Antiracist Moral Identities, or Iris Murdoch in South

Africa

Lawrence Blum
Department of Philosophy
University of Massachusetts, Boston
Boston, MA 02125
USA
Lawrence.blum@umb.edu

Abstract
I argue that Samantha Vice understates the moral resources white
people have available to them to minimize their falling into distorted
ways of perceiving and responding to the world caused by bare white
advantage. In doing so, she paints an unjustifiably pessimistic picture
of white civic involvement in South Africa, and anywhere where
white people are unjustly advantaged, such as the United States. I de-
lineate two similar but distinct antiracist moral identities—the ‘white
ally’ and the ‘person committed to racial justice’—that can guide
civic engagement, as well as provide a counterweight to the distor-
tions of whiteness. I argue that Vice’s recommendation of withdrawal
from public engagement in humble silence is not the most morally ap-
propriate response to white privilege.

I find Samantha Vice’s essay a truly moving piece of philosophical work—not a reac-
tion I am accustomed to having to articles in philosophy journals. I am grateful for the
opportunity to respond to it and hope I can do it justice. Vice has thought and felt
deeply about the moral challenge of being a white person in contemporary South Af-
rica. Her article is a sort of cri de coeur—an exploration of appropriate moral re-
sponses on the part of such white persons and a search or plea for a way to protect
some private arena of life and the personal self.
Vice asks how one should respond as a white person to the social realities of con-
temporary South Africa, especially in light of its recent history as the most racially re-
pressive state of the latter half of the 20th century. She enlists various aspects of Iris
Murdoch’s still insufficiently appreciated moral philosophy to help her arrive at an an-
swer. Vice wants to say that white people’s selves have been damaged by the privi-
leged social position they occupy and the lives they lead that flow from their social po-
sition; and that coming to grips with those damaged selves has to be part of the moral
task that white people should undertake. She argues that a certain kind of silence,
linked to appropriate moral emotions of shame, guilt, and agent-regret, is a key part of
this appropriate response. And at the same time, such silence should be informed by
the recognition that a dimension of our individual selves is essentially private, beyond
the reach of politics, and that this private self, partially articulated a formulation of
S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4) 441

Murdoch’s moral philosophy, needs and deserves recognizing, protecting, correcting,

and nurturing.
I think some parts of Vice’s argument apply to the American context and I will
sometimes comment on those connections. But I will also make tentative suggestions
about the South African context itself, hoping not to claim more than my meager
knowledge allows. I am not comfortable with the place Vice’s argument ultimately
takes her—the protection of a private self from politics. Also I think that this place is
at odds with Vice’s desire to find an appropriate moral response to white social
positionality in South Africa. I would not welcome such a direction for white
Americans.
What is the reality to which Vice is exploring the appropriate white response? She
mentions three different dimensions thereof. The first is white positional advantage,
involving material and social benefits South African whites are born possessing, or
having access to, apart from anything current whites do to maintain that advantage.1
(Vice notes that these advantages are often expressed by the phrase ‘white privilege,’
and that this is not entirely apt, as some of the advantages whites have, such as decent
schools and housing, should be seen as rights rather than privileges, and should be ex-
tended to all citizens regardless of race [325]2. The second dimension is the patterns of
perception, psychic habits, and modes of thought, often unconscious, that whites adopt
(not generally deliberately) as a result of their advantaged position—either to rational-
ize that position, or as a result of the blinders and distortions resulting from seeing the
world from that racially advantaged position. (For these forms of thought and feeling,
Vice appropriates the felicitous term ‘whitely’ from Paul Taylor (who derived it from
Marilyn Frye) [324; see Taylor 2004: 229].) The third dimension comprises acts that
white people engage in—such as crossing to the other side of the street to avoid pass-
ing a black person on the street, or choosing not to cross the street despite feeling an
impulse to do so (327). Vice argues that whites have reason to feel shame, guilt, and
agent-regret over their positionality, whitely psychic habits, and actions, independent
of whether they have done anything to bring their advantaged status about.
Two moral directions: individual and civic
To situate Vice’s proposed response to the situation described, and my own reaction to
her response, let us note that there are (at least) two directions that a morally responsi-
ble person might go in trying to come to grips with the structures of unjust white ad-
vantage in South Africa (and the U.S.), that one might call individual and civic. The
former is basically the path that Vice delineates. It involves, on the part of those privi-
leged in the unjust structures, a clear recognition of their unjust advantages, and of the
distortions of thought, feeling, perception, and sensibility that tend to go along with
them. It involves a commitment and a sincere attempt to jettison or at least mitigate
these whitely distortions, recognizing the difficulty of doing so and the near impossi-
bility of doing so completely, as Vice painfully laments. The individual
whiteliness-minimizing perspective is, or can be, grounded in the idea that as a moral
1 We can roughly distinguish at least three different types of such purely positional advantages—inherit-
ing advantage through one’s family line not grounded in any current racial discrimination, benefiting
from current discrimination against blacks (e.g., having jobs available because of discrimination against
blacks), and being spared current unjust treatment of blacks (but not otherwise benefiting from it). See
Blum 2008 for further discussion of these distinctions.
2 This point has been made by Lewis Gordon in an important American collection on whiteness, from
which Vice cites an article by Paul Taylor. Gordon 2004, 174-177
442 S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4)

