Title: “An Inescapable Network of Mutuality”: Martin Luther King’s Ecological Thought | Pray With Your Feet
Headings: “An Inescapable Network of Mutuality”: Martin Luther King’s Ecological Thought
“An Inescapable Network of Mutuality”: Martin Luther King’s Ecological Thought
“A Single Garment of Destiny”
Interconnectedness and Ecology
Individualism and Systemic Racism
Are you racist? 'No' isn't a good enough answer - Marlon James | Comment is Free

Content: This is true not only of our relationship to plants, but also animals, including other human beings. We are all part of the web of life, or what King called the “single garment of destiny” and an “inescapable network of mutuality”. And this idea is at the core of anti-racism advocacy. Individualism and Systemic Racism
Underlying contemporary opposition to anti-racism advocacy is a metanarrative of individualism, which stands in contrast to the ecological concept of interconnectedness. In The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres observe that both liberals and conservatives endorse this same metanarrative: “ [ S]trategists on both the left and right, despite their differences, converge on the individual as the unit of power.” So many responses of Whites to anti-racism advocacy assume that racism is an individual phenomenon, not a collective phenomenon. Racism is understood by them to be a characteristic of individuals and manifesting as individual expressions of racist beliefs, like a White person calling a Black person the N-word. And this is why so many White people respond to ant-racism advocacy by saying, “I’m not a racist.”