In a recently published article, Beatrice Ofwona writes, “To see injustices around us and bury our heads in the sand instead of speaking out against them puts our integrity into question.” I am struck by how this opening sentence creates a sense of shared community, an inclination to shared values, appeals to, and, in the process, creates an ideal of a just community. More than simply a clever opening gambit, this one sentence offers an opportunity for reflection on the question of justice and community. It will serve as my master text.

We might begin with the observation that injustices are readily observable—they are “see[n].” Sight, however, this “see[ing]” needs to be read in its literal and symbolic renderings. “To see,” in Ofwona’s text serves, simultaneously, as “to recognize.” One recognizes through familiarity. We learn to recognize. Seeing, by this measure, seems almost involuntary. But I like the word “see” here, if only because it suggests the banality of “injustices.” We don’t simply “recognize” injustice; we “see” it.

To see, of course, presupposes or at least strongly suggests that we are not complicit in “injustices.” We see, as from a distance, an elsewhere that also marks our “integrity.” “Integrity” names an outside from which we recognize the terms of violation, the “injustices,” and differentiate ourselves from those who violate. We, “us” in Ofwona’s rendering, live apart from injustice. In part, we live apart because we can name injustice, that which is recognizable precisely because of “our” distance from it.

Questions disturb me. The first: what might personal integrity have to do with the problem of injustice? Is it possible that personal integrity might so depend on one’s distance from injustice that the only reasonable option might be to seek even more distance? Might the act of speaking out, which somehow shores up personal integrity, not make one complicit, in some way, with injustice, muddying one’s image of oneself? In part, I wonder why personal integrity should be the index by which we measure our responses to injustice. Might there be a version of rendering justice—or participating in justice—that has little-to-nothing to do with self-aggrandizement? Might we think about justice as indifferent to the demands of the ego?

Two, how might a reliance on the visual metaphor of sight, and its reliance on recognition and familiarity, foreclose naming moments of injustice? From my own context, does queer bashing count as a form of injustice? Might discrimination and violence against queers be seen—or recognized—as a form of injustice? How might we think, in other words, about forms of injustice we sanction in the name of “integrity” or “dignity?”

What might we gain in re-thinking injustice not as that which we see and recognize, the familiar, but that which we might always lean toward, always be complicit in? In such a scenario, we might be less concerned with “our integrity” and more aware about the forms of injustice we perpetrate (Here, of course, lurks the perpetual question of class difference as a form of social injustice.)

In questioning the ostensible distance between “us” and “injustices” we might come to a certain vigilance, shall we say, that might be more appropriate to the task not of “see[ing]” injustices and speaking out against them, but acting so as not to create or perpetuate injustice.