I take it to be an incontrovertible truth that nothing is like rape.* Thus, I take it to follow from this that suggesting that one has been violated in a way analogous to rape when all that happened is that one was the object of a sexist slur is unequivocally wrong. It is wrong on three accounts: First of all, it distorts the harm that one has suffered by exaggerating it. Second, it desensitizes us in that it is the moral equivalent of crying wolf. Third, doing so contributes to a climate of mistrust. These points hold mutatis mutandis for a racial event like lynching.
Of course, language evolves. My favorite example of this is the word “shit”. Two decades ago, there was absolutely no way to use that word as a compliment. Back then, one could have said, and people often did say, “He was one bad mother fucker”. And that was a compliment. But it was still not possible to use the word “shit” as a compliment. It took some 20 years for that to happen: “Man you are the shit”.
However, the way in which we use the word “violate” does not reflect an evolution of language. Rather, it reflects an abuse of language. For the point of calling something a violation is not to render salient some feature of suffering that had heretofore gone unnoticed. Quite the contrary, the point is to call to mind a level of suffering that in point of fact one has not endured.
I fully concur that a bunch guys yelling sexual names at woman walking down the street is absolutely wrong. And I also understand that under some circumstances (such as when she is walking alone at night) a woman can justifiably feel threatened by that sort of thing. But in the typical case, say a bunch of construction workers yelling at a woman, in broad daylight on a busy street, there is no real threat. More importantly, there is no sense in which it can be said that the woman was raped. Not every sexist wrong is tantamount to rape.
I have no idea what a verbal rape is. I understand that it is a metaphor. The problem is that it is a metaphor that crumbles very quickly under inspection. Thus, “He verbally raped me” is not at all like “Her words uplifted me”. Rape is by definition an exceedingly coercive physical act. And a bunch of words full of sexual innuendo yelled from the top of a building cannot possibly constitute a form of physical coercion, notwithstanding how wrong and despicable such utterances are.
What is more, and this gets to the very heart of the matter, In order to grasp the wrong of such words, we do not need to construe those words as a form of rape. And doing so, far from making for a better world, contributes mightily to mistrust. I would be a fool to trust any woman who might turn the slightest discomfort I might cause her into a charge of having been violated, where this is meant to call to mind the harm of rape.
In this respect, feminism has mightily damaged relations between women and men rather than enhanced them. On the one hand, women have (in the name of social progress and equality) become more sexual than ever. On the other, the charge of having been violated can get off the ground more quickly than a balloon full of helium.
As my opening remarks would suggest, I hold that in a similar vein the misuse of the charge of racism has done more to hurt racial relations in America than to help them. The white student who was reading the newspaper in my class this past semester was certainly disrespectful. But this was no more an act of racism than saying “I love you” to an audience of fans is an act of sex. And it is wrong and malicious for anyone to characterize his behavior that way. Indeed, every indication is that the student rather admires me. Either that, or he is one damn good actor !
For the record, a black female student did exactly the same thing a few years earlier. Was she racist? Presumably not. But we do not need that charge in order to capture the level of her disrespect at that moment. The two students were equally disrespectfully in exactly the same way: one black student; one white student. Fancy that. Utter parity between a black and a white.
At any rate, if I were white, I can assure you that I would generally avoid black people like a plague. For nothing would perturb me more than to find myself open to the charge of racism for the least innocent thing that I did that a black person did not like.
Some of the graduate students who have served as my teaching assistants absolutely detest my teaching style. It would be foolish and rather mean of me to suppose that this reflects subtle racism on their part. The irony here is that one of the most conservative graduate students in the Syracuse University Philosophy Department seems to be quite comfortable with my teaching style.
Equality across all dimensions has to be underwritten by trust. And in the absence of actual physical violence, nothing more quickly undermines trust than exaggerated charges of abuse.
In this regard equality requires an enormous sense of responsibility. In particular, it requires that we distinguish an isolated instance from a general moral climate. In the Hill-TV fiasco, Syracuse University Chancellor Nancy Cantor failed to do just that, excoriating the entire campus as if just about any and all white folks on campus applauded the silliness committed by the few culprits in question. There will always be isolated instances of moral stupidity and moral wrong. But it is most morally inappropriate to take an isolated instance as being representative of an entire community. The rush to do so has done enormous harm by utterly destroying the good will that was in place.
In this regard, Chancellor Cantor did not make Syracuse University a more welcoming place for blacks. Quite the contrary, she made it a more hostile place in that most whites have become increasingly more weary of trusting blacks.
She fanned the flames of hostility; and I regard this as unforgivable. For anyone who thinks that I am exaggerating here, I invite you to point to the moral difference between Brawley falsely accusing several white men of rape and the Chancellor falsely accusing the entire Syracuse University of community of being racist on account of the Hill-TV fiasco.
If the wrong committed ain’t a rape or a lynching, then do not try to turn to turn it into such with a host of verbal metaphors that invite such a conception of the wrong. For this does two morally unacceptable things at once. On the one hand, it denies the moral progress that has been made. On the other, it sullies the moral character of the innocent. There can never be a justification for doing either.
The hyperbolic exaggeration of the least harm has cast a horrendous pall of ill-will over the climate of America. What is gained in the short-run, namely public acts of self-flagellation and out of court monetary settlements, will be lost in the long-run, namely a deep sense of trust and good will. This is the foresight problem that I spoke about in an earlier blog-entry on Tocqueville. And America is losing that battle in spades.
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*This blog-entry was prompted by an email that I received regading the blog-entry, ”Moral Pain and Moral Blame” that was posted Friday, 7 July.
