| By Preston Stovall |

Part 1: Speaking to the Middle

I

Paginated PDF version.

An educated populace is crucial for a well-functioning democracy, and in the U.S. the use of pamphlets, periodicals, opinion pieces, and public letters, stretching back before the revolution, testifies to the importance that Americans place on an educated public. The use of these devices has helped keep American citizens apprised of the problems we face, and in the early Republic especially it was an important method of consensus-building.

Benjamin Rush.

This interest found kindred expression in a general concern with education in the United States and the colonies, one that many of the founders shared: Benjamin Franklin was instrumental in the creation of what would become the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Rush founded both Dickinson college and what would become Franklin and Marshall College (‘Franklin’ named after Benjamin), and Thomas Jefferson worked to establish a system of schools in Virginia, from the local level up to the University of Virginia, with the aim of selecting the brightest pupils for further instruction at each stage.

These projects were animated by a sense of education as something like a public resource for the American people. As a public resource education offers individual citizens not only a path to gainful employment but also the possibility of improving our lives by developing the habits of thought and conscience that accrue through a period of prolonged engagement with the thoughts and deeds of those who came before us. And by creating such citizens American education offers, for the public, successive cohorts able to sustain the intelligent collective reflection over the shape of American society that attends our participation in this experiment in self-government.

Thinking of education as a resource for the American people highlights the importance of the principles and institutions that shape its management. For just as the principles governing (e.g.) Fish, Wildlife, and Park services for U.S. citizens are enforced by various institutional mechanisms, and these geared toward the end (in part) of allowing us to enjoy the public goods that come with resource use in wilderness areas, so are the institutions of education meant to be run by principles that enable American citizens to enjoy the personal and social benefits that come with education. And just as access to wilderness areas redounds on the health of American society and its citizens, so does access to education. This analogy suggests that if education is a resource for the American people then educators—as stewards of the use of that resource—have a duty to mind the institutional norms and mechanisms that enable the public to enjoy its benefits, just as employees of FWP have a duty to mind resource management in wilderness areas.

Thomas Jefferson.

Despite its close ties to the founding of the Republic, in practice higher education, as with political representation, would remain for generations the province of the elite, however. When Jefferson speaks of the “best geniuses” that will be “raked from the rubbish annually” by the school system he proposed for Virginia (Ford 2010, 61), his candidate geniuses were white men from families wealthy enough to pay for higher education.

It is a testament to the animating ideals of the American system of government that we have gradually overcome some of the barriers obstructing the universal enjoyment of our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If the development of American society is to proceed on the basis of a more thorough realization of the principles of individual liberty and collective self-government that animate our country, and if education in the United States offers both the individual benefit of personal betterment and the public good of intelligent control over the shape of our union, then it will be important that American educational institutions foster the mutual understanding that precedes collective action. For we cannot effectively work together on a common project if we do not understand what our partners want and are trying to accomplish.

II

Unfortunately, we live in a time of increasing political polarization in the United States, and this makes it harder for people to understand one another across political divides (see section III for the details). This polarization has grown sharply in the last twenty-five years. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2016 more than 50% of those identifying either as Democrat or Republican held not only an unfavorable but a very unfavorable view of the other party (Pew Research Center 2016b). By contrast, in 2014 43% of Republicans and 38% of Democrats had a very unfavorable view of the other party, and in 1994 these percentages were just 17% and 16%, respectively (Pew Research Center 2014). This growing divide is reflected in different views about what our top priorities should be (Jones 2019). There is also a rising sense that public discourse on political issues has become too divisive (Pew Research Center 2019).

This situation makes it difficult for people of different political views to talk to one another without the conversation devolving into acrimony. That in turn makes it difficult to share and improve on the ideas we have about what we are facing and what to do about it. It would thus seem that U.S. educators, qua stewards of the public resource that is education, bear a duty to intervene in this situation in ways that foster the collective understanding and self-government that I am suggesting education offers the American people.

III

There are reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of such intervention. Research going back over three decades suggests that Americans share more political commitments than they realize, and that it is the vocal minorities in the wings that are driving the sense of a division. Summarizing a recent study and the associated background literature, Stevens (2019) writes (emphasis in the original):

• Democrats and Republicans significantly overestimate how many people on the ‘other side’ hold extreme views. Typically, their estimates are roughly double the actual numbers for a given issue.
• Greater partisanship is associated with holding more exaggerated views of one’s political opponents.
• The Perception Gap is strongest on both “Wings” (America’s more politically partisan groups).
• Consumption of most forms of media, including talk radio, newspapers, social media, and local news, is associated with a wider Perception Gap.
• Education seems to increase, rather than mitigate, the Perception Gap (just as increased education has found to track with increased ideological prejudice). College education results in an especially distorted view of Republicans among liberals in particular.
• The wider people’s Perception Gap, the more likely they are to attribute negative personal qualities (like ‘hateful’ or ‘brainwashed’) to their political opponents.

It is distressing that both college education and consumption of most forms of media today appear correlated with a greater perception gap, and this research reinforces the suspicion that we are facing a period of increasingly difficult collective action on account of a failure to understand one another. But the model mocked up here also suggests we are facing an opportunity as well. For if we share more in common than we realize, while it tends to be the vocal extremist minorities in the wings who dominate public conversation, then once we have a better understanding of where most people are located it may be that collective understanding (if not agreement) will be easier to reach than it appears right now.

My proposal in this essay is that educators make an effort to speak to the middle on politically-charged issues, and toward that end I gather together some social-scientific data and offer an interpretive gloss about how to proceed. My focus will lie on the situation on college campuses, as I believe that university educators have a particular duty to model the norms of thoughtful conversation that are needed for the development of mutual understanding. Higher education in the U.S. today has seen its own trends of increased political polarization, however, and so it will be important for the academician to address the problem as it appears within the academy as well. But if we educators can build up a bulwark of sensible people in the middle of the debate on university campuses, we might hope to more effectively intervene in the situation with the public at large.

Part 2: Speaking to the Middle on University Campuses

IV

Over the last few years, a growing chorus of concern has been raised about an apparent disregard for principles of free expression that student activists sometimes display on college campuses in the United States. In September of 2015 Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (F.I.R.E) and Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and professor at the NYU-Stern School of Business, published an article in The Atlantic titled “The Coddling of the American Mind” (expanded into Lukianoff and Haidt 2018). Lukianoff and Haidt argue that recent attempts to suppress the expression of various ideas on college campuses, due to feelings of discomfort and offense, stultify students’ intellectual and emotional growth. Over the next six months similar articles appeared at The Atlantic (Friedersdorf 2016 and Cole 2016), The Chronicle of Higher Education (deBoer 2016, Shanahan 2016, and Boyers 2016), The New Yorker (Heller 2016), U.S. News and World Report (Mulligan 2015), The Wall Street Journal (Bloomberg and Koch 2016), and The Washington Post (Adler 2016).

A number of high-profile incidents in 2017 exacerbated the sense of a crisis (Bauer-Wolf 2017, F.I.R.E. 2018, Friedersdorf 2017, Helsel 2017, The Olympian Editorial Board 2018) and though there is reason to think the wave crested that year (Burnett 2019 and Sachs 2019a), the problem remains with us (Anderson 2020, Bauer-Wolf 2019, Campbell 2018, Mangan 2019, McLaughlin 2017, Stripling 2020, and Zoeller and Majeed 2019).

A number of themes recur over these discussions. Lukianoff and Haidt speak of the ‘coddling’ of the American mind, and Campbell and Manning (2018) warn of a rise of ‘victimhood culture’ on college campuses that is supplanting cultures of ‘honor’ and ‘dignity’ (they curate a blog – victimhoodculture.com – devoted to the phenomenon). Steven B. Gerrard argues that the American university system has moved through three eras, from the Christian college to the gentleman’s college to the consumer college, and is at the dawn of a fourth: the comfort college (2019a and 2019b). From Gerrard (2019a):

[C]ontroversies over free speech, safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions and the like are symptoms of this shift. They are currently considered controversies because the colleges are in transition, and many do not realize that the old standards no longer hold. Once the transition is complete, the “correct” side of the controversies will become central to a school’s identity — just as faith was to the Christian college, self-confidence was to the gentlemen’s college, and alumni devotion and achievement were to the consumer’s college.

