Who Speaks for Whom?
Contemporary feminist scholarship features a miniature version of a debate central to multicultural education. The debate within feminism centers on the question: who speaks for non-white, non-Anglo women? The more general question is: who speaks for any cultural or racial group? Who is qualified to teach classes that focus on the experiences of a particular group? Must one be a member of the group in question to "really understand" and thus convey the experience? Can an outsider ever do the job well enough?
As I said, one version of the debate is heard in feminist and women’s studies journals.
Non-white or non-Anglo women sometimes say their unique experience of double or triple oppression
on account of sex and race or ethnicity and class cannot possibly be adequately
represented or even understood by white, middle-class women. They conclude that white middle-class feminists cannot speak for them.
Two reasons are given to support the claim that white middle-class feminists are not
qualified to address the situation of non-white, non-Anglo women: (1) white women can’t
possibly understand what it is like to suffer multiple forms of oppression; and (2) non-white
women are more closely aligned to their communities, and thus have "divided loyalties",
which white women do not have. I disagree strongly with both these claims, but will deal
here only with the first, and will take up the second claim below.
The first claim is in effect that in order to speak reliably about the situation of non-white females, one must be a non-white female, since only a non-white female can really understand another non-white female. My point here is that this claim is an instance of a more general principle that you often hear in the debate surrounding multicultural education, in connection with the question of who is qualified to teach specialized multicultural classes. Academia appears to have imposed on itself the same "categorical representation" policy of the Democratic Party. The principle is that only persons who have had the relevant specific experience of oppression are truly qualified to testify about it. Whites cannot represent non-whites (and, presumably, non-whites cannot represent whites). We often hear, for example, that only a black person can really teach black history, only a native American can speak to native-American issues, only a woman can really understand another woman, etc., since only a member of a specific oppressed group can really understand that group’s specific experience of oppression.
I do not understand why this should be necessarily so. For one thing, I think that I myself am a white woman who has experienced poverty and sexism and discrimination because of her appearance, i.e., multiple forms of oppression – by class, sex, and appearance. I think I can understand the situation of, say, a poor black woman. This is because the two fundamental facts of my own childhood were poverty and a disfiguring skin disease. My family was poor enough that we sometimes went hungry, had only emergency medical care (Medicaid didn’t exist yet), had no dental care at all (just look inside my mouth!), and in general were subject to all the humiliations of poverty – fear of the landlord and the grocer and the doctor and the boss, fear of getting sick, fear of getting robbed, fear that the heat would be shut off in the New York winter, gifts from the church at Christmas, cheap food, obsession with money and possessions, second-hand everything, etc. I was utterly at home watching bugs crawl up the wall after the lights were turned off at night; it was fun to let them crawl on me. My father was an alcoholic; he was seldom at home, which was just as well as far as we children were concerned, because he was prone to fits of violent anger. I had a severe case of eczema (which resembles impetigo) from infancy and throughout childhood; at one point I was even hospitalized for it. Because of our poverty, however, the eczema mostly went untreated. My face and body were covered with ugly sores, which also itched terribly. Scratching made the sores worse. (It actually felt good when the bugs crawled on me.) Because of my sores, I was not much cuddled as a baby or as a child. Most neighborhood mothers would not let their children play with me. I was refused admittance to the local swimming pool, and avoided and taunted by other children. As a girl in the 1950s, I was, of course, also subject to all the usual forms of sexism, which were particularly onerous for me, because I hardly thought of myself as a girl at all – I never could imagine an ordinary girl’s future for myself, given my appearance. At the time (the 1950s and early 1960s), eczema was treatable only with what was then an new expensive drug (cortisone). However, my parents could not afford to buy it for me; once or twice we were given doctors’ samples, but they ran out in a few days.
I went to college and graduate school entirely on scholarships. I lived in dangerous neighborhoods throughout college; my apartment was robbed three times.
Physical deprivation and discomfort, and involuntary isolation because of my appearance were facts of life for me. Note that I am not talking here about one or two traumatic experiences; I am talking about everyday events for the first third of my life.
