Although Sydney, Australia, has been my home for almost 40 years, I am temporarily living in Melbourne to be close to family. The Covid-19 situation here has caused a lot of anger among many residents. We went into a second lockdown following outbreaks in aged-care facilities and in the city’s public-housing estates, which have a high concentration of Sudanese and Asian immigrants.
The handful of friends I have in this city live in the very affluent eastern suburbs (as do we) and have relatively little cause for concern. Yet they are fuming over the fact that we are inconvenienced because of people whom they repeatedly refer to as “these ethnics.” This is clearly intended as a racial slur and causes me much angst. My friends, like me, are Jewish; unlike me, they are children of Holocaust survivors. Should they not feel greater compassion for the suffering of those recent immigrants escaping violence and ethnic cleansing in their home countries?
Australian colonists decimated native populations and stole native land. Is it ethical for us to be so self-congratulatory when so many Indigenous Australians, who make up more than 3 percent of our population, live in fourth-world conditions?
My friendships have endured because I have found my friends to be loving, family-oriented and honest citizens. They observe the Jewish concept of chesed (kindness) to its limit. However, this recent racist narrative disturbs me deeply. I have rehearsed several responses to the “these ethnics” comments along the lines of “Except for our Aboriginal people, we are all ethnics in this country,” while suggesting charities to which my friends can contribute so that their fellow Melburnians receive basic care.
I can be very direct when I respond to injustice and racism. I am afraid my responses will be misconstrued and mark the beginning of the end of a very long friendship. What is the most appropriate response in this situation? Name Withheld
In Jonathan Coe’s Brexit novel “Middle England,” a British woman makes approving mention of a notorious 1968 speech in which the politician Enoch Powell declared that Britain was being menaced by nonwhite immigration. The younger woman she’s talking to is appalled and jolted by a sense that the two “lived in different universes,” which were “separated by a wall, infinitely high, impermeable.” It sounds as if you’ve recently had an experience like that.
The word “racism” actually came into widespread use in English in reference to Nazi attitudes toward Jewish people. Being the victim of prejudice, however, does not inoculate us from our own prejudices. Edward Augustus Freeman, who went on to be Regius professor of history at Oxford, wrote, while visiting America in 1881, that his interlocutors generally agreed with his proposal that “this would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a Negro and be hanged for it.” Yet WASP bigotry toward the Irish immigrants didn’t save them from bigotry toward Black people. (Nor, conversely, did suffering from anti-Black animus prevent the likes of Frederick Douglass from disparaging Irish-Americans.) I’ve heard Africans complain about being subject to racism from Europeans and Americans while denigrating Africans of certain other ethnic groups in ways that sound awfully like racism. Consider, for that matter, the tensions that have lately arisen between Asian-Americans and Black Americans. “Suffering is partial, shortsighted and self-absorbed,” the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo observes. “We shouldn’t have a politics that expects different: Oppression is not a prep school.”
Nor is displaying lovingkindness (as the King James Bible I grew up with often translated chesed) toward your in-group incompatible with displaying hostility toward members of an out-group. I think of the writer Doris Lessing’s memoir about trips she took as an adult to Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), where she grew up. She had left, in part, because she detested the racism and sexism of her fellow white colonials. Yet she managed to convey the appealing sense of community among the whites with whom she stayed, including her brother. Because she was only visiting, she didn’t bother to challenge their racist attitudes — she thought it would make no difference — and she didn’t have to decide whether to be friends with the people who had them.
There can be chesed in lovingly calling friends to account and reminding them that, in Heschel’s simple formulation, humanity is one.
You, on the other hand, are not merely visiting, however long you stay in Melbourne. So far as I can see, you’ve got three choices. One is simply to tolerate your friends’ intolerance — though my sense is that this won’t work for you. Another is to conclude that these moral failings are an obstacle to friendship; friendship is a moralized relationship, after all, and taking certain values seriously can entail not condoning them in your friends. But at this point in your life, you’re clearly reluctant to lose longstanding, meaningful relationships.
That leaves you trying to scale a formidable wall. You’re in good company. The great rabbi and civil rights leader Abraham Heschel, who lost much of his family in the Holocaust, worried about the many people whose “moral sensitivity suffers a blackout when confronted with the Black man’s predicament”; he wanted each of us to be the sort of person who, like you, “resents other people’s injuries.” There can be chesed in lovingly calling friends to account and reminding them that, in Heschel’s simple formulation, humanity is one. We can hope that your friends will take your thoughtful responses for what they are — a sign that you care about our common humanity and that you care about them. Of course, they could be offended or else simply decide to shut up about the “ethnics” when you’re around. But it’s just possible that the warmth of your conviction will prompt them to reconsider their attitudes. It would be a kindness, anyway, to try.
My spouse, a health care provider in charge of vaccine distribution for a large health system, received the Covid-19 vaccine in the first few days of distribution.
I am in my 50s, healthy and working from home, so I am toward the end of the line. My spouse and I decided not to use my spouse’s position to help me jump the line and be vaccinated with higher-risk groups. But when my group’s turn comes, is it ethical to use my spouse’s connections to move to the front of the line within my group? Name Withheld
People like your spouse have a professional responsibility not to use their role in the system to get special treatment for their own families, in violation of their duty to give equal consideration to those with equal entitlements. The principles that led you not to seek vaccination before others in your category count against jumping the line within your category too. You can safely continue to live the way you do, working at home and taking the necessary precautions when you’re out. Indeed, because (as the evidence suggests) your spouse is now unlikely to transmit the virus to you, you’re already benefiting from your spouse’s vaccination.
Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at N.Y.U. His books include “Cosmopolitanism,” “The Honor Code” and “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.”
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