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Spring 2008
Volume 07, Number 2

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

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Teaching about Racism and Sexism in Introduction to Philosophy Classes

Gail M. Presbey
University of Detroit Mercy

In a philosophy class, we learn to question our assumptions. We learn that reality is not always how it appears to be. We inquire into issues of justice that go beyond the status quo of how things have “always been.” We learn to widen our knowledge by stretching ourselves to see a situation from another person’s perspective, in an attempt to have a more realistic view of what is really going on. With these as the general goals of philosophy, a concrete project that can help students see the benefits of the philosophical approach is to explore issues of racism and sexism (and along these same lines classist, heterosexist, and ablest presumptions) in contemporary America.

Contemporary philosophers like Charles W. Mills and others have emphasized how the field of philosophy, as with so many other disciplines in the academy, is often taught in an implicitly racist and sexist way by its exclusion of non-white and female voices. He points to the problem of “white ignorance”: a problem of holding false beliefs and the absence of true belief about people of color, which presumes that they are “savages” and that whites are civilized. Such a perspective can only be had if one suppresses the history of white brutality and passes over the accomplishments of people of color. This ignorance, Mills argues, is the result of social and institutional systems of power and domination, and not mere lack of correct information.[1] I argue that teaching an Introduction to Philosophy course that includes only white male philosophers in the Euro-American canon teaches racism by continuing white ignorance about contributions from other thinkers and cultures outside of Europe. It presents these thinkers in a vacuum and has the (possibly unintended) side-effect of suggesting that other thinkers cannot think. The exclusion of women from this canon has the same effect as well.

It was in response to this distortion of the history of philosophy that my co-editors Karsten Struhl, Richard Olsen, and myself created The Philosophical Quest: A Cross-Cultural Reader in 1995, and I use its second edition in class nowadays. Many of the readings referred to throughout this article can be found in this text. Since our text was published, there have been several other philosophy textbooks (by Larry May, Christine Koggel, James Sterba, and Daniel Bonevac to name a few) that have emphasized inclusiveness in their selections.[2]

I start my philosophy classes with selections from Ancient Egypt, since we have philosophical texts from there that are thousands of years older than any others. “Dialogue Between a Man and his Soul” (from 2200-2050 B.C.E.) demonstrates the philosophical method of dialogue, and explores a philosophical topic, “Why live?” In the essay, a man critiques the injustice of his society and posits (in a personal position that goes against his society’s belief that the afterlife is much like this life) that the next world is a place of justice and intellectual clarity (since the body is a source of error—a position that prefigures Socrates’ arguments in the Phaedo by a thousand years or so). I was first introduced to the philosophical implications of this text by an article by Robert Brier.[3] Another key Egyptian text I like to use is “The Instruction of Any” (from 1550-1305 B.C.E.), in which a father gives his son prudential advice, and the son then, by debating his father, raises the issue: “Can one teach others virtue?” If so, how is teaching virtue like or unlike other training? I was first alerted to the philosophical import of this article by David James.[4]

One reason to use Egyptian texts is to accurately begin at the beginning. The earliest philosophical texts come from what we now call the continent of Africa, just like the earliest humans come from Africa. Ancient Egypt was, according to Chiekh Anta Diop, a Black society, and according to British historian Basil Davidson, a multi-racial society; even the more conservative position of Davidson still breaks through stereotypes of ancient Egypt as an “exception” cut out of the context of Black Africa. Any (in the text mentioned above) explains that Nubians come and learn the Egyptian language and become as fluent as Egyptians. So, Egypt is in communication with other parts of Africa, both through exchange of population and ideas. A good source to help students debunk the idea that Egypt was somehow “white” (therefore explaining its great accomplishments without interrupting the racist narrative of history) is to show them a few minutes of Basil Davidson’s first video in his series Africa. Davidson scrutinizes ancient Egyptian artifacts to discover the multi-racial heritage of ancient Egypt.[5]

