Using Identity to Halt Conversations

Using Identity to Halt Conversations

More and more we are witnessing the injection of our identities into conversations by using them as trump cards—as ways of, if not halting the conversation, putting our fellow discussants in the awkward position of having to face the attitude, “You’re not gay, or Arab, or middle-aged, so you do not / should not know what you’re talking about.” By “identity” I refer to currently popular aspects of one’s who-ness, especially on college campuses in The United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Examples of identities include one’s gender, sexual orientation, race, ability, cultural belonging, ethnic belonging, age, and religious identity. Here are four examples of relying on identity to stop a discussion (the examples are based on actual incidents, but kept anonymous and with some adjustments to bring out the point):

(a) While discussing in class the (famous) essay by the philosopher Don Marquis against the moral permissibility of abortion, a student states that Marquis is a man and thus has no standing to debate abortion.

(b) While discussing in class the views of the philosopher Lawrence Blum’s on racism, a student states that Blum is white and thus has no standing to debate racism.

(c) During a conversation on preferred pronouns, X, a non-trans person, politely asks Y, a trans person who takes themselves to know much about the experiences of trans people, to explain how some trans people come to adopt the preferred pronouns of their choice—why “they” in some cases, “ze” in others, and “ey” in yet others. Y responds by saying that it is a complicated process and that X, as a privileged cis-person, is denying the experience of trans people by disrespecting it. If X were truly respectful, X would trust that trans people know what they are doing.

(d) Z, a man, is critical of the practice of the veil: the practice in which (some) Muslim women veil themselves, whether they wear a basic hijab or a full body chador. W, a veiled Muslim woman, responds by saying that people like Z should not speak about things of which they know little, given that they have no experience of wearing the veil. W also adds that it is disturbing when men tell women what they should and should not do.

In these examples, people rely on some aspect of identity to terminate the discussion. They also do so in a bifurcated way: first, they claim a specific type of knowledge on behalf of the person with the identity, and they then deny access to that knowledge to the person who does not have the identity. (The two are conceptually distinct, because someone can claim that members of group G have a type of knowledge that members of Group H can access.) I will focus on the denial of access, because this is the crucial element in identities as conversational trump cards.

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Injections of identity in conversations and discussions might have to do not only with the rise of subjective experiences as ultimate justifiers (“I feel hurt” or “I feel offended by what you said, so what you did was wrong”), they might also have to do with the rise in popularity of standpoint theory in epistemology, a view that roughly states that one has a different perspective depending on one’s social situated-ness in the world, which, in turn, depends crucially on one’s gender, race, ethnic belonging, and so on.

Moreover, the contribution of one’s identity to one’s perspective is crucial in a world in which social inequalities abound. A world that privileges “white” ways of knowing over other ways of knowing, so it is a world that diminishes non-white ways of knowing, making one’s oppressed identity all the more prominent in one’s perspective on the world. Put slightly differently, if being Muslim is not a valued identity in North America, then relying on what one knows as a Muslim in North America becomes all the more important.

Note four things. (1) According to standpoint theory, what is important is not simply that one has a perspective different than another. This is because in principle anyone can come to adopt the same perspective. For example, if I have a particular perspective on, say, whether Freud’s theories are basically sound, anyone who understands what I have to say can adopt my point of view (“can” because they have to agree with it). But a crucial factor that informs standpoint theory is that of experience: the experience of, say, being an immigrant, middle school Arab student in a small town in Oklahoma, surrounded by American students (white or black), is different from that of an African-American middle school student in a small town in Oklahoma surrounded by only white students.

Because we are talking about experience—something that is undergone by an individual—it is difficult, if not impossible, for others, especially those belonging to other groups, from undergoing or having such an experience. Thus, a middle school white student in that school in Oklahoma cannot know what it means to have the experience of the African-American student, though another African-American student might, depending on what other things he or she shares with the first one. Keep in mind that the experience under discussion is a type of experience—of, say, a cis-male, adolescent, African-American, middle class student in a predominantly white school in a state like Oklahoma—not singular (or “token,” in philosophical parlance) experiences. Singular experiences can only be experienced by the individual him or herself.