being one desires to see the world justly, to use a formulation Murdoch’s, and thus
strives to overcome obstacles in the way of doing so.
The civic approach, by contrast, foregrounds public, civic action to change and miti-
gate the structures of racial injustice. Whilst recognizing that it is these structures that
have caused and continue to support the whitely distortions emphasized in the individ-
ual approach the civic approach maintains a primary focus on the public injustices
rather than the individual psychic distortions.3
The individual and the civic approaches are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely
possible for someone to engage in both and ideally, perhaps, they should be combined.
At the same time, it is possible to engage in one without the other, at least to some ex-
tent. A white person can devote herself to working in a racial justice organization or
activity without being particularly focused on the psychic distortions of whiteliness.
Perhaps it could be argued that without dealing with her whiteliness, her effectiveness
in such organizations might be limited, since if some of her colleagues or clients are
black, she may fail to treat them with adequate respect and this will hinder her orga-
nizing efforts. There is something to this point, but it should not be overstated. The
tasks of many racial justice organizations are varied and many can be accomplished
quite well without the depth of self-scrutiny and self-change that the individual ap-
proach demands. Various technological tasks, composing texts, organizing events and
activities, using one’s intellectual skills of analysis to help a racial justice group ana-
lyze policies and proposals are just a few examples of such activities that can be
largely accomplished without deep self-scrutiny of one’s whiteliness.
Something similar can be said on the other side. If someone works very hard to con-
tend with her whitely obstacles to just perception and thinking, yet never takes action
to support causes of racial justice, one raises the concern that one’s efforts at individ-
ual moral improvement are limited or insincere.
Perhaps more important, I would suggest that the context of specific projects and the
relationships around them is the most fruitful for working on the distortions of
whiteliness, in a setting in which a shared commitment to racial justice is a given
among all parties involved. Vice implies that one must pull away from public engage-
ment in order to focus on those distortions. But I think one better accomplishes the
goal of correcting whitely distortions through open-minded and respectful interactions
with one’s colleagues and clients in the context of shared moral projects, even though
3 I am only barely familiar with the range of civic organizations, activities, and practices that would ex-
emplify the civic approach in the South African context. I have the impression that South Africa has an
extremely vibrant civil society sector, with many groups, often interracial in character. There seems
much scope for whites committed to racial justice to do something about it. But I want to make clear
that I would include in civic activity that conforms to my conception activity by university teachers that
attempts to help white students and fellow academics appreciate the demands of justice, its requirements
in current circumstances, and the continuing legacy of unearned white privilege from the apartheid pe-
riod, from which nearly all current South African whites benefit in some way. And I take this recom-
mendation to be within the spirit of Ward Jones’s argument, in an article cited by Vice, to the effect that
philosophers have a responsibility to engage with issues in their own societies, and their own individual
context more generally (Jones 2006). The need for such work in South Africa is made clear in Melissa
Steyn’s ethnography of the political and moral consciousness of contemporary white South Africans,
who (in quite interestingly different ways) fail to come to grips with their continuing privileged position
and with the moral requirements following from recognizing it (Steyn 2001). And Vice herself mentions
the Truth and Reconciliation report’s call for whites to ‘take up the burden of reparation and moral reju-
venation’ (332).
S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4) 443