Comparisons to religious fanaticism and Orwellian groupthink are also common. Robert Boyers (2016) speaks of the missionary attitude student activists sometimes display, and quoting Yale English professor David Bromwich he speaks of “a church held together by the hunt for heresies.” Trent Eady, a former student activist at McGill University in Canada, identifies four “core features” of today’s social justice activism that contribute to its “dark and vaguely cultish” brand of politics: dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism (Eady 2014). Insofar as college campuses are breeding grounds for these kinds of attitudes, this situation reinforces the impression that higher education is currently compounding the divisiveness we see in the public sphere.

V

While the political right is responsible for its own attacks on the academy (cf. Alterman 2016, Beauchamp 2018, Dutt-Ballerstadt 2018), it is frequently pointed out that this state of affairs follows a period where the political orientations of university educators in the United States moved sharply to the left while the rest of the public did not. From Abrams (2016a; see also Abrams 2016b):

While the data confirms that university and college faculty have long leaned left, a notable shift began in the middle of the 1990s as the Greatest Generation was leaving the stage and the last Baby Boomers were taking up teaching positions. Between 1995 and 2010, members of the academy went from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left. Moderates declined by nearly a quarter and conservatives decreased by nearly a third.

…

[During this period] the professoriate was changing while the electorate as a whole was not. Professors were more liberal than the country in 1990, but only by about 11 percentage points. By 2013, the gap had tripled; it is now more than 30 points. It seems reasonable to conclude that it is academics who shifted, as there is no equivalent movement among the masses whatsoever.

Some disciplines (e.g. economics) tend to slant to the right, but the social sciences and humanities display particularly left-leaning faculties (Bennett 2015, Duarte et al. 2015, Langbert et al. 2016, and Wilson 2019), as do elite liberal arts colleges (Langbert 2018 and Al-Gharbi 2019a).

It is also worth mentioning that college education is positively correlated with left-wing political commitment, a correlation that grows with advance in the university educational system. A 2016 study (Pew Research Center 2016a) found that among those adults without any college experience, 26% have either consistently or mostly liberal values and 26% have either consistently or mostly conservative values, with the remaining 48% displaying a mix of both. This changes to 36% and 28% (liberal and conservative, respectively) among those with some college experience, to 44% and 29% for those who have completed an undergraduate education but have not attended graduate school, and to 54% and 24% for those with some postgraduate experience.

Many explanations might be offered here, including that liberals self-select for college instruction at a higher rate than conservatives, that liberal values are naturally more appealing as one goes through higher education, or that more general institutional and administrative mechanisms within the university are the source of this correlation rather than university instruction itself. But in 2015 72% of the adult public did not have a college degree, and 48% of this group display a mix of values that is not neatly captured by lumping them into either the liberal or the conservative camp. And considering the whole of the American adult population, 36% and 27% fall on either the liberal or the conservative ends respectively, while 38% display a mix of both sorts of values.

Now recall the data from part III showing a correlation between more extreme partisan political commitment and more distorted views of the ‘other side,’ and showing that this perception gap was increased by college education and consumption of most forms of media. If in the absence of college education the general public tends to divide evenly over conservative and liberal mindsets, with nearly half of that group not clearly identifying with either, while almost 40% of the whole adult population (college educated or not) doesn’t neatly identify with either, then an educated liberal elite wielding disproportionate influence in news media, the arts, and public discussion can only accelerate this polarization cycle, and the distortions in understanding brought with it. Add a mix of new media platforms and the ideological echo chambers they allow for, and the situation we face today is not all that surprising.

To be clear, I am not claiming that there is anything in particular about leftist thought that is the source of the problem, and here it is worth quoting Al-Gharbi (2020):

The left is not the problem. Homogeneity is a problem. Parochialism is a problem. Dogmatism is a problem. And these are general problems, not left problems. In a world where most students, faculty and administrators skewed conservative to the same degree they currently skew liberal, we should expect to see roughly the same issues arise with respect to bias, discrimination, censorship, institutional capture, etc. (indeed, we do observe just that in situations where the tables are turned).

VI

When 30 academics, primarily from psychology and the social sciences, formed the Heterodox Academy in September of 2015 a forum was opened for considering the impact of this apparent groupthink on higher education (Rosenkranz 2015). Beginning with a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, devoted to detailing the lack of ideological diversity in social psychology and its adverse effects on the discipline (Duarte et al. 2015), the members of the Heterodox Academy have been tracing the existence and effects of this tendency in the contemporary academy and suggesting ways to correct it (see the “Library” and “Press” portions of their website).

As with the so-called ‘free speech crisis’ on college campuses, not everyone agrees that the shift in distribution of political ideology across the academy that we have witnessed in the last three decades is a problem, or that it is having a corrupting influence on the attitudes of college students (see the essays in Katzav and Vaesen 2017, and Sachs 2019b). This is not the essay to address that debate, for the point here is that a number of intelligent men and women have concluded that there is such a problem, and the existence of considered disagreement on the issue militates against treating it as settled one way or the other. And that in turn bears consequences for how the educator ought to behave.

Thomas Kuhn.

In another essay (forthcoming) I use Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions to frame a view of Normal and Revolutionary periods concerning what Hegel called Sittlichkeit (ethical life), the body of norms that bind a people together as a society (roughly). In cases of Revolutionary ethical living, I argue, the educator is obliged to resist the urge to treat his or her favored view as Normal. Instead, what I call revolutionary pedagogy is one that fosters sustained and critical engagement with a variety of ethical points of view. A similar duty falls on the public work we do as academics living in a Revolutionary ethical period. For in times of ideological conflict within a society we must give special attention to, by way of engagement with, the perspectives of those with whom we disagree—only then can we hope to come to that mutual understanding which grounds effective collective action. As university educators with public-facing personas, academicians have a role to play in modeling that kind of charitable stance toward views we disagree with. One way of doing that is to try to speak to the middle, on the assumption that most people really are reasonable enough to understand one another.

On that front it is perhaps worth pointing out that in a recent study of undergraduate attitudes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, researchers found that while on the one hand conservative students were more reticent to share their views than liberals, there was a ‘hidden consensus’ among both liberals and conservatives in favor of free expression and open debate (Ryan 2020):

[I]t seems wrong to think of free expression on college campuses as a topic that must pit liberals against conservatives. At UNC, at least, many liberals and conservatives seem to want an environment where they can learn about and engage with views with which they disagree. I, for one, hope that students, faculty, and administrators alike renew our efforts to make sure that this hidden consensus does not get lost amidst the noise.

Part 3: Looking Ahead

VII

Times of instability are often times of opportunity, opening up possibilities that were not live options in the normal go of things. Just so, the existence of widespread political disagreement presents an opportunity for reshaping some of our framework political commitments, and the division between the broadly ‘left’ and ‘right’ sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. may be approaching some kind of shift.

Alasdair MacIntyre.

At the end of the 20^th century a handful of thinkers articulated a response to the liberalism that had dominated so much of that century. Often discussed under the banner ‘communitarianism’, the philosophical ground for this point of view was spelled out by philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre (2007 – first edition 1981) Michael Sandel (1998 – first edition 1982), and Charles Taylor (1989), and in the 1990s it was developed into a political position labelled ‘responsive communitarianism’ (see section 3 of Bell 2016). Communitarianism is experiencing something of a revival, joined by a number of views variously called ‘post-liberal’, ‘civic republican’, or ‘hard centrist’ (Brooks 2019, Cost 2018, Franklin 2019, Goodhart 2017, Fukuyama 2018, Papazoglou 2019, Polimédio 2019, Steiner 2019). These positions share an interest in balancing a liberal emphasis on individual autonomy with a recognition of the debts to community that provide the affective ground for the exercise of individual autonomy (as I read him, Kaufman in 2006, 2016, and 2017 examines a similar phenomenon occurring in philosophy during the modern period).

This emphasis on community relations and civic duty offers a complementary lens to lay alongside the one of individual freedom and civil rights that dominated our view of things in the last century, so as to see the autonomous person in proper depth against the background of her community. And in the last few years a number of organizations directed at fostering community dialogue and understanding have appeared in the United States (e.g. Weave at the Aspen Institute, Better Angels, BridgeUSA, Free Intelligent Conversation, Letter, and Thread). One might hope these institutions could be leveraged to help give voice to the middle ground of American political sentiment.

