Forgotten
Most people are forgotten on an individual basis, lost in the sands of time. Some people are forgotten because of who they are.
One day, I was talking with one of my co-workers, a cisgender woman. She remarked that her history teacher put his pronouns on the syllabus. “That’s weird. He’s a weird man,” she said, before she (presumably) realized I might have a problem with this, and changed the subject.
I don’t blame her for thinking that it’s weird, because to most cisgender people, that would be an odd thing to do. It’s odd to them because they assume that the world is more-or-less built around them. The teacher’s pronouns in the syllabus wasn’t meant for her. It was a sign to any gender-nonconforming students in his class that he is on their side. This is an example of how groups of people can be forgotten.
Now, this anecdote is relatively harmless. She’s a wonderful person and has been totally supportive of me. She just forgot. However, there are much more dangerous forms of forgetfulness. On a lesser level, the constant forgetting that transgender people exist makes it harder and more dangerous for us to move through the world, such as unnecessary requirements to use legal name and gender markers. On a greater level, there is what the philosopher Iris Marion Young termed “cultural imperialism.”
In Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young defined cultural imperialism as follows: “To experience cultural imperialism means to experience how the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one’s group and mark it out as the Other.” In other words, cultural imperialism is when a society-at-large simultaneously “forgets” a group’s experiences and perspectives at the same time as it speaks over and stereotypes those experiences and perspectives as secondary or lesser. This is more dangerous than pure forgetfulness, because it involves the caricaturing of the point-of-view of a group of people as bad, as opposed to just neglecting to include it.
A relatively clear place where this occurs is Black people in philosophy. I say relatively clear because I am white, and the entire nature of cultural imperialism is to make it so that dominant groups, like white people, have to exert effort to see the actual perspective of non-dominant groups, like Black people. It is something I continue to work on, but in the meantime, I feel I can speak with some confidence that white cultural imperialism has definitely occurred in philosophy.
Let’s take a look at liberal political philosophy. Some of the great paragons of liberal political philosophy are Kant, Locke, Mill, and Rawls. They are all white. Three of them are from the Anglosphere. All have troubled histories regarding race and ethnicity. Kant was famous in his time as an anthropologist, and he espoused deeply racist views. Locke’s philosophy was instrumental in justifying the expulsion of indigenous people from their land in colonial times. Mill supported British imperialism in India. Rawls, despite spilling massive amounts of ink on the topic of justice in a time and place when race issues were prominent, never once mentioned racial justice. Their troubled histories are washed over by modern liberals, nearly always ignored or regarded as irrelevant.
At the same time, there are Black thinkers who have heavily influenced the shape of liberal thought. In the USA, there’s none more prominent than Martin Luther King Jr. Despite being regarded as a massive figure in racial justice in America, he is given a secondary role in the development of American liberalism, if he’s given any role at all. Some liberals even make sure to denounce his socialism while conveniently ignoring the socialism of Mill and Rawls. It’s a similar story for other major Black philosophers, like W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP: “Sure, he may have been a massive voice with regards to granting basic rights to humans, but he was also a socialist! He’s not that important to liberalism. Ronald Reagan though? He is some of the best America had to offer.”
This sidelining of Black voices has contributed to a white supremacist narrative where white people are responsible for the majority of the good nations. This narrative can slip in even while acknowledging how B.S. it is. In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu proposed that nations fail when they have “extractive” institutions, where a small number of people hold the power and use it to gain off of the efforts of others, while nations succeed if they have “inclusive” institutions, where power is widely distributed. Even as European countries engaged in intense imperialism in Africa (extractive institutions if I ever saw them!), Acemoglu limited his analysis to intra-country institutions, labeling colonial nations as “inclusive” and therefore successful. The success of these countries was fueled in no small part at the cost of the colonized countries. While Acemoglu did acknowledge, early and clearly, that imperialism is a bad thing, he unintentionally contributed to the narrative that white people are responsible for the best politics.
Forgetting can be dangerous, and by the time we realize we’ve forgotten something, it’s too late. It’s very difficult to remember to remember, but it’s necessary. Listen to Black voices; listen to trans* voices; listen to female voices; and especially listen to voices which are ignored from several angles. The stakes are too high to forget people because of who they are. It takes hard work to fight cultural imperialism, but most the best things do.