A Course on Racism and Sexism

Occasionally, Gustavus Adolphus College people ask me to take over a racism and sexism course. I generally protest that there is an an accepted language and literature for addressing these topics. I don't know this literature, I don't speak the language, and so there's a serious kind of introduction I cannot do. They sometimes persist, most recently in early 2014, and I was forced to invent a course I could responsibly teach that fit the description. As the course progressed, I gave it the secondary title "A Bus Tour Through Hell." I was reasonably satisfied with the model I adopted. 

The course began with this video, taken to define the boundaries of the discussion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKhAd0Tyny0

I will post some framing materials for this course.
 
Here is the opening statement.

Opening Statement

This is the philosophy course Racism and Sexism, in fundamental respects, an ethics course.

Most ethics  courses address actions primarily: performing cosmetic surgery, firing employees, refusing military service, eating meat. All of these dramatic individual actions raise moral questions: people disagree about whether they are right or wrong, virtuous or vicious.

This course addresses systems, attitudes, and patterns of behavior. What ties them together is that they are unfair: they confer advantages and disadvantages based on perceived race or ethnicity or gender, in circumstances in which race or ethnicity or gender are morally irrelevant.

A criticism of systems is relevant to action: if a system is evil, one may have an obligation to oppose it, or at least, not to support it. And that may be difficult if that system is entrenched in the institutions and practices of one’s society, in the hiring policies of corporations, in the legal system, in the day to day conversational practices of one’s friends.

So, an ethics class that starts by looking at systems is more complicated than one that looks at individual actions. It is also more realistic: much of the harm that is done in the world is done by systematic injustice, supported by attitudes and patterns of behavior that must be seen in their interconnections for full understanding. People are often asked to be accomplices to wrongdoing; they seldom confront the bare choice to initiate harm to another person.

An ethics class that starts by looking at particular systems (racism and sexism) is a good introduction to ethics in one more way: once one comes to recognize particular kinds of systemic wrongdoing, one will be alert to other systems that treat people unfairly or that do other kinds of serious moral harm.  Also, the strategies of resistance --  a very complex kind of action – are similar across a broad range of systemic evils. It is important to distinguish cases that require resistance from those that require straightforward action.

We will proceed in this course in an inductive way. Rather than developing theoretical concepts from the beginning, laying out the history of thinking about these matters, we will look at three cases that are central examples discussed by those who specialize in identifying racist and sexist structures: the practice of genocide, the racial disparities in punishment within the American legal system, and the daily erosion of confidence and agency among women as a consequence of deep-seated sexist attitudes in the society. We will begin by attempting to understand the facts of these cases, and then will draw on theory and philosophical reflection to help us make sense of what we are learning.

This approach conforms to important research in college teaching about the value of active learning, about the need to raise questions before providing answers.

Given this approach, much of our work in this class will be to build together tools for understanding and evaluating the accounts we are reading. In so doing, we will have two objectives:

1.     To understand the immediate relevance of these  issues to the world in which we now live and in which we will live in the future.

2.     To understand the personal meaning of these abstract questions and critiques.

 Here is the first handout:

Racism and Sexism Handout 1: Genocide and the Topic of Character

These topics will turn our attention to character. Some general facts to make sense of:

1.     One person acts differently than another in difficult situations, though they may act very similarly in normal situations.

2.     A person’s words and actions add up to something over time. When one thinks back over a life – to give a funeral eulogy, for example, one sees a shape emerging gradually.

3.     People may do – in some basic way – the same thing, but the difference in the ways they do what they do may be very important.

4.     Some people may have more of a firewall between themselves and their surroundings or peer group. Some may be incapable of standing up to their friends; others may be willing to lose all their friends, if they disagree with them about something important.

An ethics of character shifts questioning from, “What should I do?” to “How should I be?”

Two basic facts about genocide and massacre that raise questions about character:

People who have lived with people slightly different from themselves for many years, enjoying cordial relations of many sorts, suddenly turn on those people and slaughter them in cruel ways. Differences which have never mattered before become matters of life and death – the dividing line between human and less-than-human.

