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Spring 2008
Volume 07, Number 2

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Articles

“I Sent You a Duck”: A Heideggerian Rethinking of Race and Gender Privilege[1]

Nancy J. Holland
Hamline University

In a stage adaptation of short stories by science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, Pilot Pirx is about to take off on an ill-fated mission when a duck flies between his spacecraft and the rising sun, an omen of disaster so dire that one crewmember suggests aborting the flight. Pirx, however, is too focused on the money to be made on the mission to take the omen seriously and continues the launch.

The flight is beset by strange maladies and malfunctions. At the end of Act I, Pirx discovers that the renamed ship is in fact that same space vessel in which a whole crew died during an earlier voyage. Later, in an attempt to understand the fate of his ship and crew, Pirx conjures up the ghost of Mommsen, the navigator of that previous doomed flight.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” an anguished Pirx asks the ghost.

“I sent you a duck,” the ghost replies.[2]

This response, unexpected even in context, struck me as a good shorthand for a different way to think about the nature of race and gender privilege. This conceptualization, loosely based on the work of Martin Heidegger, might be characterized as marking, not the obvious difference between people who see the duck and know it has been sent and those who do not see it at all, but the more subtle difference between those who do not see it and those who, like Pirx, act as if they do not because they choose to ignore its obvious implications.

Recent discussions of the concept of white privilege, for instance those by Naomi Zack and Alison Bailey in Chris Cuomo and Kim Hall’s collection on Whiteness,[3] make it clear that this concept, and the closely allied concept of male privilege, are overdue for fuller philosophical exploration. In this paper, I offer one attempt at such an investigation, suggesting that race and gender privilege can be understood and lived in more complex ways than is immediately obvious. To do this, I draw on a similar complexity I find in Martin Heidegger’s concept of inauthenticity. First, I briefly review the concept of privilege as it is detailed in Peggy McIntosh’s classic article, “White Privilege and Male Privilege.”[4] Then I summarize the argument for two senses of inauthenticity in Heidegger’s Being and Time[5] and argue that, despite the important differences between the two projects, an analogous double understanding of male privilege and white privilege can be useful in our thinking, and our teaching, about gender and race.

McIntosh understands white privilege by analogy with what she, as a feminist, recognizes as male privilege. She believes that men’s refusal to recognize the “advantages that men gain from women’s disadvantages” protects male privilege from “being fully recognized, acknowledged, lessened, or ended.”[6] Examples of this denial are not hard to find. Consider this story of a new faculty seminar at a mid-size university. During a discussion of concerns raised by women and faculty of color about possible bias in teaching evaluations, a white male participant declares that students tend to “see women faculty as bitchy” and suggests that his female colleagues must just “live with it.” As McIntosh suggests, this assertion presents student bias against female faculty as an irreducible “fact” rather than an attitude the could be addressed as part of the educational process, conceals the corresponding privilege white male faculty have of taking basic fairness for granted, and tacitly rejects the possibility that such bias might be taken into account in consideration of teaching evaluations. Thus, “obliviousness about male advantage” serves, as McIntosh says, to “maintain the myth of meritocracy.”[7]

McIntosh’s work on white privilege rose from the recognition that a similar obliviousness about white privilege is “kept strongly enculturated in the United States” to maintain not only the myth of meritocracy, but also the more insidious myth that “democratic choice is equally available to all.”[8] McIntosh believes this obliviousness also explains why white women can be “justly seen as oppressive [by women of color], even when we don’t see ourselves that way.”[9] She describes her own white privilege as “an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious.”[10] Her article includes an extensive, but necessarily incomplete, list of such invisible assets, from the color of Band-Aids to the freedom to ignore the perspectives of those of other races,[11] and goes on to generate a similar list of items that constitute heterosexual privilege. But the real question about any such privilege for McIntosh is, “Having described it, what will I do to lessen or end it?”[12]

She goes on to question the use of the word “privilege” for the aggregate of such assets because its positive connotations convey the idea that it is something desirable, “Yet some of the conditions I have described here work to systematically overempower certain groups.”[13] This leads her to make distinctions between earned and unearned privileges, and between positive privileges that should belong to everyone and negative ones that “unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies.”[14] She believes that, since the invisibility of both male privilege and white privilege is an important part of how they work to benefit some and disempower others, bringing them to light is a necessary first step to dismantling the oppressive systems they help to perpetuate.

