The Idealistic Pragmatist | Reflections on Ferguson

On Aug. 9 last year, 18-year old Michael Brown was fatally shot in Ferguson, Mo. Another unjustified police shooting, another abrupt end to a life and another black teenager dead. For Michael, just eight days after graduating from high school, life had come to a definitive end. The incident sent shockwaves throughout the Ferguson community and soon echoed across all corners of America. It wasn’t an anomaly, only the latest in a series of similar events. It was another wound to an already bleeding country and a manifestation of the paramount American malady of racial inequality.

It is only human for us to react emotionally. We saw it in the streets of Ferguson, in cities all across the nation and at our own campus. Who is accountable? Why is this happening? We immediately want to find justice, seek out and destroy the evils to remedy the damage done. We paint a narrative where it is us, the people out to crush racial inequality — such as students at Penn — against the evil forces of racism. It is we who realize the injustices of racial inequality against those who are passive or even clandestinely against progress. This emotional response is essential, but unfortunately, insufficient. What we like to think of as a dichotomy of good versus evil, where our condemnation of racism is a spear against those who still are ignorant and stuck in the past, ultimately, considerably misses a much more substantial and complex issue.

Hegel, the German philosopher, is famous for his dialectical conception of human history. He saw the stream of ideas as consisting of a thesis, on one end, against an antithesis, on the other, set to be combined to form a synthesis. An influential idea, the undertones of the Hegelian dialectic resonated with Marx and other thinkers, and its vestiges still figure in the social liberalism of the 21st century to which many of us adhere. While most no longer believe in the type of dialectic Marx envisioned, the tendency to see the world as a dichotomy between progress and its antithesis remains. Racial inequality is racism, and racism is an idea, an idea which must be overcome in the grand narrative of humankind. This idealistic outlook brings the unintended effect of oversimplifying one of the most momentous challenges America has ever faced.

Sometimes when you shop at Chipotle, like the one on Walnut Street, you get a quotation from the Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker printed on the bag. “We will never have a perfect world,” reads the first half of the quote, perhaps alluding to the imperfections of human nature. Indeed, Pinker would agree that unintentional discrimination is an inescapable feature of the human mind. Schema theory in cognitive psychology, for example, tells us that we automatically create bundles of associations based on our experiences, necessary for us to function in the world. Only through an excruciating last couple of centuries has it become clear that racism is biologically unfounded, but in a country with deep-rooted racial inequality, from a psychological perspective, we should not be surprised to see it persist.

Today, blacks are less well-off economically and more often commit crime than most other racial groups, adjusted for population size, in the United States. These are realities, and rather than isolating the issue of racial inequality as solely or mainly a self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuated by how we think, we need to explore the underlying causes. This is, for example, less of a problem of prejudice in the minds of “evil” policemen, which is a symptom. Rather, it is one of not providing many young blacks the socio-economic opportunities they need to avoid being forced to resort to a life of crime, which is an underlying cause.

We will never completely eradicate racism or inequality, but in order to create a better tomorrow, we need to go beyond the good versus evil dichotomy and examine our society, including ourselves — even if we are the most professed champions of racial equality — to find and address the underlying causes behind them. Instead of simply condemning the symptoms, we need to go after the disease.

“We will never have a perfect world, but it’s not romantic or naïve to work towards a better one.”

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