Sunday, June 24, 2007
(10:54 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Generalization
We need a better way to talk about generalizations. A recent thread at Jodi Dean's blog where she was talking about the fact that the British don't seem to have firm social norms regulating pedestrian traffic led to her being harrassed by a commenter for over-generalizing (and, bizarrely, for being racist). On a top-secret theological forum, I also claimed that American holiness traditions tend to be anti-intellectual, and I was similarly accused of over-generalization. I think that Jodi and I were both correct in our generalizations, provided that we think of them as generalizations.The problem, of course, is what exactly a generalization is. I'm sure that some analytic philosopher has already rigorously solved this problem, but I'm going to venture out anyway. When we make a generalization about a group of people, we're not directly talking about empirical tendencies, but about that group's "big Other," the symbolic structure that binds them. We are also comparing them to our own "big Other." So, for example, Jodi was effectively saying that the American big Other places more stress on the smooth flow of pedestrian traffic than does the British big Other -- and this would be the case even if there were particular British people who made it a general rule to stay to the right. It's not enough to say that there are members of a given group who don't fit the generalization -- the way the big Other functions is precisely through the individuals' distance toward it.
Take, for example, racism. It is perfectly fair to say that "white people" in the US are racist against African-Americans. The fact that an individual white person does not consciously hold those beliefs is no counter-argument, because the very non-racist stance of that individual always refers to the hegemonic stance: "I know that white people are generally afraid of black people, but my experience with black people tells me that's an unfounded fear." And a non-racist white person will also generally assume that she's not going to be given the benefit of the doubt as a non-racist in a group of black people -- precisely because "white people" are racist. It is not unfair of black people to think that "white people" are racist, because "white people" (the white people's big Other) includes racism that is, as it were, free-floating, independent of any concrete racist individuals. (And also because black people generally have to move within the hegemonic white culture as well as their own community, so they know what they're talking about.)
This "free-floating" racism, however, is only free-floating in terms of the consciousness of individuals -- the racism of white people is embodied and enacted daily in their institutions, laws, as well as the concrete practice of neighborhoods one avoids, etc. To white people, all these institutions doubtless seem to be basically meritocratic, and unfortunately African-Americans just haven't gotten their act together -- so that the crasser racial stereotypes are now sublated into more "nuanced" positions, such as accusing blacks of using (non-existent) racism as an excuse not to work hard, etc. At its most insidious, this "nuanced" form of racism amounts to an accusation that it is really the black people who are all a bunch of racists -- they hate whites, they don't want to join the cultural institutions we've so generously opened up to them, we bend over backwards and look what gratitude we get.... These "subtle," supposedly "non-racist" points are the way white racism circulates in more respectable circles today; the figure of the openly racist hick provides a nice inoculation against feelings of guilt ("I'm not some hick racist -- but I'm just saying...").
The claim that one is not personally a racist thus completely misses the point. Despite the violence they sometimes engage in, the people who are self-consciously virulent racists are arguably the least dangerous on the grand scale -- it's actually the continual disavowal of the existence of racist structures that keeps them inscribed in the white symbolic order. That is to say, it's precisely because no individual white person directly "is" racist that "white people" are racist.