Including selections from ancient China and ancient India before proceeding to ancient Greece is another way to be inclusive and to fight white ignorance. After ancient Greece, it is crucial to mention the importance of the Arabic language for philosophizing, and how ideas and debates from ancient Greece were continued in Arabic across the Middle East and North Africa as they made their way to Spain and eventually France (see Eric Ormsby’s history of Arabic philosophy for the details).[6] I realize that the inclusion of this broader history does little to discount the sexist nature of the field. Even the ancient Egyptian text Any is a dialogue between a man and his son; however, David James suggests that the son, Khonshotep, refers to his mother’s way of teaching virtue as possibly superior to his father’s way.[7] Confucius’s School for Young Men was a radical departure from class-based tutorial education, but did not divert from the perspective that men, not women, should be groomed for public life.[8] When I get to Aristotle I often use Elizabeth Spelman’s feminist critique of his views (included in Sterba’s text). Since I prefer to use primary texts whenever possible, I could suggest that in tandem with Aristotle’s virtue ethics one covers the writing of a Late Pythagorean woman philosopher, Theano II. She lived around 300-100 B.C.E., and her letters were preserved in Theodoret’s De Vita Pythagoras. In the letters she outlines women’s wisdom and virtue when dealing with children, husbands, and servants. She has an especially keen sense of moral integrity as lived in relationship with others.[9]

After a cursory look at Medieval debates (one always has the pressure to be cursory in an introductory course), we must, of course, cover the philosophy of Rene Descartes. There is no avoiding Descartes, and no need to avoid him because we can learn a lot from scrutinizing his highly individualistic method. It is certainly good to question our assumptions, and ensure that we “really know” what we think we know. But perhaps introspection has limited use. I follow up Descartes with Charles Sanders Peirce, who suggests the a priori method which focuses on rational scrutiny has shortcomings. It proclaims that it is able to transcend subjectivity to find objective truth, but it is still mired in subjectivity. While agreeing with Descartes in eschewing tenacity and authority as good sources for our beliefs (and here you have to warn students not to be waylaid by Peirce’s use of subtle humor when he sings the praises of tenacity), he suggests that only the scientific method can bring us to objective truths.[10] Peirce’s critique is an invaluable step, but it is not the end. It is just a new launching point for the critique of science’s objectivity, a topic discussed at length by Sandra Harding. With Harding’s critique of the assumptions behind the “hard sciences,” and her explanations of standpoint theory, it is time for students to look at Patricia Hill Collins’s critique of the social sciences. Our textbook includes passages from Harding and Hill Collins on these topics.[11] However, my students sometimes complain about the Hill Collins text. Even my African American women students will say that she is “too angry.” I think that their judgments are due to internalized racist and sexist norms. Sometimes I include Hill Collins, and sometimes I skip her and use the approach outlined later in this article, the approach through humor, not because I think it is more academically sound but because it seems to break through students’ barriers of resistance.

Charles Mills explains how there is a need to break through barriers of individual epistemology (found in Descartes) to see social epistemology at work. Further, discussions of social epistemology that do not refer to factors of race, class, and gender need to incorporate these added perspectives. I think that when Descartes is used as a starting point for such adventures, philosophy can become relevant to students’ lives and teach them life skills that will help them see through ideology and become more objective in various aspects of their lives. According to Mills, the process of cognition involves perception, conception, memory, testimony, and motivational group interest. Firstly, perception is already socialized; to recognize objects in our perceptual field we must draw upon our memory, or background knowledge, which appeals to testimony. When drawing upon testimony we decide which voices to listen to and which to ignore. Our use of language to describe our thoughts introduces social mediation since our languages are social projects. Mills explains, “At all levels, interests may shape cognition, influencing what and how we see, what we and society choose to remember, whose testimony is solicited and whose is not, and which facts and frameworks are sought out and accepted.”[12]

Without being vigilant against the social bias built into our patterns of cognition, we will tend to perceive things which confirm our beliefs and weed out as irrelevant or distrustful any information that would disconfirm the theses we already hold. If we come from a sexist and racist society that is in denial of its unfair practices and touts its “egalitarian” credentials, Mills contends, we will be predisposed to discount or suspect as false any evidence put forward to prove our society’s sexist and racist underpinnings.[13] Therefore, I consider that at this point in the course, it is important to engage students in a discussion of racism and sexism in contemporary America.