When the majority of the people in a community start slaughtering their neighbors because of racial or ethnic differences, some people don’t. Those people who don’t don’t look different from the people who do, but they somehow are different.

Questions about Weapons of the Spirit

1.     Why did the U.S. close the door to Jewish refugees?

2.     Why did the French government and the French people turn so quickly from fighting the Nazis to participating in their policies of racial cleansing?

3.     Why didn’t the people of LeChambon go along with the French government policy of cooperation?

4.     Why were the villages on the plateau so successful in protecting Jews?

Here is the second handout:

Racism

 and Sexism Handout 2 – Learning About Obstacles

Once one starts thinking about character, one realizes that people sometimes have to overcome inner resistance to live up to their ideals of fairness and humanity. Thus, ethics requires a good dose of psychology, a good understanding of the human tendencies that work against justice, fair play, and compassion. Early on, our parents may label these tendencies “selfishness,” and that covers some of what happens, but the psychological landscape is much more complicated and diverse. Here are some ideas from recent videos.

From “A Class Divided:”

1. What initially surprised the teacher and the kids? Maybe two things: how enthusiastically the children in the “superior” group embraced and acted out their superiority (and how much their behavior tracked the behavior of adult racists and bullies), and how bad the kids in the inferior group felt – and how long that feeling lasted – even though the discriminations were mild, compared to what some people endure every day.

2. Changes in real intellectual ability result from being labeled superior and inferior. You can get significantly better performance out of people by  telling them that they are superior people. You can significantly reduce people’s ability by telling them that they are inferior. And, finally, and maybe most surprisingly, the experience of being both superior and inferior has a lasting effect, increasing ability. From the first two facts, we get both a serious motive for introducing difference and superiority – to improve the performance of a subset of the larger group – and also a serious question about judging people on merit or performance: it turns out that merit and performance are very sensitive to beliefs about status.

3. An experience of empathy with those unfairly treated endures for a long time, has broad effects on people’s lives, and is regarded, in the long run, as very valuable.

From “A Problem from Hell:”

1.People have a model of what kinds of injustice and cruelty are possible. If an action is outside of that model, people will not believe it happened, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence.

2. It matters how actions are described. Descriptions can require actions from unwilling parties or they can sap people’s resolution to act. Think of the difference between calling the killings in Srebonica “genocide” and calling them “a tragedy.”

3. There are some sufferers whom people are willing to help, and others, equally worthy of help, who get ignored.  

Here is the third handout:

Racism and Sexism – Handout 3

In the last class, we discussed two topics. The first was:  an experiment in what we can find out about racism, up here on the top of the hill, by asking a few obvious questions: who knows something, who has had relevant experience, what stories are live on the internet, what do the library or the archives offer? The second was: the story of the My Lai massacre, a story that was initially unbelievable, impossible – until it was confirmed beyond any doubt by military investigators. The topics are related: massacre and genocide occur because people cannot imagine that something like that can happen, and because they do not put the information in front of them together until it is too late: think of the chaplain who hears the planning of the massacre but doesn’t intervene. Racial discrimination and the destruction of people’s self-confidence through sexual harassment have the same basic character: those who might intervene don’t get enough information, don’t see the pattern of action, until the damage has been done. One point to be drawn from the research we did in the first week: as students and teachers at Gustavus, with the internet and good libraries and a broad faculty available to us, we have  astonishing resources for understanding what is happening in the world, for putting the puzzle pieces together.

The intellectual dimension of moral character

It is tempting to say that goodness and intelligence are different: a person can be good, but not very smart, or smart, but not very good. This is surely true in some cases, but the material we are addressing suggests some important connections between intelligence (especially the sort that can be cultivated) and goodness:

1.     Those who cannot imagine evil are likely to be ineffective at opposing it.

2.     Those who are ignorant of what is happening in the world cannot even begin to take responsibility for those events.