There are avenues for collective action among academics as well, and a number of proposals have been put forward in response to what has been happening on college campuses in the last few years. DeBoer (2016) urges the academic community to be more engaged in the support and critique of student movements and their ideologies. Lukianoff and Haidt (2015) offer the tools of cognitive behavioral therapy as a partial remedy for the pathos of the social justice mindset run amok. In his discussion of the fallout from the 2017 protests and violence directed at Charles Murray at Middlebury college (Jaschik 2017), Friedersdorf (2017) lays out areas of agreement and disagreement between those who advocate stifling the speech of others and those who prioritize freedom of expression. Eady, the reformed student activist who grew disgusted with the movement’s tactics (2014), suggests four courses of action for leftists on college campuses: embrace humility, treat people as individuals, learn to be diplomatic, and take a systems approach to political problems, conceiving of them as engineering problems. Ripley (2018) discusses a dialogical method aimed at clarifying the complications that lie at the back of ideologically divisive social issues, and she summarizes social science work that suggests this method is ameliorative. The “Moral Technology” section of Chapter 8 of Campbell and Manning (2018) outlines sociological interventions, compatible with both liberal and conservative values, that may improve the atmosphere on college campuses. And at the Heterodox Academy Al-Gharbi (2019b) argues that university educators should 1) teach students to move beyond criticism, 2) prioritize civic education and engagement, and 3) teach students about biases, cognitive distortions, and methods to mitigate them. One might also consider work in the sociology of morality suggesting that the ‘big three’ moral points of view concern autonomy, community, and divinity (cf. Shweder et al. 1997), or on the research surrounding moral foundations theory (e.g. Haidt 2012).

These and related positions might be used to frame more constructive exchanges among the partisans of different factions. Imagine a series of conferences and workshops modelled on Jefferson’s system of higher education: individual campuses would convene over the issues that concern them specifically, with regional, statewide, and national meetings to follow. Similar programs could be run concurrently within individual disciplines, and public outreach and education might follow. This would require concerted effort on the part of academics and their institutions, but it would seem within the realm of possibility.

VIII         

Since before the Revolution the public space of debate and conversation has been a testing ground for the ideas around which consensus has coalesced. The existence of an educated public depends upon the existence of people willing to help with that education, however, and so by striving to create and use public spaces for constructive conversation we help the public see the problems we face and the possible solutions on offer. That in turn requires being careful in reconstructing the views of those we disagree with, particularly when talking to our own tribe about those we consider the Others.

There are encouraging signs on this front as well. Organizations like the Aspen Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Heterodox Academy, the Institute of Art and Ideas, and the Society of Philosophers in America – as well as new media platforms like Aeon, Medium, Quillette, Salon, Slate, and UnHerd – are playing a role in disseminating ideas and conversations that allow those of us paying attention to get a better view of what’s going on.

Angela Davis.

There is a long tradition in the U.S. of public engagement by the members of the academy, especially on the part of philosophers. Contributions to public discourse from people like Richard Bernstein, Angela Davis, John Dewey, Jackie Kegley, John McDermott, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Cornell West embody the value we invest in a self-aware public. And as philosophers in the pragmatist tradition have long emphasized, the living organism is a thing that is constantly adapting and equilibrating itself to the ordered flux of experience. Only in so doing does it maintain its own vitality, and to do that intelligently the organism must be unified in its affective and responsive behaviors to the difficulties and opportunities it faces.

One role for the educator, I am suggesting, is to see that the body politic is similarly unified by equipping students with the intelligence and sensibilities needed to participate in this process. To do so is to help fulfill our function as stewards of the public resource that is education in the United States.

Author Note

Dr. Preston Stovall is Post-doctoral Researcher at the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic. He works in metaphysics and the philosophy of language, informed by a reading of German and American philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is also an education researcher with Studium Consulting.

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| By Darrius Hills and Seth Vannatta |

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him not true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. ~ W. E. B. Du Bois ^[1]

The lust—the libidinal desire—for the Black male’s body that serves as the motivation behind his condemnation and death is not altogether new. ~ Tommy J. Curry ^[2]

W. E. B. Du Bois

Black male bodies are bodies under siege. In the current historical moment, one polemical, ethical issue is the deadly interplay between the surveillance of black bodies and a burgeoning militarized police state. There are several sources of this extended surveillance and scrutiny of black male bodies in American race relations. Studies in higher education and the psychology of race have illustrated how black boys are mischaracterized as older in appearance and more aggressive in demeanor than their white counterparts.^[3] There is also substantive research on the impact that implicit racial bias has on black men and boys in terms of health and well-being, imbalances in the criminal justice system, and overarching social stigma in everyday life.^[4] This mode of surveillance and sanctioning, as we illustrate, also extends into the practices of sexual victimization of black boys and men, an understudied but prominent feature of the life experiences of black male bodies in past and contemporary American culture. Assaults against black male personhood and embodiment reveal the extent to which the American context has distinguished its racial hierarchy through the ostracizing of blackness-as-non-white. Such a social habitus featuring this racialized “twoness” reveals how black people and black bodies are problem people and problem bodies—imposing upon blacks America’s anxiety about “racial others.” To this end, we are concerned with a philosophical exploration of the experience and configuration of black bodies in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) in light of the insights from W.E.B. Du Bois and in light of gender theories on the historical and contemporary constructions of black male sexuality and identity.

Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness provides one component of the theoretical lens we use to analyze Peele’s film. We investigate double consciousness, black male embodiment, and racial appropriation through an examination of the film’s symbolism relating to each as they influence the central character, Chris Washington. Du Bois outlined the former concept in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), while the themes of racial appropriation, exploitation, and surveillance of black male bodies were inaugurated in the slave trade and continue in contemporary cultural and economic practices.

Tommy Curry’s recent text, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017) will assist our efforts to extend the film’s thematic focus on black male embodiment, sexual victimization, and racial appropriation. As Du Bois notes, African Americans are coerced to see themselves through the multiple and contradictory projections of whites. Black bodies are valued “only in terms of how white gazes value” them.^[5] Black bodies, especially black male bodies, are denied complexity and humanity. Black men are, Curry remarks, “man-nots.” Black men are only bodies, problematic bodies to be tamed and controlled. Given the racializing, sexualizing, and criminalizing of black male bodies within the white racial imagination, Curry notes that black men exist only as negations—codified and mapped “in an anti-Black world” and “denied maleness in relation to white masculinity.” ^{[6] [7]} In Get Out, the black male as only body enables the continuation and safeguarding of white interests and futurity. Curry has framed this reality of black male life in terms of a practice of anti-black misandry—anti-black male sentiment—that is rooted paradoxically in both the fear and desire of black male flesh.

Curry captures the dual quality of fear of and desire for black male flesh in the notion of phallicism. Phallicism, notes Curry, invites, and further legitimizes societal suspicion and scorn, both in academic theory and in social institutions toward black men. Curry writes:

Phallicism refers to the condition by which males of a subordinated racialized or ethnicized group are simultaneously imagined to be a sexual threat and predatory, and libidinally constituted as sexually desirous by the fantasies or fetishes of the dominant racial group.^[8]

Drawing upon the historical constructions of black manhood from slavery to Jim Crow and into the present, Curry presents phallicism as a frame for anti-black male sentiment and the resulting architecture of race and place imposed upon black male bodies. In a societal context in which all “male genitalia is conceptualized as a weapon wielded against women,” views of black men as problematic only bodies with a genetic and primordially-based proclivity for sexual violence are proffered as evidentiary support for the sanctioning, controlling, and killing of black men.^[9] Here, black men are always already the rapists, the brutes, the savages, etc.; however, in this schema, black men also represent sexual desire. Because there is long historical precedent of black men (and women) being “hypersexualized as objects of desire, possession, and want,” another feature of black male experience that is under-examined involves the reality of sexual victimization of black men and boys.^[10] In the great zeal to imagine black men as the always-already-hyper-rapist, the sexual vulnerability of black men as subordinate men trapped in a racial and sexual hierarchy that denies their personhood and agency goes unchecked.

Phallicism, then, as an accepted perspectival apprehension of and desire for black male embodiment, legitimates the use of coercion and control of the black male body as an only-body within the larger racial ecology of white male and female supremacy. Chris’s ordeal in Get Out creatively highlights that phallicism as a frame for misandry is a function of the collective white American psyche on black male bodies. Given the scope of Curry’s insights on this point, we argue, first, that Chris’s experience of double consciousness in the film discloses the white lust for the black male body concealed by the thin banalities of white liberal progressivism. Second, we show that Get Out illustrates Curry’s conclusion that Black men are treated as only problematic bodies in need of administrative control. Last, we demonstrate that Get Out highlights a yawning gap between the reality of white women as proxy patriarchs, culpable in advancing white supremacy, and the mythical view of them as both pure and passive non-participants.

“Through the Eyes of Others”^[11]

Dr. Shannon Sullivan.