Teaching in a racially diverse but primarily white private university located in Detroit, my students are mostly middle class, and many of the younger students seem to have a rosy picture of what life will be like for themselves after they graduate. Sometimes students are surprised that we will study issues of racism and sexism in class because they think that these are old issues and that now racism and sexism have disappeared or at least greatly diminished. I often have women who tell me that their mothers had to deal with sexism but they themselves will not have a problem. I have some African American students as well as white students who think it is in bad taste to raise issues of racism in the class because those old wounds should just be forgotten as they join an open and inclusive society where everyone can succeed. Of course, that is not the view of all of my students; some know only too keenly that racism and sexism permeate society. Certainly, racism and sexism still exist, even if their forms are changing.

Greg Moses explains that the difference between old racism and new racism involves “shifting the weight of supremacy from codes of enunciation to codes of evasion” and that in contemporary times we must pay attention to “erasure, elision, and all the things that don’t get talked about.”[14] If one understands what racism and sexism are, and one is taught to notice its contemporary manifestations, then one can be more vigilant in protecting oneself from racist or sexist discrimination as well as prevent oneself from reinforcing unfair systems of power.

One way to introduce the topic is to point to statistics which show that women and people of color in the United States are still lagging behind white males regarding income and wealth. Recent studies by United for a Fair Economy have documented the extent of the racial wealth gap, and how the gap is widening. Likewise, statistics about the “glass ceiling” which keeps women out of the top positions of power as well as the “bottomless pit” of women’s poverty (especially single women head of households) dramatize the variety of ways in which they find themselves facing obstacles that many men are not facing.[15]

With many students being success oriented, it is important to challenge the ideas that their success is due primarily or solely to their own individual effort. To the extent that parental wealth helps students pay their tuition, statistics on how wealth in the U.S. is passed from generation to generation primarily through home ownership, and further studies that show how real estate prices and mortgage affordability are permeated by race, will go a long way in explaining why African American parents are often less able to contribute large sums to their children’s higher education compared to white parents. At the earlier stages of public school, elementary and secondary education, lower house prices mean less revenue in property tax and under-funded schools in predominantly African American neighborhoods. Decisions to fund schools from local property taxes rather than other state-wide tax bases is itself a political decision influenced by race, even if whites do not admit that race is a key factor.[16]

Still, large and systemic structures of discrimination might leave a white student feeling that he or she has had no part in continuing racial discrimination in the U.S. After all, this student has not shaped the field of real estate, banking, etc. Our cultural emphasis on individual piety and our blindness to systemic problems may leave an individual feeling that he or she is not part of the problem as long as he or she refrains from making racial slurs or showing other forms of overt hostility to members of other racial groups. For these reasons I used Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege and Male Privilege” essay to illustrate how many of us can be participating in systems of discrimination by reaping unfair advantages about which we are unconscious or unaware. We do not have to be trying to get an unfair advantage in order to be reaping the benefits of race and gender privilege. Her list of many concrete examples usually helps students to have first-time realizations about the ways in which gender and race distinctions have been at work in their lives.[17]

Since McIntosh’s essay, there have been others who have also addressed this issue of white privilege, such as Anna Stubblefield and Shannon Sullivan.[18] As Blanche Radford Curry points out, many African American scholars have been working on these topics as well.[19] I use McIntosh’s essay because it is readily available in several Introduction to Philosophy textbooks. I also use it because it draws parallels between race, gender, and sexual orientation privilege.

I do find that it is important to emphasize, when using the McIntosh selection, that she is not listing her privileges in order to gloat or brag but, rather, to expose the unfairness of it all. Without explaining this in advance of assigning the reading, it is always possible for students to misunderstand her practice of making her list, since the full explanation is at the end of the article (and students unhappy with the project may not read to the end). I ask students ahead of time to focus on her answer to the question, What should be done about the unearned privilege? For each, she suggests either extending the privilege to all (and thereby undermining it as a privilege) or prohibiting the practice for anyone (ending the privilege). (For more on the benefits or drawbacks of identifying white privilege in order to stop the practice, see Greg Moses’s article.[20])

I follow up McIntosh’s study with Laurence Thomas’s essay on the importance of practicing moral deference toward those members of diminished social categories (people of color in a racist society, women in a sexist society, etc.) when they speak in an informed way from their firsthand experience as a member of the diminished group. After all, they are speaking from an experience not available to someone outside the group. If we as a member of the dominant social group do not believe them when they speak from their experience, we are in fact practicing downward social construction, by presuming that they cannot be trusted or cannot be an authority on the topic. Not taking someone seriously is part of how racism and sexism work.[21]

Thomas helps students see that they should not presume they understand another person’s experience just because they can imagine what they think they might feel like if they themselves were in the other person’s shoes. We may in fact be projecting our own experience onto others. The safer bet is to listen to others when they describe their experience. Thomas also draws upon experiences of both race and gender in showing the challenges of trying to understand another person’s experience.