3.     As the stories of Lemkin and Proxmire demonstrate, it is often very difficult to act effectively in a complex political context.  People who might be very good at feeding the hungry and caring for stray animals will be out of their depth in trying to work effectively against systemic evils. But if people don’t figure out how to work against such evils, these evils will just repeat.

4.     There is a way in which thinking and research take courage, in the same way that political or moral resistance takes courage. Some facts, some lines of thought, give us pain – make demands on us that interfere with our plans and destroy our rosy visions of a sane and decent world. To confront the facts, to think them through to the end, may take the same kind of courage as opposing a tyrannical government or rescuing a child from an abusive parent

As students and scholars, our problem is partly how to use the intelligence we have in a morally decent way. It is also, partly, how to develop the sorts of intelligence that are necessary, given the facts of our world today. 

This is handout 4.

Racism and Sexism – Handout 4 -- The Gap Between Knowledge and Action

As we have seen, especially in the case of Bosnian Serb genocide against Muslims,

one can know that something horrible is happening and yet not act to prevent it. Sometimes, calculations of interest get in the way: for nations, what Power calls “geopolitical realities;” for ordinary people, “How will this affect my relations with my patriotic or racist or self-righteous neighbors, will this take time away from my job, etc.?” Sometimes, the problem is that people cannot focus on what they know because that knowledge challenges the basic beliefs by which they live: in the basic moral rightness of American policy, in a safe world, in the fundamental goodness of human beings, in a kind of moral individualism – ‘If I just live well, doing my particular job, I am doing as much as anyone could expect.’ None of these is a normal belief. All of them are part of that largely unexamined system that gives safety, security, limits and borders to our individual projects and concerns. To question them is to feel suddenly ignorant, unsafe, inadequate, guilty, implicated.  No one wants those feelings, and we spend a lot of time avoiding information that elicits them. Sometimes people talk about these basic beliefs as ‘assumptions,’ or as comprising our ‘paradigm.’ Our distress when they are challenged can be called ‘cognitive dissonance.’  This is the territory in which Socrates worked, challenging the basic beliefs of his fellow citizens.

A few points about the gap between knowledge and action:

1. It is likely a longer journey from ‘doing nothing’ to ‘doing something’  than from

‘doing something’ to ‘doing all one can.’ It is important to recognize the power of inertia, of business as usual to thwart any meaningful action – and to do things to overcome that inertia, just in principle, just for the sake of not being a stuck person.

2. The study of parallel cases – Power’s method in her book – is a way of moving slowly in the direction of action. One has similar experiences several times: admiring the heroes, feeling frustration when those in power do nothing, being astonished at the lack of public response. One comes to recognize the sequence. At the same time, one notices the ways that some few individuals gradually move from passivity to action, and the kinds of action that they come to adopt.

3. Power’s frequent reference back to Hirschman’s three sorts of resistance to action -- futility, perversity, and jeopardy -- is helpful. These words summarize the arguments that occur to individuals when they are faced with the prospect of doing something unusual and brave. To know that these lines of thought are common, have names, and that they have elicited interesting and coherent responses and rebuttals is one way of getting past them, sometimes.

4. Power’s book is, in one way, a celebration of Lemkin’s achievement: introducing the concept  ‘genocide’ into the moral and legal vocabulary of the world. The book documents the way that policymakers and citizens since Lemkin use that concept to focus their attention in  a new way on slaughter, past and present. It is a word that requires action. It differs in that from the word “tragedy;” leaders who say that a massacre is a tragedy are signaling that they don’t intend to do anything about it. This account urges us to watch our own language, to notice evasions and to consider which words commit us to action.

5. Clearly, emotions bridge the gap between knowledge and action. Educators aren’t good about emotions, and they often leave the problem of emotional education as a problem for students to solve on their own. The problem of coming to action is partly a problem of giving knowledge access to our emotional life, to take charge of our own emotional education.