Chris’s early experiences vividly represent double consciousness. He sees himself as others see him, and his lack of true self-consciousness is a lack of true agency and autonomy. The premise features an uncomfortable Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner scenario depicting the black boyfriend’s meeting a white girlfriend’s family and friends. Rose Armitage, Chris’s girlfriend, has not disclosed Chris’s race to her parents, and she expresses the absurdity of ‘racing’ him, mockingly saying to Chris: “Mom and dad, my black boyfriend will be coming home this weekend.” Cursorily, Rose’s parents represent what Shannon Sullivan describes as “good white people.”^[12] As Rose assures Chris before the visit, “they’re not racist.” They affect the veneer of stereotypical progressive white liberals who try to show superficial solidarity with Chris. Rose’s dad addresses Chris with a “Sup, my man?” and refers to Chris’s and Rose’s relationship as “this thang”—attempts to establish rapport through forced use of slang. The father considers this appropriation of what he imagines as a “code-switching,” urban speak as an authentic gesture of connection with his guest, to cement his credibility as a “good” white man, but his effort is sorely wanting. Even though the father presumably makes a “connection” based on some sense of shared understanding rooted in urbanized vernacular, he does not make an effort to know Chris beyond the cursory and surface level—rendering Chris still yet, a “problem.” The Armitages make no effort to know Chris beyond their restrictive epistemic glances—a fact that becomes more pronounced when we learn their actual intentions for Chris’s body.

Chris is a talented photographer who captures the white world through his filtered angle of vision, and this feature of his character further highlights the phenomenon of double consciousness. The camera extends his “second-sight,” enabling insight into “this American world.” Interestingly, one white person seeking Chris’s body wants to make use of this second sight. The blind art dealer, Jim, who is later to receive Chris’s body, openly clarifies his fascination with his sight. When Chris later asks about the rationale for the use of black bodies—“why black people?”—Hudson claims race is irrelevant: “What I want is deeper. I want your eye, man. I want those things you see through.” In this dynamic, the “second sight” of the black body is a source of fascination and admiration, but still collapses into the restrictive confines of desire for black male flesh.

Dr. Tommy J. Curry.

The art dealer’s racial erasure as a factor in his decision to appropriate Chris’s body warrants additional criticism, particularly in light of implications that shed light on the intersections of race and disability. The art dealer sees in Chris’s body a pragmatic utility that presumably eschews any concern with race. Historically considered, the bodies of black men, as we note with Curry, are often constructed as only bodies—bodies subject to the control and coercion of white political, economic, and social hierarchies. The art dealer’s disability, his blindness, provides him with a non-raced rationale for obtaining Chris’s body. Here, it is Chris’s black body, and not the white male body, that is in the immediate, “ideal type.” Curry observes that interplay between embodiment and coercion involving the bodies of black men and white men was most always driven by the inconceivability on the part of whites to read black male bodies as anything other than problem bodies—bodies that require sanctioning and control.^[13] With the art dealer, however, the presumption that those raced as black have “been constructed as the degenerate/inferior/nonhuman opposite to the rational prototype human/superior/(Western) (abled) human” is strikingly absent, but the control of black male flesh remains prominent.^[14] While the abnormality and disability of the white male body reverses the rigid racialization of Chris’s raced body, his (color) blindness once again collapses into the remorseless subjugation of Chris’s body that has characterized the lion’s share of white racial responses, perceptions, and usage pertaining to black bodies. The terrain of race hierarchy and bodily desire that is often a feature of white fascination with black embodiment is slippery here.

“A Stranger in my own House”^[15]

Rose’s parents, the Armitages, host a party where the guests observe Chris as if he is an exotic animal, while offering racially tone-deaf commentary. Rose’s brother, Jeremy, channels a racist trope linked to American slavery: he suggests Chris is bred to fight, again reducing him to the body. Frantz Fanon also spoke of this dynamic as the tendency of blacks to be “overdetermined from the outside,” that is, having agency or identity not of one’s choosing levied as an authentic representation of true selfhood.^[16] Shortly after meeting Chris, Jeremy initiates a conversation about mixed martial arts during which Chris admits that he finds the sport “too brutal.” Jeremy laments this response, noting, “With your frame and genetic makeup, if you really pushed your body…you’d be a fucking beast.” Jeremy’s word choice illustrates how black bodies are constructed within the white racial imagination. Here, Black male bodies are animalistic bodies solely suited for hyper-aggression, a designation Eldridge Cleaver once described as the phenomenon of the “supermasculine menial.”^[17] Jeremy emphasizes the point through a discussion of the martial art, Jiu Jitsu, which he imagines as reliant not upon physical prowess, Chris’s singular value, but as a “strategic game like chess” requiring greater intelligence. The implication is that Chris is the physically superior, but otherwise intellectually inferior being, valuable only for athletic labor.

Dr. Kenneth Stikkers

The guests at the party treat Chris as what bell hooks calls the “native informant.”^[18] They force Chris to be a spokesperson of the black race, which they presume is monolithic. The manner in which they press Chris to account for and represent blackness takes on an insidious tone with historical implications for the nature of racial perception and the white imagination. For example, they take sexual accessibility to Chris’s body for granted. An older female guest gropes Chris’s arms, demonstrating what Ken Stikkers describes as “ontological expansiveness,” a racial privilege enabling free access to space and place.^[19] There is no space that she is not entitled to occupy, including Chris’s body. She also demonstrates degraded value for black bodies beyond that purposed for white interests. In referencing sex with Chris, the woman asks Rose: “Is it true? Is it … better?” She defines Chris by his body, vis-à-vis her sexualized gaze. This scene reflects one of the under-discussed mechanisms of black male vulnerability: the sexual victimization of black male bodies. Chris is reduced to the mythic black phallus, implicating and reinscribing a racial legacy that frames black men as both hypersexual and as perpetual rapists, but still subject to being preyed upon by white men and women. ^{[20] [21]}

Chris’s experience at the Armitage estate is both familiar and strange. The strangeness of the party sets the tone for the film’s transition from a mere clash of cultures to outright horror. He is accustomed to the micro aggressions and both the overt and thinly veiled racism under the guise of racial admiration. As Aisha Harris wrote, “That even surface-level ‘admiration’ for black culture on the part of white people can give way to insidious interactions that are, at best, a persistent annoyance black people must learn to laugh off, and, at worst, the kind of fetishization that only conceals deadlier preconceptions.”^[22] Chris, like so many black Americans, has to distinguish between the comments of well-meaning, ignorant white people, the more nefarious racist intentions of others, and the ways the former can devolve into the latter.

“Plod Darkly in Resignation” to White Control^[23]

Grabbed fist bump in ‘Get Out.’

The abnormality of the Armitage home includes their two black servants, Walter and Georgina, the groundskeeper and housekeeper. Both appear lifeless and unfeeling. They plod through the estate in quiet resignation. A third guest, a young black man, whose dress and speech patterns mimic those of an older, white man, plods darkly in like manner. His black body enfleshes a white persona, and his wife is a much older, white woman. Disconnected from black culture, he grasps, with an open hand, Chris’s attempt at a fist-bump. He is resigned to embodied slavery to his white wife, noting: “I find that I don’t have much desire to leave the house anymore.” The older woman then grasps his waist and says, “We’re such homebodies now.” Another source of Chris’s unique sight, his cell phone camera, inadvertently wakes this guest from assimilated slumber, known as “the sunken place”—a psychic prison housing a sliver of the formerly intact consciousness of the black host.

One of the messages underscoring the film’s plot centers on the ability of the sunken guests to regain race consciousness and black agency in the interstices of their oppression. Part of Chris’s struggle is to resist the compelling racial, psychological, and scientific forces that would render him unconscious and subject to white agency and control vis-à-vis the sunken place. In contemporary parlance, sunken blacks are not “woke”—they cannot recognize the nuances of their racial subjugation. Sunken consciousness is no consciousness at all; in this realm, white psychological, cultural, and intellectual reference points supplant “wokeness.” Part of the process of racial subordination and exploitation, as Cleaver observed, requires white control over the menial black body. Cleaver refers to whites, in this framing, as “omnipotent administrators.” In Get Out, the surgical mechanism to fuse white consciousness with black bodies manifests this administrative omnipotence.