If we were to apply Thomas’s insights to the topic of disability studies, we would realize that listening to testimony is the surest way to have insights into what it is like to struggle with a physical challenge. I have my students read Karen Fiser’s essay on “Philosophy and Disability,” an essay in which she shares insights from her struggle with chronic pain and limitation of physical movement.[22] The Fiser essay can be paired with Iris Young’s insights as to how those without disabilities often wrongly assume what life must be like for those with disabilities (because they project their own limited experience onto others and so come to wrong conclusions). Here, the difference between imagining what it must be like, and actually putting oneself in the place of a person with a physical challenge, is a very different experience with different results. Citing a court case in Oregon during which people with disabilities were suing the city for allocating public health care funds in a way that discriminated against people with disabilities, Young notes that the State government, in its defense, had said that it was only responding to democratic pressures. During phone surveys with taxpayers asked how they would like to prioritize their funding of various health care services, the respondents listed health care for people with disabilities last, because they personally thought that they would be better dead than disabled. Young explains that people going through a brief imaginative thought experiment on what it would be like to be blind, deaf, or wheelchair bound, for example, might find the thought so daunting that they would presume they would be better off dead. But, if they were to find themselves with a physical challenge, they would find that, in fact, they would want to live, and would want to learn how to cope with their challenge.[23]

Thomas’s challenge regarding the limits of our understanding got me thinking about those who have experimented with taking on the personae of a person from another race or gender and then experiencing first-hand some of what it is like to be regarded by others as being from the other gender or race. Mixed-race persons have described the ways in which their encounters with others change if the others perceive them to be white or black. Closeted homosexuals note the difference in the ways they are responded to and/or accepted by the general public when they keep their sexual orientation hidden compared to when they are up front about their orientation. Dramatic differences in treatment have caused some gays and lesbians to stay in the closet, and some African Americans to continue passing for white (an option open only to some). Less frequently, in some cases women have spent their lives passing as men (such as the jazz musician Billy Tipton) so as to have the privileges of career opportunity only afforded to men. Such persons are epistemically privileged by their dual experiences to comment upon the differing treatment they have received based on different perceptions of their identity.[24]

The insights that come with experiencing dual roles have been so enlightening, albeit also very painful, that some individuals have sought to have the temporary experience of belonging to the other group, in order to gain insight. I do not suggest to students that they try this themselves, as many errors can occur: students may erroneously understand what it means to “pass” as someone of another group, there are practical difficulties in being convincing in the role, there are moral problems involved in the deception, and actual physical dangers if the deceptions are discovered. Those who have engaged in these experiments before, however, can provide food for thought for the rest of us. Those who transgress racial and gender barriers often have experiences they find quite shocking when they experience callous discrimination from members of their own group who now presume that they are a member of the other group. The book and later the film Black Like Me is an example of a white reporter who decides to disguise himself as black in order to expose the extent of racial discrimination in America.[25]

Interestingly, the reporter from Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin, engages in his experiment because he thinks that white people will have to listen to him, and they will believe his report, even if they have been skeptical when blacks report that they are being treated in a racist fashion. Of course, that is exactly Thomas’s point—Why won’t whites believe blacks when they talk about racist treatment? The tendency to doubt or disbelieve their testimony is exactly what Thomas has pinpointed as part of the racist treatment. To have a white person give first-hand testimony about racism, while the goal is laudatory since it is meant to expose racism, also caters to white racism in giving whites the opportunity to believe a white person, since they will not believe a black person describing racist treatment.

