White People and Black Lives Matter Ignorance, Empathy, and Justice

This book interrogates white responses to black-led movements for racial justice. It is a philosophical self-reflection on the ways in which ‘white’ reactions to Black Lives Matter stand in the way of the movement’s important work. It probes reactions which often prevent white people from according to black activists the full range of human emotion and expression, including joy, anger, mourning, and political action. Johanna C. Luttrell encourages different conceptions of empathy and impartiality specific to social movements for racial justice, and addresses objections to identity politics.

Chapter 1: Getting my People

1.1         Whiteness and Self-Reflection

1.2       “We” White People: On the Possibility of Collective Identity

1.3       The Hate that we see Might be our Own: Distinguishing Black Anger from White Hate

Chapter 2: Empathy and Racial Justice:  Redefining Impartiality in Response to Social Movements

2.2       Perspectives Against ‘Just Empathy’

2.3       Managing Empathy Through Colorblindness

2.4       Empathy and Racial Justice: A Different Idea of Impartiality

Chapter 3: How White People Refuse to Understand Black Mourning

3.1       White Responses to Black-led Political Mourning

3.2       Conservative Responses to Black Mourning: Militarization, Gas-lighting, Tone-policing

3.3       Liberal Responses to Black Mourning: Voyeurism and Appropriation

3.4       Recognizing Agency, Giving up the Idealized Victim

3.5       Mourning’s Potential: Undoing the Political Order in Antigone and the Book of Jeremiah

Chapter 4: Respecting Black Lives Matter as Arendtian Political Action

4.1       How Political Action is Different from Scientific Inquiry

4.2       Political Action as Unprecedented

4.3       Political Action as Revelatory

4.4       Political Action as Knowledge-Creating

4.5       Arendt’s Failure to Respect Black-Led Social Movements as Political Action

Chapter 5: Conclusion

5.1       Interrogating Allyship

5.2       Answering Objections to Identity Politics

5.3       White Feminism and Allyship

5.4       A Positive Prescription for Empathy?

Johanna C. Luttrell is Instructional Assistant Professor in the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston, USA.