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Epigraph

“This smart and subtle book explores a question all of us have, but that has proved remarkably difficult to answer. Beeghly manages to tackle hard objections—like the objection that all generalizations are stereotypes—head-on while treating the narratives of oppressed people as sources of valuable ethical insight. Her combination of analytical rigor, attention to the workings of power, and deep familiarity with the histories of social movements make this book a shining example of what philosophy should be like.”

—Serene Khader, author of Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop

“Brilliantly thorough and thoroughly engaging. The twists and turns of this study will amaze you. Indeed, my thoughts about stereotypes are forever deeply challenged by this treatise. I am convinced a philosopher’s care is what this troubled concept has needed. Prepare to be both pleasured and inspired.”

—Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of Gender(s)

“Analytically sharp, morally sensitive, and eminently readable, WHAT’S WRONG WITH STEREOTYPING is a work of verve and precision. For anyone who has ever wondered what exactly is wrong with using stereotypes, even if they contain a kernel of truth, this book has the answers. A must-read for anyone working in moral and social philosophy today.”

—Kate Manne, author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

What’s Wrong with Stereotyping?

Erin Beeghly

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom

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© Erin Beeghly 2025

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2024946827

ISBN 9780198829669

DOI: 10.1093/9780192565150.001.0001

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Created on: 20 February 2025 at 2:31 p.m.

Dedication

For

Amy and Brian,

Josh and Esme

Contents

Sources

Introduction

1. A Starting Point for Theorizing: What is a Stereotype? What is Stereotyping?

2. To Stereotype Is to Discriminate

3. Lived Experience and the Wrongs of Stereotyping

4. Failing to Treat Persons as Individuals

5. Prejudice and the Problem of Statistical Stereotyping

6. Disrespect and Harm

7. Freedom and Failing to Treat Persons as Equals

8. Radical Pluralism: A New Theory of Wrongful Stereotyping

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Sources

This book builds on research that I’ve published over the last decade. Kind thanks for permission to use the following:

Chapter 1: “What is a Stereotype? What is Stereotyping?” Hypatia 30, no. 4 (2015), 675–91.

Chapter 1: “What’s Wrong with Stereotypes? The Falsity Hypothesis,” Social Theory and Practice 47, no. 1 (2021), 33–61.

Chapter 2: “Stereotyping as Discrimination: Why Thoughts Can Be Discriminatory,” Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Policy 35, no. 6 (2021), 547–63.

Chapter 3: “Discrimination and the Value of Lived Experience in Sophia Moreau’s Faces of Inequality,” University of Toronto Law Journal 73, no. 1 (2023), 112–32.

Chapter 3: “Sexism,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Politics, forthcoming.

Chapter 4: “Failing to Treat Persons as Individuals,” Ergo 26, no. 5 (2018), 687–711.

Chapter 5: “Prejudice,” in Richard Bellamy, Carol Atack, Terry Ball, Chris Brooke, and Leigh Jenco (eds), Cambridge Dictionary of Political Thought, forthcoming.

Chapter 6: “Discrimination and Disrespect,” in Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (ed), The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination (London: Routledge, 2017), 83–96.

Introduction

I.1 The Puzzle of Stereotyping

What’s wrong with stereotyping? Behind this question lurks a presumption: to stereotype is to do something wrong. Examples of problematic stereotyping are easy to find. In The Souls of Black Folks, W. E. B. Du Bois recounts elementary school classmates trading packages of postcards. A new pupil—a little white girl—refuses to exchange cards with him. “It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness,” Du Bois writes, “that I was different from the others . . . but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”¹ The cursed veil to which he refers was made possible, in part, by racist stereotyping that caricatured Black people as dirty, dangerous, and inferior to whites. In her memoir, Judith Huemann—one of the most prominent disability rights activists in U.S. history—describes a similar childhood experience. Crossing the street in a wheelchair, she’s stopped by boy who asks: “Are. You. Sick?” “In a blinding flash,” writes Huemann, “everything in my life made a perverse kind of sense.”² “I couldn’t go to this school, I couldn’t go to that school. I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t do that . . . It was the world and how it saw me . . . The world thought I was sick.”³ In a 2023 interview, queer theorist Kathryn Stockton reflects on her own tendency to stereotype. She reports walking down a sidewalk filled with pedestrians and feeling her brain “firing away” as she classifies people as “white or male or this or that.” “I’m trying to stop myself,” explains Stockton, “and say, OK, I see this surface presentation in front of me. Surface presentations can be misleading.”⁴ Readers of this book can likely conjure a bevy of their own examples in which acts of stereotyping express prejudice and in which it seems wrong to stereotype.

At the same time, the inherent wrongness of stereotyping is up for debate. In a 2016 article in Psychology Today, psychologist Lee Jussim asks:

Who was more likely to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, men or women?

Who is more likely to commit a murder, men or women?

Who receives higher grades in high school, boys or girls?

Who is more likely to be labeled as having some sort of behavior problem in elementary school, boys or girls?⁵

“If you answered these questions correctly,” Jussim contends, “(men, men, girls, and boys), you have just demonstrated to yourself that not all beliefs (stereotypes) about males and females are wrong.”⁶ In Social Perception and Social Reality, Jussim goes further, describing a fight with his Jewish in-laws over a stereotype that plays a prominent role in antisemitic ideology: “Jewish people are wealthy.”⁷ Jussim defends the stereotype’s validity, citing alleged facts about the average income of Jewish people compared to other religious groups.⁸ On his view, “woke liberals” like to argue that stereotyping is inherently irrational and immoral.⁹ But such claims are patently absurd. How, he asks, could it ever be morally wrong to use accurate, justified group generalizations?