Mills describes whites as having a complicated cognitive relationship with black grievances, “simultaneously believing that they are false and wanting to believe that they are false (which implies a recognition that they are true).”26 To overcome this hurdle of skepticism fueled by self-interest (not admitted to consciously), a reporter like Griffin, or a “hidden camera” that cannot lie (like reporter Joel Grover’s exposé on racist department store security guards), may be needed to overcome the skepticism.[27]

It is important to note that the film Black Like Me does address the problems of “passing” and the limits and moral problems involved in the experiment (as I have outlined above). Also, while persons temporarily taking on the identity of someone from another group could have these experiences of being downwardly socially constituted, as Thomas would say, that would not be the same as having been from that category from birth and having had one’s psyche, or as Thomas calls it one’s “emotional category configuration,” shaped by repeated experiences of racism and sexism. So one still could not say, “I know how you feel” to someone who had been the subject of racist or sexist treatment. But certainly, experiencing such treatment firsthand, even if temporarily, will give one an insight (however partial) that one did not have before.

Often a direct experience happening to oneself, firsthand, makes the most hardened skeptic buckle under the weight of evidence and admit that, for example, there is such a thing as racist and sexist discrimination, and that it does not feel good. The educative role of firsthand experience was part of the motivation behind Jane Elliott’s dividing her elementary school class into “blue eye” and “brown eye” groups to discover the dynamics of discrimination. Each group of students had a chance to experience what it was like to be the favored group, and what it was like to be the group considered second-best or undesirable. They could then reflect upon their own actions of reinforcing the hierarchy in the light of how they felt when they were on the receiving end of the discriminatory behavior. It was then up to each student to understand the analogy to racist behavior.[28]

An alternative to a direct experience can be a film experience, especially since film as a medium has the flexibility to build sympathetic characters and then to use camera angles to give viewers the simulated experience of being situated in the place of that character. Feminist aestheticians and culture critics have long commented on how films often have us play the role of voyeur as film camera angles ensure that we are put in the position of the “male gaze” looking longingly at desirable women.[29] The same techniques, however, can be used to expose racism and sexism.

It is in this context of covering the above readings that I have found it helpful to show students the 1996 film, The Associate. I am a bit cautious about suggesting its use after having consulted the careful philosophical analyses of so many philosophy scholars of color. Certainly, it seems a big jump to go from their subtleties and sensitivities to proposing the use of a Disney film in class. I dare to make this segue because I have found that the use of this popular comedy works with students. Its use of humor and its use of the film technique of getting audiences to sympathize with its protagonist help otherwise reluctant students to admit that there is sexist and racist discrimination in our society.

Linguist Deborah Tannen argues that women would be well-advised to use humor while pointing out men’s sexist practices, since direct and serious confrontations (however accurate) often result in increased resistance to the point. In Tannen’s example, when men at a meeting gave a male colleague credit for an idea that a woman colleague had thought of first, the overlooked woman employee said in exaggerated fashion, “Gee, I wish I had thought of that!” Male colleagues laughed, and then admitted that they remembered her saying it first.[30] Somehow, the Goldberg film, by getting students to laugh, opens them to admitting that the scenarios in the film (at least in the beginning, before the film takes us on a wild romp of the imagination, where we are required to suspend belief about the realism of certain aspects of the plot, as is the case with most fiction and most films) are believable examples of racist and sexist treatment that still exist in U.S. workplaces today.

Whoopi Goldberg plays an African American stock broker named Laurel Ayers who finds herself passed over for a promotion. She lives in a world where success comes easiest to white males, and when she is too often discriminated against, she takes the radical step of disguising herself as a white male in order to win the clients who refused her talents due to racist and sexist prejudices.[31] By focusing on two women, both Ayers the stockbroker and the secretary Sally Dugan (played by Dianne Wiest), the film shows the intersections of gender and class, and highlights the issue of solidarity among women across race and class lines.

In the film, Laurel Ayers is shown as the brains behind the investment portfolios of her company, but her male colleague Frank (played by Tim Daly) uses his charm and cunning to get credit for Laurel’s hard work. She quits, goes into business on her own, and finally comes to the realization that she will be able to succeed only if she masters all the cultural ways which make men comfortable while talking business, on the golf course, and over card games. At first Laurel is elated to have found a way around the seemingly insurmountable race and gender bias that hampered her chances for success by creating the fictitious male partner “Mr. Cutty.” But as time goes on, she resents Robert Cutty’s “success” since she knows that she herself deserves the praise. She is, in fact, the genius behind Cutty, but no one will consider a woman of color a financial genius. Finally, she regrets creating him.