So defined, the concepts of race and gender privilege bear little similarity to the concept of inauthenticity in Heidegger’s work. What I want to explore, however, is a structural parallel between the two concepts that complicates the dichotomies between privilege and its lack on the one hand, and authenticity and inauthenticity on the other. I would argue that looking at race and gender privilege in this more complex way can connect those concepts more directly to our lived experience and make them more useful.

While there is some disagreement about the point among Heidegger scholars, this more complex account of inauthenticity can be seen in Being and Time. Heidegger initially defines authenticity and inauthenticity in terms of the fact that Dasein “can ‘choose’ itself and win itself; it can also lose itself and never win itself, or only ‘seem’ to do so.”[15] Individual Dasein can choose to understand ourselves in our existential truth or we can “lose” ourselves in the collective beliefs and practices of our social world. Heidegger terms this impersonal way of existing the “They” because one does what “they” do, thinks what “they” think, etc. This immersion in the They lends one’s life the illusion of necessity, meaning, and intrinsic worth. Heidegger goes on to say that “even in its fullest concretion Dasein can be characterized by inauthenticity—when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment.”[16] This means that inauthenticity is a permanent possibility of Dasein not only in the sense that we can choose to fall back into the They when full existential awareness becomes too much for us, but also in the sense that we can involuntarily fall back into it under circumstances such as those he lists.
Conversely, authenticity is acceptance of the absolute contingency of our situation as self-defining beings whose actual lived experience is the sole source of the meaning and value of their existence. Heidegger argues that we must remain authentic while living out our lives totally in the publicly available realm of the They, fulfilling the socially defined roles we are thrown into at birth and projecting a meaning for our actions into a future that can, at any moment, nullify that meaning, and even our own existence. To live life knowing its intrinsic meaninglessness and ultimate nullity while at the same time fulfilling our chosen and assigned roles with complete conviction is the delicate, if not impossible, balance that drives other existential thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir to parable and story-telling.

And what drives most ordinary people who catch a glimpse of authenticity to flee immediately back into the refuge of the They, into explicitly chosen inauthenticity. This internal division within inauthenticity is created by the experience of existential anxiety. Such anxiety “takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself…in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted. . . Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its Being-free for…the authenticity of its Being, and for this authenticity as a possibility which it always [already] is.”[17]

That is, anxiety pulls individual Dasein out of our immersion in average everydayness and reveals to us our freedom to choose between authenticity and an inauthentic re-entry into the They. Without the experience of this anxiety, even the possibility of authenticity remains hidden in average everydayness, just as in the play it was only seeing the duck that raised the explicit question of whether Pilot Pirx should continue with his mission, despite several earlier signs of impending disaster.

All of this seems to suggest that a distinction can be made between actively chosen inauthenticity, the topic of most of Heidegger’s account, and inauthenticity as an undifferentiated immersion in “average everydayness” that remains a possibility even for authentic Dasein. The parallel between this and the analysis I am offering of race and gender privilege, however, is not based on the content of the concepts, but on a structural analogy. Moments of existential anxiety and uncanniness, for instance, are clearly not necessary to seeing race and gender privilege, as they are to authenticity, nor are opportunities to confront our privilege (unfortunately) as rare. I want to argue instead that a parallel understanding of how such privilege works might help those with race or gender privilege move to a more positive, less harmful relationship to it and to those who do not share in it. We will return to this later, but first I want to emphasize that the analogy with inauthenticity suggests a way to clarify at least one problem theorists have raised about the concepts of race and gender privilege.

