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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 430 I distinguish between two kinds of political discrimination: first-order political discrimination as defined above, and higher-order political discrimination as a refinement introduced by pangs of conscience that result in even more radical failures of cognitive discrimination: of the other, of oneself, and of the situation. Judging a person as inferior because one perceives her race as a primary disvalued property depends upon failing to distinguish finely enough between properties she has and those she does not have, and between those which are relevant to such a judgment and those which are not. This is the essence of xenophobia. Our inability to make fine-grained cognitive discriminations in judging a person is the result of a fear reaction to the theoretically anomalous perceptual data that person presents, and the cause of a corresponding inability to evaluate her non-pseudorationally as a person. 4.1. First-Order Political Discrimination A person could make the first three cognitive errors described in Sections 3.1 - 3.3 above without taking any satisfaction in his provincial conception of people ("Is this really all there is?" he might think to himself about the inhabitants of his small town), without identifying with it (he might find them boring and feel ashamed to have to count himself among them), and without feeling the slightest reluctance to enlarge and revise it through travel or exploration or research. What distinguishes a first-order political discriminator is her personal investment in her provincial conception of people. Her sense of literal selfpreservation requires her conception to be viridical, and is threatened when it is disconfirmed. She exults in the thought that only the people she knows and is familiar with (whites, blacks, WASPs, Jews, residents of Crawford, Texas, members of the club, etc.) are persons in the full, honorific sense. This is the thought that motivates the imposition of politically discriminatory stereotypes, both on those who confirm it and those who do not. To impose a stereotype on someone is to view him as embodying a limited set of properties falsely taken to be exclusive, definitive, and paradigmatic of a certain kind of individual. I shall say that a stereotype (a) equates one contingent and limited set of primary valued properties that may characterize persons under certain circumstances with the universal concept of personhood; (b) restricts that set to exclude divergent properties of personhood from it; (c) withholds from those who violate its restrictions the essential properties of personhood; and (d) ascribes to them the primary disvalued properties of deviance from it. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
