Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory 9780271032429

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Oppression and Responsibility

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a wittgensteinian approach to

peg o’connor

social practices and moral theory

the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data O’Connor, Peg, – Oppression and responsibility : a Wittgensteinian approach to social practices and moral theory / Peg O’Connor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (cloth : alk. paper) . Social ethics—United States. . Marginality, Social—United States. 3. Oppression (Psychology) . Discrimination—United States. . Sociolinguistics—United States. . Wittgenstein, Ludwig, –. I. Title. HN.M O  .′′—dc



Copyright ©  The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA - It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper for the first printing of all clothbound books. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z.–.

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For Ann and Jack and for Lisa

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How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, §

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Contents

Preface: Why Wittgenstein? ix Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xv 1 The Necessity of Practices and Backgrounds  2 The Stability of Rationality  3 Conspiracies and Connect the Dots: The Search for Motive in the Church Burnings  4 The Meaning of Assaultive Speech: Its Harmful Uses  5 Moving to New Boroughs: Transforming the World by Inventing Language Games  6 Lesbian Barroom Brawls: Racial Integration in the s  7 If Everybody’s Responsible, Then Nobody Is  Postscript: Contra Determinism and Fatalism  Bibliography  Index 

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Preface: Why Wittgenstein?

I take seriously Wittgenstein’s comment in the preface of Philosophical Investigations that “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.” Wittgenstein also says there that he hopes that his work brings light into someone’s brain. And this is what Wittgenstein’s work has done for me—it helped me to think about the ways that oppressive systems have their lives and make particular sayings and doings possible and intelligible. I am not, in any way, asserting that the claims and arguments I make about oppression and domination and subordination can be found in Wittgenstein if one works hard enough and/or makes the texts remarkably contorted. This would be patently false. But I am saying that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is so rich that his concepts and insights can be adopted or modified for examining the incredibly complicated phenomena of oppression. This volume is not an exegesis of Wittgenstein’s work. I think there are many fantastic works that already do this. This is a work on oppression that is informed by Wittgensteinian concepts and a Wittgensteinian methodology. In various chapters, I advance an account of the background that provides the conditions for the intelligibility and meaning of our actions. I also develop some of Wittgenstein’s metaphors and imagery to explain the workings of oppressive systems. With respect to methodology, I argue against pictures that have captivated us and explore why these pictures have been so captivating. I also explore what ideological function they serve. I show how competing pictures rest on shared problematic assumptions, and what happens when you reject these assumptions. But I also deviate from Wittgenstein’s approach, most notably with respect to his

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view of philosophy and the role of the philosopher. I will not leave everything as it is. Over the course of writing this book, several readers have asked why I use Wittgenstein. After all, Wittgenstein was primarily concerned with epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, wasn’t he? What could his work bring to bear on the social, political, and ethical issues I am exploring? What can Wittgenstein say to issues of domination and subordination? Never mind that Wittgenstein’s concepts are already sharply contested in their “appropriate” realms of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. Applying them to these other contexts is at best misguided and at worst irresponsible. I tried not to let this reaction get me down. While I agree that Wittgenstein is rightly read to be concerned with issues of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, I do think that this characterization of his work is misleadingly narrow, especially when we stop to think about how narrowly defined these fields have become in philosophy. That social epistemology and feminist epistemology are taken as revolutions in the field of epistemology goes to show how narrow the field has been. Reading Wittgenstein, I have an experience similar to when I read Plato’s Republic, a book in which political, ethical, and social questions are woven together with metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological ones. I can’t imagine that, if Plato had to pick two areas of philosophy in which to locate his work, he could do it. I see Wittgenstein’s work having this same interwoven character, admittedly with some strands being more accentuated and others undeveloped. Wittgenstein’s work sparks all different kinds of connections in my mind, and trying to characterize these connections as being only of a certain kind would be a procrustean feat. A Wittgensteinian framework by itself is not enough to carry out the kind of analysis of oppression that I want to, in large part because Wittgenstein was not looking at these issues. I must also appeal to feminist theorists and critical race theorists who are examining the same phenomena. For example, I use critical race theorists to expand on Wittgenstein’s claim that the meaning of a word is its use, and examine the harmful uses (and therefore meanings) of assaultive speech and how this helps to maintain a background of oppressive practices. Hopefully, this provides a powerful analysis of the role of assaultive speech in early twenty-first-century United States. By bringing Wittgensteinian insights and concepts together with contemporary radical theorists, I hope to provide a plausible picture of the workings of oppressive systems. These systems are those that create the possibility and

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intelligibility of our sayings and doings. The primary focus of inquiry will not be the actions of individuals, but the practices that make the particular actions possible and intelligible. With this focus on social practices, I hope to make clear the need for an alternative account of responsibility that is adequate to the task of addressing the continuation and reproduction of oppressive systems.

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Acknowledgments

I began working on what ultimately became this book in summer . I didn’t set out to write a book; my hopes were much more modest. I simply wanted to write a piece for Feminist Interpretations of Wittgenstein. One piece lead to another (aided and abetted by questions at conferences, conversations with colleagues, and comments from readers), and the result is this book. This book is as much me as it is a chorus (and at times a cacophony) of interlocutors. My intellectual debts are significant. I have had the privilege of working with Naomi Scheman in a variety of capacities for the last eleven years. I know that I have benefited immensely from this relationship. She has become my in-house interlocutor who chimes in just when I think I’ve said all I need to say. I have also benefited from my philosophical training with Douglas Lewis, who helped me to appreciate more the value of clarity. H. E. Mason provided a solid foundation for reading Wittgenstein. I owe a special thanks to Alison Jaggar for her evaluation of the manuscript, and her suggestions for revisions. She has been a mentor-from-afar for me and has shown me more support and kindness than one could ever hope for. I would like to thank Gary Hagberg for his wonderful suggestions for revisions. Iris Young and Susan Hekman both read very early versions of the manuscript and provided much-appreciated constructive criticism and encouragement. Abby Wilkerson and Melissa Burchard are two dear friends who are also excellent philosophers. Together with Lisa Heldke, the four of us have constituted a lot of panel presentations. They raised some of the most pressing questions and concerns, oftentimes with great humor. A group of feminist philosophers in the Minneapolis area met regularly for

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two years, and they read and commented on several chapters. The discussions with Corrinne Bedecarre, Amy Hilden, and Anne Phibbs were very productive, and often helped me to turn a corner in my thinking. I am fortunate to have wonderful colleagues in the women’s studies program at Gustavus Adolphus College. During the course of writing this book, I received two research grants from the college, for which I am thankful. I have received many helpful questions and suggestions at various conferences or sessions sponsored by the Radical Philosophy Association, Midwest Society for Women in Philosophy, the World Congress of Philosophy, the National Women’s Studies Association, and the North American Wittgenstein Society. A number of nonacademic philosophers but still very philosophical people provided sustenance in all its forms, from food to tennis to spontaneous adventures. From Minnesota, I thank Brian Johnson, Julie Johnson, Kathy Matz, Kristi Reinholtzen, Dawn Ulrich, and Jenifer Ward. From Maine, I thank Bruce Norelius, James Schwartz, Timothy Boggs, Patty and V. B. Chamberlain, Roxanne Sly, Bob Hines, and Ellen Anthony. Thanks to John O’Connor, David Reichert, and Steven Finley, who shared their home with me during the last stage of manuscript preparation. It has been a joy to work with Sandy Thatcher at The Pennsylvania State University Press. I very much appreciate his enthusiasm and professionalism. And, finally, my debts to Lisa Heldke are of every sort. My thanks are enormous.

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Abbreviations for Wittgenstein’s Work

The Blue and Brown Books. New York: Harper, . Philosophical Investigations. d ed. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, . OC On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Harper and Row, . Z Zettel. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, . RFM Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Rev. ed. Edited by G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Cambridge: The MIT Press, . RPP I Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. . Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, . RPP II Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. . Edited by G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman. Translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, . WL Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge –. Edited by Desmond Less. Oxford: Blackwell, . BB PI

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The Necessity of Practices and Backgrounds

Backgrounds and Foregrounds

Recently, I visited a small museum that is part of the Smithsonian complex. The museum was featuring a special exhibit on using wood ecologically. I found myself drawn to a table with a top made of small squares of very dark wood. In the center of all these dark squares was one single square of very light wood. This square stood out beautifully against the darker background. I was enchanted with this table, especially the contrast between all the dark wood and the lone square of light wood. My eyes kept returning to that one light square because I thought it was the most beautiful piece of wood I had ever seen. I thought to myself that, of course, the artist must have intentionally highlighted this one piece of wood because it was the most beautiful, rarest, and probably the most expensive, too. Or not. When I finally read the small placard about the artist and his motivation for this work, I knew I had taken it all hook, line, and sinker. My beautiful light wood was, in fact, birch, which is one of the most common woods in the United States. The dark wood, which surrounded this one common wood was mahogany, a valuable tropical hardwood. In making this table, the artist was intentionally playing with the viewers’ assumptions about what is the most significant or striking or

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valuable aspect of a work. This work challenges us to see value differently in wood. Birch became valuable by its scarcity. The darker wood, by virtue of its framing the lighter wood, did not seem as valuable. I assumed the artist was highlighting the beauty of one piece of wood rather than highlighting the beauty of the dark wood. After reading the artist’s own description of the table, I went back to continue looking. This time I did not see the dark wood as the backdrop framing the single square in the foreground, but as the foreground itself. Nothing about the table had changed, but everything about it had changed. It was no longer a table in which only one piece of wood was highlighted; it was a table in which all the pieces but one were highlighted. The light piece could highlight the darker ones just as much as the darker ones could highlight the light one. This experience struck a chord; it resonated with some of my philosophical work, which has focused on locating particular actions and beliefs against broader contexts. Backgrounds usually are taken to be those that set foreground objects in relief. Once thrown into relief, these items occupy our attention. The reason objects stand out, it is supposed, is that these objects have some value or significance which breaks out or goes beyond the background. The relationships between foregrounds and backgrounds are not always clear; some things seem to move from the background into the foreground, while others fade into the background. We often think that what stands out in the foreground must be the most striking and significant, and therefore the most valuable. An object’s movement into the background is sometimes seen as a reduction of value or significance. What is obscured or is not the center of attention is not as important as the objects in the foreground. Throughout this book, I will work to show that backgrounds are significant because they provide the conditions of possibility and intelligibility.1 The account of intelligibility I advance is derived from the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In perhaps one of his most famous formulations, he asserts that meaning is use. On this view, words are animated with meaning by their use, and their use is fundamentally tied with the social practices of which they are a part. These social practices form nexuses, and these nexuses are what constitute our form of life or stream of life. Many of these social practices are oppressive, and in this book I examine some of these practices and the roles they play in our communal life. The rash of burnings of African-American churches in the 1. See Susan Hekman, The Future of Differences: Truth and Method in Feminist Theory (Cambridge: Polity, ), especially chapter , for a compatible reading of Wittgenstein’s conception of background. Unless otherwise stated, all Hekman quotations come from this work.

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South, and the meanings of these acts of terrorism, can only be understood by attending to the historical and contemporary context in which they occur. All acts of racism—ranging from the more overt to the subtle and “harmless”— must be taken together as forming an almost seamless background. This background of racism makes these burnings possible, gives them their meanings. Attending to the backgrounds entails that parts of them stand out in clear relief. Parts of these backgrounds can stand out in relief when we look more closely at particular objects in the foreground. It is a mistake to attend to one to the exclusion of the other.

The Nature of Backgrounds

How should we understand the nature of backgrounds? Backgrounds, as Wittgenstein describes them in On Certainty and Philosophical Investigations, consist of various “facts of nature” (objects don’t disappear when I turn my back on them, gravity will pull objects to the Earth), propositions (“The Earth is more than one hundred years old”), and practices, which I will discuss more explicitly below. They are the systems in which particular actions have their lives. For example, Wittgenstein discusses learning to count and being able to continue a sequence correctly. So, when given the command, “Add  beginning at ,” with a degree of confidence I start counting off “, ,  . . . ,, ,. . . .” If someone were to ask what I’m doing, I could say that I am counting by two. My actions would be understandable to that person. Similarly, if I worked in a cheese store and someone asked for a half pound of Robiola Lombardia, I would be able to cut that amount and set the appropriate price. In the background, making these activities possible and intelligible are practices dictating that we measure cheese by weight rather than square area and determine price by weight. Wittgenstein’s discussion of backgrounds is remarkably apolitical, which is partly a function of the kinds of examples he chooses (cheese, counting, reading) and the degree to which he develops them.2 But his examples can, with a bit of tweaking, become political. After all, fixing a price on an item only makes sense against a capitalist economy in which goods are bought and sold rather than bartered. As any Marxist will tell you, capitalism is predicated on the exploitation (and dehumanization) of workers. 2. Alice Crary in conversation suggested that Wittgenstein picked these examples which I’ve described as apolitical because they are the most difficult cases. If he could account for these, then accounting for others of the sort I’m examining might be easier.

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These backgrounds as I am describing them are, in part, sets of power relations. These power relations are manifest in formal and informal social institutions as well as in personal relationships. Consider Wittgenstein’s question and answer: “How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed together. What determines our judgments, our concepts and reactions is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action” (Z §). This “hurly-burly” is infused with power relations that are in no way simply given. They are created, implemented, utilized, and deployed through our practices. Sexual abuse, battering, racism, homophobia, marital rape, and being closeted as queer are all practices that are part of this hurly-burly. These practices and the beliefs about them are parts of the background. The ability of Trent Lott to say that gays and lesbians are morally corrupt, deviant sinners who rank right up there with murderers and pedophiles, and many people’s ability and willingness to hear (and agree) is a function not only of Lott’s power as a U.S. senator but more importantly is a function of the power of homophobia. Homophobia and heterosexism have many forms of expression; their power has many faces. To subvert and change them, we must have a clear sense of how they work and constantly reinvent themselves. When trying to make sense of a particular action or judgment, Wittgenstein warns us not to be overly myopic by focusing on it to the exclusion of the broader context—background—in which we make judgments and act. The intelligent Martian (who is still popular with philosophers) could not make any sense of my actions when I am working at the cheese counter. Furthermore, to choose a nontrivial example, the charges made by African-Americans that the church burnings in the South were the product of a racial conspiracy make little or no sense to people who are unfamiliar with the workings of racism in the United States, including many white people living in the United States. Backgrounds are, quite importantly, plural; that is, there is not one seamless context against which all actions are to be understood. There are multiple, shifting backgrounds that change over time and place, sometimes rapidly, sometimes imperceptibly slowly. Furthermore, backgrounds are overlapping, gapped, and fissured; there are places in which more than one background framework is in place, and places where there seems to be no recognizable background against which to understand a foreground action. Backgrounds are weaves of practices; the design of the weave can change as its threads change. The line between foregrounds and backgrounds is not absolute. What is background for some groups of people may be foreground for others. As I discuss in the next chapter, there are shifts between the categories.

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The background, in short, is indeed the “rough ground” of which Wittgenstein speaks; it is bumpy, uneven, changing, yet stable. It is, above all, ripe with possibilities for transformation, for revisioning and reshaping. The background has such revolutionary potential precisely because it is a human construction; it is nothing apart from human social practices. We are always engaged with these backgrounds, and in attending to them we can clearly see the need for them to be transformed.

Attending to Backgrounds

What does it mean to turn our attention to the backgrounds—and why should we do it? Such a move is difficult for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they are often hidden from us in plain sight. As Wittgenstein says, “The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden from us because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something—because it is always before one’s eyes.)” (PI §). Day-to-day navigation in the world requires that we take much for granted—the meaning of stop signs, object permanency, and the nature of ostensive definition, for example. When, for some reason, we choose to pay attention to these utterly familiar features of the background, we are often left stymied, baffled, unable to go on. We have called into question the very ground on which our movement is made possible. Things can be familiar in different ways. White people often cannot see racism and racist acts. Whites not having to see racism is a function of privilege; white people are not subject to oppression along race lines, and thus have not had to experience the harmful effects of a racist system. Rather, whites benefit from a racist system, though the privilege whites possess often makes itself invisible but not unfamiliar. As a friend bluntly pointed out to me while I was writing “Conspiracies and Connect the Dots,” African-Americans were not the ones who needed to see the tape of Rodney King being beaten in order to be convinced that racism infuses many law enforcement agencies. White people needed such evidence to understand the ubiquity of racism. And even in the face of such evidence, many white people were eager to ask what Rodney King might have done to provoke such a reaction. This is evidence that whites’ inability to see racism may not be so accidental and may, in some instances, be actively cultivated. Many whites who saw the riots in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers took the riots to be evidence for the anger and fury of Black people, and not evidence for racism that fueled these violent outbursts. Racism became invisible for white people, replaced by images of the destruction wreaked by Black people on other Black people.

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Other phenomena are familiar—thus invisible—for different reasons: they may be considered biologically necessary. Gender roles, including how one ought to act and which sex one ought to desire, are often taken to be natural in the sense that they are considered to be biological necessities rather than contingencies. Sexual dimorphism is presumed: one must be either male or female as well as either masculine or feminine. A person cannot be both male and female anymore than that person can be neither male nor female. But in fact, sex is no more a given than is gender. Babies born with ambiguous genitalia are often surgically “corrected” so that they can develop into the appropriate gender.3 One’s sex must match one’s gender. Acquiring a gender is an ongoing project in which one is constantly learning and internalizing a whole host of beliefs and judgments about the way a male or female person ought to be. These gender expectations are familiar because they are simply a given. We tend not to pay attention to that which is taken as fixed and therefore incapable of change. Despite the difficulty, Wittgenstein argues that attending to the background is necessary because it enables us to understand the conditions for the intelligibility and meaning of our practices. I want to go further, to argue that attending to the background is necessary because many aspects of the background are anything but harmless and trivial; failing to challenge them means leaving the framework of oppressive systems intact. Oppressive practices are fused into the very framework of the background and are made invisible by their commonplace nature. Racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against women and children are all practices we are encouraged not to see, especially when doing so would reveal to us the relationship between oppression and privilege. One way Wittgenstein suggests one draw attention to the familiar is to make it strange. Politicizing and historicizing the familiar can make it strange; such undertakings shake up the fixed nature of certain systems like gender and race. Race, for example, has often historically been taken to have a biological basis, where skin color and other physical attributes are considered to be indicators of innate characteristics. This concept, however, has defied biological definition and verification. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue, race is “preeminently a sociohistorical concept. Racial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and specific historical context in which they are embedded.”4 3. For an interesting discussion of the surgical correction of babies born with ambiguous genitalia, see Lisa Heldke, “Unnatural Selection,” Ethics and the Environment , no.  (): –, where she compares the surgical correction and construction of “appropriate” genitals to the construction in the s of an appropriate headwaters of the Mississippi River. 4. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formations in the United States: From the s to the s (New York: Routledge, ), .

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Denying the biological underpinnings of race, while revealing the social elements of it, makes the notion of race no longer familiar in the way that it had been. Race is a political concept as well as an economic one, as is exemplified by the fact that Irish immigrants until the early twentieth century were classified as Black. Another related way to make a phenomenon or practice strange is to take it out of its usual realm. The relations between husbands and wives often are said to belong in the private realm. Feminists have done much to challenge and undermine the public/private distinction and have located wife battering and marital rape against a broader social background in which sexism is pervasive. Marital rape and other forms of battering are economic issues as well. A woman who divorces her husband is likely to see her standard of living decrease significantly. In a custody battle with her husband, she may lose if she is deemed unfit. A woman can be unfit for a variety of reasons, including being a lesbian. In Ward v Ward, a  custody case in Florida, a judge awarded custody of an eleven-year-old girl to her father, a convicted murderer, over her mother because she was a lesbian.5 Drawing attention to familiar acts and practices is one way to make them strange, thereby politicizing them. Attending to these practices highlights parts of the background. Thus highlighted and revealed, these aspects of the background can be more thoroughly politicized in terms of how they make actions in the foreground possible and how this background is maintained and reinforced. Once politicized, it can be subverted and transformed.

The Rough Ground

Philosophy has done its share in contributing to the inability to see backgrounds. The history of Western philosophy is a history of the isolated, autonomous, and atomistic self—the epistemological subject and moral agent—who confronts/ knows/acts in the world out there by using his rationality/knowledge/attitudes in 5. Recently, the First District Court of Appeals removed the Ward v Ward opinion from the legal record. However, not all is well in Florida. In another custody case, Packard v Packard, a father with a history of mental illness who allegedly tried to burn down the family house was awarded custody of his children. At the time of the proceedings, he was living with his girlfriend, her children, and his children. The judge declared that the father could provide a “more traditional family environment for the children.” The mother is a lesbian living with her partner. The decision was appealed, and the First District Court of Appeals rejected the court’s reliance on the belief that the father would provide a more traditional and stable environment. When it was sent back to the trial judge, that judge reinstated his order granting custody to the father. The case was not further appealed.

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here. The captivation with this picture is not limited to philosophy, but shows up all over the intellectual map. It has a high level of staying power in debates about free speech and hate speech, especially. This picture, I argue, has contributed to a host of social harms. The influence of atomism and individualism on ethical and political thought and policy cannot be underestimated. Consider the concepts of rights, equality, and responsibility. Against a logic of individual civil/political rights, it is difficult to convince others that even though people may have the same rights, they can remain unequal in some very important ways. Equality does not necessarily follow from equal rights. All of us having the right to free speech does not imply that we can all exercise that right as effectively, or can use words that are effective because of their historical and social meaning. But against this logic, some people take the less-well-off state of others as an indication of their inferiority or failure. On this view, whatever inequality there is is a function of the failures (or successes) of particular individuals. There are no broader social forces at work here that account for the vast differences. And where issues of responsibility do arise, they are often couched in the narrowest of terms. Individuals are responsible for those actions that harm another and/or adversely affect another’s ability to exercise his rights. The scope of responsibility is sharply limited; those who are better off have no responsibility to those who are not. Traditional philosophy, with its broad influence on legal and social theory, has helped to create and maintain a foreground while at the same time creating the illusion that foreground is all there is. This is a dangerous trick; there is no foreground (because that would imply a background), but only reality. Not only, then, does the background slip from view, it ceases to be anything. There is nothing there to examine, and nothing for which we are responsible. Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations, warns philosophers not to be captivated and bewitched by all and only those problems that have troubled traditional philosophers, especially when those “problems” rest on assumptions that need to be examined. Certain issues cease to be problems when one no longer accepts the assumptions they rest upon. Much of traditional philosophy, especially ethics, has focused on hypothetical thought experiments. As Marilyn Friedman notes, “The moral world of mainstream ethics is a nightmare of plane crashes, train wrecks, and sinking ships! Women and children drown in this literature at an alarming rate.”6 A main cause of philosophical disease, Wittgenstein 6. Marilyn Friedman, “The Social Self and the Partiality Debates,” in Feminist Ethics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, ), .

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writes, is a one-sided diet (PI §). One cannot be healthy if she eats only from one of the basic food groups. Turning our attention only to ideal situations and hypothetical thought experiments constitutes such a one-sided diet. Hypothetical thought experiments and ideal situations also tend to lack subtleties and leave little room for the introduction of new complications. Ideal situations and thought experiments are slippery because they are not real; there is little or nothing to which one can grab hold. Thought experiments often leave out what is important or they are constructed in such a way that certain roles and expectations are reinforced. I would die in every one of those hypothetical situations popular in ethics: if trapped in a burning building, there is never the option of my (female) partner rescuing me, or of both of us saying in gasping breaths, “We’d rather die together than one of us live alone, so let’s help others.” (Even when dying we’ll still be talking. We’re academics, after all.) And, in the ever-popular nuclear disaster experiment in which only four people can fit in the fallout shelter, I’ll never get picked because I am not a pregnant woman who will propagate the species, nor am I a medical doctor, nor am I particularly good company in small spaces. Structured thus, hypothetical thought experiments come with many embedded assumptions about the value of certain kinds of people and/or the relations that can trump other salient considerations of moral situations. For a variety of reasons (choices, luck, temperament), I do not stand in the appropriate relations nor do I engage in the proper activities (reproducing) that would be reasons for saving me. Hypothetical experiments illustrate or illuminate just the points the philosopher would have us see. Hypothetical situations are like narrow tunnels with slight downward slopes and slippery floors—you can’t stand up and you end up sliding to the end, just where the philosopher would have you land.

Go and Look

Why make up situations when the world provides all kinds of examples? One reason may be that with ideal situations, it is easy to control the variables in order to reveal particular features and the relationships between them. Considered this way, ideal thought experiments are akin to scientific experiments. While I do not deny the usefulness of some abstract thought experiments, I do deny both that these ought to be the norm and that they are always useful. Why hold out for ideal situations when the world is anything but conducive to

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ideal conditions and few of us have the ability to actualize such conditions? Don’t. Go and look instead, Wittgenstein tells us, to the rough ground of what we actually say and do. Unlike ideal thought experiments, the rough ground is not vacuum-packed; it doesn’t lack context because it is the context. Among the things we say and do, Wittgenstein includes giving orders and obeying them, describing objects, reporting an event, forming and testing hypotheses, making up stories, solving problems in arithmetic, asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, and praying (PI §). Wittgenstein’s discussion of the rough ground, and the importance of looking to it rather than to ideal situations, is another way to explore the conditions necessary for the possibility and intelligibility of actions and judgments. The rough ground, as Wittgenstein describes it, has different surfaces with differing degrees of hardness. The rough ground has different topographic features. In some places, the surface is more like loose gravel. In other places, it is sandier. The ground may have hills, and in the presence of a river there will be some erosion. That which is hardest is beyond doubt or question, and beyond reflection. The hardest things are the most stable and sturdy; they are bedrock and least subject to change. As examples of bedrock beliefs or practices, Wittgenstein might include certain mathematical propositions, beliefs about the earth existing for more than one hundred years, beliefs about cheese not shrinking, and counting , ,  . . . in response to the order to “add  starting from .” But Wittgenstein’s description of the rough ground of what we actually say and do is incomplete in some very fundamental ways. Perhaps most important for my purposes, he excludes all sorts of beliefs and practices that are oppressive. The belief that gay men are pedophiles functions as bedrock for those people who refuse to hire any teacher suspected of being gay because he might/will sexually abuse children. The reason for not hiring the teacher who happens to be gay might be stated in terms of the children’s welfare, but it is assumed that the children’s welfare is connected to his sexuality (in a way that it is not connected to the heterosexual teacher’s sexuality). Certain sexist practices have become bedrock (and familiar, too). Few examples inspire such heated debate among students in my “Racism and Sexism” class as Marilyn Frye’s example of men opening and holding doors for women.7 Such practices, she argues, function to

7. See Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, ). I am using the term “background” differently from how Frye uses it in her book. She defines phallocratic reality as the foreground, and women as the background. Women are the invisible stagehands.

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maintain false beliefs about the helplessness of women and are oppressive. The reactions of students are relevant because they reveal both the insidious nature of oppressive practices and the degree to which people are prepared to view such activities as harmless just because they are so common.

Social Practices and Our Agreement

Social Practices

Backgrounds are constituted by social practices that make things possible and intelligible. In focusing on the nature of social practices, it is especially appropriate to appeal to Wittgenstein. Theodore Schatzki, in Social Practices, brings Wittgenstein to the realm of practice theory.8 Schatzki argues that social practices—and not the individual or the totality—are the fundamental phenomena in social life. Practices, according to Schatzki, are a site of human sociality in human life. They open “tissues of connection” between and among people. Practices are fundamentally social in the sense that they are the media in which human lives interrelate (). Practices create a web of understanding and intelligibility that establishes both meanings and possibilities.9 A practice, according to Schatzki, is a nexus of doings and sayings that are linked in three ways: through understandings of what to say and do; through rules, principles, and precepts; and through teleoaffective structures embracing ends, projects, tasks, and goals (). The organization of a practice is a function of these three elements. There are two different kinds of practices. The first is what Schatzki calls “dispersed practices” and these are found in a vast range of social life sectors. Describing, questioning, ordering, reporting, and investigating 8. Theodore Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Unless otherwise stated, all Schatzki quotes come from this work. 9. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, ), develops a practicalist strain she finds in the later Wittgenstein. The practicalist view she develops holds that there is an intrinsic relationship between practices and the criteria of truth that arise from such practices. Ruddick examines maternal practices as one example of how the demands and aims of maternal work give rise to the norms and criteria used to evaluate these practices. Practices, in Ruddick’s view, are collective human activities that are distinguished and identified by their goals and aims. The aims defining a practice are constitutive, and in their absence the practice would no longer exist or would be a different practice. People simultaneously create a practice as they pursue certain goals and make sense of their pursuit. The goals that constitute a practice will determine what counts as reasonable or true within it. Ruddick argues that truth, then, has a perspectival character; truth will be relative to the practices in which it is found. But this assertion does not, as I shall argue in the following chapter, lead to a certain kind of chaotic, wild, anything-goes rationality or truth.

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(what Wittgenstein included as language games) are all dispersed practices. This kind of practice is governed mostly by the first form of linkage mentioned above—understandings of what to say and do. For example, a person understands that listing the dimensions of a room and the colors of carpet and walls is an instance of describing. This person can understand what she is doing when she provides such a list and another takes her to be describing. Schatzki calls the second kind of practice “integrative.” Integrative practices are more complex and are often constitutive of particular domains of social life. They involve dispersed practices, but they are more than a collection of them. Examples of integrative practices include farming, cooking, military, and religious practices (). Integrative practices most often involve the three means of linkage. Consider military practices. The military is run through the establishment of order and discipline. When one enters the military life, their ordinary understanding of order and discipline becomes more sensitized, according to Schatzki. Responding to orders isn’t sufficient; one must understand how to respond to them in certain ways and with the right amount of respect. The second node of linkage—rules, principles, and precepts—conveys the ways in which behavior is explicitly governed in the situation. The third node of linkage—teleoaffective structures—is the most nebulous. The behaviors that constitute military practices express a hierarchized order of the ends, goals, and tasks of the doings and sayings. Protecting one’s country, following orders, building character, and “being all you can be” are all part of the teleoaffective structure that governs the behavior of those involved in the practice. There are countless numbers of practices, which we cannot count because they overlap and connect with each other in various ways. To say that one practice is connected to another is to say that life in one hangs together with life in another (). These connected practices form a nexus, which in turn can be connected to another nexus. The nexuses of practices constitute the social field, creating a labyrinth of interconnecting and overlapping practices. Social formations, such as groups, associations, or institutions, are slices out of this labyrinth (). Practices are inherently social entities, meaning that they are phenomena of human coexistence (). Schatzki uses the phrase “human coexistence” to name the Zusammenhang of people’s lives. Humans live in a “state of held togetherness” which is a “hanging together of human lives that forms a context in which we proceed individually. . . . Lives hang together in the microsituations of intimate relations, club activities, and classroom teaching as well as within the wider macrophenomena of economic systems, artistic practices, global communications networks, and international football” (). Schatzki refers to this “hanging

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togetherness of human lives” as sociality. Sociality extends not only to the people who share the same practices, but also to those who are involved with connected practices. The web of sociality widens as practices connect to each other, forming larger and larger nexuses. All states of sociality involve some kind of social ordering which is the arrangement that characterizes the Zusammenhang. The meanings of words, actions, and objects are created through practices. As Schatzki says, “Practices thus ‘constitute worlds’ in the sense of articulating the intelligibility of nexuses of entities (objects, people, and events), specifying their normatived interrelated meanings” (). This does not imply, however, that these entities are brought into existence. What it does imply is that meaning is socially constituted, and the meaning of any word or event or action depends on a background of already existing social practices. For example, in the absence of electoral politics and voting booths, a mark on a piece of paper would be meaningless and not a vote.10 Practices differently position people, and any differential position in a social structure is grounded in the various locations in a practice’s sociality. Practices create and maintain the center and the margins discussed above. The coexistence opened by practices does not imply any kind of equality, reciprocity, or symmetry. Practices make subject positions available in that individuals will “inhabit” spots that are created and maintained in a practice’s organization (–). Military practices, for example, make the subject position of a colonel possible. The practices bring that possible position (which does function also as an identity for some) into existence. The meaning of a subject position necessarily has a degree of fluidity because of its embeddedness in practices. When practices change, for example, new subject positions may be created, while others cease to exist. Practices make subject positions possible and these subject positions are constitutive of individuals’ minds and self-identities. Personhood and self-identity are effects or creations of social practices in that their expressive bodies, life conditions, self-ascriptions, and other-ascriptions exist within practices (). Individuals exist by virtue of the incorporation of human bodies into social practices where these bodies are transformed into expressive bodies (). Practices lay down the intelligible patterns of behavior and determine the relevant conditions. The behavior of people is informed by these practices, and they “take them on” by virtue of being a participant in these practices. Through their participation, people come to understand these behaviors, practices, and patterns as well as the conditions of life they express (). Actions, understandings, identities, and practices are holistically related. 10. Even with voting practices, a hole in a butterfly ballot might not be a vote.

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Repetition and regularity are the trademarks of a practice. This does not imply, though, that there is no openness to these practices. While it is true that practices constrain what counts as an intelligible or rational action, not all the sayings and doings of a practice are determined beforehand. As I will discuss later with respect to Wittgenstein’s account of rules and rule-following, any rule leaves something open. We Agree

A discussion of practices and rule-following requires an examination of the human communities in which they occur. Perhaps this seems obvious, but the obvious is often the most philosophically interesting. Rule-following is a social practice that presupposes the existence of a human community and agreement within that community. Norman Malcolm, in Nothing Is Hidden and Wittgensteinian Themes, argues that the presence of a human community is a necessary condition for there being any rule-following.11 He states that “the idea of a rule is embedded in an environment of teaching, testing, and correcting—within a community where there is agreement in acting in a way that is called following a rule” (NIH, ). According to Malcolm, Wittgenstein repeatedly maintains that the actions of a single individual cannot fix the meaning of a rule, but only the common agreement in action of a community fixes the meaning of a rule. Malcolm cites Wittgenstein’s comment in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (RFM, ) in support of the claim that there can be rules only within a framework of agreement. Wittgenstein says, It is of the greatest importance that hardly ever does a quarrel arise between human beings over whether the colour of this object is the same as the colour of that one, the length of this stick the same as the length of that one, etc. This quiet agreement is the characteristic surrounding the use of the word “same.” And one must say the analogous thing of proceeding according to a rule. No row breaks out over whether a rule was complied with or not. 11. Norman Malcolm, Nothing Is Hidden: Wittgenstein’s Criticism of His Early Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, ), hereafter NIH, and Wittgensteinian Themes: Essays – (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), hereafter WT. Malcolm, in “Wittgenstein on Language and Rules,” in WT, is replying to Baker and Hacker’s position that a human community is not a necessary precondition for rule-following. They argue that Wittgenstein’s view is that rule-following presupposes repetition and regularity, which could be exemplified by a solitary person in complete isolation. For their argument, see Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar, and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, ).

