“Thinking about Morality and Politics by Thinking about Race”
George Shulman
What is Ethics? And Who Cares?: The Series
December 5, 2008

Shulman explored the relationship between morality and politics by focusing on James Baldwin’s diagnosis of white supremacy. The problem as Baldwin sees it is not that whites are ignorant; the problem is what he calls “innocence”–that whites willfully disavow what they already know about their conduct and black humanity. What does moral reflection look like when we use the idea of willful blindness to frame it?

George Shulman (B.A., Amherst College; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is a professor at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. He is the author of Radicalism and Reverence and American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Politics.