Arguing for a Better World: How Philosophy Can Help Us Fight for Social Justice

Penguin Books

Arguing For a Better World

Arianne Shahvisi is a Kurdish British writer and academic philosopher. Raised in Lancashire and Essex, she studied astrophysics and philosophy at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and now teaches applied philosophy at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School where her research focusses on gender, race, migration, and health. She writes regularly for the London Review of Books, and her essays have also appeared in The Guardian, Prospect, The Independent, and The Economist.

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First published in Great Britain by John Murray (Publishers), a Hachette UK company, 2023

Published in Penguin Books 2023

Copyright © 2023 by Arianne Shahvisi

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ISBN 9780143136835 (paperback)

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For my parents

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge . . . [W]hether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture (1993)

Contents

Introduction: Show Your Work!

1. Can You Be Racist to a White Person?

2. Has ‘Political Correctness’ Gone Too Far?

3. What’s Wrong with Dog Whistles?

4. Is It Sexist to Say ‘Men Are Trash’?

5. Do All Lives Matter?

6. Who Should We Believe?

7. Where Does a Mansplainer Get His Water?

8. Who Is Cancelling Whom?

9. Are We Responsible for Structural Injustice?

Conclusion: Your Nearest Barricade

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

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Introduction: Show Your Work!

The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.

James Baldwin, New York Times (1979)

When I was a child, I’d spend rainy weekends working through mathematical problems for fun. Every now and then I’d try to prove famous conjectures, the sort that had resisted the efforts of mathematicians for hundreds of years, but most of the time I chose tamer problems that I knew I could solve with enough scribbling. The clean thrill of getting the right answer gave me a sense of efficacy and rootedness. Even so, on tests at school I rarely got good grades, because I had a terrible habit of not showing my work. I’d write down the solution and move on, pleased at having figured it out in my head. Exasperated teachers pleaded with me to play along, reminding me that outlining a sensible method meant credit could be given if an error led to the wrong answer, and was also a way of proving I hadn’t cheated. It was less important to be right, they maintained, and more important to show that I knew what I was doing.

The exhortation has stayed with me: show your work! It’s a helpful precept in my work as a philosopher, where conclusions are less important than reasoning, and in my role as a teacher, where it is more effective to show than to tell.

This book is an attempt to share my work with regard to a set of debates that have dominated the ‘culture wars’ in recent years. These disputes are sometimes dismissed as distractions from more ‘serious’ issues, and have undoubtedly been stirred by those who seek to siphon off the energy available for dissent, but I hope to show that they undergird the more obvious threats to our collective thriving.

In the two or three years before I sat down to write, fascist leaders held power in the United States, India, Russia, the Philippines, Poland, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey and Italy, to name just a few; the ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Me Too’ movements rose up in response to unaddressed racist police brutality and gendered sexual violence; tens of thousands of migrants drowned or suffocated as they fled conflict, environmental degradation and poverty; micro-plastics were found in our bloodstreams and air pollutants in our brains; the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing vaccine nationalism laid bare the extent of global health inequalities; one in three people lacked access to adequate nutrition as food insecurity rose precipitously; our ailing planet was pushed through life-threatening heat records, while 88 million barrels a day of oil were dragged out of the ground.

Philosopher Mary Midgley once wrote that philosophy, ‘in spite of all its tiresome features, is not a luxury but a necessity, because we always have to use it when things get difficult’.[1] This book is a response to the difficulties just mentioned. The tools of philosophy can help us to uncover and confront the ideology that underwrites and connects these issues. Doing so requires that we study the social world and examine the words and concepts that are the atoms of how we think, speak, categorise and resist.

The chapters ahead have also arisen from my disappointment in the tendency, particularly among those who practise their politics largely through social media, to focus on being ‘right’. The effect of this trend has been to make conversations about social justice insular, punitive and sloppy, as people fixate on their identity as a person who is right, and consider mistakes – their own or those of others – to be ruinous, rather than inevitable and correctable. Where being right takes precedence, it can seem safer to adopt, wholesale, the views of others, instead of trying to work things out from scratch. To be clear, I do think that some perspectives are correct, morally speaking, but knowing and showing why is important, not least because the same tools will help us to see when and how we are wrong.