one may unwittingly though unsurprisingly sometimes exhibit limitations caused by

one’s whiteness.
Literature on whiteness, in philosophy and other fields, contains both the civic and
the individual tendencies, sometimes with one predominating over the other. For ex-
ample, Charles Mills’s pioneering work on white privilege keeps a firm focus on white
supremacy as a political system that requires dismantling, just as does patriarchy and,
according to the Marxism with which Mills was at least once an adherent, capitalism.4
This political focus calls forth as a moral response a political engagement with this
unjust system.
My quarrel with Vice can be summarized by claiming (1) that her analysis fails to
give proper due to the civic/racial justice approach, painting an overly pessimistic pic-
ture of the potential for morally responsible white engagement of that sort; (2) that her
moral orientation fails to recognize the moral resources available to white persons to
both challenge the system of unjust white advantage and to provide a psychic counter-
weight to whiteliness; (3) that in many contexts of injustice public action is the main
activity morally required of us, and that whites must risk whiteliness in favor of these
stronger obligations; and (4) as a result of (1) and (3), Vice’s view has the effect of
nearly disabling whites from the civic activity that is required of them.
I choose my formulation of this critique carefully. Vice does not dismiss the racial
justice approach, nor see it as unworthy. In different places in her article, she acknowl-
edges a moral demand to engage in public action. But I think that her overall charac-
terization of the public moral terrain and the private moral psychology within which
she advocates the individual approach suffers these four shortcomings.
I do not disagree with Vice about the whitely tendencies to which a bare white iden-
tity is subject. But whites possess other moral (including morally-linked epistemic) re-
sources that can enable them to counter whitely ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiv-
ing, and, more generally, can help them to respond appropriately to unjust structures
of white advantage. One way to conceptualize these resources is to say that white per-
sons can strive to adopt particular moral identities—anti-racist identities—which in-
volve committing oneself to live and be guided by certain anti-racist moral principles
or to undertake particular moral commitments. These commitments involve ways of
looking and responding to the world that (like whiteliness) can become habitual, so
that accompanying feelings, thoughts, and motivational tendencies can also become
habitual and even partly subconscious. While white positionality is both unchosen and
very difficult to jettison, whereas antiracist identities must be adopted and so can be
imperfect and even lost and forsaken, we are responsible for our whitely psychic hab-
its and even more definitively our whitely actions. And we have the same form of re-
sponsibility for the antiracist identities and their accompanying psychic forms and
characteristic actions.
As bare whiteness in the context of unjust racial advantage is a negative moral iden-
tity, one that tends to pull one in the direction of wrong and provides a ‘community’ of
others who sustain that bad direction, other moral identities related to race can be posi-
tive counterweights to white identity in this same way (even if they cannot ever suc-
ceed in fully extirpating whiteliness).
4 Mills 1997a, 1997b.
444 S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4)