If a case can be made that inauthenticity has an internal duality that complicates the moral judgments we tend to make about it (although Heidegger himself insists that authenticity and inauthenticity are not ethical categories), perhaps a similar division within race and gender privilege can explain some of the moral distinctions that we would like to make there as well. For instance, we might want to put the white male faculty member in the new faculty seminar referred to above into a somewhat different moral category than another white male member of the seminar who might merely have nodded in unthinking agreement. Such a listener might accept the inevitability of student bias against female faculty as a simple fact, based on his colleague’s claim, but without also endorsing the speaker’s statement that female faculty just have to live with such bias. He might, for instance, think administrators should take the bias into account in their evaluation of junior faculty, rather than believing, as the speaker seemed to, that male faculty are entitled to fairness in teaching evaluations whereas female faculty are not. It is this sense of entitlement that I believe creates the complexity in the concepts of race and gender privilege, and marks the difference between not seeing the duck, as it were, and seeing it but not acting accordingly.

III

The word “entitlement” has become more common in discussion of race and gender issues over the last few years, and has many of the same problems as the word “privilege.” Neither has what Naomi Zack calls a “philosophical history” that can be invoked in their analysis,[18] and both can be understood in a positive sense. The word “entitlement” seems to imply, on the one hand, what McIntosh calls “earned” privileges, that is, those that we come to by some specific achievement of our own.[19] On the other hand, the word still carries the sense of having come to something through one’s birth that lies in its link to titled nobility. These disparate connotations taken together, however, reflect fairly accurately the state of mind that I wish to call a sense of entitlement—the idea that one has earned a certain privilege by being born to it. For instance, white male applicants for teaching positions sometimes convey the impression that they feel entitled to the job. Should someone else be hired who is equally qualified but lacks race and/or gender privilege, the person hired may easily seem less qualified to them, simply because s/he does not belong to the privileged group, and so they label it “reverse discrimination.” In this case, they are not merely relying on their race and gender privilege—they are invoking it as a “qualification,” as a reason they should be hired.

What such a quasi-technical concept of “entitlement” allows for, as does the dual understanding of inauthenticity sketched out above, is a third possible stance beyond the dichotomy between privilege and its lack. Just as one can make a distinction between undifferentiated average everydayness and chosen inauthenticity, one could make a distinction between those who live their privilege because they are unaware of it and those who assert and experience that privilege as an entitlement. This leaves the bearers of such privilege with three possible paths in life.

The first path would be to live out one’s privilege without full awareness of its existence, without seeing the duck, as it were. This is the state, I would suggest, of many of my students in the Upper Midwest with regard to race. Seldom having to deal face-to-face with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, they see both as something that happened long ago and far away, something that has little to do with their comfortable situations in life. This is a provisional path, available only so long as they avoid any exposure to knowledge about the pervasive racism in American society and how that racism directly benefits them in the myriad ways McIntosh refers to in her article. Explicitly laying this option out as a way in which white privilege can be experienced, however, has the advantage of allowing our students their pasts without making negative moral judgments. What needs to be emphasized, rather than the pointless guilt Zack links to the concept of white privilege,[20] is the fact that after they become aware of their privilege this path is closed to them. Once they encounter “racist anxiety,” as it might be termed, through a college course or, as in the 1960s, through watching film of law enforcement personnel turn dogs and fire hoses on children, they must choose between the other two paths.[21]

One of these paths is to develop the sense of entitlement described above, to embrace race and/or gender privilege and consider it both earned and a result of one’s heritage. In the face of this, it is tempting to think that the other path is to disown one’s gender or race privilege. But such privilege is given by society as a whole, based on certain supposedly perceptible traits of the human body. This is a function of the impersonal They, not of individual human action, and just as one doesn’t choose to have male privilege or white privilege, one cannot simply choose to deny it entirely.

The only alternative to entitlement is to avoid the exercise of such privilege where one can and, where one cannot, to adopt and use one’s privilege, to the extent possible, in ways that benefit, or at least do not harm, those who do not have it, as McIntosh and Alison Bailey suggest.[22] One can teach about race and gender privilege; one can lend the power of that privilege in specific situations to those who do not have it; one can support anti-sexist, anti-racist political candidates and social programs that benefit those without such privilege. We cannot be entirely free from race and gender privilege in a sexually and racially hierarchical society, as one of my colleagues often says, but those who have such privilege can use it to act against sexism and racism.