Showing your work is a way of being open with others, in the sense of being intellectually honest, which means making your assumptions and reasoning vulnerable to criticism. Being open in this way is also a challenge to another concerning trend. In online skirmishes about political issues, people sometimes respond to perfectly reasonable requests for explanation with the refrain, ‘It’s not my job to educate you!’ or are quick to assure others that ‘You don’t owe anyone anything!’ These proclamations are sometimes the result of an understandable frustration: marginalised people are often burdened with explaining their marginalisation and thereby expending energy that could be used for rest or resistance. It is, as feminist scholar Audre Lorde pointed out in 1984, ‘an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns’.[2] So much free or cheap labour is extracted from certain groups that the uncompensated work of teaching others about oppression can seem like part of that extractive trend.

Yet explaining marginalisation need not be a distraction from resistance. It can be part of that resistance. How else are we supposed to learn? And while self-care is important, it would be less so if we cared for each other more effectively. Teaching and learning is an important part of how we care for one another and our communities. Besides, it is in fact my job, as a university lecturer, to teach. It’s hard to see who the job of educating others falls to, if not to people like me, who have the privilege of being paid to learn. This book is, among other things, an attempt to discharge that duty.

There are many ways to write about the philosophy of social justice. This book focusses on some of the language and concepts that enable the subjugation and exploitation of particular people, as well as the words and ideas that might be used to construct a different way of living together. My aim is to sketch out some debates that will already be familiar to most readers, not with the aim of settling any particular issue, but instead to undertake some careful unsettling. I try to complicate topics that have been made to seem simple and bring some clarity to those that have been made to look difficult. I do not aim to be ‘objective’ or ‘apolitical’, if such a thing were even possible, but I have tried to make my reasoning clear enough that those who disagree with me will at least see where we part ways. Most obviously and importantly, I am vehemently opposed to capitalism, and some of my arguments for being so are outlined at various points in the book.

I focus on language and concepts because while we move through the material world of cars and concrete and growling stomachs, we make sense of that world through words and ideas. Language helps us to understand our observations and organise them into categories, and material realities spring up from those uses of language. Deploying the word ‘terrorism’ has given moral cover to mass surveillance, incarceration and murder; the term ‘illegal’ allows us to enjoy the same beaches on which the bodies of others wash up; the label ‘criminal’ means we can freely go about our lives while others are violently denied theirs. The categories of gender and race have facilitated an economy that sustains itself on the exploitation of particular groups. One of the key messages of this book is that words and concepts do things to the world, but could do other things, if we put our minds to it. As the anthropologist David Graeber wrote: ‘the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently’.[3]

Another theme that is central to this work is the idea that mistakes are unavoidable features of our moral and political lives, and should be seen as occasions for learning, rather than reasons for exclusion. I hope readers will take the errors and oversights of the text itself in this spirit. If there are more than is usual, that may be because I finished writing with a newborn baby sleeping (or often not) in my lap, or crying for me from the next room while my partner made space for me to work. This served as a reminder of the limitations on and of projects like this, and of the people whose valuable perspectives aren’t heard because they are taken up with that most important and foundational element of any liberation movement: caring for others. Their voices are among the many omissions in this text. For that reason, among others, this book should be seen as a spur for discussion, rather than an exhaustive survey of how injustice works and how it can be challenged. Many of the arguments I make can be extended beyond the contexts in which I have developed them. Perhaps others will find ways to do that. I hope the chapters ahead will help readers to think about the world that makes them and imagine how they might work with others to make it differently.

1

Can You Be Racist to a White Person?

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? . . . I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is anyone of you.

Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of Anger’ (1981)

In 2017, former British football player Trevor Sinclair was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. He challenged the police officers, demanding to know whether the arrest was taking place because he was Black. It’s a reasonable question: Black people in the UK are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched.[1] In the police van on the way to the station, Sinclair, drunk and aggrieved, called the arresting officer a ‘white cunt’. He was eventually given a twenty-month driving ban and 150 hours of community service for driving while intoxicated, and a fine for a ‘racially aggravated public order offence’.[2] He lost his position as a television sports pundit, and the anti-racism football charity Kick It Out stated that: ‘There is too much racism across society currently, with it being even more regrettable and unacceptable when it is perpetrated by individuals who should know better.’[3]

During his trial it emerged that on the evening of his arrest, while Sinclair and his family were eating in a restaurant, a stranger approached them, patted him on the head and referred to him as a ‘little chocolate man’. Sinclair explained that this humiliating incident, witnessed by those close to him, had led to his dangerous and self-destructive behaviour later that night.

