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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 434 to such exposure: for example, if the purportedly WASP offspring does not have negroid features, there is nothing for the family to feel ashamed of. So a person whose self-aggrandizing self-conception is defined by an honorific stereotype will feel shame at having primary disvalued properties that deviate from it, and will attempt to deny their existence to herself and to others. By contrast, hostility toward another's excellence is caused by shame at one's own defectiveness, and denial of the excellence is the social antidote to such shame: for example, if the woman is not as intelligent as the men are purported to be, then there is no cause for feeling shamed by her, and so none for hostility toward her. So a person whose self-aggrandizing self-conception is formed by an honorific stereotype will feel hostility toward a disvaluee who manifests valued properties that violate the derogatory stereotype imposed on him; and will attempt to deny the existence of those valued properties in the other to herself and to others. In the first-person case, the objects of shame are primary disvalued properties that deviate from one's honorific stereotypical self-conception. In the third-person case, the objects of hostility are valued properties that deviate from one's derogatory stereotypical conception of the disvaluee. But in both cases the point of the reactions is the same: to defend one's stereotypical selfconception against attack, both by first-person deviations from it and by thirdperson deviations from the reciprocal stereotypes this requires imposing on others. And in both cases, the xenophobic reactions are motivated in the same way: the properties regarded as anomalous relative to the stereotype in question are experienced by the first-order political discriminator as an assault on the rational coherence of his theory of the world - and so, according to Kant, on the rational coherence of his self. Indeed, left untreated, all four of these cognitive failures more generally - the conflation of the transcendent concept of personhood with one's provincial conception of people that another happens to violate, the ascription to the other of malevolent motives on the basis of an epistemically unreliable self-conception, the inability to imagine the other as animated by familiar or recognizably rational motives, and the equation of personality with personhood inherent in the imposition of reciprocal stereotypes - combine to form a conception of the other as an inscrutable and malevolent moral anomaly that threatens that provincial moral theory which unifies one's experience and structures one's expectations about oneself and other people. If this were an accurate representation of others who are different, it would be no wonder that xenophobes feared them. 4.2. Reciprocal First-Order Political Discrimination So far I have argued that first-order political discrimination involves the reciprocal imposition of honorific and derogatory stereotypes, on oneself and on the theoretically anomalous other respectively. But is it not possible to © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