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People don’t come to blows, for example. For that belongs to the framework in which our language works (for example, in giving a description). This agreement is necessary for language, as Wittgenstein makes clear: “The phenomenon of language rests in regularity, on agreement in acting. Here it is of the greatest importance that all of us, or the overwhelming number, agree on certain things. For example, I can be sure that the colour of this object will be called ‘green’ by most people who see it” (RFM ) The “quiet agreement” belongs to the framework in which language games work; language rests upon it. As Malcolm says of this agreement, “Normally it doesn’t ‘enter the scene’ at all, but remains quietly in the background” (WT, ). The “quiet agreement” Wittgenstein discusses involves making color judgments, taking measurements, and counting. As Wittgenstein himself notes, these are not the kinds of things people come to blows over. But there are more to our forms of life than color, measurements, and mathematics, and I am interested in what else might constitute this agreement—quiet or not. I am also interested in the “we” who share this agreement. Are All a Part of the We?

In “Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground,” Naomi Scheman argues that where one can stand to obtain a perspective on a set of practices that is both informed and critical is both a political question and a Wittgensteinian one.12 Where do we stand and how does one make judgments about practices when there is this background of agreement? This emphasis on the background of agreement can misleadingly imply that forms of life are homogeneous. And if forms of life are homogeneous, then, according to Scheman, you end up with a disjunction: “One is either inside or outside of language games, the contours of which are arbitrary, and if inside, one just does what ‘we’ do; if outside, one is clueless—not a participant, certainly not an intelligible critic” (). This disjunction results in the objectivism/relativism debate. To avoid this result, Scheman reminds us that Wittgenstein meant to cure readers of the need for “super-idealized guidance.” Instead, we should take our practices as “either adequate to our demands, or if inadequate, immanently and empirically revisable” (). 12. Naomi Scheman, “Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); hereafter cited in the text.

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The revisions and changes to our practices can come from within a form of life or community even where, or perhaps especially where, there is this agreement. The “we” in question is neither homogeneous nor arbitrary. As Patricia Hill Collins and others have argued, the “we” has a restricted scope. “We” don’t all occupy the same ground. The unmarked “we” of the center are relatively privileged compared to those in the margins who are somehow marked as different. Forms of life are diverse, and the internal diversity entails that “we do not all stand in the same relationship to what ‘we’ say and do” (). The social locations of marginalized people provide grounds for challenging the “what we do” which, according to Scheman, “rejects both the possibility of transcending human practice and the fatalism of being determined by it” (–). There is a huge diversity among these marginalized positions, one of which is the position of “privileged marginality.” For Scheman, academic philosophers occupy such a position. Part of what we must do from these locations is disrupt what is taken to be the shared consensus and reopen what was previously considered closed (). Scheman writes that sometimes what we want to do is not to make it work, not, that is, to accept the apparatus and shift the angle of vision. . . . We want to argue, or to show, that the whole apparatus is an apparatus, and that it’s one we do not have to accept, although the cost of rejecting it may well be unintelligibility, even, perhaps, to ourselves. We want to disrupt the prevailing sense that there is something we would all say about some situation not in favor of another, slightly or significantly different one, but to unsettle the sense that there is a “we,” that we do share a form of life. () My task in this work is to explore the scope and nature of the “we” and the depth and breadth of the agreement that we are supposed to share.

Cartography and the Rough Ground

I see myself in each chapter as a cartographer, mapping oppressive social practices that constitute, in part, the rough ground, the background. I also mark the scope of the agreement that “we” share. Susan Hekman argues that “[i]f the Background defines the ground for meaning constitution within a society, then feminists who want to change these grounds must begin with an analysis of the Background. We must thoroughly understand the nature and operation of these grounds if we are to formulate strategies for displacing the hegemony that they define. Our goal must be to shift the grounds of the Background” (). The first

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set of maps addresses the former task of describing and analyzing the grounds, while the second set shows how the ground can shift and be made to shift. The maps I draw need to be topographic to accommodate the different surfaces of its various elements. Given that the rough ground includes all the things that we actually say and do, we should not expect a uniform surface. Maps are useful in a variety of ways, not the least of which is the navigation and exploration assistance they provide. One often chooses her map by the kind of trip she has planned. While a topographical map might be useful for bicycle riding on logging trails, navigating across the country by means of it would be difficult and complicated in a way that navigating by a AAA Triptik is not. (But I may choose the Amoco trip planner because the Amoco Motor Club includes nonmarried people as households while other motor clubs do not.) Some might object to my drawing a map when I have such overt and subversive political agendas. My critic argues that a map ought to be an accurate representation of what is really there. The argument continues that my agenda distorts the map so that it is less a map of the world and more a representation of my political beliefs. The conclusion, my critic asserts, is that I am not really drawing a map. As a reply, I offer the following considerations. Map making always involves creating distortions because map making involves scale, projection, and symbols. Cartography, according to Mark Monmonier, rests on a paradox: in order to represent a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must always tell white lies.13 In order not to overwhelm a map with too much detail, and thus obscure important information, the mapmaker must be selective in her use of detail. A map will always leave something out. Maps will also offer misrepresentations; the symbols used in maps most often will be proportionally bigger than the actual features they represent. It is important to note that any particular map is but one of an indefinite number that might be drawn for the same situation. The same data can produce a variety of maps. People often choose the maps that best represent their interests or make their cases. Maps are commonly used in advertisements: maps can promote chain stores by equating numerousness with success and quality (). The map can also make it appear that only my stores are on the main roads by not including other details (such as my competitor’s stores across the street). Maps also have a long history of political uses, especially in justifying expansion as Germany did during World War II. Map projections can diminish or increase the area and importance of a particular area. Maps also function as political icons.14 13. Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), ; hereafter cited in the text. 14. One of the more interesting examples Monmonier provides is an Argentinean postage stamp.

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Maps have agendas, and these agendas can be hidden or they can be more overt. At this point, my critic might remind me that I am drawing topographic maps, and these maps, unlike maps drawn for political reasons, are not tainted by overt and/or covert political messages. This claim, however, is false. The green used in topographical maps to mark woodlands is inherited from the military. The green has nothing to do with botanical and ecological concerns—it has to do with tactical necessity. Any tree or brush cover that is tall and dense enough for troop cover will be marked with green (). So, yes, I am drawing maps to a particular end, which is the transformation of particular aspects of the rough ground. If we can have a nuanced and complicated understanding of how certain practices function simultaneously to maintain the oppression of one group and the privilege of another, for example, then we have the beginnings for understanding how things could be different. At least we might know where to start in attempting to transform it. The background is, above all, ripe with possibilities for transformation, for revisioning and reshaping. The background has such revolutionary potential precisely because it is, in large part, a human construction. It is nothing apart from human social practices. We are always engaged with backgrounds, so we are always in a position to change them. We can transform the rough ground by undermining certain parts of it, shifting certain foundational beliefs, breaking off pieces of it, chiseling away at certain normative beliefs, and wearing down the jagged edges. The women who have brought the issues of domestic abuse and sexual harassment into the public sphere, for example, have effected radical transformation of parts of the rough ground/background. Feminists and antiracists who have forged coalitions are engaged in transformative work in which they utilize many different strategies. While it is not possible to call an entire background into question, it is possible to effect a radical transformation of parts of it.

Philosopher with a Mission

Wittgenstein and I part company in our views about the role of philosophy and the philosopher.15 Whereas Wittgenstein simply wants to describe the terrain Argentinean stamps tout the nation’s claims not only to the Falkland Islands and the British-held isles to their east, but also to Antarctica. One way Argentinean stamps deny the claims of the British is by using all Spanish names. Using stamps with maps as propaganda is just brilliant, especially when you consider the number of these stamps that are used both domestically and internationally (). 15. Judith Genova, Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing (New York: Routledge, ), reads Wittgenstein’s claims that philosophy can play no normative role and that philosophy should not interfere with languages’ uses in a different way. She reads Wittgenstein’s reluctance to pursue change as a function

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of a background, I want to prescribe parts of it. He would accept the role of philosopher as cartographer, but he would not agree with my role as philosopher as cartographer with a political agenda. Our parting is due to my feminist sensibilities and commitments, as well as to my responsibilities as a philosopher who works in ethics and political philosophy. Wittgenstein asserts that “philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. . . . It leaves everything as it is” (PI §). Description is one of my functions as a philosopher, but this is not my only function. As a moral and political philosopher, I do want to make normative claims. I want to argue that oppression is bad/wrong/immoral/indefensible and that we have obligations to lessen and eliminate oppression. Our social institutions need to embody certain principles of justice and benevolence. I am not content to leave everything as it is, especially when the phenomena in question are oppressive to groups of people. Nor can it simply be the case that “Philosophy states what everyone admits” (PI §). Yes, we may admit that the people around us are humans and not automatons; we do admit that other people have minds (PI §). But what is more important to me is what we do not or cannot admit, often because of familiarity, such as in the cases of racism and sexism. Philosophy needs to be just as concerned with these phenomena as with the things we do admit. Philosophy needs to do more than just scratch the surface. It is important to ask how far these kinds of admissions go. Yes, we admit that other people are not automatons, but do we admit that they are all fully human? Deserving of the same amount of respect? Entitled to certain basic needs (physical, mental, and emotional)? Yes, we admit many things, but the question is how far that admission goes. Many white people admit that we live in a racist society. Far fewer of us are willing to admit that the flip side of racial oppression is racial privilege, and that we have it. While much of what is the background hides in plain sight, as Wittgenstein suggests, much hides in other ways—by reinvention, for example. Things can be invisible for reasons other than familiarity. Wittgenstein says, “Philosophy of his understanding of the nature of philosophy. Wittgenstein’s texts, on Genova’s readings, are primarily directed at himself (see Culture and Value, , , ). Where others might read his works, they can function as mirrors for the readers’ thinking. In order to be consistent with his discussions of truth and logic, he cannot definitively say that one way of seeing is the true one. The most he can do is provide alternatives and possibilities. These may change one’s way of seeing and this, as Genova argues in her book, can result in significant change (see especially –). I do share the belief that changing one’s way of seeing can effect radical change, but I still have fundamental disagreements with Wittgenstein about the nature of philosophy, which also means that I don’t share Wittgenstein’s reluctance.

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simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.— Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us” (PI §). If philosophy were truly concerned only with describing what everyone already admits, as Wittgenstein contends, then these other phenomena would be excluded from the domain of philosophy. But surely the things that hide in these other ways are philosophically relevant. What is hidden, why it is hidden, and how it remains hidden are all philosophically, politically, and morally compelling questions. Throughout his later work, Wittgenstein challenges philosophers not to be bewitched by philosophical problems. Being so bewitched and practicing philosophy in such a way can cause a philosopher to become callused (PI §). He demands that we expand the domain of philosophy to include our ordinary practices and uses of language. But while he is willing to expand philosophy to include all those things that hide in plain sight because of their familiarity, he may have been unwilling to broaden philosophy to include the things that I discuss as hiding in different ways. I cannot justify my “cartographer/philosopher with an overt agenda” role on Wittgenstein’s terms, and I see this as a failure in Wittgenstein’s work. The interference and transformation I describe above can be justified on many other grounds, most notably social justice. It is prima facie compelling to me that one ought to act in ways that promote social justice and reduce oppression. Such a belief is, for me, one that is removed from the traffic of doubt.

Charting Stability, Charting Change

There is a multitude of ways to attend to backgrounds and their constitutive practices, though in the spirit of my cartographic enterprise I consider myself to be drawing two kinds of maps. One charts stability, the other change. My final chapter advances an account of moral responsibility that recognizes and is adequate to the task of evaluating oppressive practices. Charting Stability

The first set of maps charts the features of backgrounds that make them stable. In “The Stability of Rationality,” I highlight the concept of rationality and show how it is most fully understood by its reliance upon backgrounds. In the history of Western philosophy, certain groups of people have been taken as not possessing rational capacity and therefore their actions have been judged to be

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irrational. When rationality is no longer considered a faculty or a possession of individuals, but something that is socially ascribed to individuals, interesting questions can be asked about the rationality of dissident beliefs and practices. Until recently, the term “marital rape” was an incoherent, if not oxymoronic, notion. Against a background that includes beliefs about the duties wives owe to their husbands and all sorts of threatening and violent practices against women, how could a married woman come to rationally believe that what her husband did to her is rape? How was it possible for an abolitionist to argue against slavery in the face of claims about the natural inferiority of Africans? Cases such as these reveal the possibility for a radical transformation of what is taken as rational. I call my view “stabilism”; with it, transformation is possible, but not just anything goes. “Conspiracies and Connect the Dots” shows how the nexus of racist practices functions as the background that makes the environment combustible. This makes particular acts of racism, such as the bombings and burnings of AfricanAmerican churches in the South, possible and gives the acts their meaning. I examine the findings of the National Church Arson Task Force, which were released in June . This task force was charged with investigating the rash of burnings and bombings of houses of worship in the South. More specifically, the task force was investigating the possibility of a racially motivated conspiracy behind the fires. The task force found that there was no evidence to support the existence of a racial conspiracy behind the burnings. Many people move from this finding to the assertion that the burnings were not racially motivated at all— a finding that conveniently neglects the background of racism against which the burnings occurred. The only people who were seen to have any responsibility for these arsons were those who were found guilty. Drawing from Iris Young, I begin to advance a conception of moral and political responsibility where responsibility attaches not only to the intentional acts of individuals, but also to all those racist, unthinking, habitual actions and attitudes that maintain a background with imbricated oppressions. I return to questions of responsibility in the final chapter. In “The Meaning of Assaultive Speech,” I develop Wittgenstein’s claim that the meaning of a word is its use to examine how racist and homophobic speech harms its victims. I argue that there must be a shift from primarily understanding free speech in terms of rights and the price we must all pay for having this right, to a meaning and use approach to assaultive speech. While a free speech defender ties the right to free speech to the well-being of the community, my analysis ties the use of assaultive speech to the oppressiveness of a community.

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Charting Change

The second set of cartographic essays charts the new terrain created by inventing additional practices that start to constitute new backgrounds. New terrain can be created either by widening already-existing gaps and fissures or by pulling out the seams in what appears to be a seamless background. In “Moving to New Boroughs,” I explore the ways in which the background determines the meanings of foreground experiences. This chapter also explores one model for creating new backgrounds. I develop one sense of Wittgenstein’s claim that the limits of language are the limits of the world. I focus on two cases (childhood sexual abuse and coming out as gay/lesbian/bisexual) where the language available to individuals allows for only certain meanings of their experiences, meanings that are often isolating and damaging. Both cases involve some kind of essentialism about who or what a person really is. These cases also turn on notions of private and privileged access; each person knows herself in ways that no one else can. Each case also shows how practices make expressive bodies (and make bodies express certain things). However, people can create new meanings of their experiences through language, which can open up new worlds. We can invent new language games that challenge the dominant and hegemonic worldviews that would have a woman believe that lesbianism is unnatural and sick and that a child is responsible for what an adult does to her. All sites are made up of social practices, making them suitable objects of analysis. In “Lesbian Barroom Brawls,” I explore the actions of lesbians who lived in Buffalo in the s. Some of these lesbians were moral dissidents whose critical and transformative actions exemplified moral inquiry. By breaking ranks with those (both Black and white) who demanded segregation wherever possible, racially integrating a small number of spaces and building alliances, these women helped to create fissures in what had been a seamless background of racist segregation. Lesbian bars and house parties were some of the first racially integrated spaces in Buffalo; biracial alliances were forged in response to very real and immediate needs, such as being attacked by white men. The actions of some members of the Buffalo lesbian community to racially integrate public and private space and to fight (literally) against racism and homophobia (including their own internalized racism and homophobia), concretely improved the moral climate of Buffalo. These women, for a variety of reasons, became critical of some aspects of their racialized worldviews and rejected parts of them. The interracial alliances that Black and white lesbians in Buffalo forged were neither

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long lasting nor durable. Alliances between oppressed people often have been fragile and tenuous in the face of unrelenting oppression and suffering. As recent developments in the gay movement reveal, an overreliance on identity politics at the expense of coalition politics may result in a more conservative, perhaps even exclusionary, approach. “If Everybody’s Responsible, Then Nobody Is,” the final chapter in this work, does not fit into the two categories above. The original impetus for this chapter was a set of questions directed at me after presenting “Conspiracies and Connect the Dots” at a conference of radical philosophers. But this final chapter really does follow from all the preceding ones. Schatzki says that the organization of practices is out there in the practices themselves as opposed to being in the sayings and doings of individuals. The organization is expressed in the nexus of sayings and doings, meaning that an adequate account of moral responsibility must have a wider focus than traditionally has been the case. I criticize a paradigm I call the linked chain because it relies upon certain assumptions that result in the actions of individuals (and groups in some cases) as being the only appropriate objects of evaluation. I argue that we must radically broaden the scope in order to talk about responsibility for the existence and continuation of oppressive practices. I also draw upon the work of Margaret Urban Walker, who foregrounds what she calls the “practices of responsibility.” She is concerned with drawing maps or charts of responsibilities, which complements both my own cartography of the rough ground and my project of broadening the scope of responsibility.

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The Stability of Rationality

In this chapter, I examine the concept of rationality in order to challenge the hold that an essentialist account has retained by revealing its dependence on human practices. In doing so, I will elaborate on the background of agreement against which judgments of rationality and irrationality are made. This agreement in practices provides the background’s stability. This stability does not (and cannot) preclude disagreement, criticism, or transformation, which occurs on the margins. This chapter also demonstrates why a Wittgensteinian approach to intelligible criticism does not fall onto one side or the other of the objectivist/relativist debate, which makes it useful for political analysis. The discussion of stability and agreement will be continued more concretely in the following chapters. Rationality, along with Truth, Objectivity, and Reality, is one of the most important concepts in the history of philosophy. One could say it is one of the master concepts, and also one of the most important in the history of oppression. The two are not unconnected. Philosophers have asked a variety of questions about rationality: What is it? Who or what possesses it? Do those who possess it do so equally? What rights and responsibilities follow from having it? There are two kinds of answers to these questions. The first is an essentialist response: rationality is a capacity possessed by humans that separates us from other creatures. Using this

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capacity (and using it well) requires that a person’s beliefs and actions are rational. This essentialist position maintains a very clear distinction between rationality and irrationality, a distinction that is invidious and serves as a foundation upon which oppressive systems have been built. The belief that certain groups of people lack rationality and are naturally inferior serves as a justification, if not an explanation, for the unfair, exploitative, abusive, and inhumane treatment these groups have received. When rationality is viewed not as a capacity of individuals but as a social product or achievement, then we have a nonessentialist answer. Shifting attention away from the essentialist view and its rational/irrational distinction and toward the background against which this distinction is drawn, poses a direct challenge to the priority and rigidity of the foreground categories of rational and irrational. This shift reveals the dependence of the foreground categories on the background, and the dynamic relationship between the two. The categories of rational and irrational are created and maintained through a variety of social practices and institutions; they are not natural givens but social productions. Rationality, like all social productions, involves the use of power. Understanding where and how this power operates is important in understanding how the concept has functioned oppressively and how it can be transformed. I wish to advance an account of rationality that can address the possibility and importance of beliefs and practices that sharply dissent from the dominant ones of the background. Against a background of misogyny, how can a woman rationally believe that what her husband has done to her is rape? Against a background of racism in the antebellum South, how could any white person rationally believe that slavery was wrong? My discussion of these two cases is brief in this chapter, but discussions of sexual violence and racism continue in following chapters.

The Essentialist Approach to Rationality

We use the word “rational” to refer to individuals, beliefs, actions, and arguments. With respect to these four categories, “rational” has both descriptive and prescriptive functions. There is oftentimes a not insignificant slippage in the descriptive and prescriptive roles of “rationality.” This slippage often occurs with respect to the beliefs and actions of individuals; we sometimes move from saying a rational person holds irrational beliefs to saying a person is irrational. In reference to individuals, “rationality” usually is used to describe intellectual

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capacities, often including the ability to use language. Traditionally, the capacities and abilities that constitute rationality have been used to distinguish humans from other animals. They have also been used to make distinctions among humans; one’s status as fully human has depended on both possessing and using these faculties in appropriate ways. The attribution or denial of full humanity on the basis of the possession and the exercise of rational capacity is then used as justification both for the range of activities in which certain individuals are allowed to participate and for the treatment that certain people ought to be accorded. Women, slaves, and native people of conquered lands are all groups of people whose status as fully human has been denied and contested throughout history. To say that someone lacks the appropriate rational capacities and/or is not acting rationally is, in effect, to say that either she ought not to act in these ways or that “we rational” people ought not to act in these ways. This is a clear case when what counts as descriptively rational prescribes what beliefs and behaviors are rational.1 Descriptively, rational beliefs and actions are those that are supported by (good) reasons and are generated by or arrived at by means of a reliable procedure that generally produces true beliefs. A belief ’s rationality is dependent on both the reasons for holding it and the method used in reaching it. A belief may be rational because it has been reached by a reliable procedure and has good supporting reasons, though this belief may not be true. Normatively, a belief is rational if we ought to choose or accept it. Irrational beliefs are those we ought not to accept and/or ought not to act on. If one chooses to accept an irrational belief, then one may be seen as being willfully ignorant, stubborn, or not fully in possession of rational capacity. Irrational actions are motivated by irrational beliefs or desires. Desires traditionally have been judged irrational by definition. Rational beliefs are also contrasted with beliefs that are arrived at through emotion, faith, authority, and arbitrary choice. While rational beliefs can serve as the basis of knowledge (preferably rational true beliefs), beliefs based on emotion or faith or inspiration have not been accorded such a primary role in our knowledge acquisition. In fact, beliefs based on emotion or faith may be tainted by their origins, and unless they can be justified by other beliefs or evidence not based on emotion or faith, it traditionally has been argued that they ought 1. This issue of attributing or denying full humanity on the basis of rationality is examined and criticized by both radical and feminist philosophers. See, for example, Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ); Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, ); and Phyllis Rooney, “Rationality and the Politics of Gender Difference,” Metaphilosophy , nos. / (): –.

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not to play a role in our system of knowledge. A demand for that kind of purity, that is the absence of emotion or faith or inspiration, is clearly seen in the context-of-discovery/context-of-justification distinction. Such a distinction may hinge on a version of the genetic fallacy. Feminist philosophers of science have done much to reveal the problematic nature of this distinction, in particular the claim that the context of justification is value free.2 In moral theory, Kant claims that rationality alone allows us to apprehend the moral law, and the moral law prescribes our duties. The presence of any emotions, even loving to fulfill one’s duty, neither helps in the determination of the morally right act nor adds to the moral praiseworthiness of the act. The purity of a moral act rests in the rationality of the act. The rationality of a person and the rationality of her beliefs and actions intertwine in an interesting fashion. An important shift occurs when not only are a person’s actions deemed irrational, but that person is herself judged irrational. Rational people do plenty of irrational things, and irrational people act rationally. The person whose actions are judged irrational but who remains rational in the eyes of others is often seen as corrigible or reformable. Certain argument forms can be effective in swaying such a person’s beliefs and views so that she brings herself, or is brought around, to hold the same views “we rational” people hold. Rational arguments are taken to involve suasion without persuasion, conversion without coercion. Rational suasion involves changing another’s views by appealing to her rationality through the use of reasons. But, as Wittgenstein notes, “At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think of what happens when missionaries convert natives.)” (OC §). The person who is judged irrational is taken to be beyond the pale3 and beyond the pull of rational suasion. Rational capacity is taken as a necessary condition for autonomy and for the rights and liberties to which one is entitled as a rational person. Enforcing sanctions and imposing constraints on the irrational individual cannot count as a violation of her autonomy and rights because she cannot, by definition, possess these. Much of the time when women have been mentioned in traditional philosophy, what has been noted is their inferior

2. See, for example, Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), and Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). 3. While spending time in Ireland one summer, I learned about the origin of this expression. In the fifteenth century, English control of Dublin increased to an area known as the Pale. Anything or anyone “beyond the Pale” was beyond control. The expression has taken on new connotations. Not only is something beyond the pale uncontrollable, but is also morally and socially unacceptable or depraved.

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rational capacity. Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, and Nietzsche all espoused some version of the view that women are incapable of full, genuine rationality, and they have used this view to justify our exclusion from public and political arenas. Traditionally, rationality has referred only to the means by which we achieve given ends—what is known as instrumental rationality. For example, rational behavior aims at achieving a person’s goals or ends, while rational beliefs strive to realize certain cognitive values such as truth. If we take the ends as given, then we can say that some means satisfy the ends or satisfy the ends better than some other means. However, instrumental rationality provides no way to evaluate the goals themselves, except by saying that such goals may be useful in the realization of other goals. It is clear, then, that instrumental rationality cannot exhaust the entire domain of rationality. Some theory or account of rationality is needed to put to rest Hume’s statement that “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”4 When you start to question the ends themselves, a whole new range of questions and issues opens up. It does seem right that some account of rationality for the evaluation of ends is necessary—nothing could convince me that the destruction of the world and the scratching of my finger are on par. Formulating such an account is far beyond the scope of this particular chapter; however, it does raise some interesting issues that will segue into my Wittgensteinian discussion of rationality. Does the move to bring ends and preferences under the rubric of rationality, whether an instrumental account of rationality or a noninstrumental one, assume that all preferences and ends are either rational or irrational? Are there some goals, or ends, or actions that do not lend themselves to this kind of evaluation but are, in fact, the preconditions for this kind of evaluation?

Nonessentialist Rationality

Traditionally, the categories of rational and irrational are taken to be mutually exclusive. It is my position that before we can make this distinction between rational and irrational, there must first be something against which it can be drawn, and that something will be neither rational nor irrational. I assume a Wittgenstein-inspired distinction between what I call the foreground and its categories of rational and irrational, and the background, which 4. Quoted in Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). Nozick offers what he calls a “substantive theory of rationality” in order to evaluate the rational coherence of the goals and preferences to which our actions and beliefs aim.

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is neither rational nor irrational. My primary focus in this section will be on the background in order to show how the foreground categories depend on and arise from it. While Wittgenstein does not discuss the notion of rationality in any detail, one can, I believe, develop a Wittgensteinian account of rationality based on some of his insights into other categories such as truth, correct rule-following, and certainty. On a Wittgensteinian view, it is only as a member of a linguistic community that I exist as a rational being. Rationality can be understood as the ability to “use reason,” that is, to formulate reasons and justifications and to grasp reasons and explanations. Rationality is perceived in our utterances, actions, and applications of concepts. The reasonable person described in On Certainty accepts many beliefs and judgments and, in light of these, acts in certain ways. Instead of looking into a person’s mind to see if his or her rational capacity is operating, we should turn our attention to his actions and beliefs because, as Wittgenstein reminds us, not even God can see what would be such a capacity, because nothing is (PI, p. ). The formulation of reasons and the providing of justifications are only possible within language games, and language games are possible only against some shared background or framework. Language games consist of rule-governed interactions with our nonlinguistic environment; in asking whether or not someone is following a rule or acting rationally or holding a rational belief, we do not look into their mind to see if some formula or mental process is occurring. We look, according to Wittgenstein, to the broader behavioral and conceptual context in which the alleged rulefollowing or rational act occurs. This broader context of behavior—the fabric of the language game—is public and shared, and it is only against this background that questions about rule-following or rationality can be answered. The existence of reasons, and hence the existence of the very concept of rationality itself and its possibility, depends upon the existence of language games. According to Wittgenstein, “Instinct comes first, reasoning second. Not until there is a languagegame are there reasons” (RPP I: §). Language games themselves, however, are not reasonable or unreasonable. They are there, much like our life (OC §). Language games make something rational; the playing of language games enables judgments about the rationality of particular beliefs and actions. Only within language games can judgments about rationality make sense. Language games themselves do not have independent rational justification that is some justification not depending on a language game. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein is concerned with describing the background that is necessary for the formulation of reasons and rational beliefs, the engagement of rational argument and the attribution of the status of “rational” to an

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individual. In other words, Wittgenstein is concerned with discussing the conditions under which language games are played. He notes that only against this background can concepts such as truth and falsity, rational and irrational, have their life (OC §). Questions of correctness, truth or falsity, rationality and justification can only meaningfully be asked by someone within a system. The system provides the background and makes possible the very conditions for asking and answering questions about the rationality of particular practices, but nothing in the system can provide the conditions for asking about the rationality of the background itself. Questions about the rationality of the background cannot be asked or answered in any way that is not nonsensical. Wittgenstein realizes that there is a variety of backgrounds against which we play a multitude of language games. Each background has two dimensions.5 The first, framework conditions, include (a) general regularities concerning the world around us, (b) biological and anthropological facts about humans, and (c) sociohistorical facts.6 These facts of nature are not propositions; they are not statements but what might be called actual features of the world. In order to avoid confusions that follow from the use of the word “fact,” I will use the term “given.” It is a given about the world that tables and chairs do not pop in and out of existence. Wedges of cheese do not suddenly grow or shrink when you put them on a scale to measure them (PI §). Biological and anthropological givens include our being able to perceive different kinds of sensations and having shared patterns of reactions. Sociohistorical givens are concerned with our ways of speaking and acting that express practical needs and interests that have been shaped by history. These would include measuring cheese on a scale and fixing the price by weight, or selling wood by volume and not by area. These givens are fused into the foundations of our language games (OC §). There are two things to note about these “givens of nature.” First, they often go largely or totally unnoted. We do not note them because of their familiarity and simplicity—they are always before our eyes, so we are almost unable to notice them (PI §). As Wittgenstein says, “The facts of human natural history that throw light on our problem, are difficult for us to find out, for our talk passes them by, it is occupied with different things. (In the same way we tell someone: ‘Go into the shop and buy . . .’ not: ‘Put your left foot in front of your right foot etc. etc., then put the coins down on the counter etc. etc.’” 5. To a certain extent, making this distinction is artificial because the aspects are fundamentally interconnected. There are multiple aspects to this background, intertwining and overlapping, but this nature of the background does not invalidate the usefulness of the distinction. 6. Hans-Johann Glock offers these groupings in A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, ). See the entry on “framework” (–).

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(RPP I: §).7 If we do notice them and start to question them, we literally may not be able to function; imagine what would happen if you started to question the activity of walking. The second thing to note about these givens of nature is that the formation of concepts is fundamentally connected to these natural givens, and this connection reveals the dependency of all concepts on the background. The concepts of weighing things and price fixing would be radically transformed were wedges of cheese to shrink and grow suddenly. The same is true for characteristic expressions of pain and joy—if there were no regularity for the expressions of these emotions or sensations, “our normal language-games would lose their point” (PI §). So, in those cases where there is no regularity in the expression of emotions or sensations, we could no longer talk about the rationality or irrationality of certain ways of behaving. These “givens,” such as natural characteristic expressions, provide stability. This stability is, to a large degree, a function of their being familiar, simple, and shared. The second dimension of the background consists of what can be called hinge propositions,8 of which there are four kinds: transhistorical (“The earth has existed for a long time”); discovered (“Water boils at one hundred degrees centigrade”); individual certainties (“I have a brain”); and person-specific certainties (“I have lived most of my life in the United States”). The hinge propositions, though they resemble empirical propositions, ought to be understood as grammatical ones. Grammatical propositions play a normative role; they shape what counts as an intelligible description of reality. These propositions lay down the rules of language games, while empirical propositions are moves within a language game in accordance with the rules. Grammatical propositions play particular roles within our language games—they play the role of the rules of description while empirical propositions are descriptive propositions (RFM §). What it means to be convinced of a grammatical proposition is that we accept a rule (RFM §). Wittgenstein’s conception of grammar is broader than usual usage of that concept. In Wittgenstein’s view, grammar is something more than intralinguistic rules of language use, that is, more than the rules for speaking and writing. In speaking of grammar, Wittgenstein is interested not only in the syntax of language games, but also, as Robert Ackermann asserts, “the semantic and

7. One philosopher friend who has three children wryly (and rightly) observed that Wittgenstein never had children and failed miserably as an elementary school teacher. 8. This characterization comes from Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary. See the entry for “certainty” (–).

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pragmatic constraints provided by the interconnection of language with life.”9 Language facilitates many nonlinguistic activities, and grammar includes the rules governing these various activities. Grammar, then, plays both a constitutive and regulative role with respect to moves in a language game. Grammar is constitutive in that it makes particular actions or utterances count as moves within a game. It is regulative in that it imposes regulations or constraints on what counts as reasonable or appropriate actions and utterances. Grammatical propositions are not subject to truth and falsity in the same way as empirical ones. Nor, most importantly, can they be said to be rational or irrational—they are neither. Grammatical propositions, in their normative role, are not subject to empirical refutation. On the contrary, they make empirical refutation possible. Likewise, the grammatical propositions are not subject to judgments concerning their rationality, but they make possible the conditions for judging the rationality of empirical propositions. Grammatical propositions form part of the background that makes rationality possible. As a way of clarifying this distinction between grammatical propositions and empirical ones, and the role each plays, consider Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the riverbed: It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became more fluid. The mythology may change back into a state of flux; the riverbed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movements of the waters on the riverbed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other. . . . And the bank of the river consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now in another gets washed away, or deposited. (OC §§–) The movements on the water can be understood as the changes in empirical beliefs and the shifting of the contents between the categories of rational and irrational. The shifts of the bed are changes that are brought about as a consequence of the adoption of new grammatical rules. The hard rock consists of 9. Robert Ackermann, Wittgenstein’s City (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ), –.

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those grammatical propositions such as logical patterns of inference. The shifting sands are propositions that can be used either normatively or descriptively; that is, their function as grammatical or empirical propositions can change. How strongly is the line drawn between grammatical propositions that are part of the background and empirical ones? Wittgenstein does not deny that the contrast can shade off in all different directions, but that is not to say that the contrast is not of the greatest importance (RFM §). Wittgenstein admits that even with grammatical propositions, of which we are certain and convinced (those discussed by Moore, for example), we can say of them “I know” in particular circumstances. In such circumstances, the proposition no longer functions as a grammatical one but as a move within a language game (OC §).10 Empirical propositions also can be hardened into a rule. Consider “The justification of the proposition  ×  =  is, naturally, that if anyone has been trained in such-and-such a way, then under normal circumstances, he gets  as the result of multiplying  by . But the arithmetical proposition does not assert that. It is, so to speak, an empirical proposition hardened into a rule” (RFM §). This hardened empirical proposition becomes a paradigm against which experience is compared and judged; it is a new kind of judgment (RFM §). While the framework conditions do not determine the rules of language games, they do, to a large degree, determine what games are played. They impose limits on the possibility of adopting different games with different rules. This recognition that there is a variety of forms of representation and that each lays down its own standards of rationality is important. This means that it is more accurate to speak of “rationalities” than “rationality.” And Wittgenstein recognizes that every form of representation has alternatives, including mathematics—he thinks it may be possible to adopt  ×  =  (LFM ), for example. To simply dismiss this as a mistake is to impose the form of representation of those who believe that  ×  = . Their allegiance to their form of representation is similar in kind to our allegiance to ours.