This case contains two instances in which a person makes a reference to another person’s race, but only one is properly described as racism. Sinclair may well have been abusive: calling someone a ‘white cunt’ refers to their race in a way that is intended as a slur. Nonetheless, according to any reasonable definition of the concept, Sinclair was not racist to the police officer. The woman in the restaurant, on the other hand, used no expletives, but made a comment that was unequivocally racist.

Making and maintaining the above distinction is vitally important. ‘Reverse-racism’ and ‘reverse-sexism’, which is to say, racism towards white people and sexism towards men, aren’t the problems they’re sometimes made out to be. That isn’t to deny that there are insults and prejudices that turn on the race or gender of white people or men, but they tend to be one-off incidents, or collateral effects of privilege, and therefore belong to a separate category of wrongs to the profound and repetitious harms of racism and sexism. Keeping them apart is essential to taking seriously the role of power, which allows us to devise targeted actions to tackle racism and sexism and the system they thrive within. Engaging in productive conversations about these issues requires an understanding of the concepts of ‘privilege’ and ‘oppression’, and their role in producing and maintaining social and economic inequality.

Becky with the Bad Grades

In 2008, a young white woman named Abigail Fisher sued the University of Texas at Austin, claiming that she had been denied a place at the prestigious institution as a result of anti-racist admissions policies, which, she contended, favoured academically weaker applicants from minority groups. In essence, she was claiming that, as a white applicant, she’d experienced ‘reverse-racism’. ‘Affirmative action’ policies at universities in the United States take into account the context of candidates’ applications: their race, ethnicity, gender and social class, for example. Their aim is to address the historic and enduring barriers to higher education for those from under-represented groups. White women (like Abigail Fisher) have in fact been some of the primary beneficiaries of these policies; affirmative action has played a significant role in improving women’s access to educational and professional opportunities, and white women applicants – who tend to have more extensive social connections and material resources than women of colour – have seen the greatest advancement.[4]

Fisher lost the case and won the moniker ‘Becky with the bad grades’, a reference to Beyoncé’s lyric ‘Becky with the good hair’ from the song ‘Sorry’ on her album Lemonade. ‘Becky’ is a slang term for a white woman who, as writer Michael Harriot puts it, ‘uses her privilege as a weapon, a ladder or an excuse’.[5] Fisher’s failure to secure the place she wanted came down not to her whiteness but to the fact that her grades were unimpressive compared to the field of candidates that year.

In 2020, the Becky put-down was overshadowed by the pejorative nickname for her older counterpart, ‘Karen’: a middle-aged, middle-class white woman who’d like to speak to your manager. Such people are sticklers for the rules because the rules serve them well. They wield their privilege without embarrassment, and have no compunction about summoning the relevant authorities when they feel wronged, especially when the perceived wrongdoer is a person of colour. Karens know how dire the consequences of disciplinary action can be for the people they target, and that’s what emboldens them: they like to see results when teaching others a lesson.

One of the most infamous Karens is Amy Cooper, a white woman who in 2020 refused to put her dog on a lead when asked to do so in line with the rules in that section of Central Park. The request was made by Christian Cooper (their identical surnames are a confusing coincidence), a Black birdwatcher, whose video recording of the incident captures Amy Cooper saying, ‘I’m calling the cops . . . I’m gonna tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life’ – a barefaced threat to exploit police racism.

Uses of ‘Karen’ and ‘Becky’ have been met with accusations of ‘reverse-racism’. Since the slurs are only used against those from a particular social group, it has been argued that they therefore constitute racism towards members of that group, i.e. white women. No doubt the epithets are unfair to many real, blameless Karens and Beckys, but it’s misguided to see the terms as instances of reverse-racism; rather, they refer specifically to those who harness white privilege in ways that can only be described as racist. To call someone a ‘Karen’ is to point out her racism. (Uses of ‘Karen’ have also been criticised for being sexist, which is a charge I’ll rebut later in the chapter.)