(2) The idea of social inequality is important for standpoint theory. One reason is that in unequal societies, members of oppressed groups are placed in an interesting position: they understand (or know) and have access to the perspective of the dominant groups because they work with, under, or even for them, but they also have their own perspective, stemming from their own social positioning. They thus have at least a dual perspective on the world; I write “at least” because they might have more than two. (Let’s not worry about whether every member of an oppressed group would have such dual or more perspectives or whether some have only one.)

(3) The second reason why the idea of inequality plays a crucial role in standpoint theory is that it explains why perspectives of dominant groups have no cache in such a discourse: claiming that your situated-ness as a white, Christian, straight, and cisman gives you an interesting perspective on the world is redundant at best and troubling at worst. It is redundant because that perspective is the one that has been dominant for as long as standpoint theory advocates wish to claim. (In another possible world, in which, say, the United States was invaded soon after the Civil War by an alliance of Japanese-Chinese-Korean forces, buttressed by other East Asian troops, the White-Christian standpoint might be the one with the cache.) It is troubling because someone who asserts his white, cis-male, etc. identity seems to be exercising his power or his privilege in an unequal world.

(4) Often, on top of asserting one’s identity with finality as far as a discussion is concerned, we find that the asserter refuses to engage in the “emotional (or intellectual or any kind of) labor” on behalf of the other—the attitude seems to be: “If you don’t understand what it means to be Arab in America, you can go educate yourself and then come back and talk to me. I’m not going to bother and explain it to you.”

I will not comment further on (4) because such refusals are not essential to identity assertions. I do want to say that I find the refusals’ presumption problematic: setting aside buzzwords such as “emotional labor,” I do not find it inherently a problem that sometimes we do have to engage in the “intellectual labor” of informing others about who were are, why we believe certain things, etc. After all, we don’t assume that everyone knows everything about everyone else. Even in cases in which someone ought to know better (e.g., a case in which a white person ought to know about what Latino immigrants face in the United States), a lot will depend on the specifics of the case—do we expect any white American to know everything about Latino immigrants, regardless of their country of origin, of what they do, of their legal status, etc.? (Moreover, there is the potential difficulty of a contradiction: if the refusal is referring to their experiences, and if these experiences are closed off from out-group members, then the other person cannot go and educate himself because he cannot have access to these experiences. So things get a bit bumpy and unclear here.)

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In explaining standpoint theory, I am doing just that, explaining it. I am not necessarily agreeing with it. Indeed, although I find much about it to be intuitively appealing, I also find a lot that is problematic: if standpoint theory must rely on the notion of “experience” (more on the “if” below), then the idea of discounting certain experiences simply because they are of individuals of certain groups of people is troubling, given that the inequality to which many advocates appeal is simplistic and conveniently neglects the fact that, say, white people occupy multiple axes so they cannot be dismissed as such (this is often referred to as “intersectionality,” though this concept can mean different things). Of course, the reply is that some people’s experiences ought to be heard, such as poor white people’s or those who are generally disenfranchised. But this brings me to my main worry: the simplistic notion of “experience” on which this theory relies.

People are not passive recipients of experiences. Yes, when an anvil falls on my head from the sky it causes me pain (severe pain), and this experience of pain is a passive one: I undergo it, period. But most experiences are filtered by our mental and conceptual frameworks. What I mean is that we typically understand our experiences in particular ways, and how we understand them depends on our conceptual lenses. So, for example, if I am prone to paranoia, I might experience my department chair saying to me, “Oh, you’ll definitely hear from me about that” as a threat or warning, whereas if I am less prone to paranoia, I might hear it as just a promise for further discussion of a certain issue. In normal human situations, our conceptual frameworks, which depend heavily on language and shared meanings in that language, will tend to overlap with each other, and we tend as a result to have shared understandings of most situations and experiences.

