white, mostly educationally and economically privileged, gentrifiers. The consequences are complex: the neighborhood is more peaceful, and there is a lot of new development and economic activity. Franklin Avenue is, week by week, seeing new businesses: cute cafes and restaurants, hip boutiques, cheek by jowl with neighborhood mainstays such as West Indian bakeries and small places of worship. The food landscape is changing, and in my personal life as a consumer, I enjoy being able to buy organic milk and fresh produce in my immediate neighborhood. On the other hand, these changes have another side: black, working-class residents have increasingly been displaced by skyrocketing rents (and, according to some disturbing reports, by harassment designed to remove them from their rent-stabilized homes so that landlords can charge new tenants far higher rents). Week by week, month by month, Crown Heights is less black and working class, more white and middle class.

Where do I stand in all this? Gentrification-- and especially the heavily 'raced' version we have here-- is at once personal and not personal. It is personal in the sense that it is lived by individuals face to face, as it were, as they do the most personal, everyday things-- moving in to a new home, shopping for groceries, having brunch at a cafe. There is often tension in the air between old and new residents: sometimes unspoken, sometimes not. Of course, most people are civil and even welcoming. I'm fortunate to have friendly, pleasant neighbors, who have been gracious and helpful. But there have been awkward moments in the neighborhood: the message boards are peppered with them. I've been called a "white bitch" on the street myself. It's hard not to take this personally at least to some degree, of course: I'm human. I've been called homophobic names on the street in my time, too (in Park Slope, of all places!), and it's equally unpleasant at a very raw, personal level. It is, however, politically very different. When I'm subjected to homophobic verbal abuse, I'm the oppressed: I'm in a morally clear position, I'm on the 'right' side of the line in that sense. When I'm called "white bitch" in a gentrifying black working class neighborhood, the dynamics change. I'm part of the problem: I'm a walking symbol of a process that has displaced and marginalized people, I'm on the 'wrong' side of the line in race and class terms. I'm describing a one-off incident, but everyone knows-- or at least, everyone who is paying the smallest amount of attention knows-- that as white people move in, the neighborhood "improves"; who can blame people for feeling aggrieved? I would find it hard not to be bitter at the underlying assumption: nice neighborhoods with good, healthy food and pleasant places to go are for white, middle class people. And it is uncomfortable to know that I am part of the process.

On the other hand, of course, gentrification is not personal. I did not harass tenants, I did not create the housing situation we have, I did not create the race and class systems of which gentrification is one symptom. I moved to my current home for the same reasons most people move: it was a neighborhood I could afford, it was an easy commute to work, it was near places I like to go (the park, the museum, etc). What could I do? Where else could I go? I certainly couldn't afford to live in Park Slope or Prospect Heights-- not my economic class. Why should I feel personally responsible? Why feel bad? It's the system, and the landlords and property developers who are the winners in it. And yet, I do further it every day simply by my presence, and of course my purchases (they started carrying organic milk for people like me). It seems vulgarly insensitive not to be at least conscious of the process I am part of, but my being conscious won't actually make a difference. Will it merely make me feel a bit better?

One aspect of white privilege, especially as it interlocks with class and educational privilege, is that I can choose whether or not to be conscious of these issues in my life. I can choose to tune in, or choose to take the process of gentrification for granted. Either way, I can be fairly confident that I will be at an advantage as a result of that process. Peggy McIntosh and Marilyn Frye have done interesting work on white and male privilege and what Frye calls "whiteliness" (bearing the same relation to whiteness as masculinity does to maleness), and one important lesson from it is just this optional blindness. Privilege means, among other things, being able to take things for granted, being able to not think about certain things, being able to ignore/ be ignorant of certain things (usually, the ways in which your privilege unfairly advantages you in your everyday life). This aspect of privilege relates closely to the issues I discussed in my last Intervention, "Rev. Wright and the epistemology of ignorance". Ignorance has served us privileged people well. And yet: we can plead, I didn't know, I didn't notice, I never realized, I was ignorant, not culpable! I just moved to this awesome apartment, I never thought about the effect it was having on the existing community! It's a protest that is only partly mere self-serving denial. How can we blame people for simply not knowing, being ignorant? It is difficult. Ignorance is an interesting phenomenon, though: it's part plain old not knowing, part ignoring. It's also in some ways a bad habit, for which individuals are partly responsible (their bad habit of ignoring other people's needs and suffering is also nurtured by families, communities, and the corporate media). Kant reminds us in the Metaphysics of Morals that we ought not to shield ourselves from knowledge of others' suffering: we ought not avoid places where we will meet it, but ought rather to act positively to cultivate our sense of compassion (Doctrine of Virtue 6:457). The growing literature on care ethics reminds us, too, that morality is to a significant degree a matter of being attentive/ paying attention, of being responsive/ taking responsibility. Ignorance in the sense of ignoring, not paying attention, not stopping to think, is, to some degree at least, culpable.

Let's say I start to acknowledge all of this. Again, what moral difference will it make? What can I do? It seems a small moral gain to simply realize one's privilege, although it is a start. It is dauntingly hard to know what any individual can do about race privilege in general and gentrification in particular. Only collective organizing can do anything, but of course, it is only if individuals act that collective action will happen. If all the individuals stay home alone and think "there is nothing I can do", or even act as individual consumers, individual sites of awareness of privilege-- as many of us do-- we make it true that there is nothing we can do. Everything about our system encourages this perspective. (Ever wondered why there aren't mass street protests and general strikes demanding universal health coverage?)

There are organizations and a few journalists and bloggers trying to bring attention to problems of tenant harassment and displacement; perhaps the one concrete thing one can do is to support them. Even this, however, fails to get at the root of the problem: we live under a system which allows the principle that living in a safe, clean, pleasant neighborhood with access to healthy, affordable food, public transport, parks, cultural facilities, and decent schools, is appropriately distributed according to economic status (and since race and class correlate in the US as elsewhere, according to race too). It's a principle I find horrifying. So are we back to the orthodox Marxist position articulated by some of my companions-- that the only real option is to fight the system as a whole, the system as such? The problem is: that's daunting. Most of us don't know where to begin with that. What do you build a revolutionary politics out of? Can it come merely from people who think in terms of the system as a whole? The key is, it seems to me, to realize the following: you can't solve the gentrification problem without paying attention to the system that creates it, but neither can you fight (or even understand) the system unless you pay attention to a specific, street-level experience like gentrification. What's more, people have different ways of "plugging in" to political struggle. Not everyone will be inspired by wholly theoretical, system-level talk; many people will want to get involved at a less abstract level. The trick is to get them together. We need theoretical analysis and broad-based anticapitalist, antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic struggle, to be sure, but we also need, as part of that, lots of visions of how that overall struggle makes a difference in terms of concrete issues, and we need lots of visions of how to do concrete things differently, from how we plan our neighborhoods to where we get our food. Why else would we want a new system, if not to do all of those things differently and make people's lives better? Part two of the discussion next month.