Humanism and the Challenge of Difference

Anthony B. Pinn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319940984
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319940991
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the implication of diversity for humanism.  Through the insights of academics and activists, it highlights both the successes and failures related to diversity marking humanism in the US and internationally. It offers a timely depiction of how humanism in general as well as how particular humanist communities have wrestled with the nature of our changing world, and the issues that surface in relationship to markers of difference.

© The Author(s) 2018

Anthony B. Pinn (ed.)Humanism and the Challenge of Differencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94099-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Anthony B. Pinn¹

(1)

Religion Department, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

End Abstract

Race, gender, and class are three markers of difference —or examples of projected social “irregularity”—serving to frame the United States for better than 300 years. These three are categories of imposed social meaning and placement worn on the human body but also constitutive of that body. In a word, the body is a bio-chemical reality (a physical reality that is born, lives, and dies) upon which social codes (e.g., race, gender, class, and sexuality) are layered. But it is also a social reality (a “something” spoken through language into existence) that is defined by these constructs.

Put another way, a person or group is recognized or “known” by physical occupation of time and space, and also through reading of these social codes in the same way we, say, place people culturally and economically by the style and “quality” of clothing covering the body. Or, one finds this coding in the manner the “look” of a person reads to viewers in particular ways: he “looked” threatening. She appeared “easy”. “Those” people are lazy and don’t want to work. You can look at them and tell as much. These aren’t the exact wording of any conversation I’ve overheard recently—although Donald Trump’s depiction of Mexicans and others (as well as the embrace of that rhetoric by voters) certainly speaks to the significance and widespread use of this social coding to target certain groups.¹ But even in a broad sense, these three scenarios speak to a general “gut knowledge” that relates the appearance of social coded bodies to particular values, rights, and opportunities.

While these social codes have no biological basis, they inform and influence in ways that impact every dimension of individual and collective existence—from health to financial well-being, to public-private interactions between people, and the list continues. For the full history of the United States, social codes have influenced who is entitled to the best the nation has to offer—private realization of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—and who rightly participates in public life. The counter-assertion is also true: these codes mandate who should be marginalized and prevented from equal access to all it means to be a fully realized and functioning member of the United States of America, and who should be denied positive placement within the nation’s history and geography.

Mindful of my opening comments, the difference is here understood as an arrangement of socially constructed circumstances but with felt (often tragic) consequences. At times, this distinction, relying on these socially engineered codes, has been maintained through a multi-dimensional and multi-layered system of boundaries—for example, “white-only” fountains, types of “suitable” employment, “men-only” clubs, or segregated neighborhoods often marked out through covenants preventing sale to undesirable populations. In their more passive form these boundaries are endorsed and safeguarded through a discourse—a wide-ranging narrative concerning identity and personhood—of rightful entitlement premised on race, gender, class normativity, and more.

When the marginalized and disadvantaged threaten the legitimacy of this discourse, violence re-enforces the legitimacy of these arrangements of life, and in this way it highlights pain if not death as the consequence of any significant challenge to the socio-economic, political, cultural, and ideological status quo. Maintenance of this normative structuring of life is (deadly) serious.

Difference and Disregard

E Pluribus Unum—“out of many, one”—an early framing of the desired socio-economic, political, cultural, and ideological dynamics of the new country called the United States also spoke a strong word regarding the perception of difference. It, difference, was perceived as a problem to solve or as a source of potential discord that could damage the delicate fabric of national life. As a positive justification for the status quo, it was a way to map out socio-economic positioning that accounted for slaves and servants, for instance. It circumscribed life for women so as to render their realm the domestic sphere and leaving for men the public reaches of authority and power while also ultimately justifying a man’s final authority over even the home. For this, scripture was a convenient source of justification to the extent it could be read to crush the ambitions and creativity of women by blaming them for the conditions of human life and making their punishment perpetual servitude of a sort: Eve did it; she made me eat the forbidden fruit. She started this trouble (Genesis 3-12-13):

¹² And the man said, the woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

¹³ And the Lord God said unto the woman, what is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

If this blaming and consequential belittling were the case for white women, one can imagine what this has meant for women who are not white.

Other biblical stories (although “people of the book”—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—aren’t alone in this stigmatizing of difference) would serve as epistemological and cosmic justification for disregard of other groups—including people of African descent as well as those whose sex-sexuality was considered “abnormal”.² Through appeal to the Bible and other religious texts, these mundane social codes are believed to stem from cosmic—and hence hard to question—authority extending beyond history and human reasoning. What is more, accountability and responsibility for the consequences of these negative depictions of difference are removed from humans in that circumstances are as divine forces intend them.

