Anti-racist perception requires disciplined attention that refuses categorical collapse

Evidence

In the discomfort and unnaturalness of the moment in which Collin and Miles stare at each other, you can feel the “stretching toward” (ad tendere) in attention. They do not just have their eyes directed toward each other; they are seeing each other. It was this scene that made clear for me the connection between attention, perception, bias, and will. In effect, the opposite of a racist view is Buber’s “I-Thou” perception, which assiduously refuses to let the other collapse into any one instrumental category. Recall that Buber refuses to see the tree as image, species, or relationship of numbers. Instead “thou” has the same depth as I. Seeing this way means foregoing all of the many easier and more habitual ways to “see,” and as such, it is a fragile state requiring the discipline to continue. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 419

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines attention through its Latin root ‘ad tendere’ (stretching toward) and ties it to Buber’s I-Thou, giving the reader precise machinery for how attention constitutes a world.
• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s key idea that attention is the faculty by which you constitute a world — this is Odell’s concrete mechanism.
• ADDENDUM: Could feed the ‘Grafting & Growth’ infrastructure piece thematically — attention as an active stretching toward rather than passive reception mirrors trees as active infrastructure.

Related

• Attention is etymologically a stretching toward that resists collapsing others into instrumental categories (similarity 0.93)
• Attention is the faculty by which we constitute social and ethical reality (similarity 0.79)
• Sustained mutual looking discloses another as unfathomably real (similarity 0.79)