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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 432 conceptually unifies them. Whereas cognitive failure 3.1 - of confusing one's empirical conception of people with the transcendent concept of personhood - involves thinking that the only persons there are are the people one knows, this fourth error - of equating personality with personhood - involves thinking that the kind of persons one knows are all there can ever be. So unlike inductive generalizations, the taxonomic categories of a stereotype are closed sets that fundamentally require the binary operation of sorting individuals and properties into those who fall within them and those who do not.4 As a consequence of his personal investment in an honorific stereotypical conception of persons, a first-order political discriminator has a personal investment in an honorific stereotypical self-conception that is therefore selfaggrandizing in the sense explained in Chapter VII. This means, to review, that this self-conception is a source of personal satisfaction or security to him; that to revise or disconfirm it would elicit in him feelings of dejection, deprivation or anxiety; and that these feelings are to be explained by his identification with this self-conception. In order to maintain his honorific and self-aggrandizing self-conception, a first-order political discriminator must perform the taxonomic binary sorting operation not only on particular groups of ethnic or gendered others, but on everyone, including himself. Since his self-conception as a person requires him and other bona fide persons to dress, talk, look, act, and think in certain highly specific and regimented ways in order to qualify for the honorific stereotype, everyone is subject to scrutiny in terms of it. This is not only prejudicial to a disvaluee who violates these requirements and thereby earns the label of the derogatory stereotype. It is also prejudicial to a valuee who satisfies them, just in case there is more to his personality than the honorific stereotype encompasses and more than it permits. Avoidance of the negative social consequences of violating the honorific stereotype - ostracism, condemnation, punishment, or obliteration - necessitates stunting or flattening his personality in order to conform to it (for example, by eschewing football or nightclubs, and learning instead to enjoy scholarly lectures as a form of entertainment because one is given to understand that that is the sort of thing real intellectuals typically do for fun); or bifurcating his personality into that part which can survive social scrutiny and that "deviant" part which cannot (as, for example, certain government officials have done who deplore and condemn homosexuality publicly on the one hand, while engaging in it privately on the other). One reason it is important not to equate personality with personhood is so that the former properties can flourish without fear that the latter title will be revoked. I am indebted to Rüdiger Bittner for pressing this question in discussion. 4 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