Reaction to difference is complex and layered. On one hand, difference is despised for the manner in which it might trouble the status quo, might disrupt the superiority of whiteness (male, heterosexual, and middle-class) as the norm. Still, on the other hand, difference is a necessary marker of social meaning, of proper place. In other words, through the presence of racial, gender, sexuality, and other categories of social meaning, difference becomes a way to distinguish populations and justify what happens to those populations “selected” as being problematic when measured against the norm: whiteness, maleness, and so on. Their color, gender, economic resource, and thereby social standing define these “other” populations and distinguish them for suspicion and disregard. What results, and what continues as the pattern of collective life, is the often aggressive (if not violent) targeting of populations that fall outside this normative structuring of society.

Again, for emphasis, the United States begins with and advances over the years a dominating sense of differentiation narrating difference as a problem to solve—a threat to the basic logic of collective life. This was the narrative that guided the status quo from those early years as a “free” nation moving forward.

Yet, this widely rehearsed narrative that marked difference—racial, gender, class, and so on—as problematic was never without its challengers. That is to say, while the signs of disregard—violent disregard—for difference mark the workings of the United States, it is also the case that individuals and groups have fought to establish a more expansive sense of belonging. Abolition, women’s rights, labor movement, the civil rights movement , the gay rights movement, the Occupy movement, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement are some examples of public protest meant to recalibrate the socio-political and economic codes of belonging so as to include a greater range of the population. With these various movements came cracks and fractures in the image of proper personhood.

The Current Cultural Climate

The narrative of “American exceptionalism” was broken when the “never Trump” rhetoric gave way to the 2016 election of Donald Trump as the 45th president. With this, the United States encountered loss of metaphysical naivety regarding the nature and meaning of this democratic experience. The naive slumber of self-delusion was broken abruptly by the wild screams, perhaps the death rattle of a certain performance of rabid normativity. Collective vision for so long blurred by a haze of civil rights nostalgia was confronted now in graphic ways by a disturbing fact: we are living a legacy of disregard operated by means of both crude and sophisticated technologies of violence. Difference is understood as a virus of sorts that must be wiped out. But, if not wiped out, controlled, and dominated. The same is the case for other markers of social difference—gender and class. The gender not in control (hence not dominate) is vulnerable to disregard, and those with lower economic standing are the despised and disregarded.

The terror involved in the above process of control isn’t simply the threat of death, but the inability to anticipate what will trigger violent response to raced, gendered, and classed bodies. Even compliance can be deadly, and docile bodies aren’t safe from further abuse. Any sign of struggle—even for one’s breath—can be understood as a threat to the safety of law enforcement and, as was the case for Eric Garner, can result in death. The jail cell as a place of confinement can also be a death chamber, as Sandra Bland’s demise makes clear. There are no decipherable ground rules for survival if one happens to live in despised flesh.³

It has long been the case that death operates on two levels within the context of difference in the United States: first, a type of metaphysical irrelevance and, second, physical demise. Both, as we have seen over and over again, shape the response to despised bodies “out of place”, to borrow an idea from Mary Douglas.⁴

These states have never been united based on a common love for humankind, for a deep and abiding high regard for the “other”. Sure, there are moments of kindness called love in action, but these have been fleeting and with limited impact. No, this nation was founded on and continues to operate based on a concern with the utility of the “other”, of a high suspicion toward difference and a normalizing of (male heterosexual) whiteness. In light of systemic disregard for difference, the words “this land is your land; this land is my land” to Woody Guthrie’s 1940 folk song are a statement of blind hope, a wish, not a historical fact.⁵

Angry, disillusioned, and agitated for good reason. Many look for ways to speak to this injustice, to force change within a deadly system—to establish new social-political structures and engagements as a safeguard against abuse. Yet, there is a genius to white supremacy: it mutates and transforms. It gives up a little in order (e.g., President Barack Obama or Annise Parker, an openly gay former mayor of Houston, Texas) to present the illusion of fundamental change. But when it is challenged in a significant manner, it responds aggressively.

White supremacy as a technology and identity frame finds ways to blame victims for the violence perpetrated against them. For instance, there is a desperate effort to find something in the past of the victim that will justify disregard as the safeguarding of order and well-being—for example, he was a criminal, she dressed provocatively, they don’t want to work, and the list of damaging assumptions goes on. In such a context, and in light of the tenacious nature of this systemic in/difference, some have embraced the rhetoric of resolve: this country is beyond repair and what else can one expect from a system that privileges certain performances of whiteness and demonizes all else? And from others there comes a determined and tenacious call for new strategies to resist the worst of what our current moment might entail and the max...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. The Look of Difference
• Part II. The Significance of Difference
• Part III. The Practice of Difference
• Back Matter