Criticism and accusations of bias

Yesterday Cheryl brought up Debbie Stabenow’s claim that it’s sexist to call for Diane Feinstein to resign from the Senate now, as opposed to waiting for her term to expire 20 months from now.

I want to make a general point about these sorts of meta-criticisms of engaging in criticism of members of traditionally marginalized groups.

(1) It’s practically certain that some criticism of Feinstein’s failure to resign, like some of the criticism of her exact contemporary Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s failure to resign, has sexist roots, because we still live in a fundamentally sexist society, despite considerable progress on that score since the days of Feinstein’s and Ginsburg’s youth (Ginsburg graduated at the top of her class at Columbia Law School and couldn’t get any kind of legal job).

(2) Whether a particular criticism has sexist — or racist, or classist, etc. — roots is quite distinct from the question of whether the criticism is valid. For example, criticism of Feinstein’s and Ginsburg’s decisions could be substantively correct, and yet still sexist, if the particular critic would not make similar demands of men in substantially similar situations. But note that in this instance, the injustice generated by sexism isn’t the call for the women to resign: it’s the failure to call for the men to resign. It should be obvious that the correct response to that injustice is not to avoid calling on women in these situations to resign, but rather to apply the correct standard consistently, without regard to gender.

(3) It’s always appropriate to consider carefully how one should go about criticizing a member of a marginalized group, when that criticism is of the sort that reflects prejudicial stereotypes about the group. So for example, it obviously not appropriate for a gentile who was robbed by Bernie Madoff to complain that “that greedy Jew stole my money.” Note that merely using the noun “Jew” to describe a Jewish person still has a faintly anti-Semitic resonance in our culture, if the speaker is not themselves Jewish. This illustrates how a pure descriptor can be an offensive term if used by members of in groups to describe members of out groups. The claim that one should try to remain aware of such resonances is at the core of what conservatives object to when they complain about how political correctness, now re-branded as “wokeness,” has made it impossible to speak frankly and naturally without being “cancelled,” aka criticized.

(4) An unavoidable problem is that sometimes individual members of marginalized groups typify the stereotypes about the group, not because the stereotype is valid, but because the natural diversity within any group guarantees this will happen. So for example, suppose a Black woman is appointed to a prestigious and powerful position, traditionally held only by white men, in part because the institution that appointed her is trying to rectify the social injustice reflected in the fact that this position was traditionally barred to anyone not a white man. Now suppose that because of a fairly predictable bureaucratic failure in this sort of selection process, this person ends up personifying all sorts of negative stereotypes about her identity. She turns out to be incompetent and lazy, as reflected by her unwillingness to do many of the most basic parts of her job, with eventual catastrophic consequences for the institution she is supposed to be running. In other words, in this particular case the person turns out to be a kind of exemplar of right wing criticisms of affirmative action: She is in fact unqualified for the work she is (not) doing, and it’s in fact true that she was promoted to this institutional role she is botching in part because of a — wholly justified — identitarian politics, that strives to ameliorate past injustices through affirmative action today.

Now it seems to me the appropriate response to this situation is not to deny what has actually happened, but to acknowledge it, in a way that protects the general goals of the politics and processes that in this case have unfortunately failed. The way to do that is to acknowledge that this person has in fact failed, in the same ways that all sorts of white men fail every day – not because she’s a Black woman, but because she’s a member of the human race.

(5) When people point out that Donald Trump was an incompetent and lazy president, who was unwilling to do many of the most basic parts of his job, this wasn’t an observation about a white man, because white maleness remains an almost completely unmarked category in this culture. (See Ta-Nehisi Coates’s classic essay on this subject). The important point is that the criticism was true. That similar criticisms made of powerful people who are members of marginalized groups will often be motivated by racism, sexism, etc., is again quite distinct from the question of whether, in a particular case, those criticisms are in fact true.

One key point, then, is to strive to be aware of the extent to which criticisms are motivated by traditional stereotypical bias, for two reasons:

(1) Because this leads to unfair criticisms of members of marginalized groups; and

(2) Because this leads to the failure to criticize members of in-groups who should in fact be criticized.

The other key point is that being aware that a particular instance of affirmative action has failed is not a criticism of the concept, but only of its execution in a particular case. Affirmative action is difficult to do well because anything worth doing is difficult to do well. That merely means that doing it well as opposed to badly requires real effort and intelligence, as opposed to lazy tokenism and empty institutional rhetoric.