If you are not a young black man and you listened to the recent lecture for the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace given by Professor Joseph Richardson Jr., you may have felt, like I did, that a window was opened to another world. It was a moving and deeply thought-provoking experience, both difficult and heart-warming. I realized each time one of the young men interviewed for the digital storytelling project said, “you know what I’m saying?” that I really don’t.
Research such as Professor Richardson’s offer an all too rare glimpse of the diverse realities that make up our world. But there was more to it than that. It wasn’t just the content that was significant. As I watched the video footage, I was struck by the sensitivity of approach and the alignment of goals and methods with that content. This coherence seems critical to truly widening perspectives, deepening understanding, and taking meaningful action to improve lives. In the manner of sharing the world as experienced by fellow human beings, this research communicated a strong body of values and a holistic, constructive attitude to knowledge and its application, necessary for the development of a society that is equitable and just, as well as compassionate and kind.
It is to our own individual and collective detriment when we experience an incoherence of values across goals and methods, ideals and action, rhetoric and reality. Yet, through many of our social and educational spaces – from the family to the university – we continue to generate inconsistent messages about values. The value of caring is a case in point, particularly vulnerable in meritocratic systems based on the impossible pre-condition of equal opportunity. We want to value caring, and we say we value caring, but we struggle to follow through. For example, a 2014 report from the Making Caring Common Project (MCCP) of the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that most parents and teachers rank caring as more important than achievement, but 80% of the youth surveyed responded that parents and teachers are more concerned about personal success than caring. Another report of the MCCP describes how messages conveyed by U.S. college admissions offices about what is sought, valued and rewarded in applicants generally emphasize personal achievement and success over community engagement and concern for others. Even if families and schools succeed in nurturing empathy and caring, the authenticity of these values can be compromised by the competitive nature of college admissions and the perception of what really counts.
Furthermore, failure to appreciate the value of caring jeopardizes fairness, exacerbating inequalities by disproportionately disadvantaging those from economically diverse backgrounds. Caring falls prey to individual achievement-orientation – the kind of actions that get noticed are high profile stints of service which are often not open to people whose daily lives are already based on service to family and community, including caring for siblings, responsibility for major household tasks, and contribution to family income.
The individuals who overcome these systemic barriers continue to face the challenges and consequences of incoherence. Morton (2019), for example, describes the overlooked ethical costs that “strivers” (those from economically disadvantaged communities seeking to better their lives through education) must pay in order to “succeed”. Moral dilemmas framed as practical problems are part of everyday life. Should you spend your time caring for others or on yourself? Should you care less today so you can care better tomorrow? Should you risk severing ties with those you love because you cannot spend time caring today if you value being able to care better tomorrow?
Traditional narratives are at odds with actual experience and fail to provide helpful answers. Rags-to-riches stories based on hard work and sacrifice in the short-term for the gain of universally lauded material outcomes in the long-run isolate the value of individual achievement and dismiss the value of caring that is critical to collective wellbeing. In these narratives, pressing for personal advancement is always worth it, but the “happy ending” is only possible because the story skirts the incoherence of values by omitting the importance of the community context in which the individual exists. For many, especially minorities and women, the choice between developing individual capacity and serving the family or community carries a heavy and enduring moral price, including guilt, disapproval by the community, the brand of self-centredness, separation and even alienation from loved ones, and doubts about integrity and identity.
To create coherence, we need a more honest narrative that acknowledges all that is valuable (Morton, 2019), an orientation to an inclusive ethics of care, not isolated or pitted against justice-based approaches (Slote, 2007), and a hard look at what our actions say about our morals (MCCP, 2014). We require an ethical framework that encompasses both the private and the public sphere, the individual and the collective, the material and moral components of human development, a framework that can increasingly influence our actions and approaches, systems and structures. And more and more opened windows.
References
Making Caring Common Project (2014). The Children We Mean to Raise. Harvard Graduate School of Education. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/children-mean-raise
Making Caring Common Project (2016). Turning the Tide: Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions. Harvard Graduate School of Education. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/turning-the-tide-college-admissions
Morton, J. (2019). Constructing an Ethical Narrative. In Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (pp. 120-149). PRINCETON; OXFORD: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctvdtpk2b.9
Slote, M. (2007). The ethics of care and empathy. Routledge.
About the Author:
Tiffani Betts Razavi (DPhil. Oxon) is a Visiting Research Professor at the University of Maryland Bahá’í Chair for World Peace and a senior staff writer for The International Educator. Her research and writing explore people and their environments, the changing nature of work and education, and the conversations that connect observation and insight with practice.
You can view Professor Richardson’s lecture on our Youtube channel here.
You can find out more about the Bahá’í Chair by watching our video here.