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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 442 Other arbitrary properties, not just the familiar political ones, can function as primary disvalued properties to a higher-order political discriminator. Physical appearance, style of diction, social bearing, familial, educational, or professional pedigree, circle of associates, manner of dress, are among the more familiar, if less widely acknowledged, objects of higher-order political discrimination. Some of these properties are often assumed to go hand-in-hand with, or even be partially definitive of, more widely recognized primary disvalued properties. For example, higher-order political discriminators may tend to assume that ethnic identity is inherently connected with a certain physical appearance (Jews have dark, curly hair and long noses), that racial identity is connected with a certain style of diction and class background (African Americans speak Black English and come from the ghetto), or that gender identity is connected with a certain social bearing (women are sympathetic, passive, and emotional). This is how a stereotype is formed. But again I mean to call attention to a slightly different point: These properties themselves may be seen as sources of disvalue, independently of their possible connection with such stereotypically primary disvalued properties. Someone who has all of the valued race, ethnic, religious, class, and gender properties, but lacks the valued style of diction, mode of selfpresentation, or educational or professional pedigrees may be subject to higher-order political discrimination just as fully as someone who lacks all of the former properties but has all of the latter. In both cases, this means that their other properties - their personality characteristics, interests, or achievements - will be seen as higher-order disvalued properties, by reason of their association with these equally arbitrary primary disvalued properties. This shows that the first-order political discrimination with which we are familiar is merely a special case of a more general psychological phenomenon that is not limited to first-order political discrimination at all. However, higher-order political discrimination as defined above usually includes it. For it would be psychologically unusual, to say the least, to find an individual who is in general corrupt in his evaluations of a person's other properties in the ways just described, yet impartial and scrupulous in his evaluations of blacks, Jews, women, gays, etc. and their properties. Someone who is apt to dislike a person because of her hair texture or accent or mode of dress can hardly be expected to be genuinely judicious when it comes to judging her gender, race, class, sexual orientation, or ethnic or religious affiliation. Hence we can expect that first-order political discrimination and higher-order political discrimination in general are to be found together. There is another reason that favors retaining the label of higher-order political discrimination, despite its application to primary disvalued properties less widely recognized as political in nature, corresponding to a broader conception of political behavior. We can think of politically © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