Implications of This Wittgensteinian View of Rationality for Feminists

Allegiances were sworn and battle lines drawn in a meeting of feminist philosophers discussing an early version of this chapter.11 The “ × ” claim caused 10. Wittgenstein goes on to note that such a switch in the role of a proposition marks the loss of everything philosophically interesting about it. 11. The rabble-rousers in question were Corrinne Bedecarre, Amy Hilden, Lisa Heldke, and Anne

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such a heated argument that we were almost tossed out of a coffee shop. When we rabble-rousers finally quieted down, I was asked a question about the implications of my saying that it may be reasonable for someone to believe that  ×  = . This left the door wide open to relativism in a way that my interlocutors, and many feminists, find problematic, if not dangerous. I was advocating a revolving door of rationality. According to them, without some standards of rationality that did not change and were beyond doubt, then anything goes and all sorts of atrocious acts could be counted and justified as rational. What they found most worrisome, at least as I understood their concern, was not the shifting content between the foreground categories of rational and irrational, but that there were shifts between the foreground and the background. Something previously taken as rational or irrational could harden into the role of grammatical propositions. Likewise, something taken for granted, so hardened, could be loosened and pulled into the moving waters. The elasticity and flexibility of the foreground concepts were welcome, particularly when women as a group in the past have been considered irrational by definition because we lack the proper capacities. Our inclusion on the rational side of the divide, and the benefits that attend such membership, has been welcomed. This direction of the movements in the waters is good. Many feminists would also embrace the movements from the rational to the irrational, particularly when certain “rational” beliefs about women have been displaced and relegated to the realm of the irrational. One’s willingness to embrace these kinds of movements rests on a belief that these category shifts can happen only because something stands fast as the background against which particularities can be evaluated. But this background has to be different from the background I have described—it must be some absolute standard that would enable someone to say, “That is really rational.” It makes it seem that this background is hyper-rational; it is Rationality with a capital R. This type of background does not change—it is absolute. There are no shifts between the background and the foreground on this view. The shifts in the foreground categories are a consequence of our having made mistakes in the past (calling something irrational when, no, really, it was rational, and vice versa). Somehow the background constitutes the foreground categories by endowing them with the necessary feature (or not, as in the case of irrationality). The influence is unidirectional; the background influences the foreground but not the converse. Phibbs. While this “fight” was happening, I was reminded of Wittgenstein’s comment about sitting in a garden with a philosopher who repeatedly says, “I know that this is a tree,” while pointing to a tree. To the person who arrives on such a scene, Wittgenstein says, “I tell him, ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy’” (OC §).

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The argument continues that it is only against such an unchanging background that someone can make judgments that really stick. As feminists, we do want to make judgments that stick in some important ways; how they stick is in being Right, True, or Rational. My position, my interlocutors argue, comes with too high a price. It gives us the shifts in the categories but gives away the absolute standard. I believe this enchantment with the hyper-rational is an enchantment with the ideal. As Wittgenstein notes, “the ideal, as we think of it, is unshakable. You can never get outside it; you must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe” (PI §). With this conception of the ideal, we find ourselves “on slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!” (PI §). At this point, someone could object that it is only by having a perfect background that features and attributes can stand out in clear relief. It is by virtue of this backlighting of the hyper-rational that we can make good/accurate/true/rational judgments. However, what this means is that the hyper-rational is outside the system, as it were. And given that it is outside the system, there would be no way for us (at least some of us) to challenge it. It remains unshaken; it stands untouched. So we must return to the rough ground. The rough ground includes the interwoven activities and behaviors underlying our language use. In other words, it is the nonabsolute background. The background doesn’t stand removed from the foreground, nor is it removed from the system. Rather, the foreground categories have their lives within the system. This background is not totally smooth. It has fissures, crevices, craggy surfaces, and some parts that are more smoothly worn. Recall that the background is a combination of the givens of nature, the hinge propositions as well as actions and practices. It isn’t monolithic because it is not just one thing. We shouldn’t expect it to have a uniform appearance and surface, and perhaps we ought to be suspicious if it does take on a more uniform character. Crevices also appear where different backgrounds come into contact. These crevices and craggy surfaces are the interesting ones to me, because transformative practices can take hold from these locations. My Wittgensteinian model of rationality, with its bidirectional influence, provides a tool for radically changing what counts as rational in a way that the hyper-rational model cannot, and it allows people to make sense of their actions and experiences as rational in a way that is much more difficult (if not impossible) on that model. The nonabsolute background allows for changes, and the transformations effected by the creation of alternative practices, meanings, and

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values go beyond the foreground categories. This kind of change is both more radical and more lasting than shifting the contents of the foreground categories. Consider the case of marital rape. Until recently, marital rape was an incoherent, if not oxymoronic, notion. As recently as  in New Mexico, the court said in State v Bell that “a husband is legally incapable of raping his wife, since the existence of a marital relationship bears as an evidentiary matter upon the element in the rape statute of lack of consent. A wife is irrefutably presumed to consent to sexual relations with her husband, the court observed, even if forcible and without consent.”12 Another explanation for the “contradiction” in the expression “marital rape” is that rape has been defined as unlawful carnal knowledge without consent. Since intercourse between a husband and wife is not unlawful, no act of sexual intercourse in marriage is rape. One other possible explanation for the impossibility of marital rape is that a wife is a possession of her husband, to do with as he sees fit.13 Against this background, which includes hinge propositions about the duties wives owe to husbands as well as threatening and violent practices, how could a married woman come to rationally believe that what has happened to her is rape?14 It is only because there has been a concerted and collective effort, largely on the part of women, to challenge a bit of this background. This challenge, like any challenge, is itself launched from a part of the background (OC §). This part of the background may have a different surface; that is, it includes different hinge propositions as well as different practices. It is a fissure or a crevice. But these different propositions and practices enable people to conceive ideas and act in ways that are different from those encouraged under the norms and within the practices of the dominant culture. These ideas and actions, which may start out on a very small scale, always have a social genesis. They can start to take root in a brief conversation with other women; consciousness-raising groups performed such a role. These ideas can grow and begin to achieve more staying power and can start to undermine those of the dominant culture. The emergence of the battered women’s movement as well as the movements against sexual abuse and sexual harassment have had far-reaching effects for women, one of which is the creation of alternative frameworks with which to make sense of their experiences and to attribute meanings to these experiences. The women in these movements have created languages and vocabularies for women to use in articulating 12. Cited in American Law Review, th ed., vol. , . 13. See American Law Review, th ed., vol. , –. 14. A short list of some of these practices includes: the pervasiveness of domestic abuse, rest cures for hysteria, cliterodictomy as treatment for oversexualization, and women’s lack of property and their economic dependence on their husbands.

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their experiences. A married woman can now meaningfully say to herself and others, “I was raped by my husband.” A woman can also break her silence about sexual abuse. These movements have been active in the education of the general public, the changing of public perceptions, and the passing and changing of particular laws. It is a mistake to think that a woman could reach such conclusions independent of all others, in other words, privately. The notion of rationality as a capacity and the conception of a hyper-rational background do not get us far enough, and, in fact, such notions may even hinder and oppress women. The assumption that a person should be able to reach conclusions by herself if only she used her capacity well or if only she could see things “right” can leave a person feeling as if she has failed, or is weak, or somehow lacks will. Such thinking can make a person mute and render her incapable of movement. In other words, she is silent, trapped, and isolated. On this view, the fault is with the individual and not with the broader social forces and dominant norms and conceptions. The background escapes any notice and is left unquestioned. In “Moving to New Boroughs,” I discuss the power relations that keep women silenced about their experiences of having been abused. By challenging parts of the background in a collective manner, new practices that enable women to give different meanings to their experiences have been created. They have also opened new legal avenues for addressing the harms done to them.15 As another example of change, consider the belief, used to justify slavery in the United States, that Africans are not fully human and therefore are naturally inferior to whites. This functioned as a grammatical proposition, prescribing and justifying all sorts of atrocious practices. A white person in antebellum South who questioned the beliefs about the inferiority of Blacks may have been judged to be irrational. The hold of these beliefs is evident both in the public struggle of abolitionists against slavery and in their private struggles with their own internalized racism. While abolitionists were opposed to slavery, many were still far from seeing Black people as the equals to whites. The strength of this belief is also evident in the degree to which some Black people had themselves internalized this belief. There has been a concerted and collective effort, largely on the part of Blacks and white antiracists, to challenge a bit of this background. This challenge, like 15. While the marital rape exception has been removed from the legal books, there are still some states that have restrictions in the prosecution of marital rape. Some states will only prosecute marital rape if the couple is legally separated or have filed for divorce. Due to legal criticism, criticism from women’s advocates, and a growing awareness of domestic abuse, the trend in the United States is toward the elimination of all marital exceptions in the prosecution of crimes.

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any challenge, was launched from a part of the background (OC §), a part of the background with a different surface, something more like loose gravel. The different propositions and practices constituting this surface enable people to conceive ideas and act in ways that are different from those encouraged as part of the fabric of the background. These contrary ideas and actions may start out small, but they gradually grow. The emergence of the abolitionist movement, combined with the already existing frameworks of Blacks, created alternative frameworks with which one could make sense of the experiences of living in a racist society. Resistance to such changes of beliefs that have functioned grammatically has been strong. One form this resistance takes is backlashes. Such responses can be taken as an indication that these movements have challenged a fundamental background belief. But even in the face of these backlashes, it is fair to say that the riverbed is shifting to some degree, and that change is happening. The very contestation over elements of the background change the background to the extent, at minimum, that what had previously escaped notice and had gone unarticulated is made somewhat visible. Transformations effected on the background do not entail that absolutely anything can go. As I discussed in the second section, the “givens of nature” and the hinge propositions provide the system with stability. It is true that empirical propositions do harden and begin to function normatively as grammatical ones, but this takes time. It is also the case that the riverbed can and does shift, but it doesn’t just shift willy-nilly. This model, call it stabilism, provides a large degree of stability without absolutism, change without relativism. My account shows the importance of making certainties, making sense. The power of certainties is that they are reinforced all the time, which is precisely why the old oppressive ones are hard to undermine. But, working collectively, women in the battered women’s movement, for example, have undermined old certainties and made some new ones by creating new words and languages. These new certainties can themselves be reinforced. We can make new ground, and this ground can be stable. In several subsequent chapters, I will look at the legacy of racism in the United States, particularly the form it takes in the burnings and bombings of African-American churches and in the use of assaultive speech. The legacy is also clear in the responses of white Americans to these acts. Racist beliefs and practices still function as grammar, though their content has shifted and transformed itself.

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Conspiracies and Connect the Dots: The Search for Motive in the Church Burnings

This chapter continues the discussion of the stability of racist backgrounds. The dailiness of racist practices makes particular overt acts of racism, such as bombing an African-American church, possible and intelligible as a instrument of terror. In a manner similar to my interlocutor in “The Stability of Rationality,” who wanted some uncontaminated background against which to make judgments of rationality and irrationality, many white people assume that such a background exists for judging the racist content of particular acts. This assumption itself reveals the pervasiveness of racism in shaping backgrounds. This chapter also begins to discuss the harmfulness of racist practices and raises the question of responsibility for these practices.

Burnings and Bombings

Early in June , the National Church Arson Task Force concluded that the evidence it had gathered did not support the claim that a national, racially motivated conspiracy existed behind the rash of church burnings in the South. In light of these findings, I expected to see follow-up stories as well as letters to the editor and opinion pieces in newspapers, newsmagazines, and on television and the radio. However, virtually

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nothing was said about the findings in the mainstream (white) media. The issue fell off the table for white people, relegated to the category of “Dealt with and Resolved.” Why the silence? The silence of white people about the burnings reveals our willingness to believe that the task force had settled the matter once and for all. This silence speaks volumes; it highlights our eagerness to believe that only certain individuals were responsible for these racist crimes, and that the rest of us white people were not responsible in any way. The task force told us the facts, we can now assign blame, and that’s the end of the story. In June , President Clinton formed the National Church Arson Task Force in response to the sharp rise of arsons and bombings in houses of worship, especially African-American churches in the South. The task force opened  investigations of arsons, bombings, and attempted bombings at houses of worship starting on January , . The investigations led to the arrests of  people. Of these  people,  were white, thirty-four African-American, and five Hispanic.1 In the cases involving African-American churches, members and former members of the Ku Klux Klan were found guilty in a handful of cases, but most of the  defendants found guilty between  and  “were not found to be members of hate groups” (Report, ). Furthermore, in the cases involving African-American churches, while some of the arsons and bombings involved common defendants, conspiracy charges were filed in only a few cases. The report notes: “These conspiracies, though, have tended to be confined to the small geographic areas where the arsons have occurred (Report, ). On the basis of convictions obtained to date, the cases “do not support the theory that these fires were the product of a nationwide conspiracy” (Report, ).2 1. The newspaper accounts did not break down these numbers into cases involving AfricanAmerican churches and non-African-American churches. The breakdown of these numbers is interesting. Of the  incidents investigated,  of them involved African-American churches. Threefourths of the burnings of African-American churches happened in the South. In the burnings of African-American churches,  of the suspects arrested were white (. percent)  of the suspects were African-American (. percent)  of the suspects was Hispanic (. percent). In the burnings of non-African-American churches,  of the suspects arrested were white ( percent)  of the suspects were African-American (. percent)  of the suspects were Hispanic (. percent). Five of the white suspects arrested are charged in the burnings of both African-American and nonAfrican-American churches (Report, ). 2. The Fourth Report of the National Church Arson Task Force, released in September , reports

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Deeply revealing and problematic is that whites tend to slip easily from the conclusion that there was no racially motivated conspiracy behind the burnings to the more sweeping conclusion that the burnings were not racially motivated at all. No, we assure ourselves, they were motivated by religious hatred, financial gain, burglary, and personal revenge—motives that were imputed to those who were arrested (Report, ). To challenge the claim that racism played a role in the church burnings, some white people point out cases where African-Americans were involved in the burnings of African-American churches as well as those cases where white churches were burned by African-Americans.3 These moves make twin points: “The burnings are not racist because some African-Americans burned their own churches,” and “The burnings are racist, but it goes both ways.” Sure, we tell ourselves, the occasional bigot might have burned a church because he hates Black people, but that kind of case is the exception. That kind of person is the exception, too; it is that kind of person who is the real racist. Being able to draw such a distinction allows the rest of us white people to see ourselves as not racist precisely because we have never done anything so overtly and intentionally aimed against Black people. And even those who did such racist things may not be racists; they may be people who just did something stupid. Lest anyone doubt our willingness and eagerness not to see acts or persons as racist, consider the following case. Late on Sunday, April , , after a day of beer drinking and pot smoking, three young white men went to burglarize the Springhill Freewill Missionary Baptist Church. When they found nothing they wanted to steal, they piled hymnals and plastic flowers on a pew and set it ablaze. After this, they drove off to the Rocky Point Missionary Baptist Church and set it ablaze. Driving away, people heard them yelling racial epithets. Said the lawyer for one of the defendants, “These young boys are not racist. They got a little drunk and a little crazy. I know the types who do this sort of thing with malice in their hearts and these boys are not that type. . . . It was a lark” (USA Today, June , ). that the number of arsons at houses of worship has declined since . In , there were  attempted arsons or bombings; in  there were ; and in  there were . As of August , , there had been  incidents. The task force opened  investigations into bombings, arsons, or attempted arsons that occurred at houses of worship between January ,  and August , . Three hundred and five defendants in connection with  arsons or bombings have been convicted by federal, state, and local prosecutors. See the Report at http://www.atf.treas.gov/pub/gen_pub/ report. 3. These moves are similar to the one in which an instance of welfare fraud is taken as a counterexample to the worth and/or necessity of a welfare system. Similarly, there are people who challenge the pervasiveness of childhood sexual abuse by elevating the very isolated and rare instances of fabricated memories to the status of “False Memory Syndrome.” This “syndrome” is then cited as the counterexample that can challenge the legitimacy of any claim of abuse.

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Such conclusions, both of the task force and many white people, I contend, are wrong and dangerous. The wrongness stems from our ordinary understanding of what constitutes a conspiracy, as well as what counts as a racially motivated act. While in the past the term “conspiracy” was a useful way to name the exercise of power by one group of people over others, it has recently taken on connotations that have undermined its seriousness. The danger is that such conclusions perpetuate an environment in which racism can exist in its various guises, morphing itself so that it can permeate all of our lives, marking and differently valuing members of different races, and perpetuating oppression and injustice.

The Wrongness

A conspiracy is generally thought to involve some sort of covert plan, engineered by a select few and implemented by the minions of those select few. Imagine a secret, secure room in which individuals make decisions to assassinate a person who has become a problem, to overthrow a government, or to ruin a company by dumping a lot of stock quickly in order to start a selling panic. Many times, it is those who already have a certain amount of power, wealth, or authority who participate in conspiracies. The motivations may have to do with having their authority and “rightful” position questioned or undermined. A conspiracy might be an effort to reestablish their power. For all those involved, there is a healthy dose of awe about the magnitude and daring of the operation about to be undertaken. The elements necessary for a conspiracy to be successful include covertness and a deliberate causal chain of events set in motion by a select cartel and carried out by a few individuals. Understood this way, conspiracies involve certain individuals possessing power that they can intentionally and deliberately exercise against other individuals. This picture of the operation of power is similar to what Foucault calls sovereign or juridical power, where power is possessed only by certain people, such as kings. There is a gap between those who exercise power and those over whom it is exercised. Foucault writes that “power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately, life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.”4 This is a power that 4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Routledge, ), hereafter cited as DP. See also his The History of Sexuality, vol.  (New York: Pantheon, ), hereafter cited as HS.

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prohibits and represses. It represses nature, the instincts, a class, and individuals. Such an exercise is overt and obvious; there is nothing subtle about it. While conspiracies do usually involve some degree of subtlety and secretiveness, at some point the exercise of power becomes obvious. It is possible to reconstruct a during- or after-the-fact account in which ownership and exercise of power are traceable. This traceability is why conspiracies are “uncoverable.” We are fed a constant diet of conspiracy theories, from novels to movies to television “news” shows. Conspiracies have taken on a cartoonish character— they have become a source of entertainment. And, as people ranging from the philosopher David Hume to the showman/ringmaster P. T. Barnum have noted, the more outrageous and absurd the story, the more likely it is to be believed. So, in light of this fascination with “conspiracytainment,” it is fair to ask exactly what the National Church Arson Task Force was looking for in its search for a conspiracy. If it was looking for commands issued from Hate Central, no wonder the committee was unable to uncover them. Some particular actions may be the products of the type of conspiracy described above, such as those arsons that have been linked to members or former members of the Ku Klux Klan or common defendants. These cases “fit the pattern” of a conspiracy. So while the task force did not get Hate Central, it did manage to get some of its branch operations—that is, some of those small conspiracies (Report, ). But such cases, the task force tells us, are the exception to the vast majority of the cases it has investigated. If the assumption is that the only racist acts are those that come with a clearly stated, one-dimensional motivation such as “I set the fire because I hate Blacks,” then all those acts that don’t come with such clear labeling are not seen as racist. However, if one rejects this assumption about one-dimensional motivation, one sees that many racist acts escape such clear labeling. To insist that racism be all and only about motivations is a problem as well.

Connect the Dots

In the course of investigating the arsons and looking for evidence to support or deny the existence of a racially motivated conspiracy, members of the task force were looking for direct connections between the burnings. I remember connectthe-dots puzzles I did as a child. Numbered dots appear on a white background, and it was my job to draw the lines between the dots to produce a picture. Not until all the lines were drawn could I see the picture. Drawing connections in such a manner is what I assume the task force was doing in looking for a

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conspiracy. The dots are the burnings themselves, and the lines are the relationships between the burnings in terms of suspects, locations, hate groups, timing, and so on. But in the case of the burnings, no coherent picture emerged, because the direct links could not be made between the different dots. There is no reason to go from this dot to that one, because nothing like a numbering system dictates the drawing of a line. No coherent picture, therefore no conspiracy. Connect-the-dots only works against a plain background, usually white. If the background was covered with all different colors and markings, you could never be sure what was a dot and what was a stray mark. With the burnings and the search for a conspiracy, one can ask if the background is so plain. The answer, for me, is no. The  white people arrested are associated with specific dots, but where are the rest of us white folks? The background against which the burnings occurred includes a history of slavery, “separate but equal” treatment, racial stereotypes having widespread currency, whites’ complaints of reverse discrimination, a backlash against Affirmative Action, racial profiling, racist assaultive speech, and more generally, social and economic injustice. Racism operates within the background, and not just at the foreground level of the dots. But some kind of pattern does already exist—at the level of the background. Social and economic injustice, in all of their constitutive practices and various guises, do make a kind of grid behind the dots. Power relations, in Foucault’s view, go “right down into the depths of society” (DP, –). Power circulates throughout on every possible level and in the smallest detail. This microphysics of power is an insidious network in which we are all enmeshed. According to Foucault, “Power . . . functions in the form of a chain. . . . Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization” (HS, ). It is a productive network that runs through the whole social body. It produces things, induces pleasures, forms knowledge, and produces discourses (HS, ). The presence of such a grid or mesh mandates that we see the dots as lying in relation to it.5 In other words, the dots are points on this grid. When we focus on the dots alone, we cannot perceive the patterns of the background, and this means that the background remains unchanged because it goes unnoticed. Focusing on the foreground dots of the church burnings alone leads white folks to conclude that not only is there no conspiracy, but there are no racist elements to the burnings. The background of historical and current events shows the relations between the dots on the grid. African-American churches were burned in the antebellum South when some white people saw them as sources 5. Lisa Heldke first suggested this grid metaphor for understanding that the markings of the background may not be so arbitrary and random.

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of insurrection. After the Civil War, they were burned to inspire terror, in much the same way lynchings were used. During the civil rights movement, AfricanAmerican churches were targeted again; thirty-four were burned in a threemonth period in the summer of . Every year between  and , the number of African-American churches in the South burned or bombed had increased.6 The number of attacks on African-American churches had been increasing for six years, as had the number of persons involved in these attacks. As more churches burned and more people were implicated, it became harder to draw the lines the National Church Arson Task Force had perhaps hoped to draw. The inability to draw the lines results in the conclusion that there is no racially motivated conspiracy. It is but a short step from the absence of a racially motivated conspiracy to the conclusion that there is no racist motivation involved in these bombings and burnings. Additionally, the arrests and subsequent trials of suspects allowed white people to assign blame and responsibility for the burnings. By having only certain people be responsible for these acts, the rest of us white folks who did not strike a match can wrap ourselves in a (false) cloak of moral purity and moral superiority. After all, we did not do anything; it was those other people who did. But those of us who did not strike a match still have important questions to ask ourselves. How do we contribute to, and benefit from, living in a racialized system? “Contributing to” and “benefiting from” can, in some cases, be equal to each other and in many cases not. Most often, the presumption is that the relationship between contributions and benefits is straightforward; those who contribute to something get the benefits. Understood this way, contributing to and benefiting from are equal to each other. With respect to the nature of racism and other oppressive systems, they are the same or overlap in significant ways. Both can be direct or indirect, intentional or unintentional, and obvious or subtle. The easiest case is when the contribution and benefits are direct, intentional, and obvious. Jim Crow laws are a good example of this sort; they were passed using putatively democratic processes to undemocratic ends. The benefits to whites were myriad; white political candidates faced little opposition about racial matters, Black interests were not represented, and Blacks continued to be excluded from political participation by legal means. All these very direct benefits helped to solidify the social, economic, and political power of whites over Blacks. In this case, where there is a clear connection between the contributions and the 6. There were thirty-seven bombings/arsons in the first half of . There were twenty-seven in , twenty-five in , and seventeen in  (USA Today, June , ).

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benefits—that is, benefits follow from contributions—it is easier to talk about responsibility. The more difficult cases involve indirect and unintentional benefits that can be either subtle or obvious. In these cases, “contributing to” and “benefiting from” do not mean the same thing. It becomes more difficult to trace the relationship between them, which in turn makes it more difficult to assign responsibility. I offer a brief discussion of this issue in the remainder of this chapter before undertaking a more complete examination in the final chapter.7 How have we contributed to making the environment—the background— so combustible and in what ways are we responsible for making it otherwise? I suggest that our attitudes, unthinking habitual actions, along with our intentional actions and the myriad racial practices in which we participate make the background anything but simply plain. We are, in large part, responsible for the maintenance of a background in which racist actions are possible and intelligible.8 These two questions—how do we white people contribute to the maintenance of this combustible environment and in what ways are we responsible for making it otherwise—are centrally important. Backgrounds are composed of sets of practices that involve attitudes/beliefs and actions. Our attitudes are shaped by these practices. Traditional accounts of responsibility have been inattentive to 7. One particularly interesting set of cases where “contributing to” and “benefiting from” are not the same involves those who are oppressed having to contribute to an oppressive system that clearly does not benefit them. A Marxist would argue that wage laborers who work in a capitalist economy in order to survive contribute to the maintenance of an oppressive system that dehumanizes them at the same time. While such work might ultimately sharpen their class-consciousness, which in turn starts the revolution, this is a very indirect and remote “benefit” that comes at a huge cost. And while it is true that the laborer is getting a wage in return for her labor, calling this a “benefit” is a stretch. Being able to eat shouldn’t count as a benefit; it is a necessity. The harms that wage laborers suffer have been well documented. One recent glimpse into the world of wage labor and its daily harms and indignities is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Boom-Time America (New York: Metropolitan Books, ). Another example of this sort involves members of oppressed groups who have internalized negative judgments and attitudes about these groups. The internalized homophobia of gays and lesbians and the internalized anti-Semitism of Jews contribute to the maintenance of oppressive systems without benefit. One thing that this case reveals is that the most insidious forms of oppression enlist or ensnare those who are oppressed in the reinforcement of the systems. 8. The necessity of such a background to make actions intelligible is quite obvious in the case in Scotland several years ago when a man walked into an elementary school and opened fire, killing seventeen people. To many Scottish people, this action literally made no sense to them; they had nothing against which they could place this action in order to make it intelligible. Were such an action to happen in the United States, surrounded as we are every day with images of violence over all forms of mass media, we would still be saddened and shocked by it, but I venture to say that it would not seem anomalous to us in the way that it was to the Scottish people.

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and neglectful of the importance of attitudes and beliefs. I argue that attitudes and actions are fundamentally connected, and limiting the scope of responsibility to actions alone can actually contribute to the continuation of combustible, oppressive environments.

The Nature of Racist Backgrounds

As I have argued in the previous two chapters, a shared background is necessary for the intelligibility of actions. By saying and doing similar things under similar circumstances, the bases for agreement and disagreement in judgments and attitudes are maintained. The shared worldviews and judgments are something that we humans as socially constituted individuals come to inherit or acquire. We acquire totalities of judgments, systems of verification, and hosts of beliefs. These systems and totalities include all sorts of beliefs about differences between races, assumptions about what different kinds of people do, think, believe, prioritize, discourage, and so on—attitudes about superiority and inferiority and the “natural” order of the world. More specifically, many white people just believe that those African-Americans who make it to college or get into graduate school or have a good job were able to do so only because of Affirmative Action. David Shipler, in “Mind: Through a Glass, Darkly,” discusses the camouflaged prejudices that are at work in our society. A poll by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago reveals that most white Americans regard Blacks as less intelligent (. percent), less hard working (. percent), and more desirous of living on welfare (. percent). As Shipler notes, “They are measurements of a cruel wind that whips across America. If more than three out of every four Americans believe that blacks are more inclined than whites to prefer welfare over work, if nearly two out of three see blacks as lazier, if more than one out of two regards them as relatively unintelligent, the consequence is a corrosive chemistry of low expectations, closed opportunities, and ultimate defeat. The judgments that spring from stereotypes become self-fulfilling prophecies, creating a reality of failure that is taken to justify the stereotypes themselves. And so the cycle is nourished with as much raw force as a hurricane accumulates over the tropical water.”9 These thoughts, however, have a social genesis and are related to social practices. Practices make subject positions available, and these subject positions are 9. David K. Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ), –.

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constitutive of individuals’ minds. Schatzki, in developing a Wittgensteinian conception of mind, argues that it is not a medium or substance through which practices are organized. Mind is not a something in the way that a physical object is a something. Rather, mind is “how things stand and are going for someone; and mental phenomena (e.g., believing, hoping, expecting, and seeing) are aspects or ways of this” (). He refers to mental phenomena as “conditions of life” where “condition” means the state of something’s being. These conditions of life are expressed through bodily sayings and doings that make them present in the world and intelligible to other people.10 Aspects of how things stand for us, that is, our conditions of life, depend upon the social practices in which people learn to perform these sayings and doings. Schatzki asserts that “the performance of behavior that expresses such and such a condition presupposes practices on the background of which others are able, on the basis of that behavior, to understand and say that this is the actor’s condition; and people are able to understand and say this by virtue of participating in these presupposed practices” (). On the view advanced by Schatzki, mind is present in the public realm of sense experience.11 Mind is expressed in bodily behaviors ().12 Whites’ nervousness and condescension around Blacks, their unwillingness to see and meet the looks of Black people are all bodily expressions that are open to view. These bodily expressions occur in a context of contemporary racist practices and a history of racism. These already existing social practices set up expressive connections between specific behaviors and conditions of life; the expressive behavior of life conditions presupposes a background of practices. While there are express prohibitions against overt discrimination, bias does show up in many ways, including bodily expressions. These expressions do mean something; they can convey messages. Their meaning is a matter of their use.

10. There are four categories of life conditions that Schatzki discusses: conditions of consciousness (being in pain, imagining, and hearing); emotions and moods (being happy or cranky); cognitive or intellectual conditions (doubting, believing, and puzzling); and actions (particular behaviors in particular circumstances). 11. One important kind of language game that Wittgenstein discusses involves physiognomic ones. Physiognomic language games are those that provide a public framework, giving our talk of private sensations, thoughts, and experiences their meaning. Only through the use of a public language game can we describe our sensations. These public language games are physiognomic because of their reliance upon natural expressions of one’s sensations and emotions. These natural expressions include facial expressions, gestures, bodily movements, and verbal exclamations (see Z § and PI §). In discussing the nature of self-identity or “I,” one can say that “I” is a word with a face, a face that is living and communicative. As Wittgenstein says, “the human body is the best picture of the human soul” (PI, p. ). 12. Schatzki is quite careful to say that mind does not cause bodily behavior.

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This level of racism, as opposed to the more overt, is camouflaged for white people. But it can become hardened behavior that impedes and harms others, all the while remaining hard to name.13 Racist beliefs do function grammatically for many whites in the United States. A reader of an earlier version of this chapter argued that racist beliefs do not function as grammar that lay down the rules of a language game because people do claim to have empirical evidence for them. These people can cite a variety of scientific studies, the opinions of experts, their own or others’ observations, and the weight of authorities (churches, traditions, books, and so on) in a way that evidence is not cited for grammatical propositions as discussed by Wittgenstein. I think this doesn’t undermine my position, and in fact makes it stronger. The scientific studies and the expert opinions are presented as empirical evidence for people who do not already believe it. These empirical data are meant to persuade or shore up the beliefs of people who are not already certain. The data are used to harden the beliefs of people into certainty. Wittgenstein, in discussing the different roles of grammatical and empirical propositions, is quite clear in stating that empirical propositions can harden into grammar and therefore be removed from the traffic of doubt. It isn’t that grammatical propositions cannot be proven; it is that they no longer need to be proven. They can be proven because some of them were empirical propositions that hardened into grammatical ones. Racist beliefs can be doubted, but in the course of the life of many people, they are not. It is only when we consciously think about them or something happens that they are pulled into the traffic of doubt. This is when that empirical data can do something. Someone who really does believe that Black people are inferior to white people doesn’t need this evidence. Where all this data could be shown to be false, the believer in racial inferiority still will not give up his belief.

13. Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), appeals to Giddens’s three-leveled theory of subjectivity to understand social relations and their reproductions in actions and social structures. Racism and sexism have receded from the level of discursive consciousness (where things can be verbalized) to the levels of practical consciousness (habitual background awareness that helps people to accomplish particular acts) and basic security (the basic level of security and autonomy required for coherent actions in social contexts (). Racism, sexism, and homophobia have gone “underground” to the level of the unconscious, “dwelling in the everyday habits and cultural meanings of which people are for the most part unaware” (). The unconscious acts of oppression are more common than discourse prejudice and devaluation, and the former do not require the latter in order to reproduce the relations of privilege and oppression (). One of my aims is to link more directly the content of the “underground” to the background. See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ).

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Racial interactions are no less rule-governed activities than symbolic logic or chess or multilateral trade agreements. There has not been a significant amount of change surrounding racial interactions, despite our living in a country where slavery is no longer legal, and where there are some notions of formal equality that should preclude certain kinds of discrimination. Segregation still exists; it is still dangerous for Blacks to go into some neighborhoods. Living in certain towns may not be possible when all the previously available housing suddenly runs dry. Driving a certain kind of car may result in getting pulled over by a police officer for driving (your own) stolen car. Miscegenation is no longer illegal, but taboos against it remain in place. Church lines are drawn not only by denomination, but by race as well.14 Blacks are treated less well than whites in many contexts, whether they are customers being followed in department stores by security, a young couple being denied a homeowner’s loan, men being picked up frequently by the police for questioning, or men being repeatedly passed when trying to hail a taxi.15 This racist fabric includes expressions and acts as subtle as a look to more overt acts of racial violence. Knowing the meaning of a look, and knowing the meaning of a burning church are matters of context, history, and pattern perception. Churches have been sources of solidarity, empowerment, and resistance in many African-American communities. Destroying these houses of worship is striking at the heart of many African-American communities. The burnings are instances of terrorism and guerrilla warfare, no less so than lynching. AfricanAmericans believed they were specifically targeted because they have been so often in the past. They see the burnings in the foreground as racist because they perceive certain patterns in the background. These burnings are a brighter weave in the pattern of the racist fabric of the background.

Expanding Responsibility

Given that agreement in judgments and agreement in actions mutually reinforce each other, responsibility ought to be attached to judgments, beliefs, and attitudes 14. The question of who draws the lines is critical. It does make a difference when it is Blacks who draw the lines for themselves. Blacks drawing the lines is radically different from whites drawing the lines because any particular act of exclusion or segregation implemented by whites must be understood against a racist background. Explaining this difference is important, but well beyond the scope of this chapter. 15. See “America’s Most Wanted” and “Taxi” episodes of Michael Moore, TV Nation, vols.  and , –, for demonstrations of these last two instances.

