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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 440 disvalued status? I am inclined to think not. For this seems to occur almost exclusively when the "valued" property itself conforms to the higher-order political discriminator's stereotypes. For example, an African American man may be admired for his athletic prowess but encounter hostility when he runs for political office. In such cases, the higher-order political discriminator's admiration and respect for the stereotypical trait is not unalloyed. It is tempered by a certain smug complacency at the disvaluee's confirmation of his disvalued status in the very cultivation and expression of that stereotypical trait. To sustain the above objection, we would need to see a higher-order political discriminator exhibiting unalloyed admiration and respect for nonstereotypical traits, such that these positive feelings did not, in turn, positively reform the higher-order political discriminator's prejudicial attitude toward the person's primary disvalued property: Someone who sincerely respects and admires a disvaluee for nonstereotypical reasons, without feeling threatened or invaded, has already begun to weaken the psychological edifice on which her politically discriminatory evaluation of the person as a disvaluee is based. The comprehensiveness of the n-order disvalue relation underscores a second reason why stereotypical cases of second-order discrimination do not exhaust the repertoire of higher-order discrimination: Nonstereotypical traits are also recruited to receive value or disvalue from primary properties to suit particular occasions. We do not ordinarily think of classical styling in dance as a property about which discriminators might have any particular attitude. But this may be mistaken. Higher-order discrimination is not concerned solely with stereotypical secondary, tertiary, etc. disvalued properties. It may be concerned with any further properties of the person on which the primary disvalued property itself confers disvalue. Thus, for example, being Jewish (or Nigerian, or a woman) may confer disvalue on being smart, which in turn may confer disvalue on being intellectually prolific: A person's intellectual prolificacy may be seen as evidence of logorrhea, or lack of critical conscience, and may thus poison the evaluation of those intellectual products themselves. A first test for ascertaining whether the disvalue of some property of a person is to be explained as a case of higher-order political discrimination is to ascertain whether or not that property is disvalued uniformly across individuals, regardless of anything that might count as a primary disvalued property for a higher-order political discriminator. If someone is just as contemptuous of Fred Astaire's having rhythm as they are of Michael Jackson's, or just as contemptuous of intellectual prolificacy in Balzac as in Isaac Asimov, then the charge of higher-order political discrimination may be defeated. It might be thought that this first test is inherently self-limiting for the case in which the person happens to dislike just the property that is most typically associated with, e.g. a certain race - say, dark skin, but nevertheless © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
