How would you feel if you were told, by someone who knows very little about you or your upbringing, that because of one of your immutable physical characteristics, you must have been oppressed?
For Jane Bradbury – who identifies as “Latino”, despite not actually knowing her ethnicity because she was raised by white adoptive parents – being told, by a white colleague, words to the effect that she must have been subjected to oppression simply because of the color of her skin left her feeling “very upset” and “distressed”. An employment tribunal recently awarded the former Sky Television engineer £14,000 in compensation on the grounds that the assumption was ‘a form of stereotyping’ and amounted to racial discrimination.
Bradbury told his manager after the conversation that “I’ve never felt downtrodden in my life.” And she didn’t like her colleague – who, like her, was a designated “inclusion advocate” – assuming she had done so, “without even knowing anything about my ethnicity or my upbringing”.
In a world preoccupied with victimhood in which we are encouraged to be active “allies” of those who do not share the privilege we have – although the advantages conferred by class are often overlooked – we seem to be suppressing what was once considered a transgression, to be condescending (to treat someone in a way that is apparently kind or helpful but betrays a sense of superiority”, as the Oxford dictionary puts it), from moral sin bin.
You can see this change in the number of times the word “patronage” is used in the newspapers. According to Factiva’s database – an archive of more than 2 billion items from the 1940s to the present day – its use, spelled both British and American, peaked in 2015, and has fallen markedly. from. Google’s handy “Ngram viewer,” which shows how often words or phrases are used in digitized books between 1800 and 2019, shows a similar trend.
Meanwhile, the use of “covenanting” – the practice of advocating for and “actively working” for groups seen as marginalized – exploded and was Dictionary.com’s “Word of the Year” for 2021. Is this new virtue compatible with a perspective in which condescension is seen as a vice, or are the two ideas mutually exclusive? After all, one of the widely repeated core tenets of being an ally is “to amplify the voices of the oppressed before your own.” Who decides who is and who is not oppressed?
Moreover, is automatically amplifying the voices of those who are considered “underdogs” is a good idea, even if someone sees themselves that way? Glenn Loury, an African-American economist at Brown University and a prominent public intellectual, thinks not. He voiced his criticism of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” particularly in education, arguing that changing admissions standards to improve racial diversity is not only counterproductive, but also “stinks of racism. “.
Loury distinguishes between what he calls “titular equality”, which he says is simply “a formal sort of bean-counting equality”, and “substantial equality”, which he describes as “equal respect, equal status and dignity”. . We spend too much time focusing on the first and not enough on the second.
As Loury puts it, treating those who are marginalized – whether because of their skin color, gender, sexuality or disability – as victims takes away their agency and obscures individual differences within these groups. “To be given such deference as the minority is [means] all the moral agency in this situation goes to the powerful. . . observer, who may or may not choose to be an ally.
Although I did not experience being “altered” or being patronized based on my skin color, I felt quite helpless when well-meaning men stepped in to accuse other men. criticizing me on public forums (usually in the Twitter theater) of sexism. I’ve also felt quite discouraged in the past when recruiters – who I thought approached me for a position based on my own merits – told me they specifically wanted to hire a woman.
I don’t mean to suggest that being more sensitive to those who are discriminated against is not a good thing — it certainly is — and there are particular circumstances where you have to make concessions. But to presume others feel downtrodden and need special treatment, without first finding out how they feel, that’s, well, condescending. Far from giving them power, it takes them away.