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as much as to actions. All of these are parts of practices. Iris Young asserts, and I agree, that if unconscious behaviors and practices reproduce oppression, they must be morally and politically condemnable (). But actions have been the primary loci to which responsibility has attached itself. Questions in moral philosophy, especially since Kant, have taken the forms of “What ought I to do” (questions of moral obligation) and “What can I do” (questions of moral permissibility). The connection between motivation and action has been conceived quite straightforwardly. Questions in political philosophy, at least since the early modern period, have focused on questions of rights and liberties. Rights basically concern the domain of actions that I can do and actions that cannot be done to me. John Stuart Mill’s formulation of his harm principle in On Liberty is a good example of the emphasis on action: individuals should be free to do anything that does not harm others, but actions that do may be properly restricted by society. This obviously raises the question, “What constitutes harm?” Some cases are unproblematic: if I burn down an African-American church because I hate Black people, it can easily be said that I have done harm to others. The harm is multidimensional; making people live in fear of the next terroristic attack is perhaps one of the most devastating effects. But attitudes, beliefs, and judgments that compose the background are harmful as well, though not always in such an obvious way. If I say “Blacks are lazy,” it is harmful because it reinforces an oppressive stereotype that in turn may justify particular actions against Black people. Such a belief may enter into some level of a decision not to patronize a particular shop. Such an attitude might make me unwilling to see that a person’s being out of work is not a matter of laziness on her part, but a function of an unfair economic system. This is reason enough to bring attitudes within the scope of responsibility. Whereas Western moral and political thought has narrowed the scope of evaluation and responsibility by focusing on actions, rights, and liberties, I want to widen the scope to include practices along with their constitutive attitudes and unintentional actions. Ward Churchill, in “Crimes Against Humanity,” argues that Native Americans are victims of genocide no less so than the Jews in Nazi Germany. He cites the conviction of Julius Streicher at the Nuremberg trials for “Crimes Against Humanity”: The sole offense for which the accused was ordered put to death was in having served as publisher/editor of a Bavarian tabloid entitled Der Sturmer during the early- to-mid-s, years before the Nazi genocide began. In this capacity, he had penned a long series of virulently

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anti-Semitic editorials and “news” stories, usually accompanied by cartoon and other images graphically depicting Jews in extraordinarily derogatory fashion. This, the prosecution asserted, had done much to “dehumanize” the targets of his distortion in the mind of the German public. In turn, such dehumanization made it possible—or at least easier—for average Germans to later indulge in the outright liquidation of Jewish “vermin.” The tribunal agreed, holding that Streicher was therefore complicit in genocide and deserving of death by hanging. () Churchill argues that Native Americans have been subject to similar techniques of dehumanization for the past several hundred years, and that the Native American population has shrunk to approximately , people from an estimated twelve million. Churchill polemically asks why there has not been a similar outrage over the fate of Native Americans. Churchill’s essay does make me wonder about the line I draw between actions and attitudes. In reality, the line is less hard and fast than I have characterized it. I take this blurriness to point to the need for a more expansive notion of responsibility, which I offer in the final chapter. This is a very ordinary case, but one that becomes extraordinarily interesting and important because of what it reveals when we begin to scratch its surface. This is the argument that could be made about the woman who crosses the street when a Black man approaches. . It is statistically justified that it is more likely that the economically downtrodden will commit a crime. . In our contemporary U.S. society, this economically downtrodden group includes a disproportionate number of Blacks and other minorities. . Thus it is the perception of a higher probability of crime motivated by economic desperation that she is avoiding when she crosses the street when a Black man approaches. I will grapple with this on two levels. The first concerns why individuals come to have the perceptions (about anything) they do. In more Wittgensteinian terms, how does this woman come to have a certain picture of the world? Wittgenstein, in On Certainty, discusses this question, and I offer a brief discussion of it here, though I take it up more fully in Chapter . Wittgenstein says that our world picture is something that we acquire and take on; we inherit it rather than learn it. This world picture is a totality of judgments that are made plausible to us. The world picture is the inherited background against which we judge things true or false, right or wrong (see OC §, §§–). This pushes the question to the

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second level: what about the content of beliefs, attitudes, and judgments that constitute this worldview? Regarding first premise (): The relationship between crime and social/ economic class has been an ongoing debate in criminology. Some criminologists can provide statistics to show that street crime is related to social class. Others produce statistics to show there is no relationship. What needs to be noted is that it is more often the case that it is poor people who get caught up in the criminal justice system. Regarding second premise (): Two-thirds (or . million out of . million) of the people who live below the poverty level in the United States are white, according to census data. The majority of Blacks and Latinos do not live below the poverty line, though a disproportionate number of them do. Regarding conclusion (): If you do accept the relationship between social class and crime, then you should avoid whites, because they are more likely to be downtrodden and to commit crimes. According to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice, most criminals and persons arrested for crimes are white. In a mass media society, people’s perceptions do not match the facts, especially when it comes to crime. The media are largely responsible for the content of our perceptions about crime and criminals. Consider that in the s the rate of violent crime decreased but television and newspaper coverage of violent crime increased by more than  percent. While the homicide rate declined by  percent, network news coverage of murder (and this statistic excludes coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial) increased by a staggering  percent.16 According to Beckett and Sasson, the media have a tendency to focus on the rarest of crimes: murder, rape, or robbery. While  percent of crimes known to police involve murder, over  percent of crime news stories feature a homicide case. Additionally, while  percent of crimes reported to police are nonviolent, only  percent of crime news stories depict instances of nonviolent crime (). Crimes committed by strangers are also overrepresented in news stories, even though many violent crimes (such as domestic abuse) are committed by acquaintances or intimates. Corporate and state crimes are largely ignored in new stories in favor of violent street crimes. It is also extremely important to examine the depictions of criminals and of victims. The network news stories in which African-Americans are accused 16. My discussion of the perception of crime and criminals and the relation of these perceptions to the mass media draws heavily from Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson, The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America (Thousand Oaks, Calif: Pine Forge Press, ); hereafter cited in the text. See especially chapter , “Crime in the News.”

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most often involve violence and drugs, rather than news stories featuring white people. It is true that Blacks are arrested for violent and drug-related crimes at a much higher rate than whites, but the depictions of whites and Blacks accused of violent crimes are very different. Beckett and Sasson report that “Studies of local and national news have found that Blacks arrested for violent crimes were most likely to be depicted in the physical custody of police (e.g., spread-eagled against the back of a police cruiser) and to be dressed poorly. Blacks were less likely than whites to be identified by name in still photographs or to be represented through sound bites from defense attorneys. Together, these differences had the effect of making Blacks accused of violent crimes appear more menacing than whites accused of violent crimes” (). Couple these representations with the tendency of news accounts to depict criminals as increasingly barbaric, irrational, and unpredictable, and what you have left is “Black man” as generic violent criminal. Margaret Urban Walker argues that widespread and familiar patterns of representation affect our morally significant perceptions of and interactions with other people. These representations disfigure the shared social and moral world. People who are stereotyped as a result are accorded a diminished amount of moral regard and consideration and in more extreme cases are disqualified or differently qualified as moral agents. At the same time, these practices of representation obscure the privilege of those of dominant groups. Stereotypes are a very important part of the practices of representation, and they are cause and consequence of prejudices propagated by other means. These representational practices graph or mark human bodies in ways that deform them.17 Interestingly enough—and this bring us back to the example of the white woman crossing the street—when crime victims are depicted in the media, they are typically white, female, and affluent. Young men of color, especially those living in poor urban areas, have the highest rate of victimization, while white females report the lowest (). It should come as no surprise that research studies show that fear of crime (and this means violent street crime) among middleaged white women is related to watching, reading, and listening to the news (–).18 17. Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (New York: Routledge, ), –. 18. The framing of crime-related stories greatly affects how people assess crime and potential responses to crime. Beckett and Sasson describe one interesting study in which the television crime story to which people were exposed varied along two dimensions. Some stories framed crime “episodically”—they depicted a single instance of violent crime. In others, violent crime was framed “thematically”—that, discussed as a social problem and situated in its larger social context. Researchers also varied the racial identity of those

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What can be said about the white woman who crosses the street? Given the discussion above, it is not surprising that she crosses the street, regardless of what she might cite as her reason. Is her decision to cross the street “rational” in some sense? This leads us back to the above discussion of the acquisition of a world picture. Wittgenstein might say within that world picture or relative to that framework, everything speaks for crossing the street, and very little against. What she takes as evidence comes from the media, and these representations are misleading and inaccurate. What should be done in this case? How might one go about trying to convince the woman that these perceptions and the decisions she makes on the basis of them need to be examined and discarded? Statistics and rational argumentation might start to undermine these perceptions, causing her to become more suspicious about what she sees and hears in the media.19 But given the ubiquity of these perceptions and the ways that they are part of the world picture or framework, it is very difficult to undo them. These beliefs function grammatically, which means not only are they not questioned, but they set the terms of what can be questioned and how. Racist acts generally are taken as those in which race is given as the compelling feature of the act. But, on the view I am advancing, acts in which considerations about race enter on an unthinking level are racist, too. A woman who crosses the street when a Black man approaches might say that she did so because it was a man approaching and that skin color had nothing to do with it. But so deeply ingrained is the myth of the Black man as rapist that it seems likely this belief was part of her motivation. If Wittgenstein is right about how it is that we have acquired all sorts of racists beliefs and adopted habitual behaviors, then it seems misguided to blame us for them. It is misguided because we had no control or choice over our acquisition of a majority of those beliefs. In a manner of speaking, we didn’t know depicted as “the criminal.” Not surprisingly, those who viewed stories that framed violent crime in “episodic” terms were more likely to attribute crime to individual rather than social causes. But the more dramatic finding in this study was the significance of race: Stories that featured violent Black criminals were more than twice as likely as stories featuring white criminals to elicit individualistic (rather than social) attributions of responsibility for the problem of crime. () 19. Interestingly enough, even if one accepts that street crime is related to social class, it must be noted that the opposite holds for white-collar crime. The higher one’s social class, the greater the chance that he will be involved in a white-collar crime. It must be noted that the vast majority of white-collar criminals are white. White-collar crime causes much more damage (certainly of a monetary type) than street crime ever will. According to the Justice Department, all personal and household crime (including street crime) costs approximately $. billion per year, while the comparable cost for white-collar crime is between $ and $ billion. If the woman were acting rationally and in command of the facts, she would be avoiding white people.

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any better. We could not have done anything else. But this does not entail that we cannot do anything about these beliefs. We can talk about taking responsibility for these attitudes and judgments once we reach a certain point of maturation or competency. At some point, we become capable of questioning, challenging, confirming and disconfirming, reimagining, and undermining. Taking responsibility and blaming are not the same. According to Young, blaming is a backwardlooking concept, whereas “calling on agents to take responsibility for their actions, habits, feelings, attitudes, images, and associations . . . is forward looking; it asks the person ‘from here on out’ to submit such unconscious behavior to reflection, to work to change habits and attitudes” (). Such an undertaking is vast, overwhelming, and perhaps fundamentally unsettling. Given that these beliefs have been axes around which many other beliefs turn, undermining them will cause many other beliefs to shift as well.

Conclusion

My aim in this chapter has been to change the starting point of how to begin to understand the racist nature of the burnings and bombings in the South. The National Church Arson Task Force started with a picture of what a conspiracy is and included an understanding of what counts as a racist act (one that has explicitly racist and causal intention). A Wittgensteinian point is that a picture captivated the investigators, and this resulted in seeing the acts in one way and not another. Given their starting point, it is not surprising that they didn’t uncover a conspiracy, and this made it easier for a lot of people to move to the conclusion that the bombing and burnings were not racially motivated. The concept of conspiracy is one that we perhaps should retire from discussions of racism and other forms of oppression. Certain concepts, when they cease to be meaningful, can be retired from language games. Given the connotations of and expectations for a conspiracy, this has become a concept that gets in the way of understanding the nature of racist acts. I will discuss the questions of how and when to retire concepts in our language games more fully in Chapter . The burnings of Black churches in the South are all related, even if a task force does not or cannot draw explicit lines between them as one can between numbered dots in a connect-the-dots puzzle. These burnings belong to a pattern, one that may not be obvious to people who look only at the foreground level, but which stands out in clear relief when the background is attended to. They are related to each other by virtue of their placement on a shared background of oppressive practices. This kind of relationship is different from a racial

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conspiracy, but it is racist nevertheless. And, in fact, it may be a more dangerous and pervasive form of racism because it seemingly implicates no one in particular, except those extremists who assert that they do things out of racial hatred. This different starting point requires us to focus in a different way on questions of responsibility. Rather than telescoping to the intentions and actions of individuals, we need to broaden the scope to the practices in which individuals’ intentions and actions get their meanings.

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The Meaning of Assaultive Speech: Its Harmful Uses

This chapter examines how the language use of a community structures the lives of its members. We are constantly creating and reinforcing meanings. Some of these meanings are harmful and oppressive, and their use is made possible by and contributes to a background of oppression. I continue the discussion begun in the previous chapter of the nature and extent of the harm of assaultive speech by examining the role of such speech. Chapter  continues the discussion of language use, focusing instead on the ways in which new languages undermine oppressive meanings and create new, perhaps liberatory, meanings. I begin this chapter by offering several definitions of hate speech, and then discuss the events surrounding Matthew Shepard’s murder and funeral in order to make clear the kind of speech with which I am concerned. My interlocutor in this chapter is a staunch defender of the First Amendment. I examine a traditionalist defense of it and some of the assumptions such a defense rests upon. In particular, I want to focus on the role that defenders attribute to the right of free speech— namely that it is necessary for the life and well-being of the community. The right to free speech is presented as the crux of the matter. It isn’t the content or meaning of the speech that it is important; rather, it is the possession and exercise of the right to speak. My focus is not on the right of speech, but on

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the meaning of speech. I offer an account of the meaning of speech that I derive from Wittgenstein. On the view I develop, speech cannot be separated from context in the way it seems to be for defenders of free speech. Nor is the meaning of speech primarily a function of individuals’ interpretations. This Wittgensteinian account also ties the life and well-being of a community together, but in a much deeper and more fundamental way. The meaning of assaultive speech is harmful, and I appeal to critical race theorists to address the nature and extent of these harms. Tying together a Wittgensteinian account of meaning with critical race theory enables me to offer an analysis of assaultive speech that connects it in a very fundamental way to a background of oppression. This shift away from a rights focus to a meaning focus provides the means for analyzing the ways in which “free speech” contributes to the maintenance of oppressive systems.

What Is Hate Speech?

Hate speech can be defined in a variety of ways, some of which are more descriptive, and hence more evocative, than others. Ira Glasser, in Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex, characterizes hate speech as “words that reflect racial or sexual bigotry.”1 This seems too bland a definition. It makes it seem that the words aren’t themselves full of meaning, full of bigotry. Or it makes it seem as if words just happen, and speakers don’t really matter. This definition seemingly reduces a very complex phenomenon to individual words, devoid of any context or history. Lederer and Delgado, in the introduction to The Price We Pay, define hate speech or hate propaganda as “speech or conduct aimed at a group of historically disenfranchised people; speech that reviles, ridicules or puts in an intensely negative light a person or group on account of who they are.”2 They go on to assert that the purpose of hate speech is the subordination of one people by another. Critical race theorists Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, and Crenshaw in the introduction to Words That Wound, offer the most graphic definition. Instead of hate speech, they discuss assaultive speech, which involves “words that are used as weapons to ambush, terrorize, wound, humiliate, and degrade.”3 The second and 1. Ira Glasser, introduction to Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex: Hate Speech, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, ed. Henry Louis Gates et al. (New York: New York University Press, ), . 2. Laura Lederer and Richard Delgado, eds., The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography (New York: Hill and Wang, ), –; hereafter cited as PWP. 3. Mari Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberle Crenshaw, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Boulder: Westview Press, ), ; hereafter cited as WTW.

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third definitions are not sanitized like the first, and it is clear that the words do not merely reflect bigotry or hate, but are themselves instruments of hate. This characterization of assaultive speech brings the harm and injury home on a very real and visceral level. When we think of assaults, we think of perpetrators and victims. “Assault” also implies action in a way that “hate” does not. An assault is something an individual or group does to another. Someone can use assaultive speech without hating; it may be fear based or it may be habitual and ready at hand. Hate can masquerade as just an emotion, albeit an emotion with a great deal of motivating power. I also think that hate has, in some perverse ways, become too easy or too pat an explanation. Every time someone does something really awful, we can write his or her actions off to hatred and hateful intentions. On this view, hatred is a property of individuals; its origin is in the psyche of each individual and is reflected in actions and attitudes.4 This is a reductionist move that locates and explains systems of oppression in the actions and attitudes of individuals. As an explanation of oppression, hate alone does not get us far enough in understanding the systemic nature of domination and subordination.

Assaultive Speech in the Aftermath of Matthew Shepard’s Murder

On October , , Matthew Shepard was robbed, beaten, and lashed to a fence outside of Laramie, Wyoming.5 The horror of his brutal assault and murder was compounded by several events surrounding his funeral. At a homecoming parade at Colorado State University (CSU), eleven CSU students created a float featuring a scarecrow hanging from a fence with a sign around its neck saying, “I am gay.” There was a crude reference to a sex act on its back. The act itself was incredibly offensive; the timing of it made it even more so. At the time of this parade, Matthew Shepard was dying in nearby Poudre Valley Hospital. The students were punished, but according to a CSU spokesperson, the punishment 4. For an excellent treatment of the question “what are emotions,” and the epistemological and political implications of certain views of emotions, see Alison M. Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotions in Feminist Epistemology,” in Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, ed. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (Boston: Unwin Hyman, ). 5. Russell Henderson pleaded guilty to felony robbery, kidnapping, and murder charges. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Chastity Vera Pasley pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the crime and was sentenced to an eighteen-to-twenty-four-month prison term. Aaron McKinney was convicted of felony murder and was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Kristen Leann Price was convicted of being an accessory after the crime. She was sentenced to an eighteento-twenty-four-month prison term.

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did not involve issues of free speech. The punishment was based on parade violations and misleading statements made by the students to university officials.6 Perhaps CSU officials took the stance they did because they knew the students could easily be punished on the basis of parade violations, whereas raising issues with the First Amendment might not net any punishment but rather a huge controversy. Some punishment is better than none. But this approach underscores the pervasiveness of the fear about questioning any speech on the basis of content; the students might have sued the school for violating their rights. First Amendment defenders might say the float was in the poorest of taste, but it still is protected because it was not a threat, did not incite a riot, or did not count as fighting words. Matthew Shepard’s funeral became a spectacle not simply because of the huge outpouring of grief and sympathy for the Shepard family, but also because of the presence of protesters. Before arriving in Wyoming to picket Shepard’s funeral, Fred Phelps, of the Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas, sent out faxes condemning Shepard for being gay. Phelps and his followers regularly picket the funerals of gay men and people who have died of AIDS. They brandish signs such as “God Hates Fags” and “No Tears for Queers.”7 In an attempt to protect Shepard’s family at the funeral, the Casper, Wyoming, city council voted to ban all protesters from demonstrating within fifty feet of the funeral service. Police also used bomb-sniffing dogs in the church prior to the service. City officials had received threats of violence from individuals and groups protesting Shepard’s homosexuality. Robert Knight, of the very conservative Family Research Council (FRC), issued a public statement asking that Fred Phelps not protest at the funeral. Knight stated that while Phelps and the FRC shared the same beliefs about homosexuality and shared an opposition to the homosexual agenda, Phelps’s protesting at the funeral would provide the media with imagery that could be used to smear and caricature all Christians. In Knight’s view, homosexuality activists were the ones exploiting Shepard’s death and using it as a rallying call for activists. These activists, according to Knight, “have outrageously and absurdly linked the murder to a series of redemptive tv and newspaper ads about homosexuality sponsored by the FRC, Coral Ridge Ministries, and other pro-family groups. They are pressing for ill-advised federal ‘hate crime’ laws, all the while 6. The eleven students were members of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and the Alpha Chi Omega sorority. Colorado State University handed down punishments ranging from probation to suspension. The CSU Judicial Board withdrew university recognition of both the fraternity and sorority (Denver Post, November , ). 7. Phelps’s web page is www.godhatesfags.com.

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using hateful rhetoric against Christians.”8 The “ill-advised” hate crime laws, according to Knight, are part of the homosexual agenda asking for special rights.9 Oddly enough, the actions and beliefs of Phelps and Knight at the time made more sense to me than did the actions of the CSU students. As much as I vehemently disagree with Phelps and Knight, I took them to be saying something. I didn’t take the students to be saying anything, but rather just expressing either their stupidity or wanton disregard of the brutality of Shepard’s beating and the grief of his family and friends. Upon reflection, I was flabbergasted because I was operating with the very narrow conception of speech I was trying to undermine.10

A Bit Closer to Home

Fred Phelps was exercising his right to free speech in his faxes and at the funeral, as were the CSU students at their homecoming parade. But this rights talk seemed to me to be passing these incidents right by. Rights talk did nothing to help me make sense of these incidents, and told me nothing about the meaning of the speech directed against Matthew Shepard’s family and friends and anyone who mourned his death. What was the meaning of the float as it moved down the parade route? I really didn’t care about the intentions of the students who 8. Family Research Council press release, October , . Their web page is www.frc.com. 9. In the immediate aftermath of this heinous crime, many people called for the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Hate Crimes Protection Act (HCPA) ( U.S.C. ). As it currently stands, the law permits federal prosecution of a hate crime only if the crime was motivated by bias based on race, religion, national origin, or color and the perpetrator intended to prevent the victim from exercising a federally protected right. (Sex/gender and ability are not covered under this law, though they were included in both the House and Senate amended versions.) Given that only twenty-one states and the District of Columbia include sexual orientation–based crimes in hate statutes, the amended Hate Crimes Prevention Act does, theoretically, provide legal recourse for any individual living in any state. The amended HCPA lessens the criterion for prosecution that the victim was attacked because he was engaging in a federally protected right. Both the Senate and House versions were, in congressional jargon, killed the first time. In February , hate crimes legislation was killed in the state of Wyoming. 10. I was also guilty of another spurious distinction. I believed that Phelps’s and Knight’s actions and beliefs sprang from conviction, while the CSU students’ actions were unthinking or perhaps stupid. For some reason, homophobia of the conviction sort was more understandable than homophobia of the stupidity sort. What a useless and bad distinction. I also realized that this distinction might rest upon a generalization that older people are more settled, rigid, and closed about their beliefs, while younger people are more open and malleable. Older people with their hardened, conservative beliefs must be tolerated, while the younger people should be encouraged to change. I owe an apology to older readers for that obviously false generalization.

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may have meant it “only as a joke.” Meaning and intention were completely separate for me. These questions became a little more urgent to me when someone left a pamphlet called “The Power of Living” outside my office door a few days after Shepard died. This was a religious pamphlet, and most of the articles focused on the homosexual sinner’s restoration to God. One article concerned parents who were worried that their gay son’s lifestyle would keep him from God. Another article helped readers find the balance between hating the sin and loving the sinner. Yet another article informed the reader that Christians ought not to fear death, but those of us who are under the devil’s power leading the homosexual life have plenty to fear. The pamphlet also succeeds in a cunning move of co-optation, providing information on how one can come out of the homosexual lifestyle and lead a victorious Christian life. The timing of the pamphlet’s arrival, combined with its emphasis on sin, death, and the afterlife made me uneasy. My unease was compounded when students told me that someone had defaced various posters and other advertisements for Coming Out Week at the college. Someone had written “Bag the Fag” and “Smear the Queer” several times around campus. In discussing the pamphlet and the defacements of the Coming Out Week advertisements with several colleagues on the faculty senate, one person (whom I took to be speaking on behalf of the others who were nodding in assent) was distressed by these incidents. But the college must be very careful in issuing a public statement about them. The school must be careful not to infringe on individuals’ rights of free speech and religious belief and practice. His view was that the college must be cautious not to ban expression; such a ban would not only be contrary to free speech, but it would also be contrary to the school’s mission of promoting an open learning environment. One assumption underlying my colleagues’ concerns about limiting speech and undermining the mission of the college to foster an open learning environment is the marketplace of ideas metaphor. As an institution of higher learning, a college strives to create open spaces where students can express ideas, try out beliefs and practices, and engage in collaborative and communal learning. Here, a First Amendment defender would highlight the connection between the right to free speech and the well-being of a community. Free speech is a necessity for any community’s well-being, especially when that community is dedicated to the exchange of ideas and the acquisition of knowledge. Restricting speech would cause harm not only to individuals, but would compromise the integrity and effectiveness of an educational community. Exposure to more ideas rather than limitations on some is the only way to fulfill the mission of higher learning. I will return to the marketplace metaphor below.

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A Traditionalist Defense of Free Speech

In this section, I would like to move quickly over some familiar ground in order to highlight some of the philosophical underpinnings of a traditionalist defense of free speech and its role in securing the well-being of a community. The concepts of rights, freedoms, liberties, and equality have their roots in the political philosophy of the early modern period, most particularly in the state of nature/social contract tradition. John Locke is an excellent representative of this tradition, and in The Second Treatise of Government he argues that all people are the products of workmanship of an omnipotent being and are, as a result, the property of this being.11 Because all people are the products and property of this being and share one community of nature, “there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses. . . . Everyone, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station wilfully; so by the like reason when his own Preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of Mankind, and may not, unless it be to do Justice on an Offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the Preservation of the Life, the Liberty, Health, Limb, or Goods of another” () The Declaration of Independence echoes these same sentiments, stating that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These rights, enumerated by both Locke and Thomas Jefferson, are rights that can only be taken away when someone transgresses the law of nature and is justly conquered. An individual cannot give these rights away; to give away my liberty and enslave myself to another would be a violation of the law of nature. The end of civil society is the preservation of the property of all those who have mutually agreed to enter into one community and who have each agreed to give over their natural power of punishment. It is worthwhile to quote Locke on this point: “The great end of Mens entering into Society, being the enjoyment of their Properties in Peace and Safety, and the great instrument and means of that being the Laws established in that society; the first and fundamental positive law of all Commonwealths is the establishing of the Legislative power; as the first and fundamental natural Law, which is to govern the legislative itself, is the preservation of the Society and (as far as will consist with the public good) of every person in it” (). 11. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). Citations in the text indicate sections.

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The aim of government, for Locke and the framers of the Declaration and Constitution, is the preservation of society and its members. Preservation, at minimum, consists in the security of inalienable rights. It also consists in the creation of additional civil and political rights that are predicated on the original natural rights. These additional rights include freely speaking, bearing arms, and voting. Safeguarding these rights is centrally important to the preservation of society as a whole and its individual members. Equality is now understood as a matter of the possession of civil and political rights. By virtue of our membership in this society with its attendant rights and liberties, we are all equal. Recent debates about gun control demonstrate this connection between inalienable rights, civil rights, and the preservation of the society. Immediately after the killings in Columbine High School, Jesse Ventura, the governor of Minnesota, opined that if some teachers or the guards at the school had been allowed to carry concealed weapons, then someone could have stopped Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris before they killed twelve students and one teacher before killing themselves. This view implies that not being allowed to carry a concealed weapon exposes your life to danger, makes it impossible to defend yourself and others, and harms society as a whole. By not allowing concealed weapons, or requiring background checks, or imposing waiting periods and limitations on the numbers of guns one can buy within a thirty-day period, the government is transgressing its proper bounds and infringing upon the very rights it was designed to protect. Such transgressions harm both individuals and society as a whole.

The Marketplace of Ideas Is Now Open for Business

One of the most important rights in our political society is freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is the freedom to say what we want without fear of retribution by any government agency. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for the redress of grievances.” These are very important rights, whether one lives under a repressive regime or a representative democracy. The aim of government is the preservation of society, and society is preserved through freedom of expression. Therefore, one aim of the government is to preserve free speech. Legal theorist Mari Matsuda offers a composite sketch of the civil libertarian’s defense of the First Amendment. Reading of relevant court cases reveals

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certain core ideas: “Freedom of expression, the argument goes, is the most fundamental right protected under the Constitution. Democratic, representative government presumes that people are free to think and say whatever they might, even the unthinkable. They can advocate the end of democracy. We risk the chance that they will prevail because to give government the power to control expression is an even greater threat” (WTW, –). The First Amendment, on this view, is somewhat of a gamble. Allowing even the most vitriolic dissenters of the government the right to protected speech poses a risk to our democracy. This potential harm is the price we pay for free speech. Restricting speech results in an actual harm to our democratic process. Democracy is threatened when only certain voices can speak and are heard. One important assumption at work here is that for democracy to function well there must be a free exchange of ideas, even ones that argue against democracy. This exchange requires public spaces. This assumption about the necessity of free exchange is best described as the marketplace of ideas metaphor. According to legal theorist Kimberle Crenshaw, this metaphor “Invokes a particular descriptive and normative image of social relations that is thought to exist in the absence of state interference. It invokes an image of people who are formally equal with one another, who are interacting on a free plane, a space open to all, where any inequalities are the products of competition” (WTW, ). This metaphor must take the equality of the market for granted. The public space of discourse is presumed to be a level playing field onto which all people walk, bearing equal civil and political rights. With this view, any restrictions on speech (excepting those that result in immediate danger or provoke fights) upset the equilibrium of the marketplace. The consequences that could follow from this forced introduction of imbalance into the marketplace include the tyranny of the government and the violation of individuals’ fundamental rights (which the government is supposed to protect, not transgress). Because all of us would be harmed if one person were silenced, we must all pay the price to ensure that this does not happen. The price is tolerating someone who asserts what the vast majority of us would agree to be really offensive. But the First Amendment has never been absolute; there are areas of unprotected speech.12 Speech that infringes on the public order (a bomb threat or yelling “Fire!”) is not protected. Yelling “Fire!” when there isn’t one in a crowded theater would cause an immediate stampede toward the exit doors. A clear and present danger is recognizable to any reasonable person. Someone yelling 12. The category of unprotected speech also includes speech relating to commerce and industry, defamation, and confidentiality.

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“Fire!” transforms the previously nondangerous space into a perilous one in which people could be injured. The First Amendment also does not protect words that are used to provoke violence. In , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chaplinsky v New Hampshire13 that words that “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of peace” are not protected (WTW, ). The exceptions connect the use of speech with harmful consequences. It is on the basis of the immediate harmful consequences that fighting words, incitements to riot, and threats are not protected as a right. The immediacy of the harm is the necessary feature. This explains the difference between someone yelling “Fire!” and someone saying or writing “Bag the Fag.” Yelling a homophobic insult does not pose the same immediate threat. The fire example is one in which the very utterance of it creates a dangerous condition. But in the case of homophobic comments, one might argue that they do not bring about a similar dangerous condition. To ask the government to regulate speech on the basis of content is to put the government into the role of censor. This is a dangerous move; it is the first step onto the slippery slope of democracy’s destruction by the hand of the government.

The Meaning and Role of Assaultive Speech from a Wittgensteinian Perspective

The account of meaning implicit in the claims of the defenders of the First Amendment is philosophically suspect. Wittgenstein is interested in exploring the phenomenon of meaning. Not all signs and sounds have meaning, so how is that some of them come to have meaning? Examining this question allows us to ask the subsequent question about the particular meanings of particular words. Wittgenstein rejects what I call the meaning-is-interpretation account in favor of the meaning-is-use account. Wittgenstein’s alternative stresses the use of words within social practices; meaning and social practices are fused. The meaning of words cannot be divorced from their context. Wittgenstein is particularly useful in examining assaultive speech because he understands language to be highly complex and multifaceted. He includes as elements or aspects of language many activities that are normally taken to be outside the scope of language. Hintikka and Hintikka argue that Wittgenstein includes within the scope of language things that are helpful paraphernalia for 13. Chaplinsky was a Jehovah’s Witness who was preaching about the Bible. After several citizens had complained that Chaplinsky was denouncing religion, the city marshal came to investigate. Chaplinsky called the marshal a “God damned racketeer” and a “damned Fascist.” The marshal sued, and the court upheld his complaint (PWP, ).

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the use of language, such as color samples in the use of color words. Also included as language are facilitating activities that are themselves nonlinguistic.14 One important theme that emerges in Philosophical Investigations is that everyday language is philosophically (and I would add politically) interesting and revealing. In section  of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says, “Not: ‘without language we could not communicate with one another’—but for sure: without language we cannot influence other people in such-and-such ways; cannot build roads and machines etc. And also: without the use of speech and writing people could not communicate.” Wittgenstein says that “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (PI §).15 Wittgenstein’s point is that a language cannot be conceived and understood just in terms of vocabulary and syntax, but only in how it is used. It is not possible to understand the expression “Slab!” without understanding the activities of builders and how these activities fit into, and are part of, their lives. Nor is it possible to understand “Faggot!” without understanding the activities and practices of those who yell it and those against whom it is directed. With this alternative account of meaning, it is appropriate to ask about the consequences of the use of words. As I stated above, with very few exceptions the content of speech and the consequences of its uses are not of primary importance. One of the effects of the use of any word is that it reinforces the repetition and regularity of the social practices in which words have their meanings, their lives. What are the consequences of assaultive speech, and how and to whom is it harmful? Critical race theorists have been answering these questions, focusing on the harms suffered by the targets of hate speech. The harm is multidimensional. The Wittgensteinian conception of meaning, combined with the works of critical race theorists, provides a very different conception of the relationship between life and well-being from that of the First Amendment defender. 14. Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaakko Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein (New York: Basil Blackwell, ), . 15. “Form of life” is a concept whose meaning has been widely contested in Wittgensteinian scholarship. I read Wittgenstein to be using the concept in two ways. One way he uses the concept is to mark differences between human animals and nonhuman animals. This usage is concerned with similarities and commonalities shared by humans that distinguish us from other animals. Newton Garver develops this conception of form of life as a natural kind in chapters  and  of This Complicated Form of Life: Essays on Wittgenstein (Chicago: Open Court Press, ). The second way Wittgenstein uses this concept is to mark differences among humans. Communities having widely different practices and cultures would have different forms of life. “Form of life” marks diversity within humankind. See J. W. Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), and J. H. Whittaker, “Language-Games and Forms of Life Unconfused” Philosophical Investigations  (): –. Given that the natural history of humans has social and cultural dimensions, it shouldn’t be surprising that there is a considerable amount of diversity and multiplicity within it.