Most intriguingly, the film uses camera angles so that we, the audience, can experience what the Laurel Ayers character experiences when she, an African American woman, dons the costume of an elderly, confident, and rich white male. We see the other characters give her all the respect, deference, and adulation that she deserves as the actual author of the ideas and projects that made the millions for her clients. We join her as she waltzes past the “men only” barriers that earlier kept her doing business only in the lobby of the Peabody Club. We also hear the other characters make callous and blunt “insider” jokes to her that we know they would never say to her if they knew she were a woman of color. And, therefore, Ayers has the proof she needs to show that their actions all along were racist and sexist, even though they had denied it. She will find her moment to confront them all with evidence of their prejudices—at the end of the film. Rigid gender identity is also skewered, as a cross-dressing friend of Ayers’ helps her to succeed in passing as Mr. Cutty.

The kind of unspoken and denied acts of discrimination against Laurel Ayers are still present in contemporary workplaces. What kind of discrimination do women face these days in careers with a “glass ceiling?” I often quote some of the literature in social science, linguistics, economics, and business to help explain the phenomena witnessed in the film. Students have been so affected by the ideology of America as the land of equal opportunity for all, that without concrete examples of how such high ideals are undermined in practice, they will not be able to see the puzzle pieces that make up gender and race oppression. I also like to point to such literature so that they can be handy “survival tools” for women and students of color as they graduate. In my own case, I did not have exposure to this literature until well after I graduated with my Ph.D. in philosophy.

Economics professor Linda Babcock and writer Sara Laschever, in their book Women Don’t Ask: Negotiations and the Gender Divide, explain why so many women in careers are paid less, get promoted less often, and in general make hundreds of thousands of dollars less than their male counterparts during their lifetimes. The authors chalk up the difference in rank and pay to both internalized and external expectations based on gender. On the one hand, women will not want to sing their own praises. They will ask indirectly, or not ask for a promotion or larger responsibilities. A much larger percentage of them do not negotiate for a higher starting salary, compared to men. Women feel pressure to put the needs of others first. They consider themselves laboring for “love” not money. Women are unsure of what they deserve. Women’s self-worth fluctuates more in response to feedback. Many women are satisfied with less (perhaps because they expect less), so they do not think of negotiating for more. Also, women like to be given a reward without asking. Women (unlike men) are afraid that if they are assertive, they will not be liked.[32]

But the pressures holding women back in the workplace do not only emanate from inside a woman. In fact, women are penalized for boasting. Women are in a catch-22 situation. The authors cite studies that show that men make worse first offers to women, and pressure women to concede more, while they themselves concede much less. In this context it is no wonder that women feel disincentives to ask for higher starting salaries or more promotions. A simple exercise (cited in Babcock and Laschever’s book) that social scientists created to measure gender differences in negotiations asked two parties to split ten dollars between the two of them, any way they wanted, with the only stipulation being that both parties must agree to the split. The only thing the parties knew about their partner in negotiation was the person’s gender. Across the board, if the negotiators knew that the other person was a woman, they would offer that person a lower amount of the split and withhold their cooperation until the woman agreed to the unfair split. Women therefore face an uphill battle when they insist on equal treatment rather than being satisfied with less.

Tannen cites studies showing that, in general, men talk more often and longer at meetings in the workplace than do women. If women ask their co-workers what they think about a project (in order to solicit their input), co-workers can think she is exhibiting a lack of confidence. Women apologize more often in the workplace; sometimes their apology is intended to elicit a reciprocal apology but it does not succeed. Women also tend to talk deferentially not only to superiors (as do men) but also when talking to subordinates.[33]

Tannen cites anthropologist Gregory Bateson who explains that women in the workplace are in a double bind. If they apologize a lot and give orders in an indirect way, they are well liked but not respected as competent. If they speak more along the patterns of male communication and give direct orders without apology, they are respected but not well liked, and they may be considered too aggressive and evaluated negatively. She cites Bonnie McElhinny who discovered that women in traditionally male professions such as the police force have a difficult time because if they attempt to assert their authority, they can be interpreted as trying to be masculine.[34]

According to Tannen, some of the ways that women and men communicate are best understood as cultural differences. Women have developed a style of communication and expectations about communication that are different than men’s styles and expectations. But in addition to being cultural differences, there are also power differences. Women are expected to talk in a more inquisitive way, asking questions and making requests more than making demands, and if they do not adopt that tone, they are resisted.[35] Gender studies like these, of course, have to intersect with studies of language in relation to class and race as well, and especially how language is used in the workplace. Films like The Associate focus students’ attention on many of these subtler yet all-pervasive ways in which racism and sexism occur in the workplace, short of blunt assertions by bosses that they will not hire or promote a person of a certain race or gender.