Cleaver opined that omnipotent administrators subjugate menial bodies precisely through the dulling—the obsoleting of the “menial” consciousness and intellectual prowess. The administrators maintain control in society, quite literally, because of “mind over matter.” Cleaver’s explanation also addresses why during slavery whites enacted literacy codes making it unlawful for the enslaved to learn to read. When considered with the theme of consciousness and black male embodiment in Get Out, Rose’s mother, Missy, functions as omnipotent administrator by depriving Chris full consciousness through hypnosis—prompting his immersion into the sunken place. In so doing, she literally administers the process of subordinating Chris’s consciousness to white control. As the art dealer, Jim, says to Chris before the operation: “…you won’t be gone, not completely…your existence will be as a passenger…I’ll control the motor function.”

White Women as Proxy Patriarchs

While it is in fact the psychology and personality of the white male patriarchal “ideal” who will control Chris’s vessel, there is still the issue and importance of the white woman as the inaugurator of the entire process. White womanhood serves as proxy for white patriarchy. Both Rose’s and Missy’s characters embody this proxy as both are complicit in the administrations of Chris’s body.

When Cleaver delved into gender theory on whites and blacks, his conception of white women as the “ultrafeminine” was flawed. Per Cleaver, the white-woman-as-ultrafeminine is “delicate, weak, helpless.”^[24] This view is problematic for its sexism and its ahistorical interpretation of the tensions and contradictions of white women as proxies, or rather, proxy patriarchs with tangential raced and gendered privileges. Framing white women as helpless counterparts to white males is sexist because it denies their agency and abilities to act; the damsel-in-distress trope relies on the same assumptions about women’s docility that ground much of Victorian gender ideality. Cleaver’s “ultrafeminine” conclusions are also problematic because they ignore and neglect the reality of white women’s promotion of white male supremacy and patriarchal power. Some of the most dutiful foot soldiers in the preservation and cultivation of white male identity formation as the patriarchal ideal and locale for racial power are white women.

Dr. Gail Bederman.

Gail Bederman links, for example, early white feminist concerns about the march toward higher “civilization” to white male power and influence as the determinative feature of cultural progress. Using Charlotte Perkins Gilman as an example, Bederman opines that the turn to “civilized Anglo-Saxon womanhood” as a white feminist strategy, essentially secured the trappings of patriarchal power not by opposing white men as patriarchal oppressors, but through a radical acceptance of certain virtues that propelled the race forward against the rising tides of barbarism and savagery presumably embodied in other races, namely blacks. Gilman once suggested that in order to stem black male criminality, “non-progressing” black men who did not seem to embody “a certain grade of citizenship,” or cultural assimilation, should be compelled into military servitude until “graduation,” into the realm of authentic cultural nationalism. Gilman’s feminism was wedded to race loyalty over against gender and sex interests—thus indicating the curious fusion of white supremacism with many early expressions of white feminist ideology, theory, and praxis.^[25] Other studies on white racialist movements and the politics of race within white communities provide much material on gendered expressions of racism and the centrality of white women. Recent tomes such as They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2019) and Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and Politics of White Supremacy (2018) document how white women were often key players in the reifying of American racial and political economies, from slavery to the contemporary period.^[26]

White women’s sharing in patriarchal privileges and power also extends toward sexual power, which has come at the expense of black men’s bodies and lives. White women, in addition to having economic and political power over black men, also enjoyed a more understated, subtle power rooted in the universally accepted veneer of sexual purity and unmolested feminine virtue. Assumptions regarding the purity of white women’s sexuality have yielded deadly consequences for black men. Curry provides a striking case study of this in the example of a condemned and eventually executed black man Willie McGee, who was accused of raping a white woman, with whom he actually had a consensual sexual relationship.^[27] In cultural framings and gender theories that render white women as the highest inculcators of white society’s values and as the prototype for womanhood, it is unimaginable to frame white women either as predators or as morally and psychologically capable and culpable in aiding and abetting white (male) supremacy and power. This lacuna between the perception of white women and the empirical realities pertaining to their abilities to exploit and demonize black men as a function of racial and patriarchal power is an understudied phenomenon.

We must acknowledge reality of white women’s gender-based privilege as a construct that can be weaponized against black men—rendering black men devoid of any modality of patriarchal privilege solely based on manhood. In the context of the film, Chris is disempowered at the hands of white women, Rose and Missy. When Missy began the process of Chris’s hypnosis and immersion into the sunken place; she was not a dainty, dispassionate observer; she was a direct participant and recipient of his embodied benefits. Like a good proxy patriarch, she played her part. This long history of white women as historical actors in the degradation and displacement of black male bodies is a painful one, but contemporary scholarship must reckon with it. A failure to do so eschews the kind of complex interpretive strategies that enable us to more fully wrestle with the messy, non-linear connections that often interlock raced, sexed, and gendered constructions of power and how this impacts subordinate and subaltern male communities denied the trappings of privilege presumed to constitute the nature of manhood and masculinity.

Conclusion: “Warring Ideals”^[28]

Jordan Peele.

As a realistic depiction of the larger struggle to resist the push and pull on black identity, embodiment, and personhood, Get Out provides a useful lens to explore how black men navigate the complex webs of meaning attached to their bodies. The Armitages and their guests viewed Chris with both exoticism and amusement. If Du Bois’s analysis was accurate, perhaps it was with “amused contempt and pity.” They collectively engaged in gross reductionism—in those moments, “Chris” ceased to be. He became the amalgamation of their desires, gazes, and curiosities linked to his body. The “surface-level ‘admiration’” for Chris gave way to more “insidious interactions” and the kind of “fetishization” that conceals more insidious racial appropriation and anti-black racism.

Read Du Bois’s words as a description of Chris: “his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”^[29] In this passage, Du Bois illustrates that African-Americans are both Americans and Black, and these souls are at war. Chris sustains the American ideal as long as he can, but the Armitages see him only as a means to an end, a body for use. The first ideal is at work in his compassion. He trusts Rose and agrees to visit her family. He shows compassion for the deer Rose hit with the car and for Georgina, who he hits with Jeremy’s car during his escape. But the ideal for the conservation of his race and for his survival as a black man wars with the ideal that mutual compassion and recognition of black humanity can win the day in America. His friend Rod maintains this latter ideal, and Chris’s cell phone flash into Walter’s eyes raises Walter’s awareness of this ideal as well. He must fight to prevent black bodies from being “torn asunder” by the pernicious modes, both subtle and explicit, of white supremacy. The double consciousness operative in Chris’s character shows that underneath the thin pleasantries of white liberal progressivism one finds a sexual fetishizing of the black male body, but also indicates the outright disposability of black male bodies without consequences should those bodies escape white, administrative control.

Get Out uncovers some disturbing but realistic truths about the realities of black male embodiment in American culture. As Curry notes, Black men are largely reducible to only bodies—prey to white men’s and women’s control. Chris was able to evade the grievous fate tied to the loss of agency, consciousness, and will—he was able to safeguard and preserve himself. However, in our present reality there are far more mechanisms at play that continually displace black male humanity through the attachment of blackness to disposable flesh: racial profiling, a militaristic criminal justice system, and the myriad insidious biases that mar our public, political, educational, and economic infrastructures. Ultimately, the crux of the problem with framing black bodies as only bodies is the abject denial of non-white humanity. The film unpacks this feature of America’s racial legacy.

Dr. Darrius Hills is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan State University. His research and scholarship have been supported by generous funding from the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry (of the United Methodist Church), The Forum for Theological Exploration (formerly The Fund for Theological Education), and the Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion.

Dr. Seth Vannatta is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan State University. He is the author of Conservatism and Pragmatism in Law, Politics, and Ethics (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). He was also a past guest on SOPHIA’s radio show and podcast, Philosophy Bakes Bread, in episode 6 on “Teaching Philosophy to First-Generation College Students.”

Notes 

[1] The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, Ed. Eric J. Sundquist, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 102.

[2] Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemma of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 35.

[3] See Phillip Attiba Goff et al., “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106.4 (2014): 526-545, 540.

[4] See Phillip Attiba Goff et.al, “Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94.2 (2008): 292-306; Valerie Strauss, “Implicit racial bias causes black boys to be disciplined at school more than whites,” The Washington Post, April 5, 2018, (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/04/05/implicit-racial-bias-causes-black-boys-to-be-disciplined-at-school-more-than-whites-federal-report-finds/?utm_term=.d31f5807a352).

[5] George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America, Second Edition, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) xiv.

[6] The distortion of African American selfhood and personality, particularly through popular stereotypes, is obviously not limited to black men. Womanist ethicist Emilie Townes takes up this cultural phenomenon as it impacts black women in American race relations in Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

[7] Curry, The Man-Not, 6.