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Wittgenstein might well say that a picture of meaning captivates us, and from it we draw the oddest conclusions. Meaning, under this picture, becomes something entirely mysterious. I will provide a brief sketch of this picture in order to highlight the “meaning-as-interpretation” picture and to have his position stand out in clear relief. According to this captivating picture, it seems that those sounds that mean something are accompanied by something that nonmeaningful signs lack. This different ingredient is “something mental.” Wittgenstein says that It seems that there are certain definite mental processes bound up with the working of language, processes through which alone language can function. I mean the processes of understanding and meaning. The signs of our language seem dead without these mental processes; and it might seem that the only function of the signs is to induce such processes, and that these are things we ought to be really interested in. . . . We are tempted to think that the action of language consists of two parts; an inorganic part, the handling of the sign, and an organic part, which we may call understanding these signs, meaning them, interpreting them, thinking. (BB, ) With this picture, intention and interpretation are the terminal points. A speaker animates and gives meaning to a word with her intentions, and the listener gives meaning with his interpretations. Given Wittgenstein’s sustained analyses against “mental processes” as they have generally been understood in the Western philosophical canon, it comes as no surprise that he wants to move meaning from the mysterious “inner” to the shared public and social “outer.” Meaning is not all in the ear of the beholder (nor in the mouth of the speaker). Wittgenstein’s discussion of the meaning of words, expressions, or acts focuses on use. He says in section  of Philosophical Investigations, “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of the word is its use in the language.” In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein offers that, “If we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use. . . . The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language” (–). A sign or word becomes meaningful through having a rule-governed and established use. As Glock notes, the meaning of a word is determined by general conventions governing its use, while its effects depend upon contingent

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conditions pertaining to specific circumstances.16 Understanding a sentence means understanding a language, which in turn involves being a “master of technique” (PI §). Being a master of technique involves following the rulegoverned and established uses correctly, and this can only be done publicly and not privately. As Barry Stroud asserts, “For someone’s performance to be the correct way to do something there must be some standard or pattern to which it conforms. For the use of linguistic expressions, those standards can be provided ultimately by the ways in which expressions are in fact used.”17 Content, context, and effects are fundamentally linked. The standards or patterns are necessary features for the meaningful uses of words, and the effects of their usage is to reinforce those very standards and patterns that make them meaningful. This Wittgensteinian view, having moved away from the captivating picture of meaning being a mental process of interpretation, does not allow for the easy separation of the content of speech and its effects. This inseparability is one of the most important reasons for advocating a Wittgensteinian approach to assaultive speech. Wittgenstein’s position is that the use of a word is the distinctive role that word plays in those activities of humans. The use of an expression, as Stroud claims, is “the contribution to whatever human beings manage to do in uttering or responding to it” (). The role that the word or expression plays is the life that Wittgenstein refers to in his passage from the Blue Book. Wittgenstein’s approach to meaning requires that we attend to what people are doing when they make utterances and to the point or the role the utterances play in the lives of the people who are making them and listening to them. Wittgenstein instructs us to look and see how particular expressions are being used, and what happens when they are used. When we understand their uses and effects, then we understand their meanings. Wittgenstein demands that we shift the focus away from individuals’ interpretations toward our activities or forms of life to understand meaning. But the meaning-is-interpretation picture has a hold on many of us, myself included. It took me hours to decide what I wanted to do about that pamphlet. I interrogated myself ruthlessly about it: Could it have been left there accidentally? Was it meant for someone else? Was the pamphlet really intended to intimidate? What did it mean? Was I just being too sensitive? This last question is really what kept tripping me up. 16. Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, ). See especially the entries for “meaning” and “use.” 17. Barry Stroud, “Mind, Meaning, and Practice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . All citations are from this work.

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My training as a philosopher can hinder me in these pursuits. Philosophers are trained to be skeptical, even about the most obvious things. I took to skepticism like a duck to water. If I can seriously doubt and remain unconvinced that the natural world is really as it appears, then doubting my ability to assess accurately what some words or practices mean is child’s play. How do I know what certain words or practices mean? Might not they all be fabrications of a mind that just looks for injury and insult? Couldn’t the harm that I think I have experienced be a function of my being too sensitive? Are there any criteria independent of me to which I can appeal? But let’s say for now that I can judge some situations pretty well; I am capable of picking up on patterns. But if I do pick up on these all the time, will this start to count against my reliability? People may start to write me off as a crank; I will be She Who Looks for Injury. And the vicious cycle continues when I begin/continue to doubt myself or when I become willful in not seeing certain aspects of situations. Others won’t have the opportunity to write me off if I am already doing it to myself. The political and moral implications of the meaning-as-interpretation picture are immense. On this view, any harm a person claims to have suffered originates from within her. This provides a justification for disregarding her claims. She is told that she is being too sensitive or just taking things in the wrong way from how they were intended. Any alleged offense or injury is the creation of the mind, and nothing more. Furthermore, understanding meaning as interpretation severely limits the scope of responsibility. In its most generous form, this view can ascribe responsibility to a speaker who says something that harms another person when that speaker really should have known better. If, for example, the speaker knew that someone was especially sensitive about a particular issue, saying inflammatory things is morally blameworthy. But as I discussed in the previous chapter, this is not adequate because it too sharply limits the scope to the actions and attitudes involved in personal interactions. However, even with these concerns about intentions and interpretations, we cannot simply disregard them. They are important in all sorts of political and moral ways for those who are oppressed. It is extremely important for people to have intentions and interpretations of words and actions that are rebellious and undermine dominant social practices. Understanding the use of a language requires that we become familiar with and capable of mastering its use. Achieving this familiarity and mastery requires, as John Koethe says, “at least being capable of engaging in the patterns of activities or forms of life in which the use of language is embedded, producing

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and responding to it in ways that facilitate one’s interactions with others, and approving others’ use of it in a similar manner.”18 Assaultive speech also facilitates the social interactions and movements of certain people in the world while hindering others’ movements. These patterns of activities are harmful to the targets of hate speech and to the well-being of the community. The price of the harm is unequally distributed, with the people already less well-off and disempowered paying the highest price. I discuss the multidimensional nature of the consequences and harms of assaultive speech in the section below.

Critical Race Theory and the Broader Background

Critical race theorists, who have focused on racist assaultive speech, have been instrumental in shifting the loci of concern to those who are harmed by such speech and to the broader social context in which particular acts have their meaning. They argue that legal treatments of First Amendment issues must attend to the broader background in which particular acts of hate speech occur. Their starting point is that racism as well as other forms of oppression are endemic to American life. They also are skeptical about and suspicious of dominant legal claims of objectivity, color-blindness, and neutrality. These claims are “central to an ideology of equal opportunity that presents race as an immutable characteristic devoid of social meaning and tells an ahistorical, abstracted story of racial inequality as a series of randomly occurring, intentional, and individualized acts” (WTW, ). Critical race theorists adopt a stance of contextual and historical analysis of law. Racism has contributed to all contemporary manifestations of group advantage and disadvantage along racial lines (WTW, ). The ahistorical, acontextual, abstractionist tendencies in legal theory function to obscure the harm suffered by victims of hate speech while at the same time causing additional harm. First Amendment debates often revolve around the rights of the person whose speech is potentially restricted. Robert A. Viktora (R.A.V.) along with five friends were charged with violating the  St. Paul Hate Crimes Ordinance that barred the display, on public or private property, of any “symbol, object, appellation, characterization, graffiti including but not limited to a burning cross or a Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm, or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender” (PWP, ). Viktora hired a First Amendment attorney, 18. John Koethe, The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), .

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pled not guilty, and argued that the ordinance was unconstitutional. The district court dismissed the charges prior to the trial, saying that the ordinance was overbroad. The Minnesota Supreme Court overturned the decision, stating that burning a cross is an instance of “fighting words,” which the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled were not protected in Chaplinsky v New Hampshire. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned this decision. Charles Lawrence, in writing about the Supreme Court’s decision in R.A.V. v St. Paul, notes that the Jones family, who had a cross burned in their yard, are erased in the Court’s decision.19 “The Joneses, however, are not the subject of the Court’s opinion. The constitutional injury addressed in R.A.V. was not this black family’s right to live where they pleased or to associate with their neighbors or not how this attack might impair the Joneses’ constitutional right to be full and valued participants in the political community. Instead, the court was concerned with the alleged constitutional injury to those who assaulted the Joneses, that is, the First Amendment rights of the cross-burners.”20 The voices of the victims of this kind of speech are doubly silenced, first by the act of the cross burning and then by the opinion of the Court. The opinion of the Court provides the voice for those who claim to be silenced by restrictions on the First Amendment. Judge Scalia, according to Lawrence, “turns the First Amendment on its head, transforming an act intended to silence through terror and intimidation into an invitation to join a public discussion” (PWP, ). The marketplace of ideas metaphor is alive and well in this decision, as is the emphasis of right over content. Tom Foley, the St. Paul prosecutor, describes Justice Scalia’s decision as “mindboggling: he basically said that while Chaplinsky—the ‘fighting words’ case—is still good law, and ‘fighting words’ are not protected under the First Amendment, the City of St. Paul could not have a ‘fighting words’ ordinance that has any type of viewpoint discrimination.”21 Scalia’s logic was that “fighting words” do convey ideas, but that they cannot be prohibited on the basis of their content. This kind of mind-boggling logic is not unique to the R.A.V. case. The ideology of formal equality renders segregation and discrimination consistent with the equality demands of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Crenshaw 19. After the Supreme Court decision, the Department of Justice prosecuted Viktora and four others under federal civil rights laws. Viktora and the others were sentenced to a juvenile workhouse. The other defendant, the only adult, had pleaded guilty to violating the hate crime ordinance before it had been judged unconstitutional. 20. Charles R. Lawrence III, “Cross-Burning and the Sound of Silence: Anti-Subordination Theory and the First Amendment,” in PWP, . 21. Laura Lederer, “The Prosecutor’s Dilemma: An Interview with Tom Foley,” in PWP, .

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states that “Plessy teaches us how a system of segregation, central to the social subordination of blacks, could be constitutionalized through a rigid commitment to formalism, abstraction, disaggregation, and ahistoricism. . . . In Plessy we are told that segregation constitutes equal treatment because blacks and whites are treated similarly. Blacks cannot sit in white cars, whites cannot sit in black cars.”22 Formal equality is plausible only when there is a wholesale denial of the system of racial domination. Crenshaw also makes clear how the Supreme Court in the Plessy decision denies the social significance or meaning of segregation by reducing the meaning of it to the interpretations of the victims. There is no real injury done to Blacks because “the meaning is only what blacks choose to place on it” (PWP, ). Blacks are accorded a certain kind of agency in this decision; they are choosing to injure themselves. The meaning of segregation differs for whites and Blacks because of the existing social structures and relative differential in power. Charles Lawrence reads the decision of Brown v Board of Education as being concerned with the harm of segregation and not just with equal educational opportunity: “Brown teaches us another lesson: that the harm of segregation is achieved by the message it conveys. . . . Brown held that segregated schools were unconstitutional primarily because of their meaning, the message they send that Black children are an untouchable caste, unfit to be educated with white children. Segregation is unconstitutional because it shapes a badge of inferiority upon blacks, signaling their exclusion from the community of citizens” (PWP, ). In Wittgensteinian terms, the meaning of segregation is the role it plays in “our life” or our form of life. Its role in post–Civil War United States was to draw the lines separating whites from Blacks in a new way. Now that ownership was no longer legal, a new mechanism was needed not only to separate whites from Blacks, but also to reinforce the economic, social, and political domination of Blacks by whites. So much the better if Blacks themselves internalized the messages of inferiority. At the same time segregation was stamping the badge of inferiority on Blacks, it was stamping the badge of superiority on whites. The superiority of whites did not come into existence with segregation; segregation was possible only because there already was a system in which whites had economic, social, and political power. Segregation contributed to the reinforcement of these powers, all the while denying its existence by appealing to formal equality. Similarly, the meaning of burning a cross—both its historical meaning and its contemporary one—is its use or role in “our life.” Where does it fit into the 22. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Comments of an Outsider on the First Amendment,” in PWP, .

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patterns of life of African-Americans? Russ and Laura Jones of St. Paul, Minnesota, who had a cross burned in their yard, had no doubts. Shortly after the Joneses moved into a predominantly white neighborhood, their car tires were slashed, their rear car window smashed, and they were called niggers. Laura Jones, in describing the police handling of the case, the prosecutor’s decisions to charge the defendants with violating the hate crime ordinance, and the appeals process, said, “No one seemed to care what the message of the cross burning was, or what effect it had on us. When I saw the cross burning on our lawn, I thought of the stories my grandparents told about living in the South and being intimidated by white people. When a cross burned down there they either meant to harm you or to put you in your place. It was a clear threat.”23 As Charles Lawrence says, “Russ and Laura Jones did not have to guess at the meaning of this symbol of racial hatred. There is not a black person in America who has not been taught the significance of this instrument of persecution and intimidation, who has not emblazoned on his or her mind the image of black men’s scorched bodies hanging from trees, and who does not know the story of Emmit Till” (PWP, ). After the Civil War, when “white supremacy” could no longer be manifested in the ownership of Black people, new forms of violence such as cross burning, lynching, and church burnings, were invented to control and terrorize. The person who today sets a cross on fire in front of a house imports all this meaning, regardless of his intentions. In many ways, it is beside the point when that person says, “I didn’t mean that.” The meaning of speech is not simply a function of an individual’s intentions and another’s interpretations. The historical meaning and the contemporary use of the symbol are fundamentally connected. A cross burning would not mean what it does now had it not been used in the ways it had in the past. The meaning of cross burning has not changed.

Not All Are Invited

Burning a cross or writing “Bag the Fag” is not an invitation to join the public discourse and participate in the marketplace of ideas. Rather, such an act is a threat of violence, which keeps people from participating in that discourse. And even if people could and would participate in this public discourse, what would such participation look like? Would it involve Black people using assaultive speech against whites? Given the dependence of the meaning of assaultive speech 23. Laura Lederer, “The Case of the Cross-Burning: An Interview with Russ and Laura Jones,” in PWP, .

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on the existence of social power relations of domination and subordination, I am not convinced that antiwhite assaultive speech is a coherent notion. Similarly, I don’t think that antiheterosexual assaultive speech is coherent. Writing antiheterosexual comments seems ineffective if not ridiculous. Furthermore, this adversarial approach to discourse is suspect. This model requires the denial of existing social reality while contributing all the time to the inequality of that reality. To whom does one speak when something is done anonymously? And even when the targets of assaultive speech do speak, like the Joneses, many of us cannot or will not listen. Their harm is secondary to the future or potential harm that could follow from restrictions on speech. The power to speak, the power to be heard, and the power to silence are all unequally distributed in these spaces. The marketplace metaphor has a great deal of staying power and requires a wholesale denial of the systemic nature of oppression. So long as this metaphor continues to function, the purveyors of assaultive speech will not be curtailed. Defenders of the First Amendment will say, “Let the most hateful things be said. Those people who are offended or targeted by their invective should fight back with their own free speech.” This is a version of the old fight-fire-with-fire approach. The problem is that this approach assumes that all people could and would fight back. This assumption in turn reinforces the marketplace metaphor. Incidents of assaultive speech are neither isolated nor always on a grand scale. A cross burning is a very overt and obvious example of speech meant to intimidate. But much of what can be classified as assaultive speech is commonplace and familiar, and not likely to be brought into the legal realm. These less overt, but no less harmful, expressions play an important role in all of our lives. Our everyday language is infused with racist, sexist, and homophobic meanings that similarly function to control and intimidate. They reinforce the very social practices in which they have their meanings. When people take cross burning as the paradigm or as the “real” case of assaultive speech, it draws attention away from the ordinary cases and makes them not count. This move is powerful; it makes assaultive speech the exception rather than part of the norm. Assaultive speech is anything but exceptional.

Conclusion

A Wittgensteinian approach to meaning-as-use requires that we examine the role that assaultive speech plays in our community or our form of life. With this approach, meaning cannot be separated from the context or practices in which

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words have their lives. Wittgenstein provides the theoretical tools for understanding the connection between language use and the well-being of our community. Critical race theorists show how assaultive speech comes from, and contributes to, the ongoing peril that has, in many ways, become familiar and invisible to those of us who aren’t the targets. Language use shapes our environments, transforming some of them into very dangerous places for groups of people. This transformation can be gradual, but its effects are no less harmful than the immediate harms discussed above. Segregation showed that not all people are equally well situated in “our form of life” and that the well-being and inclusion of some required the exclusion of others. The racism, sexism, and homophobia that pervade our language use also signal that not all are meant to be included in “our form of life.” When assaultive speech can masquerade as the price all must pay for our having the right to free speech, some are made less well off.

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Moving to New Boroughs: Transforming the World by Inventing Language Games

In this chapter, I explore one sense of Wittgenstein’s claim that the limits of language are the limits of the world. I explore two cases where the language available to individuals limits the meanings they can make of their experiences, and thus limits their worlds. I then focus on two processes that involve the creation of new meanings through language and examine how these new meanings open up new worlds. These two processes are breaking silence about sexual abuse and coming out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. “Breaking silence” means a person finds her voice after having been silent or silenced during and after abuse. “Coming out” is understood as a process in which a person names to herself and/or to others her sexual orientation. My approach to these two processes is greatly influenced by Wittgenstein, and so I argue that these activities are only possible with or through language. True to Wittgensteinian form, I have an interlocutor who makes himself known at various times in various ways. My aim in this chapter is to show how the creation of new language games engenders new meanings and how these new meanings enable people to make sense of their lives in ways that can be validating and liberating.

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The Limits of the World

Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (.). Don’t just think about those cases where you make a simple mistake in describing some aspects of a past experience, but rather think about those cases where the sense you had made of something is radically different from the sense you are now able to make of it. It is not that you could not make any sense, but that sense is now seen as dubious and perhaps hopelessly inadequate. In hindsight, it might seem that, no matter how rich and robust your language, it somehow failed in your making sense of your experiences. I can think of two cases. First is the case of a child who has been sexually abused. With a very young child, she may have neither the language nor the mental and emotional capacities to make sense of her experiences. In this instance, it is not the case that she has all the words in her head but simply cannot express them. Rather, she has no language beyond the most primitive (crying, for example) with which to express herself. While this case is extremely important, I want to focus on the case of an older child, age nine or so, who does have a good deal of language to use. She does have a language with which to make sense of herself, and the sense she is able to make is that she is a bad, dirty person. Her grasp of language use is new and somewhat tenuous, and her repertoire of concepts is limited. But where she can apply these concepts, she applies them without exception. She is silent for many reasons—fear of discovery by other people, fear of the judgments of others, and fear of the perpetrator. Her world is largely defined by these experiences and she thinks that she is the only one who could ever do the things she has done. No one else would ever do such things. She lives in a world of one, and a world that is limited by her inability to give other meanings to her experiences. The second case is that of a young teenager who feels quite different from all her friends, but she cannot locate the source of this difference, nor can she express it. The one thing she often does know is that she doesn’t want for this difference to be known. Her world becomes claustrophobic and the fear of discovery (of what, even she isn’t sure) is all too real. She spends a great deal of energy hiding and misdirecting. In many ways, her world is reduced to a world of one because she is sure, after all, that she is the only person around her who feels this way. The sense she may be able to make of herself is as some sort of freak or pervert.

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Unpacking the Essentialisms

Sensing that you are somehow different without knowing the nature of that difference lends itself to essentialist interpretations. I should admit at this point that I have an essentialist interlocutor lurking within. An essentialist coming-out story would go something like this: The reason the young woman is aware of something different is that something is. This difference is a consequence of her genetic makeup or the level of the androgen spritz she received in utero. The desire is already present in her like a plant is already present in the seed. The latency and potentiality become manifest in actuality. It is a foregone conclusion that she come to identify as lesbian or bisexual. No big mystery here—destiny is simply unfolding its lovely lavender self. (My interlocutor on this issue is always a gay man who read Aristotle as an undergraduate.)1 I call this my Essentialist Account.2 While some might find biological accounts of homosexuality comforting, such accounts are not without their price. When the trait or behavior in question

1. That my interlocutor on this particular issue is a gay man does not surprise me, though I do find it rather interesting. The gay men with whom I have spoken about this issue most often embrace these biological accounts of hormonal levels and genes, saying that such accounts best describe and explain their experiences. Some even go so far as to say that, “I always knew.” My tendency is to adopt a Wittgensteinian attitude: “What did you know? What do you think is this object of knowledge?” Their sense of certainty is supposed to indicate the truthfulness of the claim. When the issue of choice arises, they often do say that they make a choice, but that the choice is whether or not to act on this desire. The choice to act on an already existing desire is quite different from the choice to desire in certain ways. I wonder if the willingness to embrace these essentialist biological accounts also has something to do with the fact that the research being done on the “causes of homosexuality” (never the causes of heterosexuality) is being done on their sexuality. Lesbian sexuality is erased by science. I must admit, though, that keeping lesbian sexuality off the microscope slide of the inquiring neuroendocrinologist is not all bad. But one consequence is that any accounts of homosexuality will be modeled on male sexuality. The use of Simon LeVay’s work on the hypothalami of gay males provides a good example of this phenomenon. See Simon LeVay, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality (Cambridge: MIT Press, ). 2. This term wasn’t so much coined as it was the result of a serendipitous typo. Its genesis aside, it is useful because it highlights the emphasis placed on desire when coming out is taken to mean the public naming of what you already privately knew. Later in this chapter, I suggest that coming out is better understood as coming to inhabit an orientation.

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is considered undesirable by that part of society whose norms are dominant, then those people who manifest this trait or behavior can take the tack that they did not choose to be this way and therefore they should not be blamed. This position does little to challenge the presumption that one sexuality should be normative and leaves those with the “deviant” sexuality apologizing for it. Furthermore, genetics is accorded huge explanatory power and the chain of explanation is quite direct. Genetic makeup explains one’s sexuality which, in turn, explains everything else about a person.3 This essentialist account presupposes much of what Wittgenstein rejects—in particular, the claim that we individuals have privileged access to our sensations (or differences, in this case) and that this privileged access guarantees that we are naming such sensations correctly. How does he know what his sensation is only from his own experience? He is like the person who has a box with something in it and which we call a “beetle.” No one can look into someone else’s box; he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. The thing in the box has no place in the language game, not even as a something, because the box might be empty (PI §). The strength of the essentialist hold is a consequence of a variety of factors. One is a desire to be an unimpeachable authority on something—in this case, the working of one’s internal mechanisms. Another factor is the desire to have control over something, again in this case your thoughts, feelings, desires, and so on. No matter what sort of external constraints are placed on a person, one is still free to think and feel however one chooses, according to this account. The first case, of the abused child, involves an essentialism of a different kind and reveals a perverse relationship between blame and responsibility. The person who has been abused often thinks that she is a horrible, awful, bad person. Her nature is essentially bad and this explains all that has happened to her. She is somehow responsible for everything that has happened to her; she has brought it all on herself. Her character is accorded huge explanatory power and anything that she does or that happens to her is further confirmation of her true nature. In both of these cases, essentialism and secretiveness are linked through the need to control access to oneself. The essentialisms in both these cases are about privileged access to what are taken as the facts of the matter. In the case of the 3. Sex becomes epistemic—it is something about ourselves that we can know and discover. As Foucault, “Power and Sex,” in Politics Philosophy Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, – (New York: Routledge, ), asserts, “For that is the essential fact: since Christianity, the western world has never ceased saying: ‘To know who you are, know what your sexuality is.’ Sex has always been the forum where both the future of our species and our ‘truth’ as human subjects are decided” (). Sex becomes an object of examination—it is a key locus of inquiry.

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young woman sensing her difference from all her friends, she takes it as fact that she just is a freak or pervert. This fact or “true self ” must somehow remain hidden from view, so she needs to have complete control over access to her thoughts. Being secretive is a way to control access. With the child who has been abused, the secrecy may have to do with hiding so that no one can see her shameful true nature and all the bad things she has done. Again, being secretive is a way to control access, and the need for such control may be heightened when so much access to her has been beyond her control. In the remainder of this chapter, I offer Wittgensteinian discussions of selfidentity, linguistic training, and the acquisition of worldviews, both to describe how the individuals in my examples reach the conclusions they do about their natures and identities, and to provide the grounds for creating new languages having new meanings with which to make different senses of their experiences.

Acquiring Worldviews and Following Rules

A Wittgensteinian account of self-identity stands in sharp contrast to a Cartesian one in which an immaterial soul attaches to or is conjoined with a material body. On this Cartesian view, all my beliefs, judgments, and concepts attach to this immaterial substance. This kind of essentialism makes those beliefs, judgments, and concepts accidental to my self-identity rather than constitutive of it. Wittgenstein clearly attacks this inner(mental)/outer(material) dichotomy with great vigor, especially from the perspective of what this means for the use of the word “I.” When “I” is used as a subject, he says that there is “the illusion that we use this word to refer to something bodiless, which, however, has its seat in our body. In fact, this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it was said, ‘Cogito, ergo sum’” (BB, ). Wittgenstein continues by saying that he is concerned with the grammar of what are called mental activities such as seeing, hearing, and feeling. Wittgenstein does not reduce the mental to the physical; the mental isn’t a fiction that lurks from view. Rather, Wittgenstein claims that the mental infuses our behavior; it can be seen in our behavior: “We do not say that possibly a dog talks to itself. Is that because we are so minutely acquainted with its soul? Well, one might say this: If one sees the behaviour of a living thing, one sees its soul.—But do I also say in my own case that I am saying something to myself, because I am behaving in such and such a way?—I do not say it from observation of my behaviour. But it only makes sense because I do behave in this way” (PI §). Our behavior is what it is because we are embodied beings. It does matter to our use of the word “I” that it is used by creatures that have a body.

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Wittgenstein’s interest is in human beings (as opposed to defending one or the other side of the dualism) and what we can do and what we actually do within our form of life and social practices. This helps to make sense of his claim in Philosophical Investigations, section , that “Essence is expressed by grammar.” This essence is very different from the essentialism of Cartesianism; “I” isn’t a something given or preordained but rather is something created through our practices of daily living and the relationships in which we stand. Acquisition of Worldviews

A significant portion of On Certainty examines the acquisition of worldviews by individuals. Self-identity involves a dynamic, interactive process whereby identity is created, reinforced, and modified by participation in a wide variety of language games. Self-identity is a function of our social interaction and participation with other persons, broader communities, social institutions, and the world. These interactions are done with or through language. Playing multiple language games is what constitutes the scaffolding of individuals’ thoughts. A person’s genealogy or self-identity is assembled through such activities. Selfidentities are assembled piecemeal from worldviews, and should not be thought of as monolithic entities.4 It is language that allows a person, to a very large degree, to interact in meaningful ways. We learn particular languages and we come to learn about ourselves as members of particular families and later as members of larger social groups. We learn to become members of this family, this group, and speakers of this language. We learn to play a variety of language games, and this diversity of language games means that we do not learn to be abstract, atomistic, and generic people. Rather, we learn that we are particular people who stand in a multitude of relationships and have memberships in a variety of communities. The goal of linguistic training is the initiation of a person into a community that is bound by an allegiance to the rules of the symbolic system. This goal of 4. For a genealogical account of self-identity, see Wendy Lee-Lampshire, “Moral ‘I’: The Feminist Subject and the Grammar of Self-Reference,” Hypatia , no.  (): –. Self-identity is created, formed, reinforced, and changed by participation in a wide variety of language games. Self-identity is a function of our social interaction and participation with other persons, institutions, and language games. Annette Baier discusses what she calls the “essential arts of personhood.” These essential arts can be understood in Wittgensteinian terms as the abilities to understand a language, to participate in a wide variety of language games, and to be involved in a multiplicity of relations with other persons, social institutions, and, more generally speaking, the world itself. See Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ). See especially her chapter, “Cartesian Persons.”

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initiation is realized through individuals’ acquisition and inheritance of judgments, concepts, and beliefs which are held by the community at large. These beliefs, concepts, and judgments constitute a worldview. A shared worldview is a shared background that is necessary for the formulating and the following of rules. By saying and doing similar things under similar circumstances, the basis for agreement and disagreement is maintained. The shared worldview and judgments are something that we as socially constituted individuals inherit or acquire. We acquire totalities of judgments, systems of verification, and hosts of beliefs. According to Wittgenstein, when we first come to believe anything, what we believe is a whole system of propositions and not single propositions (OC §). And these systems or totalities of judgments are acquired by means of observation and instruction. Wittgenstein intentionally does not say that one “learns” these systems (OC §). But while one does not “learn” whole systems, one does learn to do particular things. For example, we learn to make judgments and recognize that this is judging while that is describing (OC §). Even our practice of making empirical judgments, for example, relies on our having been taught judgments and their connection with other judgments. A totality of judgments is made plausible to us (OC §). One skill children learn early on is how to judge others. And some children become quite skilled in judging themselves against standards that they cannot possibly fully or even partially understand. The child believes these standards and judgments hold for all people at all times. The standards and judgments are often transmitted and then taken as absolutes, allowing for no exceptions, mitigating factors, or alternative interpretations. A child is not yet in a position to see gray areas or the importance of mitigating factors; she does not yet possess the ability to make discriminations. The standards and judgments this child acquires are transmitted by certain authorities. Wittgenstein asks, “So is this it: I must recognize certain authorities in order to make judgments at all?” (OC §). Certain persons, by virtue of their positions as parents and teachers, are accorded intellectual authority. Structured institutions such as universities are also taken as possessing intellectual authority. In general, children are taught to obey their elders. Children do not regard all adults as authorities, and some children are brought up to believe they are superior to and have authority over adults of different sexes, races, ethnicities, religions. But in light of that, even those children so raised will treat some adults as authorities. In many cases of sexual abuse, the child knows the abuser and knows him or her in a context where that person already is seen as some sort of authority figure. The abuser comes to have a greater authority over the child throughout and after the abuse. He or she is the one who would be believed, were

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accusations ever to be made; he or she is the one who determines whether the child is good or bad, what kind of “love” or “punishment” is deserved, what count as “natural” and “special” ways to love. The abuser is the one who tells the child what kind of person she really is. The child learns by believing the adult, and further, Wittgenstein says, “I learned an enormous amount and accepted it on human authority, and then I found some things confirmed or disconfirmed by my own experience” (OC §). Understanding what counts as confirmation and knowing how to go about it in particular instances depends on my already having accepted a whole range of beliefs. The abused child’s sense of herself as dirty and bad is confirmed with every abusive act. Further, nothing or very little will count as evidence against what she believes to be true. These worldviews or systems acquired by us and others allow our correct following of a rule to be acknowledged. And further, according to Wittgenstein, “I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false” (OC §). Questions of correctness, truth or falsity, and justification can only meaningfully be asked by someone within a system. The abused child’s “picture of the world” provides her with the criteria for judging her own worthlessness. This picture tells her that she is the one responsible. The system provides the ground and makes possible the very conditions for asking and answering such questions. Our vast network of beliefs and judgments that we “take on” by virtue of being members of particular communities constitute the background against which other propositions are believed, knowledge claims are made, and claims to knowledge are grounded and justified. The vast network of practices in which individuals participate and the beliefs individuals have acquired are constitutive of self-identity. I do not think it is inaccurate to say that a significant percentage of adults in early twenty-first-century United States have worldviews that are homophobic. There are degrees of homophobia, and it can be characterized in a variety of ways depending on the specific issues in question. The fiercely contested battles over the ordination of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, gay marriage, adoption, the inclusion (or exclusion) of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals from civil rights protection, and the inclusion of gay, lesbian, and bisexual themes in school curricula, are all evidence for homophobic worldviews. Adults are fighting over these issues, but children are neither immune to nor unaware of these battles. In the course of these battles, children come to acquire many beliefs and judgments. I do not mean to imply that all children receive identical judgments. That would

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be patently false. But while there may be differences in particulars, certain general themes emerge. A partial list includes: . Homosexuality is unnatural and its unnaturalness makes it sinful. . Gays and lesbians seduce and recruit individuals—pedophilia is the extreme form. . Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals think about sex all the time—they are promiscuous. . Lesbians are man-haters who, because either they want to be men or can’t get a man, hate all men. . AIDS is God’s revenge (or nature’s revenge). All kinds of sexual activity, and not just homosexual activity, are surrounded by judgments, prohibitions, and prescriptions. There are judgments made about sex outside of marriage, reasons for sex, selling sex, having sex with people of a different race, class, and so on. Some of the judgments transmitted to children include: . Sex is dirty and only dirty people have it. . Women who have many partners or enjoy it too much are sluts while men are real studs. . Boys can’t control their sexual drives—they are at the mercy of their biology in a way that girls are not. . Girls are the ones responsible for sexual activity—they can stop it. . Having sex means being loved. This list, and the preceding one, hardly begins to expose the tip of the iceberg. That we are capable of generating such lists is a consequence of our being adults who have inherited such views and who now are in a position and possess the ability to deconstruct and pull out particular pieces. Such a list most likely could not be made by a child unless she has heard these things over and over and has spent a significant amount of time evaluating herself against them. A child who can make such list has had to pay too much attention to it.5 5. Children who haven’t been sexually abused can also, in some instances, make such a list. Michael Moore, on his TV Nation show did a segment on the Fred Phelps family of the Westboro Baptist Church. Members of that family regularly picket funerals of gay men, including Matthew Shepard’s. In the TV Nation segment, Fred Phelps’s young grandchildren offer their definition of homosexuals as those who “get it up the butt.” For more on Fred Phelps, see Chapter  in this volume.

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The child learns to believe a host of things and learns to act according to those beliefs. Gradually, a system is formed of what is believed. Some propositions such as “The earth has existed for more than one hundred years” or “Every human has parents” are beliefs that stand fast and are unlikely to shift. And “What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it” (OC §). Also included as standing-fast judgments could be any or all of the judgments about sexuality and sexual practice listed above. Only after a person has learned a whole set of propositions where some are held fast can that person realize that these propositions are like an axis around which a body rotates. The axis is held immobile by the movement around it and not because anything stationary holds it fast (OC §). Wittgenstein argues that those propositions that are held fast and more fixed are removed from the traffic of questioning and doubt (OC §). And that we have a system of beliefs where some are more firmly held and far less likely to be given up is what gives us the scaffolding of our thoughts (OC §). This scaffolding is not privately constructed and is only possible through publicly shared beliefs. This scaffolding allows us to be competent participants in a language game. Competency is generally taken to be a good thing; incompetence is a condition to be overcome. But in the case of an abused child and a homophobic teenager, the competency each possesses is a bad thing. In these cases, the competency is in judging and hating oneself. These are things in which no one should be made competent. Given the ways that oppressive practices and beliefs function grammatically, a kind of essence is given by grammar. Oppressive practices do structure the ways that people can interact and limit who can interact with whom and under what conditions. All of this affects the scaffolding of individuals’ thoughts, selfperceptions, and self-ascriptions. Self-identity is also a matter of how individuals, groups, and institutions see/understand/locate individuals. The “essence is expressed by grammar” approach underscores the ways that interpersonal relationships, even the most intimate and personal, are structured by broader social practices. Following the Rules in Language Games

The question whether someone is following a rule can only be answered within a language game. A language game includes a range of activities and practices, and these practices have a certain uniformity. Rule-following is only possible within a language game. Wittgenstein asserts that “the term language-game is

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meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (PI §). Utterances play a role in language games, but they do not constitute the whole range of possibilities within language games. Talking is but one move in a language game and its meaning comes from the rest of our proceedings (OC §).6 This uniformity of practices is necessary for determining whether or not a rule has been followed. This uniformity of practices is reinforced and preserved when rules are followed in the same way. Rule-following is ultimately practical. The necessary uniformity of practice is maintained by people doing the same sorts of things, such as continuing the series in the same way or saying “red” when presented with a particular color patch. In other words, people following rules in the same way maintain the uniformity of practice. In answering whether or not someone was following a rule, we look to the broader behavioral and social context in which the alleged rule-following occurs. This broader context is public and shared. Hintikka and Hintikka assert that “Wittgenstein calls this wider horizon of related rule-governed activities, which is needed to answer this questions of rule-following, a language-game” (italics original, ). Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following is primarily limited to simple mathematical examples, such as “add ,” but his treatment can be extrapolated for nonmathematical examples. There are many rules around desire—who can desire whom, when this desire can be acted upon, how this desire can be expressed, and the like. Desiring is as rule-governed an activity as is mathematics, and these rules are human creations enforced and perpetuated by individuals’ actions. Rule-following also depends on the existence of authority relations. Those who are in authority judge whether a particular rule is being followed correctly. The rules are not the same for all people; they vary depending on race, gender, and class, and double standards are common. It is difficult to follow a rule correctly when the criteria for doing so are not applied uniformly or when the criteria appear to be uniform and consistent but really are not. We are not as obviously and overtly trained to desire as we are to count and to write cursive letters, but we are trained nevertheless. Similar power mechanisms are in place, and children inherit a host of judgments. Wittgenstein is remarkably silent about the uses and abuses of power by those institutions and individuals possessing authority. In learning to follow a particular rule such as “add ,” Wittgenstein mentions “holding a person back” or “allowing him to go on” when he continues the sequence correctly (PI §; RFM, ). But there 6. Hintikka and Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein (New York: Basil Blackwell, ), describe language games as “rule governed interactions with our nonlinguistic environment” ().