Now, I certainly realize that many people routinely experience incomparably worse. I am not a Holocaust victim or a cancer patient or a starving Third World child. I bring up my own experiences just to emphasize that it’s not impossible, and maybe even not uncommon, for a white person, especially a poor white woman-child, to experience multiple forms of the same sort of everyday "oppression" that non-whites suffer.
And I’d like you to imagine how I feel when people automatically label me "middle-class" or "yuppie witch from hell". They assume I cannot possibly understand what it’s like to be poor and treated differently because of some unchangeable aspect of one’s physical appearance that’s irrelevant to one’s identity or worth as a person, like race. Can I "relate to" racial discrimination although I am not black? Can I relate to poverty although I am currently not poor? I think so.
Autobiographical counterexample aside, there are cogent arguments against the view that "nobody can understand me except someone just like me".
For example, even if an instructor hasn’t ever been poor or shunned because of his appearance, I think he might still bring to life in the classroom the experience of oppression – not, of course, by oppressing his students, but through the use of the relevant texts. A white man, like anyone else, might be an educated person; he might have a contribution to make. In my own life, white college boys urged me to read Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and James Baldwin, not to mention Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, and Marcuse. Later I found Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Rodriguez, Alice Walker, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Amy Tan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Saiichi Maruya, and others. I was changed by these writers. I think they speak for themselves. And I don’t intend to stop learning world literature; I feel I have only begun.
In addition, the argument that nobody can understand me except somebody just like me is impossibly vague. It is fraught with fundamental difficulties:
1. It assumes that there is some clearly-identifiable property (or set of properties) that constitutes "me" – as if each person has one absolute or essential identity, as female, black, disabled, black-female, female-disabled, etc.
2. It assumes that it’s possible to determine the degree to which one has the property.
3. It assumes that people who share the property will automatically think alike and understand one another. Other differences are irrelevant.
All three of these assumptions are highly problematic.
First, nobody is just like me. There is a tendency nowadays for people to see their personal lives mainly as instances of sociological or political stereotypes, e.g., "I am a middle-aged, white, female, college-educated baby boomer." A life is taken to be no more than an instance of one or more cultural stereotypes. Now I agree that the personal is political, but I do not think the personal is only political. People are more than cultural stereotypes; everyone has her unique story. What do we say about, e.g., the aristocratic black African who has never experienced much racism? the African who is a devout Muslim and does not consider herself oppressed? the black conservative? the gay Republican? It is often forgotten that not all African-Americans think alike; not all women think alike; not all gay people think alike.
There is, furthermore, a tendency for others to think they know you if they know the cultural stereotype. But since no one is really just like me, there is no such automatic knowledge. In fact, if nobody can understand me except someone just like me, then since I am the only person just like me, nobody else can understand me at all. The best I can do is understand myself, and even if I can do that (no easy task), I can never convey my self-understanding to others, since, not being just like me, they can’t understand me. Obviously, this attitude makes communication and resolution of conflict impossible; it is really, I think, another manifestation of the sterility and pessimism of deconstructionism (see the discussion of deconstruction in Is Philosophy Just for Aristocratic Men?).
Enormous problems surround the question of who, if anyone, is enough like me to speak to my experience. How alike is "alike enough"? Because each individual’s circumstances are unique, facile assumptions and labels seem not to work well; they oversimplify. For example, Ynestra King has "a mobility impairment that is only minorly disfiguring" as a result of childhood polio; she can walk, climb stairs, drive a car, swim, hike in the wilderness, dress and feed herself, etc. King relates how a "politically correct" friend once "dragged her across the room" at a party to meet another disabled woman, on the assumption that the two disabled women would automatically have much in common.
King comments: "Rather than argue – what would I say? "I’m not interested in other disabled people," or "This is my night off"? (The truth in that moment was like the truth of this experience in every other moment, complicated and difficult to explain) – I went along to find myself standing before someone strapped in a wheelchair she propels by blowing into a tube with a respirator permanently fastened to the back of the chair." It is absurd, King says, to suggest "that our relative experience of disability is something we could casually compare (as other people stand by!). ... So much for disability solidarity!"
