Sandra Bland

The case of Sandra Bland, who was pulled over by police and died in jail under unclear circumstances, folds into the backdrop of depressing familiarity which includes mass shootings, mass incarceration, and mass emiseration. 

But, for me in this case, I am answering the calls to "say her name" and to repeat that "black lives matter". I think it is important because we are living in a context in which the latter pronouncement is considered too divisive.  

It's too divisive for a white socialist who will safely never be president. It's too divisive for a mainstream Democrat who really, really needs black votes. It's too divisive for the president of the United States, who is African American, and never needs to run for anything again.

I also feel it's important to illustrate a failing of humanism, a particular named death for which it does not seem to have the right concepts for special recognition.

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith said that a basic problem of moral feeling was that in his gut he would sooner doom many strangers than he would to lose own finger.

Since he grounds his ethics in just such kinds of moral intuition, his work, and that of the broader Scottish Enlightenment, is based on trying to adjust the conscience toward what Hume called the "general beneficence".

Such a resolution is colorless and abstract, but it was the first morality to address the problem of moral strangers as modern people would recognize the problem.

Here and now that great tradition is failing, irrespective of whether you believe it always has been a failure.

I have often felt uneasy about the relish critics of the left take in eviscerating the liberal tradition when they have nothing to offer but barer and barer abstractions and poetic gestures.

But in this case, I have to answer to them for my guiding my conscience for something that can't comport itself to say with basic decency and dignity that black lives matter.