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needs to be a much more sophisticated and sustained discussion of the operations of power. This issue of power is central to how certain practices function to make the background oppressive.7 Girls get all sorts of messages about “boys being boys” and that little girls should find all attention from boys pleasing. They’d better not find them too pleasing, though. The message that girls and women should not only desire men but also make themselves desirable to men is so familiar that it is invisible. Women should not desire women. A woman who has another woman as an object of her desire is not only perverted, but she is overstepping her boundaries as a woman. She does, in effect, desire what she has no right to desire. Sanctions follow when rules are disobeyed, and these sanctions can take a variety of forms. And furthermore, individuals impose sanctions on themselves when they realize that they are acting in ways that, on their accounting, are wrong. These selfimposed sanctions can be the most devastating and destructive of any. There is no reprieve from yourself. Acquiring these worldviews and learning how to follow rules that are most often not made explicit and are given in veiled language, make it inevitable that a child who has been sexually abused believes that she is a bad, dirty person responsible for what has happened. All the evidence she has comes from various authority relations, and nothing could count against her beliefs. Similarly, the woman who has internalized all sorts of messages and rules about whom and how she is supposed to desire is going to feel different from her friends. In both cases, their differences cannot (and should not, according to the dominant language games) be validated. The means or avenues for validation are not available to them. One important consideration to keep in mind about rules is that they are human constructions. Unlike the laws of nature, which have to be accepted and to which we adjust, rules “not only can be changed without contravening laws of nature, but occur already in many variations. Rather than our having to adjust to rules, we can adjust the rules instead.”8 Rules do not compel us or leave any choice about how to act. The laws of gravity do compel us and really don’t give us a choice—I cannot really be said to disobey the laws of gravity. Rules, however, leave something open; it is not as if the use or the application is already determined. It is not the case that the steps are really already taken (PI §). The steps are no more determined by the rules or formulas than the movements or actions of a machine are determined. With regard to the machine, “We talk as if 7. The works of Paulo Freire, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, and Marilyn Frye are all good places to start. Such an endeavor, however, is beyond the scope of this work. 8. Newton Garver, This Complicated Form of Life: Essays on Wittgenstein (Chicago: Open Court Press, ), .

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the parts could only move in this way, as if they could not do anything else.” What we forget, according to Wittgenstein, is that it is quite possible that the various parts might melt, bend, or break off (PI §). The movements of the machine are not inevitable. That the machine has moved in these ways does not entail that it will always do so. Similarly, it is not inevitable that once a person sees herself as bad or perverse that she always will. Parts of the scaffolding of her thoughts can melt or break off, no less so than the parts of a machine. What was previously taken as a difference marking one as bad or perverted can be reinterpreted.

Breaking Off a Piece of the Machine

So how does one begin to name and find validation for these differences? Is it possible that the naming and validation can be done privately, that is, independently of a social context? My gay male interlocutor, who has been stifling himself for quite some time, pipes up: “Each person has his own View-Master. I can put my thoughts or feelings or differences on display for myself. I can click to the feeling or difference any time I want—pretty much giving myself a private display. I need only to know where to look.” The interlocutor takes this flight to the private realm in the hopes of achieving certainty and validation. This flight makes my gay male interlocutor a private exhibitionist, but such a private exhibition is an illusion (PI §). This flight is the one move that makes certainty and validation impossible (and not merely difficult) because in a case such as this, Wittgenstein argues that there is no criterion of correctness here. He says that, “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’” (PI §).9 Where must one turn then? The Weaves of Life and Changes in Seeing the World

One must turn to and make use of concepts and meanings that are socially constituted and acquired. Wittgenstein says that “Seeing life as a weave, this pattern 9. Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a case where I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a particular sensation. I associate the sign “S” with this sensation and write this sign on a calendar each time I have the sensation. When speaking or writing down the sign, I concentrate on the sensation, creating, as it were, an ostensive definition that establishes the meaning of the sign by impressing on myself the connection between the sign and the sensation. But what does it mean to impress something upon myself? Wittgenstein says that “‘I impress on myself ’ can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connection right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right.”

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(pretence, say) is not always complete and is varied in a multiplicity of ways. But we, in our conceptual world, keep seeing the same, recurring with variations. That is how our concepts take it. For concepts are not for use of a single occasion” (Z §§, ). The weaves and patterns of our lives are not always recognizable to us. There are times when we are unable to recognize a pattern because it is staring us in the face. Its very familiarity is what obscures it (PI §). As we begin to change our perspectives, literally and metaphorically, we begin to see patterns in different ways, and we may undergo a shift in what we take to be significant within a pattern.10 The patterns we perceive may be quite familiar to us—so familiar, in fact, that we fail to perceive that they are patterns. We are not encouraged to see the world in different ways when we already see it the right way. What would be the point? It is difficult, if not impossible, for a child on her own to see aspects of her life as abusive. For her, because certain things are familiar and have always been done in certain ways, these activities are “normal.” She may be quite convinced that this is just how children are (and should be) treated. She may not be able to see the abusiveness of a situation until she somehow becomes aware of different ways children can be loved. And even when she does see these ways, she may spend a significant amount of energy reinterpreting her experiences so that they, too, are like those loving ways. Language games are not fixed, and new ones come into existence while others become obsolete and forgotten (PI §). Language games, like any other games, can undergo changes. Wittgenstein asserts that “the rules of grammar are arbitrary in the sense that the rules of a game are arbitrary. We can make them differently. But then it is a different game” (WL, ). He specifically links the grammar of “language” with the grammar of “invent.” Further, new language games can be invented for specific purposes and the purposes of language use are countless. There is a prodigious diversity of our language games, and it is possible to invent new ones because there are already a multitude of games being played (PI §). Language games are human activities and so they do undergo change, perhaps gradually, as time passes (OC §). Furthermore, when we imagine the facts otherwise than how they are, then certain language games lose importance while others become more important. New language games can develop spontaneously, as we see things anew. 10. See Naomi Scheman, “Anger and the Politics of Naming,” in Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege (New York: Routledge, ), for the ways in which women have learned to name their anger and pick out certain patterns in their lives as significant.

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Wittgenstein says that “something new (spontaneous, ‘specific’) is always a language-game” (PI, p. ). The appearance of new perspectives and new ways of seeing is responsible for changes in our language games. We can decide to invent new language games, and their “newness” belongs with the new ways of looking at things (PI §). When language games are altered, then there is a “change in concepts, and with concepts the meanings of words change” (OC §§–). These new language games make new meanings possible, and these new meanings allow people to make a different kind of sense of themselves and others. The activities associated with breaking silence and coming out are two new language games that have been invented for specific reasons and in response to seeing the world differently. In many ways, they both represent shifts in how people are oriented in the world. “Shifts in orientations” is a useful way to think about these processes. New language games enable people to think about their identities and relations with others in new ways because they have new concepts and meanings to use. They create new social identities that are the loci from which challenges are waged against the dominant practices. These new language games provide a ground from which to challenge and undermine dominant language games and worldviews. Wittgenstein says in On Certainty that a group can use their language game as a base from which to combat others (§). The language games of coming out and breaking silence, with all their attendant activities and newly created recognizable meanings are, in many ways, loci from which to fight against the dominant language games we have all played. By being visible, by fighting for inclusion in all sorts of ways, by exposing the logics of dominant language games, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, people who have been abused and survived are creating, maintaining, and reinforcing meanings and concepts that are more broadly available. These new language games provide alternatives to the dominant world. Achieving a shift in orientation—of how one sees herself and one’s relations to others—allows a person to examine, criticize, and discard some of the propositions that have stood fast and replace them with others. Co-optation and Reclamation

Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a city to describe language: “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform

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houses” (PI §). New language games are, in many ways, the boroughs or suburbs of the older city. Suburbs are not completely detached from the city but they are clearly recognizable as different from the city. Because they are newer and in many ways more planned, the streets, for example, are more uniform. In a similar manner, the meanings of words in new language games will be more uniform and planned. What happens, though, is that as other people make use of these same words and phrases and begin to apply them to situations other than the ones for which they were created, their meanings change. The meanings of words, as Wittgenstein constantly notes, are in their use. Who is using these words, in what circumstances they are being used, and for what purposes, all affect the meaning of these words. The “straight original” meanings become twisty. A potential danger that follows from the creation of new language games and meanings and vocabularies is co-optation. Co-optation in language games happens when those new meanings and vocabularies created in new language games are adopted and used by those very people or institutions against which they were initially created. Consider the cover story of People Magazine on Clarence Thomas that ran after his confirmation to the Supreme Court. In that article, the language created by survivors of sexual abuse was used to make sense of Clarence Thomas’s experience of having been accused of sexual harassment. The headline in large bold print above the cover photo of Clarence Thomas announces “How We Survived.” The “we” in this case is Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia Thomas. The phrases that appear throughout the article include “telling our story” and “empowerment” and the “sense of betrayal” that goes along with someone close to you (Anita Hill) doing such a terrible thing (charging sexual harassment).11 The flip side of co-optation is reclamation. Certain words such as “queer” and “dyke,” for example, have a history of oppressive uses. These words have been used to insult, torment, and stigmatize gays, lesbians, and anyone else who does not, in whatever way, meet certain expectations. However, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals have reclaimed these words. Their being reclaimed makes them suitable for cultivation and habitation. In using them to name ourselves on our own terms, their meanings are transformed. These reclaimed words play radically different roles in our new language games, and allow many to inhabit a new orientation. 11. See my “Clarence Thomas and the Survival of Sexual Harassment,” in Proceedings of the Berkeley Women and Language Conference (Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Women and Language Group, ).

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Urban Flight

Wittgenstein’s city metaphor is useful in thinking about how people get out of the old neighborhoods by creating new practices and carving out different spaces. This metaphor is also interesting for thinking about the movements between margins and center. In many places, cities are no longer the center in the way they were in the past. With the explosion of growth in the suburbs (in part because of “white flight”) and the resulting shift in monetary resources, suburbs have become the center, while urban environments have become the margins. The city as margin may only be temporary, especially when whites and their monies start to find areas of the city desirable again. Latinos in San Francisco, for example, are alarmed by the rapid gentrification of their neighborhoods. Because much of the housing in these neighborhoods are rental properties, landlords are selling fast or renting to new tenants who are willing and able to pay higher rents. Where do these newly displaced people go? What are effective strategies in dealing with this situation?

Conclusion

New language games have been vital for people who were sexually abused to see themselves as survivors, and for people who have felt outlaw or unnatural desires to see themselves positively as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Such shifts in selfperception and orientation have been, for many, life affirming if not life saving. The threat of co-optation leaves the resistant public with a multitude of tasks: continuing to provide alternative interpretations and descriptions of experiences, creating new concepts and vocabularies for articulating experiences, reclaiming words, and most fundamentally, being visible so that no child or young person thinks she is the only one who has ever done or had done to her these things and has felt these ways. I continue the discussion of resistance in the following chapter where I look at some women who have acted to carve out their own space.12 12. My discussion in this chapter has been greatly and deeply influenced by the powerful firstperson accounts of survivors of sexual abuse and other forms of sexual violence and the coming-out stories of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. There have been a number of excellent books published in the last ten years, which is itself evidence of the ways these practices have been brought out of the “private” and become more a part of our social and political discourse. They are objects of public discussion in ways that they never have been before. Once they become so public, it is more difficult to force them back out of view. This is part of their transformative power. On the subject of childhood sexual abuse, I highly recommend Ellen Bass and Louise Thornton, eds., I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse (New York: Harper

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Perennial, ); Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse, d ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, ); Jennifer Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Sexual Abuse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ); and Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, ). One of the most moving books about coming out, in part because of the accompanying photographs, is about young adults. See Adam Mastoon, The Shared Heart: Portraits and Stories Celebrating Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young People (New York: William Morrow and Company, ). See also Julia Penelope, ed., The Original Coming Out Stories (Freedom, Calif.: The Crossing Press, ); Patrick Merla, ed., Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories (New York: Avon Books, ); Lisa C. Moore, ed., Does Your Mama Know? An Anthology of Black Lesbian Coming Out Stories (Washington, D.C.: Redbone Press, ); and Joan Larkin, ed., A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories (New York: Harper Perennial, ).

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Lesbian Barroom Brawls: Racial Integration in the 1950s

This chapter continues the discussion of resistant politics from the margins. On the basis of the real needs they face, people form alliances to fight together against dominant practices. The margins, too, are structured by social practices such that not all of us who resist are fully, equally, and comfortably part of the “we who disagree.” The alliances that people form and the changes they effect may be tenuous and temporary when the basis for the “we who disagree” is assumed to be a shared identity rather than real, shared needs. Any social location is structured by social practices, making them suitable subjects for analysis. Those social locations on the margins, structured by oppressive practices, are potential sites of resistance to and transformation of some of those practices. People who occupy these sites are dissidents to the broader community or background. A lesbian barroom in Buffalo in the s was such a site. In this chapter, I examine the actions of some lesbians in Buffalo living in a racially segregated society which brought about racial integration in this bar. This racial integration was an act of dissent and was in response to very real needs that white and Black lesbians faced living in a racist and heterosexist society. The actions of these women— literally fighting racist and homophobic people and carving out a geographic area in the city—challenged part of the shared and recognized consensus that many people have inherited.

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The Concept of Dissent

Dissent is a challenge to some part of the shared background; it questions and perhaps transforms a dimension of the recognized and enacted consensus of a community. When people recognize that we are participants in a system of practices and that our actions contribute to the maintenance of the existing institutions, a tension may be introduced into our lives. My sense of identity or my feelings of comfort with my identity as a member of a community may no longer be at ease with the public, shared life of the community. Each of us may begin to feel that she is an outsider to the broader community and feel alienated from the very institutions that have endowed us with our identities. Some of the judgments, beliefs, and attitudes we have taken on as members of particular communities may be in tension with those of other communities in which we are also members. The same institutions and practices that endow us with our identities are maintained by our participation. The greater the internal coherence of a community, the greater the reach of the intellectual (and material) authority relations.1 In order to be a community, there must be some degree of internal coherence among its members and practices. There are some communities that are highly monolithic and therefore have an exceptionally high degree of internal coherence. A community strictly segregated by race or religion would also possess a high degree of internal coherence. In communities such as these, there may be little room for dissent on particular issues. Buffalo was not such a monolithic community, though it was segregated. The city had racial divides as well as divisions along class lines and sexual orientation. These cut across each other, bringing people into contact who might not normally meet one another. These divides resulted in various competing subcommunities, each possessing its own standards, norms, and practices. Embodied

1. Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), discusses the role of intellectual authority relations in exercising the “pull toward objectivity.” Exerting or exercising the pull requires that people or institutions be accorded a certain intellectual authority. Certain persons, in virtue of their position as parents and teachers, are accorded such authority. Structured institutions such as a university, a religion, or even science in general, are taken as possessing such authority. Our judgments also have material expression, and these expressions range from material suasion in the sense of giving praise and rewards for things done correctly, to more coercive means where a person may be reprimanded or punished for saying or doing something. Sanctions are brought to bear on those who seek to act, think, or talk in ways that are deviant. One runs into conflict and consequences when one deviates from common practice (RFM, §).

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within each of these subcommunities were multiple language games, many of which came into conflict.2

Lesbians in the 1950s

Following World War II, “the homosexual” was a particular target for persecution in America. Between  and , , men and women were dismissed from the armed forces and civilian agencies for being homosexual.3 The Republicans decided to make homosexuality a key issue in their party platform. Guy George Gabrielson, the Republican national chairman, wrote in the official party newsletter in early  that “perhaps as dangerous as the actual communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our government in recent years” (OGTL, ). The Senate justified the government policy of harassment of homosexuals by claiming that they must be fired from government jobs because of the “lack 2. Science and religion are often taken to be competing institutions within a community. As an example of a historical figure who was caught between these two competing institutions, consider the inner conflict in the mind of Philip Gosse, the father of Edmund Gosse. The elder Gosse was a religious fundamentalist who believed in the literal interpretation of the Christian holy scriptures. He was also very well read in the scientific literature of his time. As a fundamentalist, he believed that the world was created in  .. His readings of the biologists and geologists provided strong evidence for a more distant date of Creation. Most of Gosse’s contemporaries who shared his knowledge of science either rejected or reinterpreted the scriptures. Gosse, however, turned in the opposite direction and reinterpreted the scientific findings. For him, it was the fossil readings that were misleading, not the scriptures. Gosse’s conclusion was that God did create the world in  .. but that he created it in such a way that there were misleading indications of its origins, designed as such to capture the unbelievers and test the faith of the believers. The existence of the competing religious and scientific institutions made the conflict in Gosse’s mind possible. Each of these institutions provided the grounds for questioning and doubting the other. Gosse was, in effect, a dissident in the scientific community while remaining a nondissident in his religious community. The conflict experienced by Philip Gosse can be understood as an example of a fairly common experience in our everyday life. People often speak of internal disagreements they have with themselves or the feeling of being pulled in two or more directions by different parts of themselves. Such inner conflicts can involve varying degrees of intensity and Gosse’s conflict is more on the extreme end of the spectrum. For Gosse, a fundamental religious worldview and particular beliefs were directly opposed to a scientific view of the world. He became a dissident within the scientific community because of his religious beliefs. See Renford Bambrough, “Fools and Heretics,” in Wittgenstein Centenary Essays, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. 3. Lillian Fadermann, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in TwentiethCentury America (New York: Columbia University Press, ). See especially chapter , “The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name: McCarthyism and Its Legacy.” Unless otherwise stated, all quotes will come from this work, hereafter abbreviated OGTL.

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of emotional stability which is found in most sex perverts and the weakness of their moral fiber” (OGTL, ). Federal agencies began to use lie detector tests in loyalty investigations of men and women in “sensitive” government jobs. One of the first executive acts of President Eisenhower was an order that mandated the investigation for homosexuality not only of persons in “sensitive” positions, but of any government employee and all new applicants. This act also did not permit any judicial review of decisions based on the investigations (OGTL, –). In the popular press and in mass circulation magazines, there was very little opposition to the harassment of homosexuals. Often mass circulation magazines presented homosexuality as a chief cause of American ills in articles with titles such as “New Moral Menace to Our Youth.” In this particular article, same-sex love was said to lead to “drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder” (OGTL, –). When a magazine attempted to present homosexuality in a better light, censorship became a distinct possibility. The homophile magazine One published in  a story of a woman choosing to be a lesbian. The postmaster general of Los Angeles confiscated all copies of the issue that had been mailed and demanded that the publisher prove that the story was not “obscene, lewd, lascivious, and filthy.” The federal district court upheld the postmaster’s decision, arguing, “This article is nothing more than cheap pornography calculated to promote lesbianism. It falls far short of dealing with homosexuality from a scientific, historic, or critical point of view. . . . An article may be vulgar, offensive, and indecent even though not regarded as such by a particular group . . . because their own social and moral standards are far below those of the general community. . . . Social standards are fixed by and for the great majority and not by and for a hardened or weakened minority” (OGTL, ). It is a reasonable hypothesis that gay and lesbian subcommunities were established as a response and challenge to the social standards fixed by the general community and to their overt persecution in the s. Lesbian bars, for example, were an arena where one did not face persecution or punishment for not meeting gender stereotypes or for desiring women. Such bars were a place where women could go to meet other women and not worry about getting beaten up by a male patron for looking at women. Apologies or justifications did not have to be offered for one’s desire and identity as a lesbian.4 As one woman notes, “To us it was our world, a small world, yes; but if you are starving you don’t 4. I do not want to romanticize lesbian bars and imply that they were safe haven from all violence. Police brutality, white and Black straight men, and violence among lesbians were common features of the lives of many lesbians.

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refuse a slice of bread, and we were starving—just for the feeling of having others around us” (OGTL, ). These bars often bristled with the excitement of women together, defying their own outlaw status and creating their own rules and their own worlds.

Life in Buffalo in the 1950s

The lesbian community in Buffalo in the s was recognized and identified as such by both lesbians and heterosexuals. This community had geographical markers, and one area of the city was considered the “gay area” and certain bars were known to be lesbian bars. In some ways, it is misleading to speak of a single lesbian community at this time.5 Rather, there were several communities of women that overlapped to varying degrees. These communities were divided along race lines, white and Black, as well as along the lines of class, working and more upwardly mobile. Against the oppressive social and political climate of the s, this time is also marked by the appearance of what Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis define as the “tough bar lesbian.” Kennedy and Davis use this phrase to refer to bar butches, which problematically erases femme lesbians. I prefer to use the phrase “tough bar butch” where appropriate and when I want to refer specifically to butch lesbians. Joan Nestle suggests that butch and femme roles and relationships were not imitations of heterosexuality but unique in themselves. These roles were not based on the social and sexual models with which lesbians had grown up, but rather were based on natural drives and lesbian-specific, lesbian culturally developed behavior.6 The butch/femme roles were rather rigid, and many of the lesbians with whom Kennedy and Davis spoke recalled that there was little tolerance for women who did not identify themselves as one or the other. Within the lesbian bar community, maintaining consistent butch/femme behavior was a constant pressure. Women who did not conform were the objects of derision. One woman notes: “They used to make little wise cracks . . . you know, like, ‘well, I wonder which way she’s gonna go tonight.’ Little smirks . . . 5. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Penguin, ); hereafter cited in the text as BOL. See especially chapter , “A Weekend Wasn’t a Weekend If There Wasn’t a Fight: The Tough Bar Lesbians of the s,” and chapter , “Maybe ’Cause Things Were Harder . . . You Had to Be More Friendly: Race and Class in the Lesbian Community of the s.” 6. Joan Nestle, “Butch/Fem Relationships: Sexual Courage in the s,” Heresies: Sex Issue  (): –.

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[and] ‘Oh, I see she’s playing femme this week’ or ‘Oh, she’s playing the big bad butch this week’” (BOL, ). It was thought by many in the lesbian community that people who refused to conform to these rigid expectations disrupted the butch/femme social order. This new-style butch was streetwise and ready to fight back when provoked by straights as well as other lesbians. These tough bar butches, both Black and white, were central players in the Buffalo lesbian community of the s. Most often these women were blue-collar workers and their background was working class. Kennedy and Davis hypothesize that these women primarily worked blue-collar jobs because these positions did not place as strong a demand that women dress and act suitably “feminine.” Blue-collar jobs didn’t demand as high a level of “passing” as a secretarial job or a teaching job would demand. And, for Black lesbians, the range of available employment was already severely limited by their race. The tough bar butches were less concerned with passing and were more defiant in their public appearances.7 It would be a mistake to assume that only the butches were rebellious. A femme woman was often in the position of supporting both herself and her butch partner if her partner was not willing to compromise appearances and take a job requiring skirts. Femme women were proud in public with their lovers and made little attempt to hide their outlaw status at a time when supposedly every woman’s fondest wish was to be a wife, mother, and keeper of a lovely home. Femmes were rebellious in their own right, not just because they were seen in the company of butch women. They, as much as butch women, played an active role in the community. The category of working-class tough bar butches included both white lesbians and Black lesbians. The group of working-class white lesbians generally gathered at Bingo’s bar. Black working-class women, to some degree, also visited this bar. Bingo’s was, in fact, one of the few places in Buffalo where white and Black women gathered in public. Black working-class women also had their own spaces to which some white working-class women were invited. Weekend-long house parties in Black neighborhoods were common, and Black lesbians participated and hosted their own house parties. The roots of Black lesbians were firmly established in the Black communities. When Black woman threw house parties, it was a way for them to be both Black and lesbian (BOL, ). Some white women did come to these parties, but in terms of frequency and consistency, 7. Kennedy and Davis suggest that this attitude was an attempt to end the phenomenon of a double life—passing as straight and feminine at work while identifying as lesbian and butch outside of work (BOL, –).

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it was more likely that a group of Black lesbians would show up at Bingo’s than a group of white women would go into a Black neighborhood. White lesbians may have held assumptions about the dangers of Black neighborhoods that prevented them from crossing too frequently into Black neighborhoods. A third group distinct from the white tough bar lesbians and the Black tough bar lesbians were those white lesbians who “passed” and generally whose economic background or situation was more middle class or upwardly mobile. They tended to work more white-collar jobs than blue collar. This group of women gathered at a bar called the Carousel, and the Carousel was known as a more upscale bar where fights generally did not break out, as they did at Bingo’s.8 Small groups of tough bar lesbians, both Black and white, crossed racial divisions. The crossing of racial boundaries and the violation of informal segregation may have been a consequence of many of the women having a tough masculine appearance and an unwillingness to make themselves invisible. These lesbians were easy targets for straight men, whose hostility often provoked the fights. As one woman comments, “[Fighting was] the only way we could act then. We just didn’t have any ground except what we fought for. Especially butches on the street. . . . People just stared at them. Out on the street you were fair game” (BOL, ). Most of the attacks directed against both Black and white lesbians were by white men (BOL, ), and white men particularly targeted Black lesbians. Black narrators remember the Buffalo police in the s as terribly hostile, to the extent that “disorderly conduct” consisted of walking in their own neighborhoods (BOL, ). The tough bar lesbians’ emphasis was on survival in particularly hostile and difficult conditions. They were well versed in the harsh realities of everyday life on the streets and in the bars; not getting killed or physically assaulted were their major concerns. This hostile reality created needs that made interracial connections necessary. The times were so difficult that Black and white tough bar lesbians had to work and fight together in order to survive. Willingness to engage in physical confrontation gave lesbians more control over their environment, including their bars. Physical conflict was part of these women’s battle for their own territory and their right to occupy it. One woman commented with pride 8. Kennedy and Davis theorize that the lesbians who had a tendency to congregate at the Carousel were uncomfortable socializing with the tougher, more obvious crowd (BOL, –). This discomfort may have sprung from a desire on the part of these lesbians to be more discrete and not to call attention to themselves as lesbians in the way that the tougher bar butches, both Black and white who refused to try to pass, called attention to themselves. And these white middle-class lesbians may not have wanted to call attention to themselves in ways that threatened the racial and economic privilege they possessed.

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that “we fought for what’s ours and we still have it” (BOL, ). This fighting required and engendered feelings of solidarity. As one narrator notes, “Back in that era we were a very close, tight knit group. If any guy would start something, we would just make a circle around him and just walk right in. We wouldn’t beat him up or anything. We would just walk that circle to the door” (BOL, ). Feelings of solidarity were also engendered in the ways that lesbians took care of each other, care that was needed as a direct result of fighting. Oppression, having to fight together, and caring for one another can produce a certain consciousness and knowledge. What is done in light of that consciousness and knowledge is what is important. Actions can bring knowledge, and our actions can change in light of that knowledge. One consequence that followed from women having to fight together in order to survive and banding together in opposition to white heterosexism was the achievement of a more interracial social life for some women. This more interracial social life also involved interracial couples, who, in a sharply segregated society, were taboo. Consequences follow from the breaking of taboos, and so both Black and white women were considered race traitors and unwelcome in their own communities. One woman describes how she and her friends started going to Bingo’s. She says, “So a whole bunch of us got together and went to the place. And it ended up that we just kept going, we made friends with quite a few. And then there’s still some of that . . . don’t let one of the white girls like the Black girls and she was considered a nigger lover” (BOL, ). Lesbians involved in interracial relationships were subject, to varying degrees, to sanctions from both their own racial communities and the communities of their lovers. The connections they established, however transitory, did subvert the logic of a racist system. Even for a moment, the ranks were broken.

The Continuation of Change

The story that Kennedy and Davis tell us about lesbian life in Buffalo in the s is incomplete. The emergence of an open lesbian culture in the s was marginalizing for many of the older generation of lesbians. Butch/femme roles were seriously challenged by feminists in the s as being oppressive to women. Roles that were integral to more than a generation of lesbians were being rejected by younger women, and those lesbians who continued to identify and live as butch and femme were regarded as suspect. Butch women were taken to be imitating men, while femmes were said to be embodying male patriarchal norms of femininity. The older lesbian subculture had not altered much, and

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instead still another lesbian subculture was being created by groups of women willing to proclaim their lesbianism while rejecting the styles and behaviors their predecessors had held as sacrosanct (OGTL, –). For their part, older lesbians, both Black and white, chose not to participate in the new gay liberation movements and lesbian feminist movements. These women came of age in a very different period from the civil rights movement, antiwar movements, and the sexual revolution. They did not belong to homophile organizations; they hung out in bars and private homes. But these older lesbians had been visible (as evidenced by their being so frequently targeted by men), and the new notion of “coming out” may not have made sense to them. Many of these women had experienced major economic hardships as a consequence of their lesbian identity and appearance. Those who were still “closeted” worried about losing whatever little economic security they had. Black lesbians faced a more complicated situation. With the growth of the civil rights movement and its demands for full and equal rights and protection under the law, Black lesbians found themselves pulled by a stronger allegiance along racial lines than along lines of sexual orientation. Compared to the long history of the hatred and oppression of Black people, the treatment of gays and lesbians was not as devastating and pervasive. Because most gay and lesbian movements were composed of white people, there was also the (well-founded) fear that racism would be as prevalent in these organizations as it was everywhere else. As Pat Parker notes in her poem, “Have You Ever Tried to Hide?” a white lesbian might have a smaller foot than a white man, “but it’s still on my neck.”9 It was not until  that Black lesbians and feminists organized along race lines to form the Black Feminist Organization. Another way a story can be incomplete is that certain voices have not been heard. One set not heard by the lesbian community or by the feminists in the s were the voices of he-shes, or transgendered people. He-shes were those individuals who were often taken by themselves and others to be at the far end of the butch scale. The main character in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, Jess Goldberg, grows up differently gendered in the Buffalo area.10 Jess came out as a butch in the bars and worked in blue-collar factory jobs and then made the decision to pass as a man when left without a community or job in the s. The incorporation of the experiences of Leslie Feinberg and other transgendered people makes the story more complete. Transgendered people who have had to fight in order to survive and to have their voices heard are dissidents to 9. Pat Parker, Pit Stop (Oakland, Calif.: Women’s Press Collective, ). 10. Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, ).

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both lesbian and feminist communities as well as to the broader community. The actions of these people and the telling of their stories has challenged many of the concepts and beliefs that, for the most part, would be considered bedrock, namely that there are two sexes and two genders naturally connected.

Need, Not Just Identity

Sharing an oppression by no means guarantees solidarity or partnership for change. The nature of the connection established by people who are oppressed is critical. Partnership in misery and partnership in change are not the same; partnership in misery does not necessarily provide for partnership in change. As June Jordan says, “When we get the monsters off our backs all of us may want to run in very different directions.” A commonly felt conflict is not a sufficient condition to effect change. The ultimate connection between people, even of the same race or sexual orientation, cannot be the enemy. Rather, according to Jordan, “the ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us. It is not only who you are, in other words, but what we can do for each other that will determine the connection.”11 The emphasis is not so much on sharing some sort of identity, but rather what each of us can and will do for each other. The connection is made in the face of particular situations requiring action. As Wittgenstein notes, “One might say: the axis of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need” (PI §). One question to keep asking ourselves is how do we forge connections with other people? The connection is not a matter of identity politics, but a real need facing individuals. And one is an ally to another not on the basis of who one is, but rather on the basis of what one does for justice, what one does for equality, and what one does for freedom.12 Establishing connections and undertaking certain actions can represent direct challenges to the training, initiation, and acquiring of worldviews that we each come to have. Part of what we acquire as part of our worldviews are beliefs about our own and other races and beliefs about sexual orientations. We do acquire a whole host of beliefs, and we are expected to act in certain ways that are in accordance with these beliefs. Living in a racist and heterosexist society, we participate in different kinds of practices and take on social identities by virtue of these 11. June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays (Boston: South End Press, ), , . 12. June Jordan, Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union (New York: Pantheon, ), .

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practices. Changing our participation in these practices and challenging the practices themselves involve undermining the intellectual and material authority relations of communities. If the goal of training and initiation is to instill, at some level, habitual responses that are similar to other members of the same community, then challenges to these authorities will, in some sense, take the form of breaking habits. Challenges can be in the form of being traitorous to some part of one’s worldview. Given that dissent involves a challenge to some part of the recognized consensus, and the basis of this consensus is ultimately agreement in actions, then it follows that challenges involve action. It’s not who you are, but it’s what you do. The usefulness of identity politics for the gay and lesbian movement has become the target of great criticism lately. Identity politics is the view that those of us who share an identity such as gay or lesbian share a political agenda as a consequence of the shared identity. Identity politics may require that some of us check a part of our identity at the door. This was brought home to some of us when the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest and wealthiest gay civil rights lobby, endorsed pro-life Republican Senator Al D’Amato over his gayfriendly, pro-choice Democratic opponent in the  election in New York. Said Urvashi Vaid of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, “There can never be a separation between reproductive freedom and sexual freedom.”13 The alternative to identity politics is coalition politics based on needs shared by marginalized groups. Coalition politics offers a more productive and effective way to engage in resistant politics, particularly at the grassroots level. Coalition building has been essential to Kentucky’s gay rights movement, which recently had a great victory when the Louisville Board of Aldermen passed an ordinance outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender orientation. This same proposal had failed to pass on its previous three attempts. The Fairness Campaign, the local gay and lesbian group, attributes its success to its alliance with the NAACP and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Those working for the passage of hate crime legislation in Kentucky have found it vital to join forces with Blacks in rural areas where church burnings have been a major concern.14 The needs are immediate and at the grassroots level. Much of the antigay war is being waged on the local and state level. Of the upcoming  gay-related bills pending in state legislatures, almost half of them are gay hostile.15 Oregon, 13. Quoted in Doug Ireland, “Rebuilding the Gay Movement,” The Nation, July , , . 14. Ibid., . 15. Doug Ireland, “Same-Sexers Under Siege,” The Nation, July , , –. In , right-wing groups began to increase their efforts to mobilize people of color to take action against gay, lesbian,

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for example, has had antigay referenda on its ballots in , , , , , and . The referendum on the  ballot would have banned openly gay teachers, the establishment of any gay student groups, and any teaching (“promotion”) of homosexuality in schools. It was narrowly defeated, but its supporters have vowed to attempt its passage again. The Christian Coalition has focused its efforts and resources in Dade County, Florida, in order to repeal the county commission’s passage of an ordinance that bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. While they failed to get enough signatures to attempt a repeal effort in the  election, they, too, have promised to continue their efforts. The need for coalitions grows as unions are targeted, welfare reforms pass, racial profiling becomes standard procedure, health insurance becomes less available, immigrants are refused education, English-only initiatives appear on more ballots, Affirmative Action is dismantled, and so on. These practices and acts all hang together, creating an oppressive web or system that oppresses groups of people. This system, this background, is precisely what must be challenged.

bisexual, and transsexual equal rights bills. More recently, religious groups have advocated for the passage of bills protecting religious liberty. Many gay activists are worried that passage of federal bills like the Religious Liberty Protection Act might have the effect of invalidating state and local civil rights ordinances. See the legislative updates at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force at http://www.ngltf.org.

