When liberal-pluralists like Lindsay argue that even racism should fall under freedom of speech, they picture individuals expressing racist accounts of society. Their left-identitarian critics, by contrast, think of racism as symbolic violence and as a structure of inequality.1/3
On the political philosophical level, the standoff is between a tolerant, individualistic liberal perspective and a kind of ‘racialized Bourdieusianism.'
As a sociologist and student of philosophy, I’m intrigued. 2/3
As a sociologist and student of philosophy, I’m intrigued. 2/3
That 'racialized Bourdieusianism' is a structuralist, symbol-power-nexus-oriented perspective informed by heterogeneous sources, including Bourdieu, Foucault, and Gramsci, as well as post-colonialism and the legacy of Marxism's cultural turn in the Cultural Revolution. 3/3
I would define Bourdieusianism as a structuralist take on the 'culture wars' that sees people's habits, consumption patterns, tastes, and language use as reflecting and reproducing a macro-societal power structure. 4/14
For Bourdieu, lower social classes are partly kept down through a prestige battle. In interactions, people from higher social classes will immediately recognize and subtly exclude bearers of lower-class dispositions. This, in turn, reproduces larger structures of inequality. 5/14
If you start looking at culture from this perspective, nothing, so to speak, is 'innocent.' One's music tastes and fashion, one's interests, a joke, supposedly good-natured: all reflect, reproduce, bolster or challenge the structure of power and unequal prestige divisions. 6/14
The 'anti-racist' camp in Anglo-American academia and activism, of course, draws on a variety of source and not just on Bourdieu. They don't cite Bourdieu very often. But I call them 'racialized Bourdieusianists' because their mode of analysis is quite close to his. 7/14
Like Bourdieu's analyses of class and gender inequality, their analyses of ethnic/racial inequality leave little room for 'innocent interactions.' Every discussion, opinion, movie script or joke can be seen as furthering or diminishing a racial group's relative standing. 8/14
They must hence reject the liberal idea of a free, pluralistic public sphere in which even dreadful racist opinions should fall under freedom of speech.
Why?
9/14
Why?
9/14
Because that liberal idea assumes that there is a realm of communication outside of power, outside of the dynamics of resource and prestige distribution. The racialized Bourdieusianists don't believe in such 'innocent' communication. 10/14
This is why they often say things such as 'Racism is not an opinion' or 'Racism is a structure.' For them, every racist opinion expressed, every joke even about African-American subcultures, reflects and bolsters the unequal prestige distribution between the races. 11/14
The type of political action most compatible with their theoretical framework is the de-platforming of people with the 'wrong opinions.' The less of such wrong opinions, the better—structurally. 12/14
The problem they face, however, is that they operate in a liberal democratic public sphere that directs public attention to discussions between different perspectives. They look grouchy, as they cannot arrive at a positive valuation of the existence of such discussions. 13/14
The liberal-pluralists, meanwhile, have behind them liberal-democratic practice, but have difficulties defending this practice of nominally free debate against the theoretical challenge of the racialized Bourdieusianists that such freedom is fake and a cover for oppression. 14/14
@threadreaderapp unroll