Anti-racist moral identities: the white ally, and the commitment to

racial justice
To illustrate the ways antiracist identities can provide psychic and behavioral re-
sources to counter whiteliness in white people, let me discuss two distinct, though re-
lated, such anti-racist moral identities. One is that of a ‘white ally.’ The white ally rec-
ognizes that black people are fighting for equality and justice in an unjust society5 and
she desires to assist black people in that goal. The white ally recognizes that histori-
cally whites who have joined with blacks in struggles for justice have often arrogated
too much power and influence to themselves, and have not had sufficient respect for
blacks themselves to be the leading force in their own liberation. But the white ally at-
tempts in her own behavior and thinking to avoid these moral pitfalls, and recognizes,
as Beverly Tatum says, that ‘it is possible to use one’s privilege to create more equita-
ble systems.’6 In South Africa, while whites are now about 9% of the population and
no longer have substantial political power, they still hold economic resources that
must be part of a solution to the continuing problem of racial injustice in South Africa,
and they possess human capital that can be put to use in rectifying the injustices of the
past and their legacy in the present, creating a just society rather than for mere private
gain. This possibility of restitution is part of what impels the white ally to make
common cause with blacks to improve their situation.
A second anti-racist moral identity that can be adopted by white persons is that of a
‘person who makes a commitment to racial justice,’ which I will call an ‘RJC’ (‘racial
justice committer’). The commitment of the RJC involves a recognition that her soci-
ety is not racially just, and a desire to do something substantive to bring it closer to
that moral standard. The RJC recognizes that persons of any racial background can be
committed to racial justice, and she will be prepared to work with persons of any racial
background in that joint cause. The RJC may see racial justice as a moral principle that
makes a claim on all human beings, as in the Rawlsian view that all citizens have a re-
sponsibility to try to bring about just institutions in their societies. Or the moral com-
mitment could have a more particularistic slant, in which one feels that as an unjustly
advantaged white person, one has a special responsibility to bring about more racially
just institutions. Or it could take a patriotic form of wishing to better one’s country by
making it more just.7 So there are different moral groundings of the racial justice
perspective.
Both the white ally and the RJC civic identities acknowledge racial injustice and in-
volve a desire and a striving to be on the side of racial justice and to take part in activi-
ties that bring it about. Neither are merely ‘well-intentioned.’ They take action over an
extended period of time, action that reflects not only a good heart, but goals plausibly
related to a genuine mitigation of racial injustice in some domain. But there are differ-
ences of emphasis that affect the total moral identity and sensibility involved in each.
The white ally sees her primary commitment as that of supporting black people in their
5 ‘Blacks and other people of color’ is a bit cumbersome, so I will use ‘black’ with that meaning, essen-
tially the same extension as ‘people of color’ in the U.S., but also recognizing that ‘black’ is often used
in the South African context to mean ‘non-white.’
6 Tatum 2007, 37. Tatum is an important theorist of the idea of the ‘white ally.’ See especially Tatum
1994.
7 In her study of white South African university students, Sally Matthews suggests this form of patriotic
white South African identity, i.e. one that involves a strong commitment to racial justice (e.g. p. 10). I
do not see this suggestion exemplified in any of the students she quotes in the article. (Matthews 2011.)
S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4) 445

struggles for justice; the racial justice committer sees her primary commitment as the
achievement of racial justice itself. The white ally is more sensitive to the challenges
of interracial alliances and the ways that whites have sometimes or often behaved in
ways that made these alliances work less well than they should. Using Vice’s framing,
one might say that the white ally is more sensitive to the perils of whiteliness than is
the RJC. At the same time, the white ally has hope and confidence that these perils can
be avoided or overcome to a sufficient degree to permit whites to serve as capable and
welcome allies of blacks.
On the other hand, the RJC brings a firmer recognition of the validity and moral
force of the principle of racial justice that give all a reason to support racial justice.
Within the Rawlsian framework, there is a sense in which justice for black people does
not belong only to—just as it does not make a demand only on—black people. The
RJC has a firmer grasp than does the white ally of the moral fact that justice for black
people should be a concern of all persons. Of course white people may well fail to rec-
ognize the demands of justice that, in both the U.S. and the South African context, re-
quire a divestment of some of their unearned privilege. Some may wrongly see
redistributive policies that favor blacks as unfair to themselves. In the give and take of
public discourse, many whites will resist the viewpoint of justice and claim that justice
is injustice and injustice, justice. This is not to say there is not room for genuine differ-
ences of opinion about what justice demands. But the basic point that justice demands
that whites be prepared to give up privileges to which the apartheid regime and its
legacy provided them remains.
These two civicly-oriented moral identities are not mutually exclusive and someone
could strive to embody both, in a salutary complementarity. Both can provide psy-
chic—motivational, emotional, cognitive, perceptual—resources that serve as compet-
ing identity anchors to withstand whitely tendencies. They both provide ways of being
white while attempting to minimize whiteliness. They help to provide a moral psychol-
ogy that can sustain the civic direction mentioned earlier—a lived commitment to ra-
cial justice or support for black struggles. In addition, when these antiracist identities
are embodied in interpersonal and organizational settings, they often involve a com-
munity of others who support that moral identity, and this supportive community can
be important to sustaining a moral identity when other whites around one remain
mired in various forms of whiteliness that implicitly or explicitly challenge one’s
anti-racist identities.8 So the two identities are at once moral and political.
Biko’s criticisms of white privilege and white liberalism
Anti-racist identities supply a different angle on the racially unjust world from the
overly pessimistic portrayal of the possibilities of white forms of moral being that Vice
provides. She cites two passages from Steve Biko, the Black Consciousness leader of
the late 1960’s and 1970’s, in support of her pessimistic view of white identity. One is
as follows,
For the 20-year-old white liberal to expect to be accepted with open arms is
surely to overestimate the powers of forgiveness of the black people. No matter
8 Steyn has a nice articulation of the communal support dimension of an antiracist moral identity: ‘I find
community with an ever-growing group of South Africans of all gradations of pigmentation, who care
about creating a fairer, more equitable society in which we all can grow in human dignity.’ (Steyn 2001,
xvii). I discuss non-race-based (or ‘non-racialist,’ in the South African terminology) forms of antiracist
political solidarity, identity, and community in Blum 2007.
446 S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4)