In order to see that reverse-racism or reverse-sexism aren’t meaningful concepts, it’s necessary to understand what constitutes a case of racism or sexism. Racism and sexism are forms of oppression, as are homophobia, transphobia, ableism and classism, among others. Oppression is a kind of harm that merits special attention because it accounts for serious, long-term, widespread, predictable suffering, which, crucially, is preventable. Other kinds of contingent suffering – losing people, falling ill, failing to achieve our goals – may loom large in our personal lives, but are less interesting from a political perspective.[*] Nor are they as ‘contingent’ as we think; oppression tends to compound these harms, too. Cancer and road traffic accidents can affect any of us, but those whose risks are increased by living near polluting industries and busy roads are much more likely to be poor people of colour.[6]

In the sense in which they are used here, oppression and privilege are technical terms referring to specific forms of collective harm and advantage experienced by a set of people because of some feature of their identity that they have in common. Oppression doesn’t just arise out of the chaos and complexity of the world; it’s part of the design of our societies. It therefore has the distinctive feature of being largely inescapable for those it affects. It is characterised by ‘double binds’, which means that a person attempting to avoid one of its harms will only be harmed in another way. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. A family trying to flee their homeland after it was razed by an imperialist war then faces the risk of drowning in the open sea; a woman who is labelled as ‘bossy’ and ‘difficult’ if she advocates for herself otherwise has her needs and preferences overlooked; a Muslim teenager quietly endures his peers’ Islamophobic comments to avoid being seen as a troublemaker.

The Economic Logic of Racism and Sexism

Privilege and oppression describe the standing of a person, or group of people, in relation to a social hierarchy. Men are privileged within the hierarchy of sex and gender; people of colour are oppressed within the hierarchy of race. The primary purpose of these hierarchies is to enable the subjugation and exploitation of particular groups. Racism and sexism therefore play an important role in facilitating the operation of an exploitative regime like capitalism. Capitalism is an economic system which centres on the accumulation of ‘capital’, that is, wealth that is used to produce even greater wealth through direct or indirect exploitation. Capital accumulation begins with people carving up and claiming ownership of the world’s resources, appropriating goods that are essential to everyone’s survival and that might otherwise be held as commons and shared according to people’s requirements. These privatised resources are thereafter unavailable to others – no matter their level of need – without payment of some kind. Capitalist states endorse these ownership claims, and protect them via property laws and state violence. In this way, a small number of people are permitted to hoard almost all the world’s basic goods and charge the rest of us to access them. We have no option but to sell our labour and exchange the money we earn for food, shelter and other necessities.

The amount of capital held by any person would remain static without some kind of ongoing extraction. Capital accumulation therefore depends on keeping wages much lower than the value of a person’s labour (in terms of how wealthy that work makes their employer), and demanding payment for goods and services that exceeds their value (in terms of how much it costs the owner or seller to make or maintain them). For example, a garment worker in Vietnam might earn thirty-five cents an hour, but the items she sews will be sold for thirty-five dollars, and the difference between the value of her contribution and that of her salary is claimed by the clothing company. Similarly, renting a one-bedroom flat in London costs around $26,000 per year, even though the cost to the landlord of wear and tear to the property will be a mere fraction of this, and when the tenant leaves, the landlord still owns the property and can begin the extraction anew. Capitalist states make these forms of barefaced exploitation legal.

Accumulating capital also requires the continual growth of markets, because increased demands for goods and labour means more value can be extracted. This is not an abstract notion: growth means extracting more physical ‘stuff’ from the earth and using more energy, both of which degrade the environment. It also requires that we are urged to covet and buy commodities or services that we do not need, in the promise that doing so will stave off the misery of living under an exploitative regime. As philosopher Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1913, capitalism

ransacks the whole world, it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society . . . It becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe.[7]

Such a patently unjust system could not persist without some degree of assent from those it harms. This compliance is secured by producing and maintaining divisions between people in order to consolidate its rule. The objective of extracting as much labour as possible while paying the lowest possible wages is helped along by the entrenchment of gender categories. There are many ways to define and understand gender, but one of the most concrete characterisations follows from a simple question: which group of people performs the majority of the world’s unpaid labour? (This is not just a question about historic allocations of work: in the UK and the US, women who also do paid work outside the home perform the equivalent of an extra work day of additional housework compared with men.[8]) Without continual housework – maintaining safe and sanitary conditions, preparing food, gestating and birthing children, cleaning clothes, caring for the young, old and ill – no one would be able to work outside the home and sustain the process of capital accumulation. In order to have a functional supply of labour, you need a shadow workforce that recharges the more visible workforce. If you can get away with not paying those invisible workers, all the better.

