Miller - Blog Post 5

  In the wake of the horrendous killing of George Floyd at the end of May, 2020, hundreds of thousands of people took to the street in protest of police brutality and systemic racism. Most of the protests were peaceful; a study conducted by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project found that about 93% of 7,750 protests from May 26 through August 22 remained peaceful and nondestructive. Nevertheless, the protests that generally garnered the most attention from the media were more violent: the looting of stores, riots, and continued police brutality during protests gained the bulk of media representation. In response to this violence, many criticized the protesters for not protesting the “right way,” and condemned the looting and rioting. 

In response to these critics, Trevor Noah produced a thought-provoking video about the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. Noah brought up the idea of contract theory, in which we all agree to “common rules, common ideals, and common practices.” He furthered that insofar as the rights of Black individuals are constantly violated (for, by example, systems of oppressive police brutality), those who protested by rioting and looting were justified in breaking the contract. Specifically, he said that “there is no contract if law and people in power don’t uphold their end of it” and “the contract is only as strong as the people who are abiding by it.” This relates to what happens in Rawls’ veil of ignorance, because in the original position people agree on certain principles of justice to live by in society, thereby making a contract. Under the finality constraint on the concept of right, the principles cannot be violated, and are the final court of appeal. Yet, as we see with police brutality, we live in a nonideal society wherein unjust things regularly occur. This is where Shelby’s nonideal theory comes in, weighing the “principles that should guide our responses to injustices” (11).

It is interesting to look at the BLM protests in light of Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos, and to compare Shelby’s stance with that of Trevor Noah. In his introduction, Shelby wrestles with the issue of how instances of lawbreaking (think rioting and looting) should be addressed in a society that is “seriously unjust” (13). He asserts that political acts of defiance by the ghetto poor are often “interpreted as deviant or pathological” when they “should instead be understood as moral responses to injustice (14). Referencing the Stand and Fight tradition, which stems from black political thought, Shelby argues that in the context of injustice, fighting openly rather than suffering silently is necessary. Shelby concludes that if institutional arrangements are unjust, one’s duty of justice demands that they work to “establish a just social order and to reform unjust institutions” (57). 

And yet, it seems as though Shelby believes there are bounds to what persons can do to fight oppression. A response out of justice is limited in what it can do. Shelby writes that “not all responses to oppression are justified or virtuous. We must admit that the oppressed sometimes respond in ways that are wrong or blameworthy” (6). It seems intuitive that it is unjust to bomb a predominantly white school in an attempt to respond to unjust school segregation. While the boundary in such a case is clear, other responses to injustice may be far more ambiguous. How would Shelby weigh in on the 2020 BLM protests, and how can we define a clear boundary between just and unjust responses to oppression?