how genuine a liberal’s motivations may be, he has to accept that, although he
did not choose to be born into privilege, the blacks cannot but be suspicious of
his motives. (326)9
Vice suggests that we have to accept this sentiment as entirely valid about well-mean-
ing white people in general. Earlier in the same paragraph as Vice’s quoted passage,
Biko says,
It is not as if whites are allowed to enjoy privilege only when they declare their
solidarity with the ruling party. They are born into privilege and are nourished
and nurtured in the system of the ruthless exploitation of black energy. (66)
That is entirely correct, and is no doubt a point that was not appreciated by many, even
most, whites at the time who regarded themselves as ‘liberals.’ Perhaps it is still not
appreciated by many South African white liberals. Important as Biko’s insight was,
particularly in its role in promoting black self-organization and self-activity, and black
confidence in being able to carry on the struggle for liberation without white tutelage,
it can hardly be regarded as the last word on white privilege in South Africa, even for
the period in which it was written.
It is perfectly consistent with Biko’s view that some whites have adopted antiracist
moral identities that place them unequivocally on the side of blacks in the struggle for
justice, despite their race. When one thinks of some of the white heroes of the struggle
against apartheid—such as Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Barbara Hogan, Arthur Goldreich (a
random selection whom I know something about)—it is obvious that what might be
accurate about whites as an aggregate is quite defeasible about particular whites.
Some—both in that era and in contemporary South Africa—prove by their actions,
dedication, loyalty, and sacrifice that the privilege of being white nevertheless allows
for whites who are reliable, conscientious, and essentially non-whitely white allies and
RJCs.10 And their value to the anti-apartheid struggle often depended on their utilizing
their white privilege; for example, for a period in the early 1960’s when the ANC was
banned, Nelson Mandela pretended to be a houseboy or caretaker for Goldreich’s fam-
ily’s farm, which was used as a training area for the armed wing of the ANC
(Umkhonto we Sizwe: ‘the spear of the nation’). These whites are people who adopted
an antiracist identity that helped to sustain their participation, often quite risky, on
behalf of blacks and racial justice.
It is worth remembering that Steve Biko was writing in a very specific historical pe-
riod. He implies that white liberals all want to preserve their privilege, while they try
to salve their consciences by making some alliances with blacks or forming integrated
groups or organizations (Biko, 65). It is not entirely clear that Biko really means all
whites when he refers to ‘liberals’ and ‘leftists’ here. He may be simply calling it as he
sees it about those who fall into those categories in the particular period of his political
activity and writing.
9 Biko 1978, 66.
10 Vice recognizes exceptions to whites trapped in whiteliness: ‘There are justly famous exceptions, and
we probably all know people who are simply and quietly good in ways that allow them to transcend
their whiteness’ (334). I don’t think they have to be ‘quietly’ good, although they can be. More impor-
tant, I wouldn’t like the measure of moral goodness (in the context we are discussing in this paper) to be
only the transcending of whiteliness, but rather to be the adequate response to racial injustice, which can
include the civic direction of both the RJC and the white ally.
S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4) 447