Myths are created or entrenched in order to support the devaluation of women and their roles: that housework is not really work, that it is the ‘natural’ duty of certain people by virtue of some biological propensity, that it is not important, that anyone could do it. (Consider the phrase ‘Oh, she doesn’t work’, when a person means ‘She doesn’t work outside the home for pay.’) And those myths, among others, reinforce the idea that some people – men – have certain roles and strengths, while others – women – have different roles and strengths. The positions and properties that are associated with men are more highly valued, and tend to be linked to greater power, prestige and pay. This is ‘male privilege’. The system is more permissive to men than equivalently positioned women, even though they’re also being exploited and corralled into restrictive social roles. Most notably, much less is asked of men in terms of unremunerated care and consideration for others, and their wrongdoing, especially their violence, is more readily ignored or forgiven. It is through these relative advantages that men’s complicity is bought, and many defend their status by keeping women in their place and policing the norms and boundaries of heteronormativity.

This kind of analysis dates back to Black American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, who described the way in which ‘white privilege’ serves to divide Black and white workers from one another, and thereby protect the interests of powerful (white) people. In 1935, Du Bois wrote:

the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and tides of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.[9]

White privilege can be understood as a ‘psychological wage’ in the form of greater leeway (from the police, say), a sense of superiority and relative fortune, and a ready set of scapegoats on which to pile blame or take out frustration. White workers’ wages were, and still are, higher than their Black counterparts’, but those wages are nonetheless, in the general case, much lower than the value of that labour in terms of its social worth or how rich it makes their bosses. But there’s a non-monetary top-up: the ‘psychological wage’ of white privilege. It comes in the form of an unspoken promise – life will be better because you are better – and on the strength of that promise, white people are often willing to put aside class loyalty in favour of race loyalty. This divide-and-rule system suppresses everyone’s actual wages and has people fighting over crumbs.

Grasping these economic uses of privilege is essential to understanding how oppression came about, how it works, and why it persists. Under capitalism, almost everybody is exploited, but the stability and longevity of such an intuitively intolerable system requires that some groups of people are marked out to be exploited to a much greater degree. This is necessary both because capitalism subsists on exploitation, so it needs a large reserve of exploitable people, but also because a hierarchy of exploitation is a more stable arrangement since, if the balance is right, those with a modicum more power and freedom will better tolerate their own exploitation and defend a regime that favours them. Creating these hierarchies of exploitation requires division into social groups, and requires that some of those groups be subjugated relative to others or, in other words, that some groups are oppressed.

Oppression: A Primer

Instances of oppression can be identified through a set of characteristic features. They involve some kind of unjustified negative treatment that happens to a person as a result of belonging to a particular social group; such treatment has historical precedents and is part of a pattern that emanates from the way our society is organised, rather than merely the actions of individuals, which is to say that it is structural.

The subjugation of women has a long and dispiritingly unvarying history. In Medieval Europe, women taking charge of their own reproductive capacity in devising and using methods of contraception and abortion, or those who were deemed to be unruly, unpleasant or insufficiently feminine, could be killed as ‘witches’. Until the twentieth century, married women in the UK and the US were legally erased by ‘coverture’ laws, which treated them as ‘covered women’, i.e. subsumed by their husbands, who could make all legal decisions on their behalf. The term ‘sexual harassment’ didn’t exist until the 1970s, which meant there was no legislation to protect women against this common form of sexist harm. A 1736 British legal treatise mandated that ‘the husband of a woman cannot himself be guilty of an actual rape upon his wife, on account of the matrimonial consent which she has given, and which she cannot retract.’ A woman getting married amounted to open-ended sexual consent. This remained in force until 1991, so within my lifetime, a man in the UK could rape his wife and it didn’t count as rape.[10]

Contemporary incarnations of sexism bear the imprints of their progenitors. Women are no longer considered to belong to their husbands, but 90 per cent of married women in the UK adopt their husband’s surnames, while just 3 per cent of