Transcript self-deception

From anti-racist self-deception
to liberatory commitments
Race: the power of an illusion
NAACP
Blacksburg, VA
Tuesday, April 7th,
Christian Matheis, Ph.D.
Departments of Philosophy and Political Science
The Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought
VTAction: Community/Grassroots Organizing
• What does it take to prepare oneself for liberatory anti-racist
thought?
• What does it take to cultivate the habits of liberatory anti-racism in
response to white supremacist racism on a broad social scale, and
white privilege on a more local level?
To equip us for the work
• First, the necessity of making oneself persistently aware of
fundamental errors in reasoning I will call “anti-racist self-deception”
and…
• Second, adding liberatory insight into the daily routines, the habits, of
one’s life.
• Systems of white-supremacist institutional discrimination and cultural
hegemony depend in part on deeply held beliefs – cognitive states of
mind so deeply entrenched that whites and those with other forms of
unearned advantages resist hypotheses, supporting evidence, and
arguments that contradict their imagined and felt reality.
• What equips those with white-supremacist racist white privilege, or
“the dominant paradigm,” with the capabilities needed to, one, learn
to notice and critique broad institutional systems and cultural norms
and, two, to change their habits of daily life?
Ancient Greek conceptions of morality and
justice
• Plato and Socrates seem to suggest that we cannot ask questions about
individual morality and individual character without also questioning the
systems of justice (and injustice) in which a person must try to make moral
decisions
• Anyone who tries to live up to moral standards in an unjust society will find
limits and constraints on what their society permits them to do.
• If so, how can any of us try to determine when we at least do our best to
challenge (political) injustices by acting morally?
• In terms of white-supremacist, racist oppression, how might an individual
evaluate her whether her reasoning, actions, and habits tend to resist
colluding in white privilege versus attempting to reject and replace
racialized cognitive biases?
Challenging white privilege
• First, dismantle self-deception  false beliefs that we have better antiracist habits than we actually have.
• Second, adopt liberatory anti-racist commitments in ways that complement
conventional moral (racism as immoral) and political (racism as unjust)
commitments.
Anti-racist liberation?
• Morality, Ethics  Cultural
Norms
• Political Justice  Institutional
Systems
• Liberation  …?
• Immorality of racism (moral)
• Injustice of racism (political)
• Emancipation from racism
(liberatory)
Key concepts
• Race  a false hypothesis that resists rejection, remains socially “real” (has
influence) and simultaneously false (no evidence).
• Racism  1) institutional distributions of the benefits and burdens of political
authority and opportunity, and 2) moral norms and habits that advantage one
racially classified group specifically by disadvantaging another.
• Bigotry, prejudice  tend to refer to individual psychology – to beliefs that
persons use in order to render condescending judgments about an individual
based on a stereotype about a group.
• Fallacy of confirming instances (noticing what confirms a belief, remaining oblivious to
evidence that contradicts a belief)
• Appeals to the myth of scarcity (we have a distribution problem, not a lack of resources)
• Oppression/Institutionalized Cruelty…?
Oppression/Institutionalized Cruelty (Hallie)
1. It is substantial – it crushes or mains dignity.
2. It is pervasive, or total – a person living under oppression typically cannot find
any respite or relief from assaults on their dignity. And the few times they do
count as rare, fleeting, and unreliable outlier events that merely prove the
general rule.
3. It involves a differential of power – persons living under oppression have only
partial power, perhaps power to endure or survive or even share a little scrap
of political and cultural power – but only to an extent. Under the unequal,
partial power of oppression, members of marginalized groups can only have as
much power as permitted by those with the ultimate power to give and take
partial power.
4. It operates just outside of awareness of those with unearned advantage –
people who reap the unearned power of oppression can do so while remaining
persistently ignorant of their society’s functions as oppressive. They can enjoy
blissful ignorance of the very thing that makes them believe they have earned
what they simply have not earned.
White privilege
• The result of a maldistribution of benefits to whites, burdens to
everyone else
• All of the unearned moral regard and political influence a person from
a dominant group can access when cultural norms and political
institutions systematically distribute the benefits to their group
specifically by displacing the burdens onto subordinated groups.
• The daily, patterned, unquestioned access to goods, resources,
opportunities, credibility, in the present and, perhaps most
importantly, seemingly in perpetuity forever.