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If Everybody’s Responsible, Then Nobody Is

In this chapter, I continue the discussion that I began in Chapter  about the responsibility for extreme acts of racism such as the recent burnings of African-American churches in the South. I do not deny that it is appropriate to assign responsibility to those who actually set the fires. These acts cause a great deal of harm and suffering while at the same time reinforcing a background of racism. Individual harmful and oppressive acts are made possible and intelligible by existing practices, and they reinforce these practices. It is a mistake to assign responsibility only to those who actually set the fires. Doing so, I argue, keeps the focus and moral outrage on particular actions rather than on the conditions that make such acts possible and intelligible. Those of us who hold racist attitudes and beliefs and participate in racist practices are, in some way, responsible for creating a combustible environment. That combustibility makes the burnings possible and intelligible. We must, therefore, conceive of responsibility for practices, and not just actions. After I read an early version of “Conspiracies and Connect the Dots” at a conference on race sponsored by the Radical Philosophy Association, one person challenged the view I articulated. This chapter is a sustained response to his challenge. First I lay out my interlocutor’s objections and reveal the account of moral responsibility I take to underlie his criticisms. I call this

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underlying account the linked chain, and I describe this account, pointing to where it works well, and where it does not. To further explicate this linked chain account, I turn to Larry May’s work, Sharing Responsibility. May’s account, while an improvement on the original linked chain account, is not adequate to the task of addressing responsibility for racist practices. In formulating an alternative both to the original linked chain and to May’s account, I stretch the chain to include attitudes and unintentional actions. I also expand upon May’s notions of collective and shared responsibility. I then move to an account of an association that enables me to make sense of the claim that white people qua white bear responsibility. I end with a discussion of Margaret Urban Walker’s project of making practices of responsibility central in moral theory. These practices of responsibility, like any other practices, must themselves be subject to critical scrutiny and evaluation.

The Criticisms

The main criticisms leveled at my claims in “Conspiracies” revolve around the coherence of my claim, given a traditional account of responsibility. For the sake of simplicity and clarity, I have boiled down my critic’s argument into three main points: . My view rests on a paradox: if all of us are responsible, then none of us is. . My view that all white people share responsibility stretches the concept of responsibility to meaninglessness. How could I use the same concept to evaluate the actions of the arsonists and the actions (and inactions) of other white people? I call this the dilution view. Responsibility, when spread so thin because it is spread over so many people, loses its potency and effectiveness. Responsibility works best when it can be heaped on particular individuals in light of their actions and inactions. . My position engenders a form of helplessness. Suppose that my view that all white people bear some responsibility is right; then what are we individual white people supposed to do? We cannot change the system by ourselves, therefore there is nothing we can do. These three criticisms are fundamentally connected: Responsibility attaches to individuals, and by extension, to groups. But, in order to spread responsibility as far as I want, it must be spread thinly. Spread thus, it loses its effectiveness

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because the motivational force of responsibility for individuals requires a certain dosage.

Linked Chain Paradigm

The three young white men who first burgled an African-American church and torched it, and who then went to another African-American church and set it ablaze while yelling racial epithets, are responsible for these actions. Such cases are paradigms for how responsibility works. The intentions played a causal role in the actions undertaken. These actions were freely chosen on the basis of one’s attitudes and intentions. The consequences of these acts were harmful. There was a direct causal chain between the intentions of the individuals, their actions, and the consequences of them. Most importantly, all three elements— intention, action, and consequence—are linked together. I call this model the “linked chain account.” It is true that in much of traditional moral theory, responsibility attaches to the intentional acts of individuals and, by extension, to the consequences of these acts. The dominant moral theories (Kantianism, Utilitarianism, rights-based), though they differ in very important ways with respect to content, all share a similar form. Margaret Urban Walker calls this shared form the theoreticaljuridical model.1 According to Walker, “The regnant type of moral theory in contemporary ethics is a codifiable (and usually compact) set of moral formulas (or procedures for selecting formulas) that can be applied by any agent to a situation to yield a justified and determinate action-guiding judgment. The formulas or procedures (if there is more than one) are typically seen as rules or principles at a high level of generality. Application of these formulas is typically seen as something like deduction or instantiation. The formulas and their applications yield the same for all agents indifferently” (). The picture is that morality is an individually acting guiding system within or for a person (). Given the application of an abstract rule, whether it is in the form of Kant’s Categorical Imperative where motivation or intention is key, or the utilitarian’s maximization principle where consequences are the focus, it makes sense that the linked chain is the regnant model of moral responsibility. The three elements taken together will determine the kind or degree of 1. Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (New York: Routledge, ); hereafter cited in the text.

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responsibility that an individual or group has for actions. All three elements in one action present the strongest case. If, for example, there is some question about the voluntariness of the action, or the intentions are not clear, or the consequences of the action are not all that bad, then we often say that these mitigate and lessen the degree of responsibility. What is important is that intentions and consequences are linked by the action. In the absence of action, there is little cause to assign responsibility. Intentions without action are impotent, and it is actions that have consequences. A particular conception of agency underlies this linked chain account. Full agency involves the ability and opportunity to make choices freely. A person who has reached a certain degree of maturation, demonstrates appropriate rational behavior, and finds herself evaluating and choosing acts, is exercising full moral agency. Agency requires intentional acts freely chosen; agency is manifest in intentional actions. Unintentional acts, mere reactions, and coerced acts do not demonstrate full agency. This linked chain paradigm provides a formula for the moral evaluation of events. In the case mentioned above, those of us who did not light the fires can discern the intentions of the arsonists. The racial epithets they yelled as they set the fires are evidence of their intentions and attitudes. The actions that resulted from these intentions are the fires. Some of the consequences, such as the destroyed buildings, can clearly be seen, while other consequences are not so easily noticed, such as the church members’ feelings of fear and anger. This paradigm encourages us to look for the links between intentions, actions, and consequences. When we can see these links, we can make judgments of responsibility. This linked chain account of responsibility is also equipped to address groups’ responsibilities for the actions of their members. A group, according to Iris Young, is “a collection of persons that recognize themselves and one another as in a unified relation with one another. . . . Members of the group, that is, are united by action that they undertake together. In acknowledging himself or herself as a member of the group, an individual acknowledges himself or herself as oriented toward the same goals as the others; each individual thereby assumes the common project as a project for his or her individual action.”2 The project of a group is collective; each member recognizes that it is best undertaken by a group. As examples of such collective projects best undertaken by a group, Young includes storming the Bastille, organizing a women’s conference, and achieving women’s suffrage. 2. Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), ; hereafter cited in the text.

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Obviously, groups can be organized around projects that are not morally defensible in the ways that organizing for women’s suffrage or a women’s conference are. The Ku Klux Klan is a group whose members have a shared project of asserting the supremacy of white Christian people and the inferiority of all other races. In those few cases where the arsonists were found to be members of hate groups, many people would say that all the members of that group are responsible, even those individuals who did not participate in those particular arsons. Though they did not actually light a fire, these other individuals created and cultivated an environment in which such racist acts were sanctioned, and perhaps rewarded. By holding all members of hate groups responsible, we are saying that they have been creating an atmosphere which they ought not to have through their actions and attitudes, and this resulted in some of its members undertaking overtly racist actions such as the church burnings. This notion of group responsibility is being utilized within the legal system to redress wrongs and injuries perpetrated by individual members of certain groups. The Southern Poverty Law Center has adopted a strategy of suing hate groups such as the United Klans of America and the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) in civil court. In , the law center won a seven-million-dollar judgment against the Klan and all the Klansmen who had played a role in the lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama. The suit was filed on behalf of Donald’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald. As a result of the court’s decision, the United Klans of America had to turn over its headquarters to Beulah Mae Donald. In October , a jury awarded twelve and a half million dollars to the family of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian who had been killed by members of a Portland, Oregon, skinhead group. The suit was filed against WAR and its leaders, Tom and John Metzger. Prior to the killing of Seraw, the members of that skinhead group had been at a training organized by the top recruiter for WAR. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center argued that the Metzgers had a preexisting relationship with the perpetrators and that the Metzgers did occupy a position of authority over the Portland skinheads. Assigning responsibility to a group such as the Ku Klux Klan and WAR keeps us within the linked chain paradigm, except that the actions of groups instead of the actions of an individual are the relevant ones in question. The intentions of individual members are formed and organized against a backdrop of the intentions of the larger group. The civil suits filed on behalf of the victims or families of victims appeal to what Larry May calls collective responsibility.3 In 3. Larry May, Sharing Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); hereafter cited in the text. In his chapter “Groups and Personal Value Transformation,” May notes that there

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the cases of the church arsonists and the Ku Klux Klan mentioned above, the linked chain account works very well. But there are instances when it does not work so well, yet we still hold on to it. Each link in the chain has weaknesses. The importance of evaluating intentions shows up most clearly in Kant’s moral philosophy. According to Kant in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, the moral goodness of an action comes solely from the intention from which the action springs.4 Furthermore, the content of the intention matters. The only action that is morally good is the action that is done for the sake of the moral law; mere conformity with the moral law is not sufficient (). Furthermore, he says, “The moral worth depends, therefore, not on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition according to which, without regard to any objects of the faculty of desire, that action has been done” (). Inclinations do not matter, nor do the consequences of the actions. What is necessary is that the principle of volition be from duty. It is also necessary that the intention be clearly identifiable. However, in many cases, the intentions or attitudes of the agent are clear neither to the agent himself nor to others around him evaluating the act. Intentions are complicated phenomena, and so, too, must be the search for the intention or the set of intentions that caused the agent to choose one course of action over another. We often attribute intentionality in an after-the-fact manner. The intention reveals itself to the agent and others after the act is done. On the basis of a particular act, we say that must have been the intention. In other cases, though, an act can be made to accord with a variety of intentions, and choosing one as the cause may be a matter of caprice or convenience. In order to evaluate the moral permissibility and praiseworthiness of an action, the intention must be recognizable to both the agent and others around him. Wittgenstein might say that this would have to mean that the agent sees are two main ways that a group changes the values of its members. First, the organizational structure or decision-making process (or lack thereof) brings about a conformity in values of the group. Second, conformity is bred by the feelings of camaraderie, solidarity, and alienation from or aversion to what adversely affects the group as a whole (). Values reside in individuals and not in a group. May is careful to assert that groups are not some superentities that are reifications of individuals. Talking about groups influencing the values and behaviors of individuals is a way of speaking in shorthand. Rather, “it is individuals within groups, operating through the formal and informal relationships or structures of the group, who influence the values of their fellow members” (). While I agree that organizational structure and social identification are two means to bring about individuals’ conformity to group values, I am neither convinced that values are solely the possession of individuals nor that groups do not influence the values of its members. 4. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Elligton (Indianapolis: Hackett, ).

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the causal connection from the inside and the observers from the outside (PI §). But here it is appropriate to ask exactly what is being seen or ascertained by the agent and others. We can ask both about the transparency of an intention and its location. Consider the following set of passages: “I am not ashamed of what I did then, but of the intention which I had.”—And didn’t the intention lie also in what I did? What justifies the shame? The whole history of the incident. “For a moment I meant to . . .” That is, I had a particular feeling, an inner experience; and I remember it.—And now remember quite precisely! Then the ‘inner experience’ of intending seems to vanish again. Instead one remembers thoughts, feelings, movements, and also connexions with earlier situations. It is as if one had altered the adjustment of a microscope. One did not see before what is now in focus. “Well, that only shews that you have adjusted your microscope wrong. You were supposed to look at a particular section of the culture, and you are seeing a different one.” There is something right about that. But suppose that (with a particular adjustment of the lenses) I did remember a single sensation; how have I the right to say that is what I call the “intention”? It might be that (for example) a particular tickle accompanied every one of my intentions. What is the natural expression of an intention?—Look at a cat when it stalks a bird; or a beast when it wants to escape. (PI §§–) For reasons similar to those discussed in Chapter  about interpretations not being understood as the mental accompaniments to the meanings of words, an intention cannot be understood as a mental process that causes or accompanies an action. Searching for some discrete sensation or mental process that one identifies as the intention causing the action is misguided. Wittgenstein might remind us that we couldn’t really be sure what we were looking for, or when we had found it. It would be as futile as seeking the core of an onion by peeling away its layers. When we “look for intention” we need to take into account “the whole history of the incident,” and this involves looking at context, which entails looking at the practices that shape our behaviors and attitudes. With regard to actions, the linked chain can handle cases of inaction of a particular sort. In the linked chain account, inaction is a species of action. Inaction involves choosing not to act in a particular situation. But this is not the only brand of inaction.

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Perhaps the biggest weakness of the intention/attitude and action link is the assumption that all acts suitable for evaluation are caused by an intention. Many acts lack an intention, but nevertheless should be the object of moral analysis. Evaluating consequences is a very tricky undertaking, one that has been the subject of great concern since the development of Utilitarianism and Consequentialism. It is not always possible to draw a clear line between an act and its consequences. Nor is it possible to draw a ring around all those things that are consequences of a particular act. When is something a consequence of this act and not of that act? But even though the linked chain cannot address all moral situations, it still has a hold on us. When it works, it works extremely well. But sometimes in the interests of assigning responsibility, we make the case fit the paradigm by bracketing some considerations in favor of others, or redefining the situation, or making some features the defining ones.

Collective and Shared Responsibility

Larry May, in Sharing Responsibility, stretches the linked chain so that he can address the issue of responsibility for racist attitudes. I turn now to an examination of how he stretches this chain, which will be useful for me as I stretch it even further. Collective Responsibility

Larry May argues that the responsibility that the Ku Klux Klan has for the actions of its members is collective responsibility. May defines collective responsibility as “nondistributed responsibility of a group structured in such a way that action can occur that would not occur if the members were acting outside the group” (). With collective responsibility, the group as a whole is responsible. This does not entail that all, if any, are individually responsible for the harm (). When a group is collectively responsible for a harm, the group as a whole must have done something, or failed to do something, that contributed to the harm. One example that May offers is the collective responsibility that the United States bears for the downing of an Iranian passenger plane by the U.S. military (). A corporation also bears responsibility for the actions of its employees because the corporate decisions shape the attitudes and behaviors of its employees. And the absence of a company policy on sexual abuse, for instance, might be taken as a tacit condoning of it by employees (–).

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Shared Responsibility

May offers one other kind of responsibility that will be useful in making my argument about the responsibility that white people qua whites have for acts of racism. Shared responsibility, according to May, is “the aggregated responsibility of individuals, all of whom contribute to a result and for that reason are personally responsible, albeit to different degrees, for a given harmful result” (). When responsibility is shared, responsibility attaches to each individual member of a collective. Shared responsibility does not even depend upon the existence of a cohesive group because it concerns aggregated personal responsibility (). For example, those people who are at a beach but do not attempt to rescue a drowning child share responsibility for the harm of the child. Similarly, those people who hear a person shouting for help but do not call the police share responsibility for the harm done to that person. The residents of a New York apartment building who failed to do anything (including calling the police) while a woman was being murdered outside their building chose not to do anything. They have shared responsibility for their inaction (). Part of May’s project is expanding the scope of moral responsibility to include attitudes. He asserts that “those who have racist attitudes, as opposed to those who do not, create a climate of attitudes in which harm is more likely to occur . . . members of a community who share racist attitudes also share in the responsibility for racially motivated harms produced by some of the members because of this climate for racist attitudes” (). In expanding responsibility, May also advocates an expanded notion of agency that includes “those attitudes and dispositions that make overt behavior, even the behavior of others, more likely to occur” (). On May’s account, people who continue to hold racist views, even when they recognize the harm these attitudes can bring about, are exercising their agency. They are demonstrating a kind of moral recklessness because they are posing a threat to others, while refusing to do anything to lessen this risk (). Such people contribute to the production of racial violence indirectly by helping to create an environment in which overt behaviors are more likely to occur. With these notions of collective and shared responsibility, May has broadened the scope of responsibility. But his account remains in the linked chain paradigm and has too restricted a scope to enable me to justify the claim I make about whites’ responsibility for racism. May restricts his account by his emphasis on individual choice and his conception of the role and nature of attitudes: “[I]n arguing for the view that the attitudes and beliefs we choose, and not just our overt behaviors, are relevant to

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judgments of responsibility, I remain committed to the view that people should only be judged morally responsible for those things that are under our control; but control here does not necessarily mean that one could make the world a different place” (). On May’s view, one is in control when she can freely and voluntarily choose her attitudes and behaviors. This emphasis on individuals’ control—what they choose to believe and how they choose to act—is overly narrow. May, in his discussions of collective responsibility, is primarily concerned with groups. The groups he discusses and uses in examples—a college community, a corporation, the mob, health-care institutions, and the United States—have fairly clear criteria for membership. With the possible exception of the United States, they are all groups to which people voluntarily choose to belong. But there is another way people can be connected to each other. This alternative form of association will enable me to combine elements of both collective and shared responsibility which in turn will address the broader social practices in which actions and attitudes have their lives. Underlying May’s position is the assumption that it is possible for a person not to have racist attitudes. However, given my analysis throughout this work, this position just isn’t tenable. Against a long history of racist and oppressive practices, it is not possible for any person not to have racist attitudes. These attitudes are part of the worldviews we inherit. May understands attitudes to be not just cognitive states but affective states in which a person is, under normal circumstances, moved to behave (). The person who acts out of racist attitudes causes direct harm for which he ought to be held morally responsible. Other people who share these attitudes but do not act, according to May, cause an indirect harm because they bring about conditions in which others will cause harm. This distinction between direct and indirect harm makes me uneasy. It would appear that harm attaches primarily to actions, so what we are really evaluating are the harmful consequences of actions. This brings us right back again to the linked chain account. In May’s view, the harmfulness of an attitude is a function of its being instrumental to action. The harm is indirect, and perhaps only potential. If the attitude does not bring about an action causing direct harm, then should we conclude that the attitude was not harmful? I want to avoid this conclusion and address the ways attitudes are harmful in and of themselves, and not just because they lead to harmful actions. Attitudes in the absence of actions can be quite harmful. The racist climate is maintained in a variety of ways, and so the account of moral responsibility we need is one that is broader than the linked chain

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paradigm and incorporates elements of both collective and shared responsibility. My account expands the ways in which people ought to be responsible. Like shared responsibility, there must be an aggregate quality because it is individuals who act and who have attitudes. I also recognize that responsibility must also be collective because individuals’ actions and attitudes are made possible by and do reflect broader social practices and structures. The alternative account that I offer includes unintentional actions, unintentional inactions, and the harmfulness of attitudes, even in the absence of action. This account decenters the direct causal chain of intention→action→consequences. More specifically, under this new paradigm, unintentional actions can have harmful consequences for which people ought to bear responsibility. Also, intentions and attitudes in the absence of actions can have harmful consequences.

Unintentional Actions and Habits

Some actions and habits are so familiar that they do not need to be accompanied by any intention in order to be undertaken. Such actions help to maintain and reinforce the racist system in which we live. That I speak more nervously about racism when there are students of color in my classes, that I grimace when a group of African-American girls seems to be talking so loudly, and that I get defensive when my privilege is named by others, are all actions that are unintentional. As I discussed in Chapter , these bodily expressions are beliefs and attitudes that are open to the public. Attitudes have public expression and meaning. I will return to this point below. By “unintentional” I mean not intending harm, and in some cases, actually intending something good. Those who argued for a gradual ending of slavery on the basis of the belief that Black people were like children and unable to care and provide for themselves did not intend to harm Black people. To the contrary, they saw themselves as doing something good because they were trying to end slavery. Their approach, however, was harmful to Blacks because it did not abolish slavery immediately, thus prolonging the abuse and suffering of many. Further, the notion that Black people are like children dependent on white people for their well-being has been used not only as a justification of slavery, but also as a justification for their continued exclusion from certain jobs and careers. As I have argued, beliefs such as this can begin to function normatively, becoming ones around which others will cluster. In this role, they recede from view and doubt.

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Another example of unintentional actions that are harmful even though the intentions may have been good is the food stamp program. Food stamps often require that the bearer purchase a certain foodstuff, sometimes even specifying the brand. Such programs remove any choice because it is assumed that either the people who need this kind of assistance are not able to make a choice or that the choices they would make are bad ones.5 Losing the opportunity to make choices affects one’s ability to make choices. Perhaps this isn’t the greatest harm that one can suffer (especially when weighed against the “benefit” of having food), but it is a harm nevertheless. The loss of opportunity and ability to make choices results in more people becoming dependent on others (federal, state, and local agencies) at a time when programs are being cut and needs are growing. These unintentional actions are often difficult to name because the intentions that accompany them are often, in some sense, good. These cases show how actions have their meaning in their use and role in our communal life rather than in the intentions of individual actors.

Unintentional Inactions

The linked chain paradigm is primarily concerned with intentional actions. Inaction can similarly be intentional. One can choose not to stop an arsonist because she does not care if a church is torched or she does not want to get involved. Inaction such as this is often partly evaluated on the intentions that accompany it. The possibility of being harmed if she intervenes is a reason for not acting to prevent the fires. Talking about inaction in this way still preserves the relationship between intention and action. Many inactions, however, are not accompanied by such explicit intentions. Inactions such as these are important to evaluate because they are part of the oppressive foreground and background. One kind of inaction involves actions that would never occur to a person. Something not occurring to me may be a consequence of my privilege; I am not forced to pay attention to certain things. For example, a native speaker of English may never have to think about taking classes and achievement/aptitude tests in a different language. California’s Proposition  (which was passed in June ) requires that after one year in an English immersion class, all students be put into English-only classes. California also requires that all children, regardless 5. See Nancy Fraser, “Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation,” in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).

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of their first language, time lived in the United States, and time spent learning English, take math and reading achievement tests in English.6 It might not occur to a native speaker of English that such a test might not reliably measure what a child knows. The test scores of nonnative speakers could be significantly lower than their native English-speaking counterparts. Politicians and educational administrators put a huge emphasis on these tests. The results are used to place or track students through their elementary and secondary school careers. They are also used in diagnosing all sorts of social “problems” and prescribing remedies for these problems. Such remedies often involve more traditional subject matters, teaching methods, and forms of discipline.

Harmfulness of Attitudes in the Absence of Actions

My critic might say that attitudes, without actions, are like the ornamental knobs that spin on a machine but don’t engage with any part of it. In some sense, they just don’t do anything. One can have whatever she wants in her heart, so long as she doesn’t act on it. Underlying this position is the assumption that there is a clear connection between having an attitude, forming an intention on the basis of that attitude, and the action that springs from it. “Acting on an intention” or “acting out of an attitude” means acting in a way that attempts to achieve the desired outcome. This is certainly one way that actions are connected to intentions and attitudes. But there are other ways that actions can attach to attitudes. Consider a white person who tends to doubt that a Black person is having difficulty securing a homeowner’s loan because that person is Black, no matter what sort of evidence is produced. This white person may seek out and then parade a variety of explanations for the refusal—the person may have bad credit history or too much debt, or the house is in a “bad” neighborhood. For the white person, the refusal does not have anything to do with the race of the person, but only with that person’s financial history. Or the refusal may have nothing to do with the person but rather with the neighborhood. The neighborhood is 6. The San Francisco school district refused to administer these tests to non-English speakers in academic year –. The State Board of Education and the Department of Education petitioned the court to force San Francisco to administer these tests. Superior Court Judge David Garcia denied the petition in a terse, four-sentence ruling. Unfortunately, Garcia’s ruling applied only to the San Francisco district. A bill in the state assembly that would have exempted immigrant students with less than thirty months of English instruction from having to take such tests was vetoed by Governor Pete Wilson in August .

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the problem, not race. It just wouldn’t make good business sense to give homeowners’ loans for houses in certain neighborhoods. Banks have obligations to their customers. To the person who replies that financial history is closely connected to race (including the opportunity to get good-paying jobs, obtain credit cards to build that all-important history, and have a pension plan) and that neighborhoods are often segregated along race lines, and that most banks are not located in such neighborhoods (pawn shops and check-cashing businesses have started to play the role of banks), this doubting white may express exasperation and exclaim that Black people are making everything be about race when clearly (at least to him) most things are not. Blacks are playing the race card too much and blaming too much on race. The initial disbelief can turn into frustration. Uttering this sentiment is harmful, I believe. A child hears these comments often enough, especially from an authority figure such as a parent, admired adult, or even a radio personality, and the child will take them as true. It is only after a child has reached a certain point of maturation that she may begin to question the veracity of such claims.7 Many people might be tempted to say that a person who just says something like this isn’t really doing anything. The person saying such things isn’t the one keeping people from getting loans. But how sharply is the line drawn between saying and doing? Using my imaginary critic, I want to show how this distinction breaks down. My critic might assert that uttering a statement like the one above is an action. Talking is an action and not an attitude. What, then, about a person’s facial expressions? A frown or a grimace certainly conveys attitudes such as sadness or disapproval. Here, my critic might say that frowning or grimacing is an action; she is doing something with her face. But if my critic defines actions this broadly, what is left for attitudes? The only thing an attitude could be is what is manifested in the privacy of my own mind. Attitudes could include all and only mental processes. Everything falls to the action side of the divide. Attitudes could never be reflected alone in the real world but only in the privacy of one’s mind. Once they move outside the privacy of one’s mind, they cease to be attitudes and become actions. Attitudes are phantasms or chimeras. Presuming a sharp distinction between attitudes and actions while asserting that only actions have consequences for which we ought to bear responsibility 7. See Chapter  for a more detailed discussion of the relationship between beliefs and judgments passed from authority figures to children. Acquiring a host of such beliefs, I argue, can be harmful to a child, and such beliefs can begin to function as the axis around which many other harmful beliefs can turn.

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means that one does not have responsibility for attitudes. But when the action/ attitude distinction breaks down, and when we do not limit ourselves to the linked chain paradigm, attitudes clearly become things for which we ought to bear responsibility. A racist climate is harmful in itself; its very existence is harmful. A racist climate is a toxic one for people and the environment. Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed says that oppression dehumanizes both the oppressed and the oppressors, albeit in radically different ways.8 To be an oppressor and exercise power and authority over others requires that some part of you becomes warped. Not being able to see the humanity of others requires that your own humanity be compromised. A racist climate destroys the social environment by creating hierarchies and divisions. It sets parameters (if you are an oppressor) and high, razor wire fences (if you are oppressed) around the social relations into which you can enter. Finally, a racist climate helps to destroy the physical world. From the lack of adequate sewage treatment to the location of toxic waste sites in predominantly Black geographical areas in the United States to the use of biological warfare and land mines to widespread poverty and disease, a racist climate is destroying the world in ways that we have not yet come to realize. The harmful effects of a racist climate are long lasting and never localized.9

Collective Identity

My task here is to advance an account of a social association that helps to make sense of the claim that white people qua whites bear responsibility for racist acts. The kind of collectivity is different from the notion of group described by Iris Young above and employed by Larry May in his examples. To formulate an account of a collectivity that differs from a group, I introduce another concept Young develops from Sartre’s notion of a series. Young uses this idea to argue that, while not a group, women do constitute a social collective; women have a serial identity. I will argue along lines similar to Young’s that white people have a serial identity. As Young describes it, a series

8. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, ), . 9. For several good articles about racism and the physical environment, see Laura Westra and Peter Wenz, eds., Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, ).

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is a social collective whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the actions of the others. In everyday life, we often experience ourselves and others impersonally, as participating in amorphous collectives defined by routine practices and habits. The unity of the series derives from the way that individuals pursue their own individual ends in respect to the same objects conditioned by a continuous material environment, in response to structures that have been created by the unintended collective result of past actions. (–) Sartre provides an example of people waiting for a bus to illustrate a series. These people have no shared agenda; they are not all going on a trip together; they share a physical location. The unity of these people gathered on the street corner comes from each person arriving and waiting there so that the bus can take her to her destination. Each person is pursuing her own ends, and it is because each person is acting in her own interests that there comes to be a gathering on the street corner. Individual actions are constrained by the social and physical environment in which we live. This environment or system is what Sartre calls the “milieu of action.” This milieu, according to Young, “is the already-there set of material things and collectivized habits against the background of which any particular action occurs. Thus for the series designated ‘commuters,’ for example, the milieu is the totality of the structured relations of the physical space of the streets and rail lines, together with the predictable traffic patterns that emerge from the confluence of individual actions, together with the rules, habits, and cultural idiosyncrasies of driving, riding, and walking” (). The gathering of those people on a street corner already has a serial structure. That public transportation is structured in the way it is, that traffic follows a certain pattern, and that people push to get on the bus first—all of these bring about the series even though each person is acting out of her own ends. The series becomes actualized by each person’s individual actions, and the milieu of action limits the actions available to individuals. Sartre says that for each person, this condition “integrates him into an ordered multiplicity by assigning him a place in a prefabricated society.”10 The category “women” is a much more complicated one than that of bus riders, but Young argues that women constitute a series in the same way that bus riders do. Bodies and objects constitute the series of women through structures 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol.  (London: New Left Books, ), .

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and practices such as the sexual division of labor and enforced heterosexuality (). In virtue of being positioned by these structures and practices, individuals are assigned an identity in the prefabricated series of women. Individuals’ actions are limited and constrained by the system milieu of action, and each person’s actions are oriented toward the same or similar structures. Young notes: “The gender structures are not defining attributes of individuals, but material social facts that each person must deal with and relate to. . . . In a heterosexist society, for example, everyone must deal and act in relation to the structures of enforced heterosexuality” (). One’s identity as a woman does not depend on possessing particular attributes, nor does it depend on having the same experiences (). Rather, the unity of the series is a passive unity; the unity is constituted by people being positioned in this milieu in such a way that they must deal with structures and practices such as a sexual division of labor and enforced heterosexuality. But saying that all women have to deal with these structures is not saying that all women have a common experience. The ways individuals can relate to and through these structures vary dramatically, depending on other factors such as race, class, ethnicity, and physical ability. Race positioning can also be understood as seriality, and Sartre describes Jews as originally belonging to a series. Whites in the United States constitute a series, and it is by virtue of our having serial membership that it is appropriate to talk about the responsibility that all white people bear for racist acts such as the church burnings. So what is in the background that provides the unity of the series “white”? As I have discussed throughout this work, racism is infused into the framework of the background. The framework includes beliefs that function grammatically, which some racist beliefs do. Racist beliefs can move from being empirical propositions to grammatical ones. Framework conditions affect what language games are played and what social practices are undertaken. These social practices form a nexus of oppressive social practices in which individuals are enmeshed. Whites are a series relative to a background of racist practices. The “prefabricated seriality” of “white” occurs within a background constituted by a wide range of oppressive practices and beliefs. We see a “complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (PI §). “White” is a family resemblance category. Whites do not have one thing in common that makes them white people, but rather we extend the concept “white” “as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres”

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(PI §).11 These crisscross and overlap, connecting people as white. These crisscrossings include, but are not limited to, light skin color and other physical attributes, family membership, benefits enjoyed in a system of privilege, social history, societal expectations, socioeconomic status, career options, speech patterns, music, segregation, and numerous other things. All of these, to a large degree, circumscribe the relationships in which one can participate, both on a personal level and on an institutional one. They also determine the kinds and ranges of actions one can undertake as well as the meanings of the actions. It is important to note that saying that the range of possibilities available to all people is limited or constrained is not to say that all are oppressed. Racism constrains whites in radically different ways from how it constrains nonwhites. This background is a racial hierarchy that is constantly reinforced through economic, legal, political, and scientific institutions as well as through less formal institutions. This racial hierarchy constitutes the series white (and Black, too). The racial hierarchy is created and then codified by what Charles Mills calls the Racial Contract. The Racial Contract simultaneously manufactures the nonpersonhood of nonwhites while enshrining the personhood of whites.12 Mills asserts that “The Racial Contract establishes a racial polity, a racial state, and a racial judicial system, where the status of whites and nonwhites is clearly demarcated, whether by law of custom. And the purpose of this state . . . is, inter alia, specifically to maintain and reproduce this racial order, securing the privileges and advantages of the full white citizens and maintaining the subordination of nonwhites” (–). Living in this racial polity means that “all whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some are not signatories to it” (). This beneficiary/signatory distinction is not hard and fast, given the way the Contract works. The racial system benefits all white people, no matter how hard some of us try to reject our privileges and subvert them. Many of the benefits and privileges are invisible to us. Signatories of the Contract, on the other hand, are those who do not actively reject our privilege, and by not doing so, remain complicit. However, given the way racism constantly reinvents itself, the lines between beneficiaries and signatories blur. Despite my best intentions to the contrary, I may be enacting and embodying my racial privilege. Today’s traitorousness is tomorrow’s complicity. 11. Hilde Lindemann Nelson, “Wittgenstein Meets ‘Woman’ in the Language Game of Theorizing Feminism,” in Feminist Interpretations of Wittgenstein, ed. Naomi Scheman and Peg O’Connor (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, ), argues that the category “woman” is also a family resemblance category. 12. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), ; hereafter cited in the text.