It is necessary, however, to point out one strong similarity between authenticity and such uses of race and gender privilege, and one even stronger difference. The similarity is that, as already noted, the unexamined exercise of race and/or gender privilege is a permanent possibility even for those who work to avoid it, just as inauthenticity is a permanent possibility even for authentic Dasein. Those with white privilege cannot not be white and so cannot help but act in what Marilyn Frye calls a “whitely” fashion[23] whenever they allow their attention to the sexism and racism imbedded in our culture to slip, “when busy, when excited, when interested, when ready for enjoyment,” as Heidegger says. Thus, even those with race and/or gender privilege who try to do anti-sexist, anti-racist work can find ourselves exercising our privilege when caught unaware, by accepting preferential treatment in a crowded store, perhaps, or by enjoying a movie, novel, or television show we realize only in retrospect perpetuates sexist or racist stereotypes. That such incidents are both inevitable and unintentional does not make them okay, but it is also important to keep them in perspective, rather than being immobilized by the guilt Zack argues is a result of focusing on privilege.[24]

The more important difference, however, is that the resolute decision to wield race and/or gender privilege in an anti-sexist, anti-racist way is not yet authenticity in Heidegger’s sense of the term. It is not yet to “free” ourselves from the They in order to choose autonomously how we will act with regard to sexual and racial differences because the very fact that we consider there to be such a thing as a single sexual difference, or racial difference at all, is part and parcel of the social world that makes racism and sexism possible. At this time, in this country, none of us are free with regard to gender or race. The best that one can hope for is to live a life that embodies the attempt to create a radically different social world, one in which race and gender privilege, and the concepts of gender and race on which they depend, will have disappeared and true authenticity will have become possible. For me this means that we must confront others when their words or actions do harm, make it harder for them to do such harm, and work to make them aware of their race and gender privilege. But we must also do so with compassion, whether for friends, colleagues, or students. When it comes to making people recognize their race and/or gender privilege, we can do no more, and we must do no less, than to send them a well-timed duck. That is, I think, what it means to teach.

Endnotes
1. This paper has benefited greatly from discussion with members of the women’s studies program at Eastern Michigan University and from the helpful comments of my husband, Jeffrey Koon.

2. “Terminus” by Julian McFaul and John F. Bueche, with excerpts from Michael Kandel’s translation of Stanislaw Lem’s Tales of Pilot Pirx and More Tales of Pilot Pirx, produced by the Bedlam Theatre, Minneapolis, Minnesota. (The line about the duck was added to the script by actor Mike Harris, who played Mommsen.)

3. Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall, eds. Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).

4. Peggy McIntosh. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.” In Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, edited by Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1995), 76-87. Many others, of course, have written on white privilege, but hers is the articulation of the concept with which I assume most philosophers are familiar.

5. Martin Heidegger. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962).

6. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” 76.

7. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” 87.

8. Ibid.

9. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” 78. For a more detailed discussion of this question, see Ellen Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

10. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” 76-77.

11. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” 79-81.

12. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” 77.

13. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” 83.

14. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” 84.

15. Heidegger, Being and Time, 68.

16. Ibid.

17. Heidegger, Being and Time, 232, translation slightly modified, his emphasis.

18. Naomi Zack. “White Ideas.” In Whiteness, edited by Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 79.

19. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” 83.

20. Zack, “White Ideas,” 80-81.

21. Among his other helpful comments, my colleague Stephen Kellert suggests another possible path, “giving up and saying the world is unjust and there is no point in trying to change it. I see this, however, as a way of embracing one’s privilege, roughly analogous to Pilot Pirx saying of the duck, “if we’re doomed, we’re doomed” and continuing the flight. The difference between the two interpretations of such “fatalism” can be important from a teaching point of view.

22. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” 87; Alison Bailey, “Despising an Identity They Taught Me to Claim,” in Whiteness, edited by Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 98-101.

23. Marilyn Frye. Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1992), discussed in Bailey, “Despising an Identity They Taught Me to Claim.”

24. Zack, “White Ideas,” 80-81.

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APA Newsletters

Spring 2008 Volume 07, Number 2

Spring 2008
Volume 07, Number 2