But my point is not about conceptual frameworks in general, but about moral ones specifically. And what I want to say is this: how we experience the world is filtered by our moral views and values. A white, rich young man might walk by a homeless black person without so much as batting a mental eyelash. But another white, rich young man might pass a homeless black person and feel as if he were punched in the stomach. He sees it as another reminder of the sorry state of the United States and of how it treats its poor people, its black people, and its poor black people. So, even the experience of privileged white people cannot be taken for granted. To dismiss it as always reflecting privilege would be to dismiss it on simplistic grounds. Yes, its possessor might come from privilege, but this does not mean that his experiences are of unfiltered privilege—of privilege unfiltered through moral and critical lenses. He might not experience oppression, but his experience is neither redundant nor troubling: it need neither replicate “dominant” experiences nor need it be an exercise of power.

It is also worth mentioning that bringing in conceptual filters of experiences indicates how relying on experiences is simplistic in a different way, which is that it does not account for the fact that experiences can be unjustified or mistaken because they are understood or valued in a mistaken way. For example, if I feel tremendous anger at a colleague’s criticism of something I said in a meeting, then my experience of anger is unjustified because it is based on one or more misconceptions (that I am infallible, that my mistakes should not be pointed out in public, that my colleague was “attacking me,” and so on). For another example, if I find the concept of “mansplaining” impressive, I might start understanding many of my male colleagues’ interactions with me as instances of “mansplaining,” whereas in fact they are not.

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Above, I wrote that “If standpoint theory must rely on the notion of ‘experience,’ ...” Why? This is because I do not think that standpoint theory needs to be wedded to the notion of “experience.” All that it is committed to is the idea that our social positioning gives us access to some form of knowledge not readily accessible to others in other social positionings. And this in itself says nothing about what form of knowledge this should be (experiential, conceptual, sensual, etc.), and it says nothing about just how accessible or inaccessible this knowledge is to others in other social positionings. Indeed, standpoint theory might not even be committed to the idea that the access is to a form of knowledge, if knowledge is tied to truth (which it is) and if standpoint theory wishes to make room for error in whatever it is that we have access to. Perhaps “perspective” or “conceptual tools” are better, though whether they are strong enough for the purposes of the theory remains to be seen.

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Let us go back to identities. I want to say what I think is obvious: that if identity is to enter the discussion at all (I think that it has no place in some discussions), it should enter as a starter, not as an ender. It should not be asserted in such a way as to close the discussion, but as a way to either start it or to add to it, to branch it out, to enrich it. Why do I say this? Well, the knowledge claimed on behalf of the person with the identity is experiential knowledge. It is true that I, as a non-African-American person, simply cannot know what it means to experience anti-black racism as part of my life. No amount of disguising myself and “passing” as black can help me experience what it means to be African-American who experiences racism, certainly not as a way of being or existing (which is not the same thing as experiencing racism on a daily basis), unless I do so for most of my life—and even here, knowing that I can at any time quit being “black” might make a crucial difference to my experience, much like Muslims who fast during Ramadan cannot fully fathom what it means to go hungry all the time given that they know that they will have a meal at the end of the day, especially when the meal is a feast. (Empathy with the hungry is one of the reasons given for why fasting is morally laudable.) Here, we see again how the conceptual filters through which our experiences go affect the way we have these experiences.

However, from the fact that I cannot have that type of experience it does not follow that (i) I cannot have an experience similar in crucial ways to the one to which I am denied access, (ii) that I cannot understand what the experience means, or (iii) that I cannot understand any of it to the point that I am deemed epistemically unfit to contribute to a discussion about it. Thus, even if I cannot know what it means to be the victim of anti-back racism, I might have experienced anti-Arab racism that would allow me to share something with the victim of anti-black racism. After all, entire books have been written on comparisons among various forms of prejudice to each other. If experiences of such prejudices are completely walled off from each other, it is hard to see how such comparisons can be made. Moreover, we are all human beings—we have a shared humanity, which means that our experiences of being oppressed and of oppressing have common elements. There are only so many ways that we can “other” each other!