As King points out, every person is, with respect to disability, "somewhere on a continuum between total bodily dysfunction ... and complete physical wholeness." Few people fit neatly at one or the other end of this continuum. I think race and ethnicity in America constitute continua also. There are few "pure" racial or ethnic specimens; rather, most people are more or less assimilated both genetically and culturally – some more than others, of course, but most everyone to some extent. Think of Malcolm X’s reddish hair. Even I have a little Native American blood. Furthermore, the cultural influences, if not the genetic ones, expand all the time as a result of mass culture. Think of those "United Colors of Benneton" ads again. We are becoming more the can of mixed paint, and less the mosaic.
So, how alike is "alike enough"? It will not do to answer simply "I’ll know it when it see it"; in the academic job market, for example, people’s livelihoods are often at stake. How do we measure if one understands another person or culture "enough"? Consider the following (unlikely) scenario. Suppose I decide to get out of philosophy and devote the rest of my academic career to, say, ethnic studies. Surely the fact that I am white does not affect my basic brain-power, and I should not be assumed incapable of doing good work in that field. Now suppose I were to buy the argument that I do not "really understand" ethnic studies, because I am not "ethnic enough"; I acknowledge that I have been made blind to essential aspects of ethnic experience by my supposed membership in the dominant culture. Well, I tell myself, surely my blindness is not permanent. So I try to improve my prospects by making myself more ethnic, by, say, embracing a completely different culture, learning its language and customs, marrying a native, etc. Several years pass. Have I become more qualified? I can certainly imagine proponents of the "just like me" argument saying "no": I am now just a white woman who embraced a different culture: a curiosity, like Margaret Mead among the Samoans. What exactly must I do so I can "really understand"? Well, my teachers regretfully reply, there may be nothing you can do; but if and when you’ve become enough like us, we’ll know. This scenario might be specious; perhaps clear criteria exist for measuring the degree to which one "really understands". If clear criteria exist, I withdraw this argument. But I am not aware of such criteria.
The attitude that nobody can understand me except someone just like me is, in addition to being impossibly vague, both illogical and prejudicial. The non-white woman might say: "No one can really understand me except someone just like me." But the white middle-class feminist now has no possible contribution to make to the dialog, since anything she says is automatically judged inaccurate and off the mark, simply because she is white – not because of the content of anything she says, but simply because she is not the sort of person who is allowed to participate in the discussion. But discounting the white woman’s opinion just because she is white is flagrantly ad hominem. Indeed, it is exactly an instance of the sort of treatment which the non-white woman would legitimately complain of, if it were done to her.
The argument that only people like me can teach about people like me leads, finally, I think, to unacceptable consequences. Surely if European men are more or less automatically disqualified from teaching women’s studies or ethnic studies – on the grounds that they are "unable really to understand" female or ethnic experience – we are implicitly granting legitimacy to the principle that one’s academic qualifications are at least partially determined by sex or race or ethnicity. But if that’s true – if there really are classes European men simply can’t teach – then conversely, there must also be classes non-Europeans simply can’t teach, no? Adopting the principle that qualifications are determined by sex or race or ethnicity opens the door for exclusion in both directions; the door swings both ways. ("I’m sorry, but you non-Europeans can’t really understand Shakespeare.")
It is usually taken for granted that a person of color can use his or her experiences of oppression to enhance and broaden the analysis of, say, English literature, e.g., by noting that the life of the playful aristocrats in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is financed by sugar plantations in the New World – i.e., by slavery. It is taken for granted that a feminist can do the same, e.g., by critically analyzing the double standard regarding virginity in Much Ado About Nothing. Certainly a white European man could learn from such analyses and advocate these very persuasive ideas also – and not just in English literature classes. Why not, exactly?
