Feminist philosophers have questioned the exclusionary and discriminatory practices of society since their field was first conceived. Much of the attention has been on the silenced voices of women and the devaluing of their stories in our society, but more recently, feminist philosophers have begun to take this idea even further by asserting the need for voices of all cultures and backgrounds in order to create a more complete view of the world. Whether arguing for the importance of privilege-cognizance, more complete ways of understanding those around us through loving-perception, or fighting for epistemologies that follow in the vein of feminist standpoint theories, these philosophers have fought for a more inclusive view of the world that includes the recognition of each individual’s societal standpoint. I propose that these powerful arguments point to the need to begin the emphasis on a more inclusionary base of knowledge and perception in the socialization and education of the next generation. If we are to seriously take on the charge of changing the way that we view the world and our places in it, we must dedicate ourselves to teaching “strong objectivity”, privilege-cognizance and “world-traveling” to the very youngest of society before the patterns of exclusionary and culture-blind thinking take hold in their minds.
As a white-woman from a rural, White, community in Minnesota, I was never encouraged to be critical of my privilege. To be honest, I don’t remember ever even considering my own whiteness until I began college and had the evidence of my privilege shoved in my face. I grew up in a town with very little racial diversity where outward racism is a way of life. Overt racism was the only kind of intolerance that I was aware of and I was taught to reject it from a very young age.
My parents were quite liberal for our town and taught me that race was simply a category that didn’t matter. I remember much of my young education about race focusing on the idea of “color-blindness”, an emphasis on looking past the differences of people to what made us all alike. While it is quite obvious that my parents and educators meant well by teaching me to think about racial and ethnic differences in this way, they missed the point. By attempting to argue for the equality of all people, it lead to the idea that all people were like me, and that any differences between us weren’t worth noting. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking devalues the important ways that people do differ and how these differences lead to new forms of knowledge and values. In truth, this way of approaching the differences between peoples in different societal placements leads to the erasure of only their perceptions and uniqueness while forcing them to adhere to mine.
There is a definite failure in this way of socializing and educating children, no matter how well meaning it is, and it all too often results in what Alison Bailey refers to as “privilege-evasive” scripts (Bailey, 349). While I was never directly taught by anyone to be afraid of people of color, I was. I could have told you that “those people” weren’t inherently bad, but in mind, that didn’t change the fact that “they” seemed to be committing all of the crimes. After all, it was their faces gracing my television screen every night on the news. Until about a year ago, I also would have fought you to the end about the concept of affirmative action. In my mind, it simply didn’t make sense that I should have to give something up to people that I had never wronged. The fact that the privileges that I lived with daily came at the expense of people of color never occurred to me. And despite my own deeply seeded ideas and feelings concerning people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, I thought that the affects of racism in our country were a thing of the past.
Looking back, I am deeply disturbed by the ways that I viewed the world and I realize the truth behind Bailey’s argument concerning racial scripts. “Racial scripts are internalized at an early age to the point where they are embedded almost to invisibility in our language, bodily reactions, feelings, behaviors and judgments” (Bailey, 349). Because I lived in a society where I was dominant and my own dominance was never pointed out to me, I had deeply internalized a belief in my own superiority. This arrogance leads to a deeply flawed view of the world and a lack of compassion or value for those forced into the margins of society. The issues with this way of viewing one’s place in the world leads to a need for a different way of approaching one’s privilege in the world and using it to effect change.
My own privilege-evasive, “whitely” script points out my own arrogant perception of the “Others” in our society. María Lugones states this truth so completely when she asserts that “part of racism is the internalization of the propriety of abuse without identification” (71). As a White woman living in a predominantly White “world”, I could easily ignore, use, or stereotype the “Outsiders” in the U.S. without feeling any loss or empathy for them. My behavior robbed them of self-worth but left me with no sense of guilt at doing so. María goes on to explain my behavior by asserting that, “being taught to perceive arrogantly is part of being taught to be a woman in both the U.S. and Argentina, it is part of being taught to be a White/Anglo woman in the U.S., and it is part of being taught to be a woman in both places to be both the agent and the object of arrogant perception” (Lugones, 70). If this is true, and I think that my own experience as well as the experiences of many other women would suggest that it is, then we must consider how to end the socialization that leads to arrogant perception and change it to what María refers to as loving perception.