After listing the benefits of using a film like The Associate, I do want to list some of its shortcomings as well. The racial discrimination aspect of Laurel Ayers’ experience is under-theorized in relation to her experience of gender discrimination. Race is not as directly addressed in conversations, and the film sometimes gives the impression that the race discrimination dimension could have been a last minute add-on topic. The Ayers character is the only main African American character in the film, and her glass-ceiling problem is framed as a case of a person with exceptional talents going unrecognized. She forms an unlikely alliance with her white lower-class secretary possibly because there are no other African American women characters available to be in solidarity with her.

Passages from Patricia Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor help to give some concrete examples of struggles of African American women in white-dominated workplaces. Books like The Agony of Education share testimonies of African American students struggling to succeed in white-dominated educational institutions, and how such experiences are different than educational experiences in historically black universities. Such passages follow Thomas’s strict advice of learning best from listening to the testimonies of those in the position of the diminished social category.[36]

Additionally, the “glass ceiling” problem of discrimination against women is not the only form of gender discrimination. Equally pressing and more widespread is the problem called by Tilly and Albelda the “bottomless pit” of poverty: women who head single-parent households and contend with marginal and minimum wage employment, and who have little educational opportunity that could lift them out of their situation.[37] These large problems are not explored in the film. As such, the film cannot be both the beginning and the end of the conversation with students about race and gender discrimination. I consider it a good ice-breaker because many students are career-oriented and so will be especially interested in glass-ceiling discrimination problems. They may not see the “bottomless pit” problems as their own.

Women students, however, should be warned that becoming the single head of a household that includes children (either born out of wedlock or due to divorce) is the biggest factor in even educated women finding themselves in the “bottomless pit” of poverty. This awareness is important, not just as a caution for individuals striving to make it in the current system, but also to increase the perceived need for solidarity of all women to change our economic structures so that they do not unduly penalize (or demonize) women who devote themselves to the important tasks of child rearing. Tilly and Albelda’s book is filled with concrete prescriptions (from minor reforms to major overhauls of our economic system) that will support mothers and children and help to end the cycles of poverty.

How does one get students interested in the problems of poverty for large numbers of women in our society, especially when they may be convinced that it will never happen to them? Jane Addams’s essay “Charitable Effort” raises the issue in a way similar to McIntosh’s “White Privilege” article (Addams was a person of privilege who critiqued her own privilege). Addams explains that as a white middle class woman, she expected to be giving sound advice and practical help to the impoverished women she visited as part of her social work. Instead, she found that the women she met had exemplary characteristics when it came to caring for others, and they had sound critiques of her and her middle class ways. She found herself being judged, not the other way around, and came to respect and admire the women she met who struggled with poverty.[38] That is just the kind of learning situation I try to create for my students—I hope that they will realize that they had things backward: that, in fact, they are to learn from the very people they had earlier dismissed and marginalized.

Endnotes

1. Charles W. Mills. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), 11-38.

2. Gail Presbey, Karsten Struhl, and Richard Olsen (Eds.). The Philosophical Quest: A Cross Cultural Reader, second edition (New York: McGraw Hill Publishers, 2000). See also Eliot Deutsch, Introduction to World Philosophies (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), and Christine Koggel, Moral Issues in Global Perspective II: Human Diversity and Equality, second edition (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006).

3. Anonymous. “The Dispute of a Man with His Soul.” In The Wisdom of Ancient Egypt: Writings from the Times of the Pharaohs, edited and translated by Joseph Kaster (London: Michael O’Mara Books Ltd., 1995); Robert Brier, “Evidence of Ancient Egyptian Philosophy,” unpublished paper.

4. “The Instruction of Any.” In Beyond the Western Tradition: Readings in Moral and Political Philosophy, edited by Daniel Bonevac et al. (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1992), 16-18; David James. “‘The Instruction of Any’ and Moral Philosophy.” In African Philosophy: Selected Readings, edited by Albert G. Mosley (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), 147-55.