Only one additional argument comes to mind in favor of the view that you can’t understand me unless you’re just like me. I have heard the claim that the non-white’s or women’s experience of oppression is psychologically devastating to a degree unimaginable by anyone who has not shared it; and this is why white men, who presumably live uniformly unperturbed lives (!), cannot ever "really understand" non-white or female experience. Non-whites’ and women’s experience of everyday oppression is claimed to be emotionally catastrophic; it is said to damage them in the same deep and comprehensive ways as childhood sexual abuse. Phyllis Chesler, in Women and Madness, argues, for example, that ordinary women’s lives make them clinically insane. The black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, even claims that violence by oppressed Third World people is justifiable, as a means to recover their dignity and mental health.
According to Fanon, rational arguments are relatively useless to people who have suffered from intense oppression; these people really need therapy in order to recover their psychological stability and self-esteem. They need emotional release. They literally cannot think straight while in the throes of suffering. Ordinary educational methods will not help them, for their rage and pain are too all-consuming. They need to participate in a support group of persons with similar experiences, led by a sympathetic facilitator (one who has shared the experience). They need a safe, non-judgmental environment in which they can share their turbulent and crippling feelings and become healed. Or they need a classroom environment where they can act out their rage by excluding and demeaning representatives of the oppressor group; for example, Angela Davis does not permit white students to speak in her classes. In any case, they need special classes with special faculty. Only people who have gone through what they’ve experienced can really understand and be effective in teaching them.
I have several very serious objections to this line of argument. First, I object strongly to the characterization of women and non-white people as emotional cripples incapable of rational thought or moral behavior. Surely that characterization in the West in our time is simply false of the vast majority of non-whites and women. Indeed, I would think that many women and non-whites would find it insulting and alarming to be characterized as "damaged" by oppression and in need of what amounts to therapy in the classroom; for this just invites another, more insidious form of racism. The oppressor can say, with a great show of sincerity and humility, his head hung down low, that "Yes, it’s unfortunate but true, they really can’t compete because they’ve been hurt so badly by our oppression – and we’re really, really sorry, we feel sooo bad about it (wink wink) – but gee, this means that by their own admission, they’re really not ready for positions of power or authority where they’d be forced to interact with us – that bothers them too much, don’t you know. Better keep them in those neighborhoods and schools and classrooms and pink-ghetto jobs with their own kind where they feel comfortable."
The oppressor is only too happy to allow racially and sexually self-segregated ethnic studies and women’s studies departments in the university. Such departments are a relatively cheap way to give non-whites and women the illusion of power, while at the same time marginalizing them.
Camille Paglia, Allan Bloom, Arthur Schlesinger, Page Smith, Diane Ravitch, and others also have serious reservations about the quality of scholarship in such departments. The fields are not well-defined: why is ethnic studies not a specialty within sociology or anthropology, for example? Does women’s studies have a characteristic methodology distinct from other disciplines in the social sciences or the arts? Ethnic studies and women’s studies have few scholars to begin with, so there is not much competition to get published in dedicated journals. Furthermore, scholars in these fields frequently read and quote one another, i.e., the fields are both insulated and isolated. There is virtually no cross-disciplinary criticism, since scholars within these fields often assume that outsiders can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be non-white or female, and thus outsiders are automatically thought incompetent to render judgment about their work. This is a perilous situation, and strikes at the heart of the idea of the university, which assumes an interdisciplinary community of scholars.
In my opinion, the insular nature of disciplines like ethnic and women’s studies do not serve their own scholars; the insularity makes it difficult for them to be taken seriously no matter how competent they are. It is not surprising that traditional academic departments, with few exceptions, publicly ignore and privately disparage ethnic studies and women’s studies. It is common for traditional academics to suspect that the "top" scholars in these fields might merely be giants among pygmies, and sometimes with reason. Patently false notions seem to flourish in these fields (e.g., the use of the word "African" to denote a racial or cultural group, as if the huge African continent is racially or culturally homogeneous – obviously false to anyone who knows even a little about the history of Islam; or the absurd notion that the American Founders were influenced "equally" by the Iroquois Confederation and the ideas of the European Enlightenment; or the extremely widespread notion that the ancient Egyptians were black). Wacky ideas receive rapt attention (e.g., that all of Greek culture was "stolen" from Africa). Odd decisions are made about curricula (e.g., that Hispanic children in Southern California should study Mayan history and culture, but not the history and culture of Spain). Even in philosophy, there is far less prestige attached to publishing in the feminist journal Hypatia than in a mainstream journal like the Journal of Philosophy; and it is also true that the quality of work in Hypatia is simply not as good.