Sandra Harding takes the argument against an objective, value free view of the world even further by capturing the way that it plays into the creation of knowledge in the modern sciences. She argues that there is no way to create knowledge outside of society, and therefore, knowledge will always be entrenched in the society that it comes from. Unfortunately, this leads to partial knowledge as only one view of the world, the view of the researchers to be specific, is taken into account when drawing conclusions from the results of any study. “The conception of value-free, impartial, dispassionate research is supposed to direct the identification of all social values and their elimination from the results of research, yet it has been operationalized to identify and eliminate only those social values and interests that differ among the researchers and critics who are regarded by the scientific community as competent to make such judgments” (Harding, 744). This is especially true in a system in which those who benefit the most from the current institutions are the ones that create the knowledge. When we call for inclusivity of knowledge, what we are really saying is, “’They (those people of color at the margins of the social order) are to be integrated with us (whites at the center), leaving us unchanged and the rightful heirs of the center of the culture. They are to give up their agendas and interests that conflict with ours in order to insert their contributions into the research, scholarship, or curriculum that has been structured to accommodate our agendas and interests” (Harding, 751). It follows in this vein of thought to conclude that objectivism is a flawed way of looking at the world and creating knowledge and that a new way of viewing scientific results and considering their implications must be conceived.
All three of these feminist philosophies demand that we reconsider the way that we socialize and educate members of our society from a very young age to think about one another in regards to racial and ethnic differences. After considering their arguments and how well they apply to my own experiences as a White woman who has lived most of her life blind to the continuing devaluation of the marginalized members of society and their contributions, it becomes quite clear that Bailey, Lugones, and Harding have all identified what seem to be truths about my flawed perception of the world. Our society fails those of us with privilege by allowing, and even encouraging us, to remain blind to our privilege and the injustice that surrounds us but leaves us unscathed. Assuming that I am not alone in this conclusion, and I truly doubt that I am, changes must be made in the socialization and education of the next generation so that they are not failed, and in turn, fail others, in the same ways that I have been.
Bailey provides a solution to the many flaws of privilege-evasive racial scripts by offering us the concept of privilege-cognizant racial scripts. “A key feature of privilege-cognizant standpoints is the choice to develop a critically reflective consciousness” (Bailey, 350). In order to take on these new ways of thinking about our privilege, we must become aware of it and recognize the ways that our actions play in to the continuing systems of white privilege. If we fail to play in to the roles that keep white privilege going, we are beginning the work of breaking this unjust system down. These new racial scripts can be considered “traitorous” according to Bailey. By forging traitorous scripts, we use the analysis of the “outsiders within”: the marginalized members of society that must live within it. These scripts will lead to choosing a new way of acting with our privilege by keeping our actions in line with a call for a more just society. “Traitors choose to try to understand the price at which privileges are gained; they are critical of the unearned privileges granted to them by white patriarchal cultures, and they take responsibility for them” (Bailey, 351). They actively choose to disrupt the ways in which they are given privilege and to fight the systems that continue the cycle of unearned advantages. Bailey goes on to lay out an action plan for those that hope to create a traitorous character and do their part in disrupting systems of privilege and oppression, and she does so through Lugones’ strategy of “world-traveling”.