Vice mentions whites who say with pride and perhaps defiance that they ‘refuse to
feel ashamed for feeling white’ (328). Vice’s response is that they have failed to come
to grips with what whiteness is in South Africa, and that shame for being white is en-
tirely appropriate. I certainly agree with this, but I would want to frame the response
differently. I would say that unless whites have taken steps to adopt a genuinely
anti-racist moral identity, their professions of moral innocence in refusing to feel
shame ring entirely hollow. That is, I would put the emphasis on the failure to act and
to be, in response to their whiteness, as the more significant basis for whether the
white person in question should feel shame. Action on behalf of justice may not wipe
away privilege, but if sustained in a principled way over time, action appropriately
mitigates warranted shame, even if it does not entirely undercut its justification. Vice
mentions such a possibility but her way of doing so does not do justice to it:
One could of course become politically or socially active, financially support-
ing worthy causes, joining or working for a relevant organization to make repa-
rations for the harm one’s whiteness expresses and maintains (334).
I do not envision either the white ally or the RJC engaging in racial justice work in or-
der to make reparations for the harms caused by her whiteliness, but rather out of a
sense of moral responsibility to support the struggles of black people (for the white
ally) or to bring about racial justice (for the RJC). Here again I fear that Vice’s
overconcern with whiteliness can be disabling of sincere attempts to take action on be-
half of racial justice.
Is silence with humility the road to moral repair and responsiveness?
The moral character of these anti-racist identities makes clear why they constitute re-
sponses to the damage to the white self (through the collusion with whiteliness) with
which Vice is concerned. In the final paragraph of her article, implying that this is the
point to which the argument has been building, Vice suggests that the appropriate re-
sponse to this damage lies in humility and silence.
For White South Africans, work on the self, done in humility and silence,
might indicate the recognition that any voice in the public sphere would inevi-
tably be tainted by the vicious features of whiteliness. It might also be one way
of saying that I am not merely a product of what is worst about me and a re-
fusal, finally, to be fully defined by it (340).
But the attempt to adopt an antiracist moral identity precisely is a way of repairing the
damaged self. Vice seeks a purely private response to this moral challenge (cf. 338),
drawing on the substantial self of Murdoch’s philosophy that is constituted in part by
its inner responses to the world. But there is a question of balance here. The ultimate
goal of repair of the self must be to get it to a place where it can respond morally to its
world. I have suggested two forms that response can take—an individual one and a
civic/political one. But I want to lay my cards on the table and suggest that if one’s
world is constituted by a very public injustice, it may not be possible for an adequate
response to fail to have some public face. Vice has shown ways that whiteliness can
block that adequate response. But coming to terms with whiteliness must be able to is-
sue in public actions, whatever Murdoch-like inner work the agent engages in as part
of that struggle. It must involve public action recognized by others, and especially by
those who suffer injustice, to be an honest, sincere, and plausible attempt to address
and rectify that injustice.
448 S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4)

