The Will to Injustice. An Autoethnography of Learning to Hear Uncomfortable Truths

Abstract

This auto-ethnography starts from three moments of insight into privileges through which I benefit from injustice towards others, whether or not I want to. These are: 1) "Being in the Know": The privilege of a trusting familiarity with Higher Education, and realising how this enabled me to join a university in the first place. I recognised privilege in the comfortably bygone past. 2) "Crooked Fingers": Accepting my need to act more decisively for Earth Justice, this moved me to the need to change my actions in the present. 3) "Skin Deep in Black Lives Matter": Accepting that I have privileges as a White that manifest as injustice to others, regardless of whether I actively want them or support this. This one is hard, suddenly I see that I do not know how to fix it. I need to change not so much outwardly as inwardly: My thinking, and deep assumptions behind it. As these three moments progressively shake up a straightforward sense of injustice, the paper next articulates ways of moving on from just shock and guilt. Insights especially from James Baldwin, Reni Eddo-Lodge, and Ruth King, provide guidance and support for elaborating movement towards Whites' collective taking of responsibility for injustices participated in. For my own part, I yearn for discussions: which encompass both my privileges and the subordinations I have experienced; with the power to combine sitting still with action and combine indigenous ways of knowing with national and international governance. For this work, I need a more complex mathematics than ‘1’ or ‘2’, identity or separation. Viewing instead individual and collective as mutually constitutive provides richer grounds for discussing responsibility for participating in cultures that sanction privilege, and for developing connectedness with other people, and with all inhabitants of the Earth. [While the chapter is a revised version of a paper published in 2022 under the same title, this summary is original.]

The Will to Injustice. An Autoethnography of Learning to Hear Uncomfortable Truths