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Whites, as beneficiaries and signatories of the Contract, constitute a series in the sense of Sartre and Young. The unity of the series is passive because white people are positioned in such a way that we must deal with certain structures and practices that systematically confer benefits and privileges. Racist practices make certain subject positions available only to whites; however, this passivity only goes so far, especially as a defense for the privilege we have. If we peel away what appears to be passivity, we see activity. The Racial Contract requires constant execution; its terms are continually being put into effect. Mills’s discussion of the implementation of the Contract is focused primarily on the colonialism and imperialism of white Europeans and white EuroAmericans. The Racial Contract has been enforced through these more blatant executions of power. But, as Mills recognizes, enforcement of this Contract is also accomplished in small, ordinary, almost mundane ways. It is the minutiae that I find interesting. In the late twentieth-century United States, many people are quite likely to admit that, in the past, white people did some terrible things to nonwhites. But, as many of the white students in my “Racism and Sexism” class say, “It isn’t like that anymore. Racism isn’t as prevalent.” Their insight is both right and wrong. Since the beginning of the Modern era, it was justifiable (and perhaps even obligatory on the basis of certain moral and religious grounds) to conquer nations and convert “the natives” to Christianity, to take their land, and to enslave them. This justification meant that such extreme and blatant forms of racism were normal, unexceptional, and unchallenged at the level of the foreground. Racism in the United States, since the Fourteenth Amendment and other legal mechanisms were designed to prohibit the more overt acts, has, to a large degree, shifted to the background. By shifting into the background, the character of racism has changed; it is no longer as transparent to white people. Overt, explicit acts of racism, such as church burnings, are exceptional; but though they are taken to be anomalous, they count as “really racist” and set the benchmark against which other acts are judged. The daily, common, ordinary acts won’t meet this measure, and won’t be seen, by many whites, as racist.13 13. Making racial discrimination be all and only about having and exercising legal/civil rights is a trick of the signatories of the Contract. The extension of legal rights and the accompanying status of full citizenship to nonwhites in the United States (except for immigrants) may actually cause white people to be less willing or unwilling to do anything else. The argument is something like this: “Well, nonwhites are equal to us now because they have the same rights. They can make it on their own. Giving anything else to them (such as preference in hiring, extra economic incentives, educational opportunities) would actually be giving them special rights. Their having special rights would then be discriminatory against white people, and all discrimination is wrong. Q.E.D.” Limiting the scope to civil/legal rights has a powerful, twofold effect. First, many actions that nonwhites know to be

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The Racial Contract requires an epistemological ignorance on the part of whites. As Mills states, “White misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race are . . . in no way accidental, but prescribed by terms of the Racial Contract, which requires a certain schedule of structured blindness and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity” (). Like grammar, the terms of the Contract are normative. The terms are executed in social practices, and these put constraints on how individuals, groups, and series can and should participate in them. As I have discussed throughout this work, practices make subject positions available. The Racial Contract creates and reserves positions of privilege, power, and domination for whites. In its earliest implementation, the Contract enshrined the personhood of whites and the nonpersonhood of nonwhites. This was accomplished through moral, political, legal, and academic practices and institutions.14 The invisibility of this background and the operation of the Racial Contract are a consequence of its familiarity. The most familiar things can be the most harmful, but their very familiarity keeps us from seeing this. For the Contract to work well, it must remain invisible to both its signatories and beneficiaries. Its working well requires participation and agreement in the sayings and doings that underlie the dominant background. One reason for it to remain invisible is that some people, once they begin to perceive the patterns of power and privilege, choose to become traitorous and unruly. The Contract requires complicity; those people who speak out and challenge its implementation pose a serious subversive threat. This issue of ignorance, willful or not, and the effects of that ignorance on whites’ abilities to perceive systems of oppression, bring us right back to the issue of responsibility. Mills ties responsibility to consent: “By unquestioningly ‘going along with things,’ by accepting the privilege of whiteness and concomitant complicity in the system of white supremacy, one can be said to have consented to Whiteness” (). Consenting to “Whiteness” is consenting to a set of power relations; it is a taking up on one’s privilege at the expense of others’ oppression. By not struggling against the Contract and rejecting its terms, and refusing (so much as one can) the privileges and benefits that come with being a white person, one is consenting to it. This makes a person not just a beneficiary, but a racist fall outside of the legal domain and its abilities to address these wrongs. Second, the Racial Contract manifests a new dimension. Whites can now take themselves to be the ones discriminated against; they are now disempowered. These (mis)perceptions will help to fuel all sorts of racist actions and attitudes. For a discussion of the dangers of appeals to formal equality, see Chapter . 14. This is not to say that all white people inhabit these subject positions equally or fully. Sex, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, among other factors, affect one’s subject position.

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signatory. Judgments of culpability and responsibility are appropriate because people can choose to consent or not. The issue of choosing to consent or not is a tricky one. The Racial Contract requires an epistemological ignorance and structured inability to perceive how the racial system really works. That ignorance affects our ability to make choices. Choices are always made against a background of social practices with their constitutive actions, beliefs, and attitudes. These shape what is a choice, and to whom it is available. Social practices and our positions within them make some choices more attractive than others, and reward some while devaluing others. The practices and the nexuses they form make individual choices and actions possible, which in turn reinforces the practices. The conditions created by and through these practices are the backgrounds that connect individuals as white and others as nonwhite. These connections— as members of the series “white” and as beneficiaries and signatories of the Racial Contract—help to constrain and determine the choices and actions of individuals. This is why we need an account of moral responsibility that has both a collective aspect and a shared/aggregate one. Collective responsibility concerns the ways in which actions and attitudes are undertaken and adopted by members of a collectivity. The collectivity as a whole creates an environment and engenders attitudes that contribute to people’s undertaking some course of action. Collective responsibility attaches to the whole body; white people qua whites bear responsibility. The shared/aggregate aspect of this account attaches responsibility to each individual of a collective. Shared responsibility has an aggregate quality because individuals’ actions and attitudes contribute to the maintenance of the racist background, which in turn positions and connects people as white.

Charting Practices of Responsibility

Margaret Urban Walker’s project in Moral Understandings consists of drawing maps or geographies of what she calls the practices of responsibility (). Walker’s project of making geographies of moral practices, especially responsibilities, is important to my own projects of drawing maps that chart stability and change and expand the domain of moral responsibility. Walker’s starting point is one that I share. For both of us, social and moral forms of life are structured around highly differentiated and hierarchical social and moral positions (). These positions are created out of the practices of these forms of life. At the same time, they presuppose and reinforce these practices. In

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my work, I have been primarily concerned with oppressive social practices and the ways positions of domination and subordination, centrality and marginality are made possible by nexuses of practices. These practices determine our social locations and our subject positions, and shape our self-identities and worldviews. The move from oppressive social practices to moral practices (which are themselves social) can, unfortunately, be a short one. As Walker rightly claims, moral practices, including those of responsibility, often have functioned as justification for rather than condemnation of hierarchical social arrangements (). The system of moral responsibilities aims not only to ensure particular moral outcomes but, more importantly from my position, strives to reproduce the specific and shared understandings of which the system consists (). Like other social practices, practices of responsibility renew the common background of shared understandings, thereby reproducing the uniformity and coherence required for a form of moral and social life. Therefore, practices of responsibility must themselves be the objects of critical scrutiny and something for which we take responsibility. Walker advocates making geographies of responsibility in order to reveal the structures underlying the distribution of responsibility. Charting these reveals the structures and assumptions that determine the distribution of responsibilities in terms of how and to whom they are assigned and how they are negotiated or deflected (). Charting responsibilities in these ways requires an alternative to the theoretical-juridical approach to morality. In place of that model, Walker advances what she calls the expressive-collaborative model, which pictures morality as a socially embodied medium of understanding and adjustment in which people account to each other for the identities, relationships, and values that define their responsibilities. This medium provides varied resources for moral understanding. There are shared vocabularies and grammars of moral discourse that give us things we can say, and an understanding of when to say them. . . . There are commonly recognized moral exemplars and paradigmatic moral judgments that show and teach the accepted sayings of such things; we learn the kinds of things “any of us” will recognize as a lie or kindness, assessments “any of us” would make. . . . There are formats of moral deliberation and argument that give recognized ways to give reasons and to weigh, elaborate, or disqualify them. . . . There are standards forms of imputation. () In more Wittgensteinian language, we might say that morality is a family of language games, interwoven with a multitude of other language games. Our moral concerns are shaped and have their distinctive character by virtue of our being

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language-using animals. Engaging in moral practices presupposes the ability to use language. We put a nuanced and complicated spin on our actions within language. We can formulate principles, ascribe reasons to our actions, justify our actions, locate them within a broader context, and take or assign responsibility— all activities made possible through the medium of language. These are characteristic activities of moral language games.15 One of the most important activities in moral language games involves responsibility, or what Walker calls the “practices of responsibility.” For Walker, practices of responsibility are organized around moral accountability and recognition. Included in these practices are: attributing some states of affairs to human agency; taking ourselves and others to be (variously) answerable for these; setting the terms of praise and (more elaborately) blameworthiness, excusability, and exculpation for what is done or not done, and for some of what ensues as a result. . . . But practices of responsibility are not only ones of assignment. They also include ones of accepting or refusing, deflecting or negotiating, specific assignments of responsibility. . . . Specific distributions of responsibility roughly map this complex terrain of who must account, how far and for what, to whom. (–) Living in a highly differentiated social life means that not all of us are equally and comfortably part of the “we who agree” or the “any of us.” There is a very unequal and inequitable distribution of responsibility in oppressive systems, and these inequities can be reproduced and justified in the name of responsibilities. Most often, those who are the least well off bear the heaviest burdens of responsibility, especially in terms of being assigned blame by those of us in positions of privilege. This, then, returns me to the argument that I have made about the responsibilities that those of us with privilege have for the workings of the systems that confer those privileges. Taking responsibility for social and moral practices, including the practices of responsibility, is not a supererogatory duty on the part of those with privilege. This is not to deny that doing so can be extremely difficult and painful, and come at great expense. But these are insufficient reasons for not taking responsibility in the ways both Walker and I have discussed. 15. Developing a Wittgensteinian picture of morality is far beyond the scope of this book. I argue for morality as a family of language games in “Back to the Rough Ground! Wittgensteinian Moral Realism” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, ). Where I had previously argued for a form of realism, I would now argue for a form of naturalism.

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The Final Criticism

The last criticism of my interlocutor was that my saying that all white people are responsible for racism engenders a form of helplessness. His question was, “What are we supposed to do when individual acts can’t change the system?” To me, this criticism no longer makes sense once you see the myriad ways we maintain and reinforce the system. We give it its life. The better question is, “What couldn’t we do?”

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Postscript: Contra Determinism and Fatalism

My aim in this work has been to describe and analyze at least a slice of the workings of oppression and, in doing so, reveal some of the ways radical change can be effected. But in my zeal to describe oppressive practices and the ways they form oppressive systems and structures, some might argue that I have gone too far. I seem to have described a world in which all of us are locked into our respective social and subject positions that are created by social practices. Ironically (given my commitments to responsibility and resistance), some might say that there is not a lot of agency in the systems I have described. Without agency, one is left with fatalism; in the face of the juggernaut of oppressive practices, is there anything we can do? The (il)logic continues that if you can’t do everything, then you can do nothing. A system is deterministic only if it leaves just one way to go on, and if it is closed to competing alternatives. But the system of oppressive practices that I have been discussing throughout this work does not have such a closed character. Rather, systems of oppression are open, and this openness is double edged: it results in reinventions that are often responses to challenges, and entails that new strategies be adopted to combat them. But the openness also provides the possibility of transforming oppressive practices. Systems of oppression have gaps, fissures, and crevices. As

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I have argued, backgrounds are not monolithic entities, and the agreement underlying them is not absolute. Practices with their underlying rules are not immutable entities that are simply given. Rules and practices are nothing apart from human activity and participation. But we often speak as if they are independent of our activity, and in doing so, we reify them and thereby remove human agency. We end up with a picture in which the rules and practices determine what we must do. With this misleading picture, rules and practices have the agency, while humans do not. The cracks and crevices in the background create competing criteria for rulefollowing. Rules of oppressive practices are often not explicitly stated, and there may even be express prohibitions against doing so. The criteria for the correct application of these rules are often not clear and not easily available to those who actively seek to follow them, or simply go along with them. As a consequence, there are differences in how these rules are followed. So, while any rule requires a certain amount of uniformity, the uniformity is not absolute, nor does it guarantee that all follow it in exactly the same way. The strength of the pull of uniformity does not function as powerfully in the margins or in the crevices as it does in the center. Sometimes not obeying the rules or not following them is a matter of conscious choice, and other times it is not. In the latter category, no matter what we do, those who are not in the center and not unequivocally part of the “we who agree” cannot obey rules in the same way. No matter what we do, it won’t be considered correct. In the former case, one is consciously choosing not to go along with the way things usually are and engaging in some form of resistance. What forms might resistance take? Consider Wittgenstein’s own description when he says, People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them from these presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in. One must, so to speak regroup their entire language. —But this language came about //developed// as it did because people had—and have—the inclination to think in this way. Therefore pulling them out works only with those who live in an instinctive state of rebellion against //dissatisfaction with// language. Not with those who following all of their instincts live within the herd that has created this language as its proper expression.1 1. This quote comes from the “Big Typescript,” section . See Philosophical Occasions –, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), .

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It is not only individuals who are in rebellion, but groups that create new language games and undermine dominant ones. Individual actions are important elements of resistance and social change, but they alone are not sufficient to effect long-lasting, progressive, radical change. Neither oppression nor resistance involves only individuals’ actions. Oppression and resistance must be understood in terms of social practices. Similarly, an account of moral responsibility is inadequate when it focuses only on the conscious, voluntary actions of individuals at the expense of looking at the conditions under which the choices were made and the actions undertaken. Responsibility for oppression cannot be reduced to the actions and attitudes of individuals. In a manner similar to the way that many are captivated by the linked chain account of responsibility, we are bewitched by a picture of resistance. In this picture, the lone hero takes on some terrible system and single-handedly brings it down. The mythology of rugged individualism pervades the understandings of historical and contemporary figures. This unrealistic picture carries with it the expectation that each of us should be able to do this, too. Failure to meet this (unrealistic) expectation can produce the politically dangerous conclusion that “if we cannot do everything, then we can do nothing.” Resistance must be understood in terms of practices and movements and not solely or primarily by the actions of particular individuals. Resistance to dominant beliefs, attitudes, and practices is always a collective effort in response to the real needs that groups of people share. It is true that some particular individuals might stand out, but their actions are part of a collective effort, and grow out of it. Rosa Parks’s refusal to go to the back of the bus one day in Montgomery, Alabama, is an act that had a long, shared history. Parks had been involved with the NAACP for twelve years prior to her refusal. She had also spent part of the previous summer at the Highlander School in Tennessee discussing the Supreme Court’s view of “separate but equal.” There had also been an earlier bus boycott in Baton Rouge. My recounting of this is not to take anything away from Parks, but rather to underscore the fact that resistant action (even apparently individual resistance) has a collective nature. The NAACP and the Highlander School are cracks and crevices in the background, and these were what made Parks’s refusal meaningful to Blacks and others concerned with combating racism. Her action was part of a movement that was already well rooted and already creating resistant practices. These cracks are themselves backgrounds to other (resistant) systems; with their constitutive actions, beliefs, and practices, these cracks and crevices radically affect the topography of our shared human social life.

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Postscript

Back to the Riverbed

In the first chapter, I discussed the relationship between riverbeds and backgrounds. Riverbeds can shift over time, resulting in significant change. Backgrounds, too, can shift, and those changes can be quite noticeable. Susan Hekman sees the potential for this metaphor. As she says, Wittgenstein’s “riverbed metaphor in On Certainty encompasses change, flux, even ‘mythology.’ Wittgenstein’s position makes clear, however, that accounting for change entails neither arbitrariness nor nihilism. Riverbeds change slowly, incrementally; the slowness of the change and the complexity of the elements that contribute meaning entail that the process of change does not threaten meaning itself.”2 Hekman elaborates on the nature of change; the riverbed of meaning does not shift overnight, but over time “change is thus effected by connection and not radical relocation”; social and linguistic change is a function of the “redeployment and redefinition of words and practices that already exist in social life” (). Further, she asserts that changing our concepts means changing our world. Changing the concepts on the margins “can and does profoundly change our world; it shifts the riverbed onto new rock and sand. But far from inviting nihilism and chaos, this understanding of social/linguistic change builds the possibility of change into the bedrock of social intelligibility” (). One of Hekman’s aims is to argue against a feminist approach that would attempt to destroy or dismantle the background wholesale. Feminists must instead recognize that transformation requires the background. Attempting to destroy the background destroys the very grounds for change. Hekman is right to remind us that dissent is not a total breakdown or abandonment of intellectual authority relations. A dissident individual or group is not an anarchist; even while challenging some judgments or concepts, dissidents still subscribe to a whole host of shared ones. Dissent can only be understood against a broader background of agreement. Dissent is a species of doubt. Wittgenstein argues in On Certainty that the entire background cannot be called into question. Some things must be taken for granted and, at least temporarily, removed from the traffic of doubt. Doubt is only possible where there is a shared ground of beliefs, actions, and practices. Trying to destroy that ground destroys the conditions necessary for real radical change. Obviously, Hekman and I share similar views about the possibility for change and the dependence of change on the already existing background of existing 2. Susan Hekman, The Future of Differences: Truth and Method in Feminist Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, ); hereafter cited in the text.

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social practices and meanings. But one concern I’ve always had is that the change is gradual and incremental. This is not to deny that gradual change over a long period of time can be quite radical. But this still leaves me uneasy because slow change isn’t good enough with respect to lessening and ending the oppression of people. When I think about Wittgenstein’s metaphor, I have always had a picture of an unpolluted river flowing through a pristine countryside. My image is an instance of naive realism—something that could easily be an advertisement in a tourist guide. No people ever appear in my visual representation of this metaphor; it is completely bucolic. At this point I must confess that my own river imagery amazes me. This imagery belies the fact that I live along the Minnesota River at its most polluted point and where it regularly floods, and that I lived for a year near the Red River which in  flooded Grand Forks, North Dakota. Floods can radically change the shape of the riverbed and the areas surrounding them. The city of Grand Forks was heavily damaged and entire areas destroyed. Floods also rip away the sides of the river, leading to a greater rate of erosion. Polluted rivers flooding fields can affect the viability of farming land for years to come, especially when the waters have high concentrations of herbicides and pesticides. The effects continue to snowball—farmers who already are on the economic margins because they only earn twenty-two cents on the dollar become even less well off. The effects of a flood are physical and social at the same time. The reasons for the flood may be, too. It is true that sometimes floods do just happen, and that human agency isn’t really at issue. But many times, the flow of rivers has been altered by human action. Damming and rerouting water supplies are two such human actions that directly affect the flow or life of the river. Rivers and other freshwater supplies dry up as a consequence of human action. According to a recent study by the Worldwatch Institute, maintaining a stable world food supply is now dependent on an increasing global water deficit. Giant pumps are now being used to extract water from ever deeper tables in the earth. The problems of dropping water tables are immense; Bangkok is running out of water, and Mexico City is showing signs of sinking because of drain water damage. Running out of water means a reduction in the supply of food, and an increase in starvation and death.3 So far, this discussion has focused on the incredible destructive power of rivers and what happens when rivers dry up. But there is no denying that water power can be harvested for productive purposes that have brought about 3. From the Associated Press, in the Bangor Daily News, July , .

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beneficial consequences. Hydroelectric power is more environmentally friendly than many of the alternatives. My point here is still the same—human agency plays a profound role in the flow of the river. Thinking about Wittgenstein’s metaphor in light of these considerations makes it take on new significance. Human actions directly affect the life of a river, and the river directly affects human life. Tying these together in this way reveals that change is a consequence of a complicated chain of happenings and actions, practices and institutions. Human intentionality might fit in somewhere, but appealing to that alone cannot explain the nature of change. Nor can the actions of particular individuals account entirely for change. This is not to deny that particular areas of the riverbed cannot be targeted for change. One way to reroute a river is through the selective use of explosive materials. Other times the focus might be smaller, and a particular crevice is the focus of a sustained project of widening. Particular actions can matter a great deal, but the role they play is a function of the much larger context in which they occur. Understanding Wittgenstein’s metaphor in this way is perhaps not what he intended, but it does seem plausible, given these facts about rivers. When we look at how rivers flow, we can’t help but see that it is a matter of complicated interaction of natural and human factors.

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abolitionist movement,  abolitionists, ,  absolutism,  abuse, domestic. See domestic abuse; marital rape abuse, sexual. See sexual abuse Ackermann, Robert, – Affirmation Action,  African Americans: and crime, , –; discrimination experienced by, ; and whites’ bodily expressions, –; whites’ views on, , , –,  n.  antigay war, –,  n.  antiracists, ,  anti-Semitism,  n.  Aristotle,  assaultive speech: antiheterosexual, ; antiwhite, –; background of, , ; consequences and harms caused by, , ; and critical race theory, , ; defined, –; as instrument of hate, ; and the marketplace metaphor, ; meaning and use of, , , –; and power relations, –; racist, ; response of whites to, ; Wittgensteinian approach to, –, –. See also hate speech atomism,  attitudes: and actions, –; and racism, , 

change, –; charting stability, –; creating new, ; dependency of all concepts on, ; and foregrounds, –, , ; and the grid metaphor, ,  n. ; and intelligibility, ; invisibility of, –; nature of, –; as plural, ; possibility and intelligibility provided by, ; and power relations, ; and responsibility, ; and the riverbed metaphor, , ; and social practices, –, ; transformation of, , , , –, ; viewed as apolitical by Wittgenstein, ,  n.  backlashes,  Baier, Annette,  n.  Baker, G. P., and P. M. S. Hacker,  n.  battered women’s movement, –,  battering. See domestic abuse Beckett, Katherine, and Theodore Sasson, ,  Bedecarre, Corrinne, – n.  Bingo’s bar, ,  bisexuals, ,  Black Feminist Organization,  blacks. See African Americans Blue Book (Wittgenstein), ,  breaking silence, , . See also sexual abuse Brown v Board of Education,  Buffalo, s, –,  California, – capitalism,  Carousel, ,  n.  cartography, –, – n. , 

backgrounds: and attitudes and beliefs, –,  n. ; and cartography, –, ; charting



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 Chaplinsky v New Hampshire, ,  n. ,  Christian Coalition,  church burnings: arrests and convictions, ,  n. , – n. , ; background of, , , , ; and conspiracy, –, –, , –; decline in, – n. ; foreground of, , , ; history of, –, –; increase in, ,  n. ; intention, action, and consequences in, , ; in Kentucky, ; and racism, , –,  n. , , , , –; and responsibility, , –, , , ; as terrorism, , , ; white response to, , , –,  n. ,  Churchill, Ward, – city metaphor, –,  civil libertarians, – civil rights movement, ,  Civil War,  Clinton, Bill,  coalition politics,  Collins, Patricia Hill,  Colorado State University students, –,  n. , ,  n.  Columbine High School,  coming out: defined, ; essentialist story of, , –, ; and inhabiting an orientation,  n. ; language games associated with, ; and older lesbians, ; in social and political discourse, . See also gays; homosexuality; lesbians community, ,  nn. ,  Consequentialism,  conspiracy, –,  Constitution, , ; First Amendment, , –; Fourteenth Amendment,  Crary, Alice,  n.  Crenshaw, Kimberle, , – crime, , –,  n.  “Crimes Against Humanity” (Churchill), – critical race theory, , , ,  cross burning, , –,  Dade County, FL,  D’Amato, Al,  Declaration of Independence, ,  Dees, Morris,  dissent, ,  n. , ,  domestic abuse, , , ,  n. . See also marital rape Donald, Michael, 

Index Eisenhower, President,  empirical propositions, , , , ,  essentialisms, – Essentialust Account, ,  n.  ethics,  Fairness Campaign,  Family Research Council (FRC), – Feinberg, Leslie,  feminist philosophers, – feminists: backgrounds challenged by, , ; domestic violence challenged by, ; and the irrational, ; transformative work of,  First Amendment, ; and the anti-gay parade float, ; and community well-being, ; defense of, –, ; and the person whose speech is restricted, –; and unprotected speech, –,  n. ; viewed by critical race theorists, ; and words used to provoke violence,  floods,  Florida,  Foley, Tom,  food stamp program,  “Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground” (Scheman),  Foucault, Michel, , ,  n.  Fourteenth Amendment,  free speech, , , ; and community wellbeing, , , ; defined, ; and democracy, ; goal of government in, ; and the maintenance of oppressive systems, ; traditionalist defense of, – Freire, Paulo,  Friedman, Marilyn,  Frye, Marilyn, ,  n.  Gabrielson, Guy George,  Garcia, David,  n.  gay movement, , ,  gays: internalized homophobia of,  n. ; language reclaimed by, , ; oppression of, ,  n. ; subcommunities of, ; viewed by Trent Lott, . See also coming out; homosexuality; lesbians gender roles,  Genova, Judith, – n. Giddens, Anthony,  n.  givens of nature, –,  n. ,  Glasser, Ira, 

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

Glock, Hans-Johann,  Gosse, Edmund,  n.  Gosse, Philip,  n.  grammar, – grammatical propositions, –, , ,  Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant),  groups, –, – n. , ,  gun control, 

Kant, Immanuel, , , , ,  Kennedy, Elizabeth, and Madeline Davis, , ,  Kentucky,  King, Rodney,  Klebold, Dylan,  Knight, Robert, –,  n.  Koethe, John, – Ku Klux Klan, , , , , 

Harris, Eric,  hate crime,  n.  Hate Crimes Protection Act (HCPA),  n.  hate groups,  hate speech, , , , –; defined, –. See also assaultive speech “Have You Ever Tried to Hide?” (Parker),  Hekman, Susan, , – Heldke, Lisa, – n. ,  n.  Henderson, Russell,  n.  heterosexism,  Hilden, Amy, – n.  Hill, Anita,  hinge propositions, ,  Hintikka, Merrill B., and Jaakko Hintikka, ,  homophobia: author’s reactions to,  n. ; of gays and lesbians,  n. ; invisibility of, ; and language use, ; power of, ; and the relationship between oppression and privilege, ; themes of, ,  n. ; underground as unconscious in,  n. ; victims harmed by speech of, ; as worldview,  homosexuality: biological accounts of, –,  n. ,  n. ; persecution of, after World War II, –. See also gays; lesbians human community, ,  n.  Human Rights Campaign (HRC),  Hume, David, , 

language: and community well-being, ; and context, ; life structured by, ; limits of, , , ; and meaning, , , –, –, , ; new meanings created through, , ; racist, sexist, and homophobic meanings in, ; social practices reinforced by, ; viewed by Wittgenstein, –, –,  n. , – language games, –, , ; backgrounds for, –,  n. ; and the city metaphor, ; and co-optation, , ; creation of new, –, ; defined, ,  n. ; and morality, –,  n. ; and new meanings, ; physiognomic,  n. ; and reclamation, ; retiring concepts from, ; rule-following in, –; and self-identity, ,  n. ; viewed by Wittgenstein, –, ,  n. ,  n. , –, ,  Lawrence, Charles, , ,  Lederer, Laura, and Richard Delgado,  lesbian bars, , –,  n.  lesbian feminist movement, ,  lesbians: black, –, ; and butch/femme roles, –,  n. ; butch/femme roles challenged by, –; internalized homophobia of,  n. ; language reclaimed by, , ; oppression of,  n. ; physical confrontations experienced by, –; racial boundaries crossed by, –, –; and rule-following, ; sexuality of,  n. ; subcommunities of, ; tough bar butches among, –,  n. , ,  n. ; viewed by Trent Lott, ; white, –,  n. . See also coming out; gays; homosexuality linguistic training, ; goal of, – linked chain paradigm, ; and attitudes, , ; and intentional actions, ; and responsibility, , , –,  Locke, John, – Lott, Trent,  lynching, , 

identity politics, ; defined,  individualism,  intelligibility,  Jefferson, Thomas,  Jews: genocide of, –; internalized antiSemitism of,  n. ; as a series,  Jim Crow laws,  Jones, Russ and Laura, , ,  Jordan, June, 

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 Malcolm, Norman, ,  n. ,  marital rape, , –,  n. ; background of, , , , ,  n. . See also domestic abuse marketplace metaphor, , , , ,  Matsuda, Mari,  Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, and Crenshaw,  May, Larry, , , , –,  McKinney, Aaron,  n.  media: crime depicted by, –, – n. ; and the National Church Arson Task Force findings, – Metzger, Tom and John,  military, ,  Mill, John Stuart,  Mills, Charles, –,  “Mind: Through a Glass, Darkly” (Shipler),  miscegenation,  misogyny,  Monmonier, Mark, , – n.  Moore,  morality, – moral theory, , – Moral Understandings (Walker),  NAACP, ,  National Church Arson Task Force, , , , ; media response to findings of, – National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute,  Native Americans, genocide of, ,  Nestle, Joan,  Nietzsche, Friedrich,  Nothing Is Hidden (Malcolm),  Nozick, Robert,  n.  Nuremberg trials, – Omi, Michael,  On Certainty (Wittgenstein): background in, , –,  n. ; dissent in, ; language games in, ; reasonable person described in, ; riverbed metaphor in, ; worldview in, –,  On Liberty (Mill),  oppression: and agency, , , ; and conspiracy, –; of gays and lesbians,  n. ; harmfulness to all, ; of Jews,  n. ; openings in systems of, –; and privilege, , ; and rationality, , ; resistance to, – (see also dissent); and responsibility,

Index ; and the rough ground, , ; and rule-following, –; solidarity under,  Oregon, –,  Packard v Packard,  n.  Pale, the, ,  n.  Parker, Pat,  Parks, Rosa,  Pasley, Chastity Vera,  n.  Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire),  Phelps, Fred, ,  n. , ,  n. ,  n.  Phibbs, Anne, – n.  philosophers, feminist. See feminist philosophers Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), , , , ,  philosophy: feminist, –; and hypothetical thought experiments, –; and the invisibility of backgrounds, –; moral, , ; political, ; role of philosophy viewed by, –, – n. ; and skepticism, ; women’s rationality viewed in, –,  Plessy,  Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Frye),  n.  Portland, OR,  “Power of Living” pamphlet, ,  Price, Kristen Leann,  n.  Price We Pay, The (Lederer and Delgado),  Proposition , –,  n.  R.A.V. v St. Paul, – race, – Racial Contract, –, – nn. ,  racial interactions,  racism, ; acts of, ; and agency, ; and attitudes, , ; background of, , , –, , , –, , ; and conspiracy, –; as grammatical proposition, –, , ; harmfulness of, , ; invisible to whites, , –, –n. ; and language use, ; legacy of, ; and motivation, ; and rationality, ; and the relationship between oppression and privilege, , ; and responsibility, –,  n. , , , , ; shift into background of, ; and subject positions, ; underground as unconscious in,  n. ; viewed by critical race theorists, ; and whites’ bodily expressions, –; whites constrained by, ; whites’ responsibility for, , , –, 

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Index Radical Philosophy Association,  rape: defined, ; marital (see marital rape) rationality: alternative representations of, –; background of, –, , , –, , –, ; and beliefs, –; essentialist approach to, –; foreground of, , , –; and full humanity, ,  n. ; and grammatical propositions, ; and hyper-rationality, , ; and the individual, –; instrumental, ; and irrationality, , ,  n. , , ; nonessentialist approach to, , –; and oppression, , ; substantive theory of,  n. ; Wittgensteinian approach to, , , , – relativism, ,  Religious Liberty Protection Act, – n.  Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Wittgenstein),  Republican party,  responsibility: and attitudes, –, , , –; author criticized, , –; and the background, , ; and blaming, ; and church burnings, , –, , , ; collective, , , , , ; and consent, ; expanding, , –, ; and groups, –, ; intention, action, and consequences in, –; and the linked chain paradigm, , , –, ; and moral theory, ; and oppression, , , ; practices of, , , –, ; shared, , –; and unintentional actions, , – riverbed metaphor, –, , , – Rocky Point Missionary Baptist Church,  rough ground, , –, , – Rousseau, Jean Jacques,  Ruddick, Sara,  n.  Sartre, Jean-Paul, , , ,  Scalia, Judge,  Schatzki, Theodore, , ,  n. , ,  n.  Scheman, Naomi, ,  school shooting, Scotland,  n.  Second Treatise of Government, The (Locke),  segregation, , –,  self-identity, –,  n. ,  Seraw, Mulugeta,  serial identity, – series, – sexism, , –,  n. , 

 sexual abuse, ; and authority, –; breaking silence about, , ; and children’s worldviews, ,  n. , ; essentialism in, , –; and False Memory Syndrome,  n. ; and judgement, ; language use in, , –, ,  sexual dimorphisim,  sexual harassment, , – sexuality,  n. , – Sharing Responsibility (May), ,  Shepard, Matthew: assault and murder of, , ,  n. ; funeral of, , ,  n. ; parade float relating to, –,  n. , – Shipler, David,  Simpson, O. J.,  slavery, , , ,  social practices, –, , ; backgrounds of, –, ; defined, ; dispersed and integrative, –; nexuses formed by, , , ; and oppression, , , ; and rule-following, –,  n. ; Schatzki on, –; and subject positions, , ; viewed by Ruddick,  n. ; “we” of, – Social Practices (Schatzki),  Southern Poverty Law Center,  Speaking of Race, Speaking of Sex (Glass),  speech. See language; language games speech, unprotected, –,  n.  St. Paul Hate Crimes Ordinance, – stabilism, ,  State v Bell,  stereotypes,  Stone Butch Blues (Feinberg),  Streicher, Julius, – Stroud, Barry,  Thomas, Clarence,  Till, Emmit,  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein),  transgendered people, – United Klans of America,  unprotected speech, –,  n.  Utilitarianism, ,  Vaid, Urvashi,  Ventura, Jesse,  Viktora, Robert A., –,  n.  voting, ,  n. 

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 wage labor,  n.  Walker, Margaret Urban, , , , , – Ward v Ward, ,  n.  welfare fraud,  n.  White Aryan Resistance (WAR),  whites: African Americans viewed by, , , –,  n. ; and crime, –; racism invisible to, , –, – n. ; response to assaultive speech, ; response to church burnings, , , –,  n. , ; responsibility for racism of, , , –, ; serial identity of, , –, ; women (see under women) Wilson, Pete,  n.  Winant, Howard,  Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing (Genova), – n.  Wittgenstein, Ludwig: on backgrounds, –, , ; city metaphor of, –, ; and dissent, ; and empirical propositions, ; form of life used by, ,  n. ; on the givens of nature, ,  n. ; grammar viewed by, –; and grammatical propositions, ,  n. , ; on the human body,  n. ; and hypothetical thought experiments, –; on the ideal, ; and intention, –; and language games, –, ,  n. ,  n. , –, , , –; language viewed by, , , , –, –, , ,  n. , –; and

Index linguistic training, ; and the mind, ; and morality, –; practicalist strain in later works,  n. ; and rationality, , , , , –; riverbed metaphor used by, –; role of philosophy viewed by, –, – n. ; and the rough ground, , ; and rulefollowing, –,  n. , , –,  n. , ; self-identity viewed by, –; and solidarity under oppression, ; worldview explained by, –, , , , , – Wittgensteinian Themes (Malcolm), ,  n.  women: rationality of, in traditional philosophy, –, ; serial identity of, , –; violence against, ; white, and crime, , , –,  n.  Words That Wound (Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, and Crenshaw),  worldview: acquisition of, , , –; and beliefs about race and sexual orientation, ; and linguistic training, ; and racism, ; and rule-following, –,  n. ; and self-identity, ; Wittgenstein’s view on, –, , , , , – Worldwatch Institute,  Young, Iris, , , ; group defined by, ; and the serial identity of women, , –; series described by, –