The self-segregated classroom leads many black intellectuals such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Marian Wright Edelman to be concerned that the "victim" for whom special allowance is made is after all not playing on the "level playing field" with the rest of society. The "victim" whose education has been segregated is playing on a different field altogether, never able to pit her skills against most of the competition – her situation is quite similar to, and no better than, what it would have been in the days of enforced segregation. The victim knows this, too; she is no fool. She may wonder if she is "really" as good as her teachers tell her. Even if she appears to win in the larger world, she may be undermined by her own self-doubt.
The victim role is morally treacherous, too, since the victim often finds she can successfully appeal to the pity of others both when she needs help and when she doesn’t (when, say, she is merely feeling frightened or lazy). She knows her victim status is a powerful tool for getting what she wants, and she faces the special temptation to over-use that tool. She is tempted to identify with the role of victim– to believe that that is what she is. (Sartre calls this "bad faith".) Her situation is analogous to the pretty woman who uses her sexuality to manipulate men; by using men whenever she is afraid, the pretty woman remains infantile and dependent. But who can blame her for using what may be the only tool at her disposal? The strategy works, at least as long as she is young and pretty.
But it doesn’t work forever, and it exacts a price. Unaware of their own strengths (not having used them), both the pretty woman and the person who identifies with the victim role are likely to become even more fearful and dependent. They do not gain self-respect by their too-easy manipulation of others; they lose it, and can become caught in a downward spiral of fear, dependence, and self-contempt.
Analogously, children frequently use their actual lack of power, money, etc. to manipulate their elders; and the well-brought-up child doesn’t usually get away with it. But the victim often has no one who will speak plainly to her; misfortune and weakness frighten the fortunate – but she knows that too.
Finally, I am concerned about the underlying view that the classroom is primarily a place where people share their feelings and learn psychological wholeness and self-esteem. Surely if people need therapy they should get it. But while therapy can be educational, education is not therapy. Many people seem to think that everyday classroom practice should be primarily expressive, not analytical: they think students should be encouraged to express their feelings, all are entitled to their feelings, feelings can never be criticized, and one’s opinions – even if supported by evidence and argument – are never anything more than feelings. I have called this the trendy "group therapy" model of education. Many of my students have experienced this sort of classroom; they will admit to no serious views (because someone might object and they don’t want to commit the faux pas of "putting down" someone). Because the students have not been encouraged to think things through, they are completely unanchored intellectually. At the same time, they will passionately defend their "right" to believe whatever they like, and sometimes become quite heated when I claim some arguments are better than others.
But some arguments are better than others. There is an obvious difference between feeling and truth. The university is not the clinic. The clinic has its place; and of course we all sometimes might like to sit in a circle and share our feelings. But feelings are not always interesting, enlightening, or worthy of expression; as both Christians and Freudians know, feelings are frequently shameful, half-baked, and juvenile. They do not necessarily reveal our best selves; quite the contrary. The thing we desire is not necessarily the thing we ought to desire. We do not show respect for others or for ourselves when we insist that all feelings be shared; part of dignity is keeping some feelings to yourself. I bring this up because, as I will discuss below, many proponents of multicultural education seem also to advocate the group-therapy ("no hierarchies") classroom model; and I suspect they do so at least partly because of some version of the argument that non-whites and women are especially damaged.
Thus, I have argued that the claim "no one can understand me except someone like me" is imprecise and logically flawed. If we argue the claim with the premise that women and non-whites are damaged, the argument becomes positively treacherous because of its potential use as justification for more comprehensive forms of racism.
Another popular rationale for the group-therapy classroom model is deconstructionist philosophy, which I shall discuss in Is Philosophy Just for Aristocratic Men?. Before analyzing deconstructionism, I need to say a few things about the nature of philosophy and philosophical method. I think those remarks will lay the groundwork for a better understanding of why philosophers usually find deconstructionism shallow and tedious.
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