Dying to Learn: Murder, Misery, and Moral Apathy

The ensuing editorial is but one section of a five-chapter research document, and lies at an intersection of moral, political, and Africana philosophy, social ethics, linguistic pedagogy, and culture studies. My project endeavours to displace the concept of moral apathy from the realm of being unquantifiable and into the measurable, providing a richer, more specific theoretical and practicable framework for what moral apathy is and how it is exuded, describing the particularization of its exhibition as often systemic and thus destructive to the social advancement of marginalized individuals in civil society. To do this, I perform a data-driven analysis of the local school district from my native Portsmouth, Virginia, explicating moral apathy as phenomenal and noumenal of an aspectual continuity of culture. The moral apathy of Portsmouth City Public Schools and its complicit local government, examined herein across a longitudinal range from 1998 to 2022, is found to have its proairetic instantiation and apotheosis in the dearth of policy response following the deaths of four local Black students in a seven-month period--from June 2021 to January 2022--who were murdered by other Black school-aged youths in front of three different Portsmouth City school buildings. Therefrom, I posit a thick description of culture in four iterations relative to morality: culture as supra-moral, culture as amoral, culture as immoral, and culture as moral. Consequently, due to the unpredictability of the aspectuality of culture, I submit that it cannot be reckoned upon to be a guiding force toward enlightenment to address the problematics of any society. Thus, finally, I develop the metaphysics of a process I term cultural anamnesis--a dutiful remembering by a systematically oppressed demographic of the people, the principles, and the power of their own cultural context. The methodology of cultural anamnesis transposes David Hume's concepts of demonstrative and probable (moral) reasoning, and belief as a mediating factor between these two epistemic poles. However, inevitably, I reject Hume's subject-oriented, insular ethical framework for a revolutionary intercommunalist methodology informed by Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party, as a philosophical method to assert the ways in which a marginalized group's remembrance of their cultural heritage is a foundational and efficacious approach to confronting moral apathy and actualizing a just and verdant society. This article, based on chapter 3, however, focuses on how moral apathy is evinced in the city leadership through a culture of immorality. I outline the listless governing policies of the Portsmouth City school district and those in power over it. To do this, I analyze data from the Virginia Department of Education and the Portsmouth City Police Department, giving particular focus to the three high schools in Portsmouth, Virginia--I.C. Norcom High School, Manor High School, and Churchland High School--as a case study, examining the pathological and phenotypical expressions of moral apathy in Portsmouth City Public Schools longitudinally across twenty-four years, from 1998 to 2022, comparing homicide rates with the pass/fail rates of state sanctioned tests, called Standards of Learning, demonstrating how when pass rates are lower, murder rates are higher.