But even if I have no way of experientially knowing how you might feel as a victim of, say, racism, I can surely understand it at an intellectual level. I can understand what it means (though not how it feels, per our assumption) to be denied service, to be spoken to as if I were a child, to be the subject of contemptuous looks, and so on. Now, I admit that I have a hard time envisaging how someone can understand such things at an intellectual level but not at an emotional or experiential one (and if understanding such cases requires both an intellectual and an emotional aspect, then in my view this further supports [i]). That is to say, because I can understand what it means to receive contemptuous looks because I am, say, obese, I can, to some extent, understand what it means for someone to receive contemptuous looks because she is black. Being the recipient of contempt might very well have a shared element across various sources of contempt, not because being obese is similar to being black, but because contempt is contempt.

Of course, there might be some experiences that are so unique to a certain identity, such as having an abortion or giving birth, that no similar experiences can provide an adequate window of shared understanding. Even if we offer “excruciating pain” as a common element to the experience of childbirth, perhaps not enough men (or people who have not and will not give birth) undergo such pain for it to provide an adequate common ground. But even with such unique experiences, it would still not be true that people who cannot have them are barred from a discussion about them. One ought not be prevented from discussing the pros and cons of giving natural birth simply because one is unable to give birth. At best, one should approach the topic with humility and openness, but this is a far cry from having to shut up and listen.

In examples (a) and (b), it would be perfectly appropriate for the teacher to not steer the students’ remarks so that they constitute a “teaching moment.” That is, given that philosophy classes are devoted to a discussion of arguments for various views, philosophers’ identities (typically) have no place in such discussion. I submit, however, that if there is enough time, the teacher could use the students’ remarks as an opening to a discussion about the place of such identities in discourse, why it is not apt in philosophical discourse but apt in some non-philosophical ones (or in philosophical discourse, too, if the teacher thinks that). More importantly, the teacher can definitely discuss the role of the experience of having an abortion and the role of experiencing anti-black racism in the respective arguments by Marquis and Blum: do they affect any of their premises or inferences to their conclusions? How and why? But note that once the teacher does this, we are outside the realm of experience per se, and solidly within a discussion of the role of experiences in philosophical argument, which are two very different things.

In example (c), Y could at the least have delivered their answer in a less combative way; they need not have seen the question as disrespectful (indeed, it might very well be motivated by respect, namely, trying to better understand the experiences of trans people), and could have answered it in a less defensive way. Substantively, and if Y knows about the subject, Y could have said that there is not enough research on such experiences to provide a definite answer, or Y could have provided examples of one or two such processes. Depending on where they are in the conversation, Y could have also added a question to X, namely, what an answer to the question provides X with: Why is X asking?

In example (d), the experience of wearing the veil could have been used to enrich the discussion. Assuming that she knows the subject, W could have offered various reasons for why some women wear the veil, and she could have explained the varied ways in which women experience wearing the veil and how it affects them at different levels. Such intellectual offerings allow the discussion or dialogue to proceed.

In all conversational cases, insertions of identities can always be made in such as a way as to move the conversation forward, instead of halting it. If we are to use identities, let’s use them that way. Using them to halt the conversations is bad not only because it is counter-productive, but also because it smacks of cowardice and immaturity: the infantile desire to hide behind an experience with or against which people feel they cannot argue.

There have been various definitions of what a human being is. In their old incarnations, they always began with “man”: “man is a rational animal”; “man is a political animal”; and “man is a social animal.” Some are funny, including ones intended to be so: “Man is a laughing animal”; “man is a smoking animal”; and “man is a porn-watching animal” (this last one is literal about “man”!). But my favorite (and it is dead serious) is this: “man is a reason-giving animal.” Using our identities to halt conversation is the opposite of giving a reason, and, if the last definition is onto something, it goes against the defining characteristic of being human.