[8] Curry, “Killing Boogeymen: Phallicism and the Misandric Mischaracterizations of Black Males in Theory,” in Res Philosophica, Vol. 95, No. 2, (April 2018), 265.

[9] Curry, Killing Boogeymen, 264.

[10] Ibid., 265.

[11] The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, 102.

[12] Shannon Sullivan, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism, (SUNY Press, 2014).

[13] Tommy J. Curry, “This Nigger’s Broken: Hyper-Masculinity, the Buck, and the Role of Physical Disability in White Anxiety Toward the Black Male Body,” in The Journal of Social Philosophy, 48: 321-343. doi: 10.1111/josp.12193

[14] Ibid., 322.

[15] The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, p. 102.

[16] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 116.

[17] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York, Delta Books, 1999), 209.

[18] bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 43.

[19] Kenneth Stikkers, “…But I’m Not Racist”: Toward a Pragmatic Conception of “Racism,” The Pluralist, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 1-17.

[20] Curry takes up the sexual victimization and exploitation of black men in chapter 2 of The Man-Not, but see Thomas A. Foster, “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2011), pp. 445-464.

[21] Curry, Man-Not, 91-92.

[22] Aisha Harris, Get Out (Review), Slate, Feb. 23, 2017.

[23] The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, p. 102.

[24] Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 217.

[25] Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Ch.4.

[26] Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Elizabeth G. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[27] Tommy Curry, “He’s a Rapist, Even When He’s Not: Richard Wright’s Account of Black Male Vulnerability in the Raping of Willie McGee,” in The Political Companion to Richard Wright, ed. Jane Gordon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2018).

[28] The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, p. 102.

[29] The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, Ed. Eric J. Sundquist, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 102.

References

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Delta Books, 1999.

Curry, Tommy J. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017.

–––. “He’s a Rapist, Even When He’s Not: Richard Wright’s Account of Black Male Vulnerability in the Raping of Willie McGee,” in The Political Companion to Richard Wright, ed. Jane Gordon. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2018.

–––. “Killing Boogeymen: Phallicism and the Misandric Mischaracterizations of Black Males in Theory.” Res Philosophica, Vol. 95, No. 2 (April 2018): 235-272.

The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Foster, Thomas A. “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 20. Number 3 (September 2011): 445-464.

Goff, Phillip Attiba, et al. “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106.4 (2014): 526-545.

–––. “Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94.2 (2008): 292-306.

Harris, Aisha. Get Out (Review). Slate, Feb. 23, 2017.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress. London: Routledge, 1994.

Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

McRae, Elizabeth G. Mothers of Massive Resistance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Stikkers, Kenneth. “. . . But I’m Not Racist”: Toward a Pragmatic Conception of “Racism,” The Pluralist 9, No. 3 (Fall 2014): 1-17.

Strauss, Valerie. “Implicit racial bias causes black boys to be disciplined at school more than whites,” The Washington Post, April 5, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/04/05/implicit-racial-bias-causes-black-boys-to-be-disciplined-at-school-more-than-whites-federal-report-finds/?utm_term=.d31f5807a352.

Sullivan, Shannon. Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism. SUNY Press, 2014.

Townes, Emilie. Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Second Edition. Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.

| By Raymond D. Boisvert |

One of my nieces helps publicize Maine cheesemakers. She invited my wife and me to an actual “cheesery.” Yes, it’s a cheesy name but one that says it all. Why bother with fancy, disguised labels like “creamery” or “dairy farm” when what you do is make cheese. The setting is lovely: The Belgrade Lakes region. The address is Pond Road and, sure enough, the land rolls down to a body of water. Strangely enough, its official name is Messalonskee Lake, not pond but, as we know, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

The cheesery is small, homey, artisanal. Milk comes from the farm’s own 60 or so goats. There are also sheep. Where there are sheep and goats, this is what a city dweller notices, there’s also a certain aroma, and bugs. Plenty of bugs. Bugs are central to the philosophical lesson to come, but that’s for later. A great number of the bugs are visible, hovering around the animals (and the human visitors). Others are invisible, in the soil, in the guts of the animals and the humans. Some bugs, though, come in neat packets and are carefully stocked. These have actually been sought after and, yes, paid good money for, by the cheesemaker.

The sought-after bugs are mostly bacteria. They have Latin names. Some of them are immediately recognizable, Penicillium roqueforti, or Penicillium camembertii. Other names are just enigmas, for example Brevibacterium linens. While the name may be enigmatic, its presence is not. Anyone who has smelled foot odor has noticed its impact. So has anyone who has savored cheeses like Munster, Pont L’Évêque, Port-du-salut, or Limburger.

Bugs are annoying. We try to avoid them. Bacteria are annoying and disease-causing. We try to avoid them as well. In other words, for quite a while now, we have been “Pasteurians.” We have succeeded, in the tradition taught us by the great Louis Pasteur, in eliminating unwanted, disease-causing bacteria from our foodstuffs and ourselves. The background scenario was fairly straightforward: bacteria = bad = must get rid of them. But now we are confronted with cheese makers who spend good money to acquire and then use bacteria. What is going on?

Louis Pasteur.

Well, several things about which a history of ideas can enlighten us. The general topics have familiar and very old labels: the one and the many, the pure and the impure. These labels can be matched with a historical one: the ancients and the moderns.

Interestingly enough, the ancients, it turns out, tended to embrace multiplicity and mixture. We often don’t notice because we read their texts through the interpretive lenses of later thought. Philosophers, influenced by Modernity, will tend to talk about the “good,” for example as if it were a singular thing.

Aristotle.

This can be a source of problems when life is a complicated adventure. The ancients like Plato and Aristotle did pretty well. One of the famous maxims inscribed at the temple at Delphi read “Nothing in Excess.” In line with this saying, philosophers recognized the need for some balance among multiple elements as defining the “good.” Plato thought in terms of an optimal society, one in which “good” was to be defined by the proper arrangement of the multiple and differentiated humans who made it up. Aristotle invented a word, “eudaimonia,” to indicate “happiness,” or human “flourishing.” A flourishing life involved multiple elements: proper organization of dispositions, good habits, friends, some luck as regards things like health and a stable society, all accompanied by a general reasonableness and attention to what is learned from experience. Eudaimonia was always a complex affair.

Epicurus.

Then, came a shift. After Aristotle, Epicurus defined “pleasure” as the content of happiness and thus goodness. As a philosopher, he asked a complicating question: what is pleasure? It turned out to mean “ataraxia,” non-disturbedness. A life lived in equilibrium, with minimal disturbances, would be the most pleasant life. The Stoics, often contrasted with the Epicureans, had a similar ideal, “apatheia,” absence of powerful emotional upheavals.

These post-Aristotelian moves marked a major change: an inward turn. Things to be avoided, e.g. disturbances, emotional upheavals, upsets to a life lived in equilibrium–all of these arose from what was outside us. The less we involved ourselves, the less we made ourselves vulnerable, the greater were the chances of achieving a pleasurable, minimally disturbed life. The older ethics assumed that a good/happy life was not possible unless there were people on whom we could depend. The newer one followed the trajectory sung by Whitney Houston: “And so I learned to depend on me.”

Mass grave at the Nazi Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Religion added another ingredient. This arrived via the teachings of a Persian sage called Mani. The internal/external distinction became a sharp good/evil split. Manichaeism described a world in which good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter were irreconcilable. Each could be easily identified. Matter was evil, spirit was good. Within this context it made perfect sense for large numbers of men, aspiring to a good life, to withdraw from the world and become cloistered monks. Also encouraged was a tendency as old as humanity: identifying scapegoats. Women labelled as witches felt this wrath, as did heretics. Later writers traced political problems to “parasites,” either the idle rich (Lenin lambasted them), or poor folks (Ayn Rand lambasted them). The Nazis treated their enemies as parasites and germs, agents in need of eradication.

Newspaper headlines about the notorious E. coli do not help, especially when they fail to mention that most strains are harmless and even beneficial. Eliminating them would be disastrous for our health. Better to work with them. This is where cheese making offers an object lesson. Streptococcus thermophilus, Lactobacillus casei – don’t eliminate them. Welcome them, cooperate with them. The results: healthy, tasty cheeses.

Pasteurizing plant, from the McCord Museum.