Sometimes Vice seems to me to fall into thinking that ‘undoing whitely habits’ is the
full content of the adequate moral response that the white person should seek. But in
my view, we want to undo those habits because they block, constrict, and distort our
ability to come to grips with public racial injustice, and to relate in a respectful and ap-
propriate way to those of other races. The view Vice states in the quotation above
could even be seen as a retreat from the white person’s responsibility to name and ana-
lyze her own position in society, and to work out what her moral responsibilities to
that society are.11 Learning from Stephen Biko that whites can take up space that pre-
vents blacks from developing their voice and their analysis, perhaps she will just have
to risk displaying vicious features of whiteliness. But the alternative—holding oneself
back from civic engagement—is not compatible with a fully responsible moral iden-
tity, and the adopting of antiracist identities can supply some epistemic, motivational,
and other moral resources to reduce the likelihood of the vicious forms of whiteliness.
I understand that the position of whites in South Africa is importantly different from
in the U.S. Whites, once the politically-dominant group as in the South Africa, are
now a fairly small minority (especially after the post-apartheid emigration). There is
an important sense in which blacks have taken ownership of South Africa, and whites
cannot be a dominant presence in that reshaping. Blacks in the U.S. have nothing re-
motely like that degree of power to shape the country’s political agenda. Nevertheless,
an outsider cannot help but be struck by the strong tradition of non-racialism in South
Africa, still an official part of the ANC ideology, movingly articulated by Mandela.
Does not the Freedom Charter say ‘That South Africa belongs to all who live in it,
black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based
on the will of all the people?’ I have the impression that this is not mere sentiment, but
a living national philosophy, even if not shared by all. It is a philosophy that, no doubt,
some whites misuse to defend their privileges, or feel entitled to a greater role than is
appropriate. But it is a philosophy that can provide a framework for the full participa-
tion of antiracist whites in building the new South Africa, with its staggering
challenges and its vibrant civic life.
I cannot tell if my defense of a robust civic engagement by antiracist whites is ulti-
mately at odds with Vice’s overall stance on these matters. She frequently mentions
the possibility that one must act publicly. Consider the following passage:
In a country beset by continuing injustice, it will be hard sometimes to discern
when it is appropriate to maintain silence and when that would indicate, rather,
an inappropriate disengagement or obsession with moral purity. Perhaps gross
injustice is being done, and whatever one’s race, whatever the context, one
should take a stand (338).
This worry that an overconcern with one’s own moral purity can be morally distorting
is itself very Murdochian. And Vice gives it a particularly Murdochian articulation
elsewhere: ‘It is certainly easy for this project to degenerate into a morbid ego-
centricity and perverse fascination with our faults’ (335). Vice is exquisitely aware of
the possible pitfalls of the private road to healing the self. Despite this I think the way
she portrays public action as its main alternative contributes misleadingly to the seem-
11 Paul Taylor makes something like this point in the article Vice cites, mentioned in note 2. Taylor 2004.
In the article, Taylor discusses the American philosopher John Dewey’s refraining from saying anything
substantive about Claude McKay, the African American poet, in his introduction to a collection of
McKay’s poems that dealt with the African American experience.
S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4) 449

ing plausibility of that private road. Her footnote to the passage above is revealing of
her conception of privacy and of the public response to injustice:
My view is that morality trumps other considerations. One should not stand by
in the face of injustice. Here, however, the transgression is race-neutral; it af-
fects everyone as human beings, not as members of a particular race and one
should respond as a human being, not a member of a particular race (note 49,
342).
This formulation implies that the injustice Vice speaks of here, saying that one must
respond to it, is somehow external to the white self, and is thus of a different character
than the unjust white advantages that seemed to have been presented as the moral con-
text of the article. This is connected with her presenting the injustice as ‘race-neutral.’
I am not sure what she can mean by this. The injustice is certainly racial in the obvious
sense that it is a form of racial injustice. But perhaps the ‘neutrality’ lies in the ability
of all, of any race, to recognize the injustice and to take a stand against it. This way of
glossing ‘race-neutral’ is in line with my suggestion of a racial justice moral identity
(somewhat Rawlsian in character) that a white person can adopt. And yet Vice implies
that the universality of the wrong somehow puts it outside the scope of her concern in
the paper—that because one recognizes it to be wrong qua human being rather than
qua white person, it does not bear on the moral responsibilities of white persons as
such. I am not sure that this is a coherent view. White persons who have consciences
are also human beings, and our humanity is an important source of our conscience. My
suggested notion of an anti-racist white moral identity helps to keep this intertwining
salient. The white person draws moral resources from many places—her roles in soci-
ety, her profession, her family and its legacy, moral traditions with which she aligns
herself, and including her humanity. All of these are part of her self. Of course they
are not all parts of her whiteness, although many of them are affected by her white-
ness. But they constitute elements of her moral identity that can help her counteract the
deleterious effects on the psyche of her white social positionality.12
I think that we work on the obstacles to our best moral responsiveness through at-
tempting to live up to moral identities that we endeavor to make our own. Murdoch is
helpful in thinking about this task, both because she emphasizes that moral philosophy
itself needs to help us conceptualize the task of making ourselves morally better,13 but
also because she articulates the rich moral psychology—including perception, emo-
tion, imagination, and thought—that Vice fruitfully utilizes to support her idea of the
substantial moral self. That moral psychology can be put in service of anti-racist moral
identities and the public activities in which they express themselves.
But where in this Murdochian picture do we find Vice’s desire and promotion of si-
lence and privacy?14 Part of the problem is terminological. Sometimes by ‘private’
Vice includes our relations with those who are part of our everyday world—contrast-
12 Moreover, Vice’s desire to affirm that the self is not simply a deterministic product of its political (or
other) circumstances (see quotation from her page 340, at the beginning of this section) constitutes a
reason for her to accept humanity as internal to the (white person’s) self.
13 ‘What is a good man like? How can we make ourselves morally better? Can we make ourselves morally
better? These are questions the philosopher should try to answer.’ (italics in original). Murdoch, ‘On
“God” and “Good”’, in Sovereignty, 1970, 52.
14 While Vice is not incorrect to emphasize the inner and private aspects of Murdoch’s philosophy,
Murdoch sometimes does state that outward action is the necessary outcome of this inner work, e.g., ‘Of
450 S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4)

