Alison Bailey here is not with cultivating sensitivity to harm per se; rather it is with May’s unidirectional description of the nature of this sensitivity; white community members are encouraged to keep tabs on how they see and make sense of the Ward family. However, shared responsibility has no provisions for encouraging whites to explore how Bridget might see them or how she might be angered by their self-focused efforts to fix things. “Responsibility,” Linda Bell reminds us, “extends to the way in which one is seen by others and to one’s being as an inert presence in the world.”9 But understanding responsibility in these terms requires a great deal of work. As Maria Lugones suggests, being in the foreground is important to white people’s being integrated and responsible decision makers. As she remarks, “Your sense of responsibility and decision making capacity are tied to being able to say exactly who it is that did what, and that person must be one and have a will in good working order. And you are very keen on seeing yourself as a decision maker, a responsible being: It gives you substance.”10 And members of privileged groups are reluctant to examine their character flaws by learning to see themselves through the eyes of the harmed. Sensitivity to Ward’s pain and anger requires more than examining your attitudes; it requires learning to see yourself as others see you. Now there is nothing about May’s view that would exclude him from developing a stronger interactive forward-looking view.
But his failure to consider the details of the interactions between harm contributors and those harmed suggests that the white Bridesburgers’ worlds are shaped by what Marilyn Frye might call a whitely “view from here.” The forward-and downward looking dimension of shared responsibility is, I think, restricted by Lugones’s earlier observation that whites desire to see ourselves as decision makers and our failure as decision makers to be keenly attentive to what our interactions might reveal. So, I think we need a sense of responsibility that both makes the voices of the harmed audible while considering the interactive nature of responsibility. SHARED RESPOND(ABILITY): AN ALTERNATIVE TO MAY’S VIEW Margaret Walker once observed that an “alternative [moral] epistemology…will not be one of individuals standing singly before the impersonal dicta of morality, but one of human beings connected in various ways and at various depths responding to each other by engaging together in a search for shareable interpretations of their responsibilities, and/ or bearable resolutions to their moral binds.”11 I want to preserve the participatory use of sharing that May highlights in his forwardlooking dimension of responsibility but in a way that avoids the non-interactive baggage he inherits from liability views. Following Walker’s call for us to “engag[e] together in a search for shareable interpretations of [our] responsibilities,” I’ve been thinking about how to re-conceptualize shared responsibility 18