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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 453 higher-order political discriminator may sincerely deny that the person's race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic or religious affiliation, etc. arbitrarily influences his evaluations, when his behavior shows patently that they do. 4.3.4. Exacerbation There are many forces that may exacerbate higher-order political discrimination and its social consequences. Among them are, first and foremost, complicitous institutional practices. As we have seen in Chapter X, individuals in positions of responsibility may rank their personal and social allegiances ahead of their professional obligation to protect disvaluees from the pernicious effects of higher-order political discrimination. Or they effectively reward it, by regularly interpreting instances of it as expressions of professional autonomy, and refusing in principle to scrutinize suspected instances of it, on the grounds that doing so would be unwarranted interference in an organization's internal affairs. Institutions whose internal equilibria depend on such complicity are bully systems in the sense defined in Chapter X; and the arguments offered there apply. These institutions often comply with the letter of anti-discriminatory policies, by hiring members of disvalued groups to temporary positions of high public visibility. Such individuals are usually in a small and powerless minority, and regularly create cognitive discomfort in the majority whose territory they invade. Predictably, such individuals are then forced out - through harassment, discrimination, retaliation, or "downsizing" - and replaced by other, equally competent but equally transient members of the same disvalued group. Hence that group's symbolic representation within the institution can be maintained, without infiltrating its entrenched system of political discrimination through permanent or seniority status. The paucity and transience of such representative individuals then enable those who benefit from a bully system to deceive themselves about the depth and seriousness of their higher-order political discrimination, and to indulge without interruption fantasies of the tolerance and generosity they would manifest, were there more such individuals among them. This is to abdicate responsibility for enforcing those anti-discriminatory policies to which such institutions publicly claim to be committed. But bully systems such as these do not thereby evade their moral accountability, because they knowingly and deliberately deceive both the public and the new recruits on whom their continued existence depends. Second, there is the intellectual resourcefulness of the higher-order political discriminator: Someone who is in fact deeply invested in the disvaluational status of some primary property may always recruit some further, equally irrelevant property to explain her seemingly irrational judgment, and thus deflect the charge of higher-order political discrimination: It may be said, for example, that the disvalued property is not a person's race, gender, sexual orientation, class, ethnic or religious affiliation, etc., but rather © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