5. Basil Davidson. Africa: A Voyage of Discovery (Video recording, Chicago: Home Vision, 1984), volume one: “Different but Equal.”

6. Eric Ormsby. “Arabic Philosophy.” In World Philosophy: A Text with Readings, edited by Robert Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994).

7. David James, “‘The Instruction of Any’ and Moral Philosophy.”

8. R.G. Creel. Confucius and the Chinese Way (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 76.

9. Elizabeth V. Spelman. “Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul.” In Social and Political Philosophy: Classical Western Texts in Feminist and Multicultural Perspectives, third edition, edited by James P. Sterba (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 2003), 68-74. Mary Ellen Waithe, ed. A History of Women Philosophers: Volume 1, 600 BE – 500 AD (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), 41-48.

10. Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in The Philosophical Quest, edited by Gail Presbey et al.

11. Sandra Harding, “Is Science Multicultural?” and Patricia Hill Collins, “An Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology.” In The Philosophical Quest, edited by Gail Presbey et al., 84-104.

12. Mills, “White Ignorance,” 24.

13. Mills, “White Ignorance,” 25.

14. Greg Moses. “Unmasking through Naming: Toward an Ethics and Africology of Whiteness.” In White on White, Black on Black, edited by George Yancy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 50.

15. Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “The Gender Wage Ratio: Women’s and Men’s Earnings,” http://www.iwpr.org/pdf/C350.pdf (April 2007); Meizhu Lui, Barbara Robles, Betsy Leondar-Wright (United for a Fair Economy). The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide (New York: New Press, 2006).

16. Jonathan Kozol. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).

17. Peggy McIntosh. “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” In The Philosophical Quest, edited by Gail M. Presbey et al., 558-65.

18. Anna Stubblefield. “Meditations on Postsupremacist Philosophy.” In White on White, Black on Black, edited by George Yancy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 72-82; Shannon Sullivan. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

19. See Blanche Radford Curry, book review of Shannon Sullivan’s Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege in APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience 07 (Fall 2007): 10-14.

20. Greg Moses, op. cit.

21. Laurence Thomas. “Moral Deference.” In The Philosophical Quest, edited by Gail M. Presbey et al., 565-76.

22. Karen Fiser. “Philosophy and Disability.” In The Philosophical Quest, edited by Gail M. Presbey et al., 580-89.

23. Iris Marion Young. “Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Mentality.” Constellations 3/3 (1997): 340-63, see esp. 343-44.

24. Diane Wood Middlebrook. Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton (Boston: Peter Dawson/Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

25. John Howard Griffin. Black Like Me (New York: Signet, 1964). Film directed by Carl Lerner and starring James Whitmore, 1964.

26. Mills, “White Ignorance,” 5.

27. Read about Joel Grover’s 1991 report for KSTP in Robert Lissit, “Gotcha!” American Journalism Review (March 1995).

28. PBS/Frontline documentary, “A Class Divided” (1985), about Jane Elliott’s 1968 experiment. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html

29. Griselda Pollock. “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.” In Aesthetics, edited by Susan Feagin and Patrick Maynard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Graeme Turner. Film as Social Practice, second edition (New York: Routledge, 1988), 116-18.

30. Deborah Tannen. He Said, She Said: Exploring the Different Ways Men and Women Communicate (Barnes and Noble Audio 2004), booklet, 56.

31. The Associate (1996) starring Whoopi Goldberg. Walt Disney Video. The film is an American remake of a French film. About L’associe (the 1979 French film that was the precursor to The Associate) see: http://www.vh1.com/movies/movie/1854/plot.jhtml

32. Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. Women Don’t Ask: Negotiations and the Gender Divide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

33. Deborah Tannen, He Said, She Said.

34. Tannen, He Said, She Said, 50-52, 60.

35. Tannen, He Said, She Said, 61.

36. Patricia Williams. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Joe R. Feagin. The Agony of Education: Black Students at a White University (New York: Routledge, 1996).

37. Randy Albelda and Chris Tilly. Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women’s Work, Women’s Poverty (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1997).

38. Jane Addams. “On Charitable Effort” [1902]. In Democracy and Social Ethics (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

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