What keeps white privilege entrenched?
• How can people who want an end to racist oppression, and who yet
also receive systematic rewards for enjoying unearned white privilege
dismantle the tension – how can someone come to change their
habits from a surface belief about racism as immoral or unjust to a
liberatory commitment practiced in daily life?
• Not merely bigotry or bias… also self-deception
Self-deception / anti-racist self-deception
• The false belief that I have commitments against racist oppression
when in reality I do not.
• Beliefs about the moral problems and political circumstances, but
without anti-racist habits.
Four strategies of self-deception
• The first: conflating single acts (instances) with habits (trends, patterns) that is,
doing something good once in a while and telling oneself, “There, I am a good
person!”
• Second: Choosing faulty examples to justify one’s own faults. That is, comparing
oneself to other people who seem to live with their faults, who have made
themselves comfortable with their white privilege, versus comparing oneself to
people who are ardently, consistently committed to refusing and resisting white
privilege.
• Third: confusing one’s conceptual or theoretical knowledge and talents at
conversation with habits of practice – confusing knowledge of white privilege
and one’s ability to converse about anti-racism with one’s practices of antiracism.
• Fourth, and finally: comparing oneself to those who have done worse harms
rather than living by principles.
Liberation
• Liberation sets the priority on respect for unique alterity (undeniable
distinct features) of another person/group – whether or not I fully
understand them.
• Liberation has two objectives:
• One, to challenge or call into question the legitimacy of a dominant regime
– a society’s moral, cultural, and political systems of power, and…
• Two, liberation seeks to put any dominant social system of institutions,
norms, patterns, etc. in the obediential service of ending suffering.
Liberatory anti-racist commitments, habits
• Commit to rejecting habits of self-deception.
• Guided by commitments to liberatory change.
• Assume that you can demonstrate better and better and better forms of
respect even when you do not fully understand another person’s
circumstances.
• Commit to questioning and challenging dominant systems of power that
may appear good and decent, but that maldistribute our society’s benefits
and burdens (resources, opportunities).
• Commit to finding and acting on opportunities in which you can invite,
demand, or propose that persons in authority, policies, laws, and traditions
serve the end of patterns of cruelty and suffering.
Making Sense of Racism
Colorblindness and Racialized Social Systems
Ellington Graves, PhD
Director of Africana Studies
Virginia Tech
Overview
• Individual bigotry versus racism
• Historical fluidity and racial domination
• Racism as translational mechanism
• The emergence of the colorblind narrative
• Colorblindness, liberalism and denial
• Conclusion
What is racism?
• Frequent emphasis on individual attitudes and beliefs - bigotry
• Bigotry + power
• Ideology and justification
• Institutional practices
• How do these account for variations in racial domination over time?
How can we understand historical variations in
racial domination through the lens of racism?
• Slavery – justified by ideology, but motivated by economic interest
• Manifest Destiny and indigenous genocide – motivated by economic
interest, facilitated by ideology and bigotry
• Jim Crow – grounded in law, married to racial terror driven by bigotry
• Post-Civil Rights era – the “end of racism” and the failure of
traditional accounts of racial inequality
How do we get beyond individual motive and
interest to make sense of racial inequality across
historical contexts?
• Racism as a translational mechanism
• Considering race as a social field that impacts the distribution of capital in
other social fields
• Racism can be understood as the mechanism that allows racial categories to
become the basis for durable patterns of inequality across social systems
Human
difference
Racialization
Racial
categories
Racism
Racialized
social
system
How do we get to colorblindness as racism?
• Justice John Marshall Harlan
• “…in view of the constitution… there is in this country no superior,
dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our
constitution is color-blind…. The law regards man as man, and takes
no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as
guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.”
• “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country.
And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth, and
in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it
remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of
constitutional liberty.”
How does colorblindness work as a
manifestation of “racism without racists?”
• Colorblindness as fact rather than aspiration
• The continued need to explain racial inequality
• Racial inferiority as a logical conclusion
Conclusion
• “I’m not racist….”
• SAE at Oklahoma
• The new genomics – eugenicists in not-so-good disguise
• Appropriating black culture while deriding black people
• Statistical discrimination and “market behavior”