ing our behavior in this context with action taken in a larger and less personal ‘public’
sphere. She mentions actively listening to non-white voices (335), and being guided
by an appreciation that the oppressed must find words for their own experiences (336).
My understanding of a white ally or a racial justice identity very much includes this
interpersonal realm.
But there remains a substantive disagreement, for even if Vice wants to include the
interpersonal realm, she also wants ‘care of the self’ to exclude public action, or at
least she wants to defend that exclusion as a possibility. This seems to me a luxury the
morally conscientious person who lives in a context of great injustice cannot afford.
Both the U.S. and South Africa are societies of such appalling inequities in every do-
main of life that I think one must do what one can to deal with this situation. Yet the
way Vice conceptualizes the realm of the ‘political’ so that it seems almost entirely ex-
ternal to the moral self undermines the claims of this civic direction.
[I]n such a context, no life and no self is only political; no one can think of her-
self as only a citizen or as only and essentially constituted by factors external to
her. The concern with the quality of the self that is so central in the origins of
the western philosophical tradition seems even more important in a land that
has denied the privacy and nonpolitical reality of individual lives. Part of eradi-
cating racism would be to eradicate the forced identification of oneself as a par-
ticular public and political product. (323)15
Of course no one thinks persons are only citizens—that view seems to me a straw
man—but the suggestion that the realm of the civic is external to the self goes much
too far in the other direction. Vice adds to this demotion of the public and civic what
seems to me an implausible claim that a major wrong of South African racism (and
perhaps especially the imposition of official racial categories on every citizen) is that it
has forced people to be public and political. It seems to me more apt to say that a cen-
tral moral wrong of apartheid was its preventing non-whites from being citizens, from
having public lives that engaged with and were recognized in the national polity.
Clearly Vice feels that some demands for public and political activity are unwel-
come and even oppressive. But I do not think that a morally conscientious self,
whether damaged or not, can hold itself apart from engagement with the political
arena. Perhaps, as Murdoch once said,16 ultimately differences of temperament under-
lie our differing philosophical positions, and this may be true of the difference be-
tween Vice and myself on these issues. Vice seems to yearn for a mode of life that in-
volves no public political commitments and engagements, though recognizing that the
world in which she lives renders that vision nearly morally unacceptable—nearly but
not entirely. I myself do not find such a mode of life appealing. I agree with Aristotle
that humans are political beings. On this point the differences between South Africa
and the United States are not pertinent. Most white Americans in advantaged positions
possess both race and class advantages that depend on the sufferings of others. There
course virtue is good work and dutiful action.’ ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,’ in Sov-
ereignty, 91.
15 See also ‘So I seek an appropriate way of living with white shame that is nonetheless private and does
not assume that every person ought to respond only as a political animal and that every response need
be an outward action.’ (334)
16 ‘It is frequently difficult in philosophy to tell whether one is saying something reasonably public and
objective, or whether one is merely erecting a barrier, special to one’s own temperament, against one’s
own personal fears’ Murdoch, ‘On “God” and “Good”’, Sovereignty, 72.
S. Afr. J, Philos. 2011, 30(4) 451

is no place for the purely private—where that means politically unengaged—self. And
if Simone Weil (an important influence on Murdoch) is correct, the idea of a
self-sustainingly just and non-oppressive social order is in any case a mirage. There
can be no dispensing with the moral vigilance required of citizens. For myself, I would
not wish it were otherwise and I accept the never disappearing discomfort that Vice
powerfully argues the morally responsible privileged person must feel in an unjust so-
cial order in which he or she benefits (329, 337). 17

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