The ethical eye

When I read about the slaying of New York City police officer Brian Moore, I thought about the dangers of police work, the availability of guns and the kinds of violence we experience all too often.

When I read about the establishment of independent monitors for police departments in Albuquerque, Baltimore and Cleveland, I thought about the young lives lost to violence at the hands of police.

As we entered this commencement season, I asked my campus community to think about our roles and obligations as members of society and to consider what it means to be an ethical person. When we consider our ethical roles, we must ask, can we allow ourselves to remain silent in the face of social and economic injustice, demonstrated, for example, by the recent and repeated manifestations of racial bias and misconduct in the public square?

We citizens must employ the “ethical eye” to observe and challenge societal patterns that test our sense of what is just. This takes courage, as well as compassion, but it is our obligation to identify the fault lines and to seek empirical evidence so that we can arrive at a larger truth and develop appropriate strategies to address injustices wherever they occur.

The ethical eye helps us identify the principles required to find the truth that lies beyond the prejudice of racism by focusing on fairness, equity and justice for all — even those who fit a certain profile. No one should be an “other” to us if our education has succeeded. We are one species, with each member seeking to find a unity connecting head and heart. There is no progress in civil rights if our goal has been redefined as “Don’t shoot” instead of “Let us rise up.”

I raised these issues because of events that affect us all, but affect some of us in more immediate and problematic ways. Think of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Rekia Boyd, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, people we now know by name who were killed recently by representatives of the justice system. Each name represents one event among too many that can be recounted, black youths, female as well as male, killed in cold blood.