The post-Aristotelian dispensation in ethics led readily to a fetish with eliminative purification. Cheese making returns us to a more complex, i.e. more concretely accurate, setting. It’s not one that is anti-Pasteurian. Its more accurate label is “post-Pasteurian.” The philosophical framework that accompanied the “eradicate to purify” move, the post-Aristotelian inward turn, was doubly problematic. (1) A good life was to be achieved by insulating ourselves from the vagaries of existence. (2) The dispensation encouraged a combat mode. It fostered, in other words, not just withdrawal, but attempts at purification through eradication of what was considered, unilaterally and unequivocally, evil.

Cheesemaking offers another model: streptococcus, lactobacillus, penicillium, we can work together. We could, of course, go the radical antibiotic route. But it is better to reject the Manichean, purificatory move. Instead of defaulting to a position which is hostile, start with one that is hospitable. Viruses? Not eliminate, but integrate. (We call this vaccination.) Bacteria? Avoid blanket condemnations. Admit a good/bad mix, and the responsibility for sorting things out that comes with it. Then, welcome, integrate, harmonize what will give rise to fruitful culminations. In other words, make cheese. Mary Douglas an anthropologist with an interest in food wrote an important book about the drive to purification. The book was called Purity and Danger. The ethics lesson offered by cheesemakers would suggest, as a life guideline, a different title: Purity is Danger.

Dr. Raymond D. Boisvert recently retired after 35 years of teaching at Siena College, near Albany New York. His early research was on American Pragmatism. This culminated in Dewey’s Metaphysics (1988) and John Dewey: Rethinking Our Time (1998). More recently he has concentrated on philosophy and food, publishing I Eat, Therefore I Think (2014) and Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human (2016, with Lisa Heldke).

Click on the image here for a printable, Adobe PDF of our One-Sheet on “Clutter.”

SOPHIA has created our journal, Civil American, and our radio show and podcast, Philosophy Bakes Bread, in part to offer content for conversations among our local chapters. The Chairman of SOPHIA’s Board of Trustees John Lachs published his short essay, “Clutter,” in the 2017 edition of Civil American not very long after his wife passed away. The objects in our lives can seem mundane, but they can also bear great emotional weight for us. The leaders of the Lexington SOPHIA Chapter selected his essay as the focus of one of our “One-Sheet” documents, which will serve as the topic and guiding document for an upcoming chapter meeting. You can click on the thumbnail image of the one-sheet on the right hand side or you can open it by clicking here for a printable version of the “One Sheet” document on “Clutter.”

SOPHIA is grateful both to Dr.  Lachs for his essay a well as to the leaders of the Lexington SOPHIA Chapter for drafting the questions that groups can use to jump easily into fun philosophical conversation. Thanks to Caroline A. Buchanan, Derek Daskalakes, Erik Jarvis, James William Lincoln, and Eric Thomas Weber. If any groups choose to make use of this one-sheet also, we encourage them to let us know how the conversation went as well as what thoughts their group has for possible improvement of this one-sheet or for future pieces.

John Lachs of Vanderbilt University

This piece includes the full content of Lachs’s short essay, thanks to Civil American Editor Shane Courtland. The author, John Lachs, is Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

| By Avery Kolers |

I. What is Solidarity?

Suppose you are a white bus rider in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. You look up from your newspaper to see Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. She is expelled from the bus. What should you do?

On the one hand, you have paid your fare for a public service and are entitled to receive it. Justice supports your claim to remain on the bus until you reach your destination. A “Good Samaritan” might take an interest, but if you are on your way to work and need the job to pay the bills, you might look at your shoes and mind your own business. It’s not as though standing up for Mrs. Parks will enable her to keep her seat, it will only cause the bus to be late and might just get you ejected, as well – or worse.

Anyway, how sure can you be that she is telling the truth when she says she is tired and just wants to rest her legs? Perhaps the people accusing her of being ornery – people who are in your social stratum, people you know and like and trust – are right. So what should you do?

I submit that there is a single right answer to this question, and that, at least from our vantage point today, it is obvious to all decent people: you must not stand for this. You should insist that Mrs. Parks be allowed to keep her seat, and if she is ejected from the bus you should walk off alongside her. If her community then boycotts the bus company, you should boycott too.

Admittedly, it might be exceedingly difficult to make yourself do this.

Fast-forward to today. You reside in a neighborhood in which there is a monument to some minor Confederate figure. Local African American activists demand that the statue be removed, perhaps replaced by a statue of Rosa Parks. You might wonder whether it matters all that much; he was after all a minor figure and was rehabilitated into a philanthropist of sorts after the war. And the statue is quite lovely. Your neighbors, whom you know and like, view the statue as a landmark in a neighborhood that, though mostly white, is completely lacking in “Southern sympathizers.” They just like their statue.

It is not completely clear to you why the activists have descended on your neighborhood. This is hardly the most important issue in the world. Most people don’t even realize who the guy in the statue was. Why make such a big deal of it?

I submit, again, that there is a single right answer: the statue must go. Not because in some objective or eternal sense there is a rule that we should not honor people of dubious moral character or political leanings, but because there are victims of white supremacy who plausibly see in it a celebration of their oppression, and until they are satisfied that their society does not celebrate their oppression, their demands are compelling.

These cases pit solidarity against friendliness, civility, orderliness, and loyalty. It is not clear in either case whether the outcome will be better or worse by the standards of justice or overall well-being. After all, the white bus rider does not know whether the bus walkout will make things better or worse for African Americans, in Montgomery or nationwide, and the statue removal seems likely to upset people without making life materially better for anyone. In these cases, then, the only reason to act in the way I claim morality requires is that by doing so you act in solidarity with victims of oppression who are refusing to go on being treated and demeaned in habitual ways, and have chosen this site to express their refusal.

“Solidarity” is a popular idea these days, both in political life and, increasingly, in academic writing. But I suspect the popularity of this idea is due in part to a tendency to conflate it with other, less challenging notions.

Solidarity is not just acting together with others for shared political aims; that is an alliance or a coalition. Nor is it simply collective action for justice. For as we noted in both cases above, it is not clear that the action in question will enhance justice. For all the actors know in the heat of the moment, things may get worse, not better. In solidarity it’s not essential that you think the action likely to succeed. It’s not essential that it be directed at a just outcome. It’s not essential that you would yourself endorse the action if it were up to you. What’s essential is that you would act alongside the other even if you thought they were wrong. I call this attitude deference. When you act in solidarity with someone, you act on their behalf: as they would have acted if they could be in two places at once.

Solidarity can thus be defined, roughly, as political action on others’ terms.

That is a dangerous idea. What could justify you in acting contrary to your best judgment about what is strategically or even morally best; contrary to the best judgment of your peers and friends; contrary to the interests of your family and community?      

II. What could Justify Solidarity?

I suggest that solidarity is justified, when it is, neither by the ends you pursue nor by the means you use to pursue them, nor by your relationship with the larger group. It is justified not by justice as a goal of the action, but by justice as a duty that you owe to those who ask for your solidarity. It is in this sense “deontological”: a duty owed irrespective of its consequences.

Of course, people request your solidarity all the time. White supremacists are big on it. But surely it is only rarely if ever that white supremacists are entitled to your solidarity. So who is, and why?

The core moral notion in my defense of solidarity is equity. This term explains both who is owed solidarity, and why: both the object of solidarity, and its justification.

Equity is the core of justice. It is recognition of each as an equal, and as entitled to basic fairness and coequal citizenship. Not all injustice is inequity; for instance, “mere” economic deprivation below some baseline does not seem to meet this criterion, but economic deprivation that is grounded in a “stacked deck” against, say, mine workers or undocumented immigrants clearly does.

Dr. Larry May.

Larry May connects equity to the basic Magna Carta rights, which are rights not to be “disappeared,” not to be answerable to unknown charges or accusers, not to be made an outlaw, not to be deported into peril. All of these, May contends, have to do with visibility – that each person be seen, and I would add be seen as a person and an equal. Systemic discrimination such as that faced by Rosa Parks in 1955 is a particularly vivid example of inequity in this sense.

My contention is that solidarity is owed to those who suffer inequitable treatment, when they are engaged in a struggle against those who treat them inequitably. We owe solidarity to victims of inequity, which means we should stand and act alongside them, on their terms, when they struggle against their oppressors.

But why does equity require solidarity? Here I distinguish three senses of equity. The first is traced back to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, by way of contemporary followers such as Larry May, Anna Stilz, and Aaron James. Suppose you are treated inequitably. By responding to your call for solidarity, I not only do something but I also express something: my action in solidarity expresses my rejection of your inequitable treatment, and effectively rebukes your abusers. In so acting I see and recognize you as an equal, entitled to equal status and respect.