María Lugones offers an alternative to our arrogant perception of others in the form of what she calls loving perception. She suggests that the way to be disloyal to arrogant perception is to instead perceive with love, and she suggests that the best way to begin this new kind of perception is through world traveling. Bailey explains this concept well by stating that, “Lugones believes that women’s failure to love one another stems from a failure to identify with women who inhabit worlds they do not share; it is a failure to see oneself in other women who are different” (Bailey, 352-253). World traveling is exactly what we fail to do when we perceive arrogantly. To travel to another woman’s world is to lose your own standpoint and replace it with that of the other woman. As a White woman, my privilege has meant never being forced to leave my own world as it is the “mainstream world”. Women from different ethnic and racial backgrounds, on the other hand, are constantly forced to leave the worlds in which they are at home to interact in a mainstream world that is often a very hostile place for them. Lugones, and Bailey in turn, suggest that by traveling to other’s worlds “we can understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes” (Lugones, 79). By knowing their worlds we will come to know them better, and this knowledge assists in loving them. Lugones makes the urgency of the need to take on world-traveling clear and describes it beautifully when she says, “We are fully dependent on each other for the possibility of being understood and without this understanding we are not intelligible, we do not make sense, we are not solid, visible, integrated, we are lacking. So traveling to each other’s ‘worlds’ would enable us to be through loving each other” (Lugones, 73). Therefore, if we hope to break down our arrogant perceptions as described by Lugones and our privilege-evasive scripts as described by Bailey, and replace them with loving-perception and traitorous scripts respectively, we must take on the work of world-traveling.
The solution to the failed practice of objectivity in epistemology as set out by Sandra Harding also emphasizes the importance of the individual’s place in society when considering their contributions. She calls for a rejection of objectivity and adherence to the concept of “strong objectivity” in its place. Strong objectivity is the conception of all knowledge coming from an individual or group of individuals who are immersed in a society that they can never be completely separated from. Therefore, the conclusions that they draw and the knowledge that they create will always be connected to their placement in society as well. It completely acknowledges our differences as individuals but remains different from subjectivity in that it requires a critical analysis of these differences and how they affect the knowledge we create. Harding goes on to state that this new way of creating knowledge will lead to greater recognition for the contributions of “outsiders”: those who have previously been excluded from the privileged positions in society. “It starts research in the perspective from the lives of the systematically oppressed, exploited, and dominated, those who have fewer interests in ignorance about how the social order actually works” (Harding, 748). Because these individuals are excluded from positions of power, they have no reason to hide what would be considered more objective truths. After all, the worst thing that new knowledge can do to those who are already oppressed is to keep them in their current state of oppression. When those in power are the ones creating knowledge, it directly benefits them to keep the systems of oppression in place. Therefore, a system in which the most privileged create the knowledge, such as the one our society functions with now, has much less reason to remain true and objective. Strong objectivity “starts thought in the lives of people who are unlikely to permit the denial of the interpretive core of all knowledge claims” (Harding, 748). What Harding is calling for is a new value system for knowledge that recognizes the value of the contributions made by the marginalized members of society.
Returning to the consideration of my own experiences as a White woman who has lived most of her life blind to her own privilege and who was socially conditioned to devalue the contributions and knowledge of the marginalized, it is easy to see how the realizations made by Bailey, Lugones, and Harding can explain how this social conditioning is a failure, and how the tools that they provide us can help to reverse these failures. Imagine a world in which the social conditioning that helped to create my ignorance no longer took place. If the next generation were to be educated and socialized in a new way, a way that considers all of these theories and the realizations that they present, we would no longer have to hope to reach them later in life to point out the flaws in their thinking. There would undoubtedly be other flaws in their conditioning that we would need to address, but they would at least be socialized and educated to have a more complete view of the world around them. They would start out life appreciating the value of the marginalized, and hopefully, working to free the oppressed and create a more just society. What if we conditioned our children to perceive with love, to travel to the worlds of others, to be privilege-cognizant traitors, and to recognize the value of strong-objectivity and knowledge created by the socially marginalized? It seems that this is the next step in using the revelations that Bailey, Harding, and Lugones have come to, and it would allow the next generation to start out on the right path. I only wish that my parents and community had had these tools to use in my education and socialization. However, now that I possess them and have begun to work with them myself, I can use them to help the next generation create a world that is more just.
Works Cited
Bailey, Alison. “Locating Traitorous Identities: Toward a View of Privilege-Cognizant White Character”. The Feminist Philosophy Reader. Ed. Alison Bailey and Christ Cuomo. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. 344-355. Print.
Harding, Sandra. “’Strong Objectivity’ and Socially Situated Knowledge”. The Feminist Philosophy Reader. Ed. Alison Bailey and Christ Cuomo. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. 741-756. Print.
Lugones, María. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception”. The Feminist Philosophy Reader. Ed. Alison Bailey and Christ Cuomo. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. 69-81. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment