Blended

While I disagree with the Just-World Hypothesis (it's the Just-World Fallacy, in my estimation) I don't have anything against it as a matter of course. If people want to understand that the world is a just place, and "people get what they deserve," that's up to them. Likewise, I don't have a problem with the idea of personal responsibility. I, for my part, am a firm proponent of the idea of taking ownership of one's actions and their effects and consequences.

What I do take exception to is the careless blending of the two.

I was talking to man the other day and the subject of Nike and Colin Kaepernick came up. My interlocutor was of the opinion that if Black people objected to being universally regarded as suspect (or suspects) that we needed to take "personal responsibility" to reduce the levels of crime in our neighborhoods. (Never mind the fact that in my specific neighborhood, other Black people are rare.) I pointed out to him that the sort of collective guilt that he was proposing was, in fact, the opposite of personal responsibility. I should not, I noted, need to purchase the ability to be seen as an individual by policing the actions of some number of people who are not me. After a few minutes of amusing (if somewhat strained) mental gymnastics pressed into the service of reconciling collective condemnation with individual responsibility, he settled on accusing me of "twisting" his words, and we parted company.

I was thinking back about the conversation, and that's when it finally occurred to me that the man may have conflated ideas of a just world with an ethos of personal responsibility. The Just-World Hypothesis commonly leads to derogation of people who have undergone some harm or wrong, on the understanding that bad things do not, in really, happen to good people. If something bad happens to a person, then they must have done something "wrong" to cause it to happen. By this logic, prejudice against a group of people doesn't just happen, something must have been done to cause it. Given that it's rare for a person to believe that literally each and every Black person is guilty of some more or less serious crime (beyond the everyday lawlessness of speeding, littering and the like), there must then be something else that we are not doing, as individuals, that creates our problem. A failure to properly police one another for criminality fits the bill nicely. It allows for collective guilt to be seen as a Bad Thing that shouldn't happen to people, and at the time time can't really be countered by the subject. If the only acceptable proof that I have been living up to my responsibility to combat Black crime would be the literal scarcity or non-existence of Black crime, any instance of criminality the comes to mind is sufficient proof that I'm not doing my job, and therefore deserving of being regarded as a possible criminal myself.

In the end, I understand the rationale behind a belief that the world is just, and that personal responsibility can forestall other people's negative choices. It makes the world into a more seemingly predictable place, and allows people to credit themselves for any good fortune that may come their way. But the combination can be a nasty out of actually understanding the way the world works for others. Although I suppose that this may also be a benefit, under the right circumstances.