Immanuel Kant.

Notice that it does not matter here whether I am to blame for your inequitable treatment; innocent bystanders who fail to respond to the call for solidarity thereby fail to treat people equitably. They fail to rebuke the abuser, and continue on their way as though the abuse were an appropriate way to treat you: as if you were just another object on the sidewalk.

So suppose you are about to enter a hotel where you have a reservation, but there is a picket line outside. The custodial staff is on strike and asking you to refuse to cross the line. You can either deny their request for solidarity by crossing the line, or respect it by refusing to cross. You cannot, say, express your sympathies and then feel good about yourself as you go in through the back door. If you cross the line, you participate in their inequitable treatment; you see them as an obstacle rather than as equals.

You might object that just seeing the picket line doesn’t tell you all you need to know. Isn’t it fair, then, to take some information and decide for yourself whom to support? I can grant this for the sake of argument. Even so, you must still choose what to do now, while you are deciding. Cross the line and think about it once comfortable in your hotel room which was cleaned by replacement workers? Or refuse to cross the line? There is, again, no third option.

Unlike views that justify solidarity by appeal to the eventual justice that the cause brings about or aims at, the current view, which I call “Solidarity as Equity,” justifies it on the basis that it treats others equitably in the instant. Equitable treatment is an ultimate value: it is justified in itself and does not depend on any further justification. So if solidarity (partly) constitutes equity, then solidarity, too, is intrinsically valuable. It is valuable irrespective of anything else it brings about. Equitable treatment is not optional but is owed, to particular people at particular times, like a debt. We have no right to treat people inequitably unless they specifically release us to do so. (This might happen if, say, someone was having a heart attack and needed to get into the hotel lobby to receive CPR. Or more prosaically, if someone had checked in before the strike started, and now needed to get back inside to collect their belongings and check out.)

Dr. Martha Nussbaum.

There is a second sense of equity, one that derives from Aristotle, by way of contemporary interpreters such as Martha Nussbaum. For Aristotle, equity requires seeing people and their plight as particulars rather than as abstractions. Sometimes, general rules misrecognize or misrepresent particular people in distinctive contexts, and hence the application even of just rules would be unjust. Affirmative Action seems to be such a case. Justice Harlan’s famous dictum that “the Constitution is color-blind” expresses an abstract justice that, in the real world, hinders efforts to repair racial injustice. Equity requires partly setting aside the abstraction in order to do justice in the real world. The so-called “right to work” is another example of the same phenomenon. Freedom of association is an important right, but given the real-world bargaining advantages of owners over workers, the abstraction hinders workers’ real freedom of association. Consequently, equity supports relaxing the abstract fairness to achieve the concrete fairness for which effective unions are often required. Thus solidarity is not only about stark cases like Rosa Parks vs. Jim Crow; it can be about supporting unions and affirmative action, as well.

Aristotle.

Finally, a third sense of equity, also from Aristotle, is relevant to solidarity: being an equitable person. According to Aristotle, an equitable person not only “chooses and does [equitable] acts” such as the ones described above, but also “is no stickler for his rights in a bad sense but tends to take less than his share though he has the law on his side.” It may seem odd to describe someone acting in solidarity as taking less than his share, given that we associate solidarity with making demands. But recall the white bus rider in Montgomery, Alabama. Solidarity in his case involves sacrificing the bus ride for which he has paid, and joining the ensuing boycott, even at some cost to himself, and even if he doubts the effectiveness of the tactic. Indeed, even if he strongly believes that the tactic is doomed to backfire, that is what has been chosen by a group that is struggling for equity. Insofar as he is an equitable person, I contend, he will participate in the boycott, accepting his share of the beatings and the fire hoses. He will not seek to exempt himself from the fate that befalls those who are specifically targeted for police anger. Moreover, given that this supporter is white, he may recognize that his presence has a political power that the bodies of African Americans are not accorded by Montgomery police, and hence use his body to shield others.

Aristotle’s concept of an equitable person thus has two roles in the moral justification of solidarity. First, on the front end, it counsels us not to do what we think best, even if we are right about that: not to stand on (our confident belief in) our own correctness, but to defer to the group. Second, on the back end, it counsels us not to take advantage of our own ability, within an unjust context, to escape the unjust treatment that others cannot escape. Rather, to be in solidarity is to share the fate of the victims of injustice.

III. Limits to Solidarity

All this may be plausible or even inspiring, but it might also be scary. What if it’s neo-Nazis who claim they are being treated inequitably? Or what if the victims of inequity demand that we jump off a cliff to show solidarity? Or what if I am a hotel guest with a particular ability to convince management to meet the picketers’ demands, but I have to cross the picket line to do so?

Let’s take that last question first. Suppose I come to the picket line and realize that I can do better for the strikers, but only if I cross the line to negotiate with management. Shouldn’t I, then, cross the line? The first response is that this kind of case is rare. Socially privileged and relatively wealthy people often believe that their individual intercession can and should make a difference in a way that even the collective action of the poor cannot. We are usually wrong about this. But suppose I really can make a difference by myself. In that case what I should do is check in with the strikers. If they want me to intercede I should do so. If not, then my doing so is an imposition on them, in fact a demonstration that their fate is determined by factors outside their control. My savior-like intervention is then an attack; even if it helps win the day today, it erodes the workers’ efficacy in the long term. Solidarity does not necessarily entail doing exactly as everyone else is doing; each of us brings to the table skills, talents, and, yes, forms of privilege that might be useful to the struggle. But the essential first step is to put these capacities at the disposal of the struggle, to be deployed at the behest of the group, not subject to our own ingenuous guesses.

How much can solidarity demand, though? The question of demandingness is a perennial problem for moral theories. At the margins it always seems more important to help out the desperate than to pursue our own private goals; and yet if we never prioritize our own goals we will not be able to have lives of our own. I have no firm answer to this question, but my view is that we can make sense of the idea – admittedly still fuzzy – of a person’s living for justice. When I take stock of my life I should be able to say that justice was the point of my life; that I evinced an abiding and genuine commitment to the struggle for a more just world and to the plight of people in it; that I was never complacent and self-satisfied; and that I could be relied upon when needed, when the struggle confronted me and I needed to choose a side. Moreover, if I am to live for justice I must be organized, for nothing can be accomplished alone. By pooling resources we become more intelligent, effective, and reliable, enabling individuals to cycle in and out of the fray as life allows, even as the esprit de corps helps build our capacity and resolve.

But finally, what happens if I am in solidarity with a group whose actions themselves treat others inequitably – say, by burning crosses or parading with swastikas? The answer is that I must oppose my erstwhile allies, and do so in the name of solidarity itself. Solidarity is justified by equity, and by equity it is also limited. Suppose the neo-Nazis are themselves socioeconomically disadvantaged: they have a legitimate complaint against the rich, but instead they pick fights with a minority ethnic group. They thereby turn themselves into the oppressors; solidarity requires switching sides to support the minority ethnic group. This is a crucial difference between solidarity and something like loyalty or tribalism, which might allow us to stay onside even when our group is the oppressor. But when solidarity does recommend switching sides like this, the reason for doing so is not the identity or even the beliefs of the neo-Nazis, but their actions and aims. If people (who happen to be neo-Nazis) are demanding a raise from an exploitive boss, then solidarity with them can, indeed, be required. But if they then start attacking their boss’s ethnicity, gender, or race, supporters must object.

IV. Conclusion

We live in perilous political times, where nefarious actors sow division and use both money and violence to foster the power of the few. Solidarity is the essential, and sometimes the only, tool of the oppressed. Yet those of us in the middle – philosophers, white activists and commentators, journalists, the “middle class” – seem to use our words, our money, our bodies, and our votes to punch downwards at least as often as we punch upwards. Or else we sit on the sidelines and treat political struggle as someone else’s problem.

This is wrong. We are morally required to treat people equitably, and solidarity – taking political action on others’ terms – is how we can do so. Consequently, solidarity is valuable even when we lose, and is owed to others not as a form of charity or generosity, but as a duty: as basic equity.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the editors and to the anonymous referee whose comments significantly improved this manuscript.

Dr. Avery Kolers is Professor of philosophy and Director of the Social Change program and Core Faculty Member in the Interdisciplinary M.A. in Bioethics, Health Policy, and Law at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which won the Canadian Philosophical Association’s biennial book prize, as well as A Moral Theory of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2016). In 2012, his article, “Floating Provisos and Sinking Islands,” received the Journal of Applied Philosophy prize awarded for “the best article published in the year’s volume.”