This book explains the wrongness of stereotyping. As an explanatory project in ethics, it starts with the common—but controversial—presumption that stereotyping is morally wrong.¹⁰ Other explanatory projects explore the wrongness of phenomena like terrorism, lying, prostitution, murder, brainwashing, sexual harassment, even slavery. In each case, a theorist proceeds by testing the taken-for-granted presumption of wrongness. Is the phenomenon—in this case, stereotyping—always morally wrong, as people often believe? Is it only sometimes wrong? What explains why it is wrong when it indeed is? Some explanatory projects are revisionary. This book will be a case in point. I’ll be presenting morally permissible examples of stereotyping and raising the prospect that stereotyping could be the morally best thing to do in some cases. In a certain way, my arguments vindicate contrarians like Jussim. It’s not always wrong to stereotype. At the same time, I’ll argue that the ethics of stereotyping is complex. Even if there’s evidence in favor of a stereotype, it can be morally wrong to use it in conversation or cognition. So, in a deeper moral sense, Jussim and provocateurs with similar views are profoundly incorrect.

An explanatory project about stereotyping forces a reckoning with fundamental aspects of human nature. In artifacts, visual culture, discourse, and the built environment, stereotyping emerges, expressing views of groups and prescriptive group relations. Now algorithms make predictions about individuals in ways that track gender, race, and ethnicity in ways that have serious impacts on people’s lives, for example, on their ability to get a job or bank loans.¹¹ In these ways and more, stereotyping cements social inequality. What implications do these facts have for the ethics of stereotyping? Should we seek an end to all stereotyping? Is stereotyping never wrong because of its cognitive and practical utility? Or must we cultivate better judgment about when it is wrong to stereotype? These are the philosophical and practical questions at the heart of this book.

I.1.1 Stereotyping

Chapter 1 takes the first step in any explanatory project: delineating the phenomenon under investigation.

To prepare for this chapter, readers might reflect on their own definitions of the term. Some may think of stereotyping as caricature and, hence, as inextricable from exaggeration and falsehood. Others might conceptualize it as pigeonholing. The Cambridge Dictionary of English picks up on this usage when it says that to stereotype “is to have a set idea about what a particular type of person is like, especially an idea that is wrong.”¹² According to definitions in this vein, stereotyping is an apt label for unfair or inaccurate generalizations. But it also can apply to accurate and well evidenced ideas. For that reason, some may believe that to stereotype simply is to generalize. In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, this usage is on full display with a list of synonyms for the term “stereotype.” Presumed synonyms include “concept,” “conception,” “generalization,” and “notion.”¹³ Yet, in the very same entry, Merriam-Webster’s says that to stereotype—the verb—is “to make hackneyed” and “to develop a mental stereotype of.” To make something hackneyed is to cheapen it by overusing it, rendering it common and cliché. We’ve circled back, it would seem, to the first definition: that is, to the idea of stereotyping as oversimplification and, hence, as caricature.

Swirling among these competing definitions is a question. How should one define stereotyping for the purposes of philosophical investigation?¹⁴ In this book, I’ll try to convince you that the line between stereotyping and generalizing is slippery. There is no clean line to demarcate these phenomena, try as one might.

Dive into the slippage with me. Stereotypes are often expressed in speech: “Nerds wear glasses.” “Black people can dance.” “White people can’t jump.” “Latinos are passionate.” “Girls wear dresses.” “Boys play sports.” “Moms are better at talking about emotions than dads.” To utter any of these statements is to express a stereotype. Because stereotyping is a linguistic phenomenon, it can be studied using linguistic frameworks. One question for linguists is what the semantic meaning of stereotypes might be. While stereotypes are strongly associated with universal generalizations, the standard view in linguistics is that stereotypes have a more complex meaning because they tend to express “generics.” Generics don’t feature quantifiers like “some” or “all.” They are statements of the form: “Fs are G.” “Women are emotional.” “Catholics have guilt complexes.” The semantic meaning of generics is hotly debated. Generics have been analyzed as implicitly referring to “most” people of certain kind; “typical” or “normal” group members; as well as “real” or “good” group members.¹⁵ One lesson from the linguistics literature is that stereotypes—though often false or misleading—have the potential to state claims that are, strictly speaking, true. Pragmatics, a subfield of linguistics that examines what people do with stereotypes in speech and how context shapes meaning, entails that stereotypes can also be “word bombs”: insults, threats, and punishments. A teenager might lob the phrase “girls wear dresses” at a classmate in order to belittle them for violating gender norms. Acts of stereotyping can likewise introduce essentialism into conversational spaces. The teenager who utters “girls wear dresses” may be implying that dress-wearing is unnatural and wrong for boys because of their presumed biological sex (i.e., because they are males).¹⁶ Such an utterance is a powermove and functions as gender policing.

Though linguistic analyses of stereotyping are incredibly useful, they don’t tell the full story. Even if a person doesn’t express what they’re thinking in words or write it down, they can be stereotyping. If so, stereotyping isn’t purely a linguistic phenomenon. It’s also a psychological phenomenon.

According to psychologists, stereotypes aren’t rogue mental states that undercut rationality. They are an integral part of humans’ cognitive architecture. Psychologists classify stereotypes as mental states of different kinds. Some say that they are beliefs with generalizing content such as “women are emotional.” Others invite us to understand stereotypes by thinking of something specific: a doctor, example. Think of a doctor, and an image likely pops to mind: a stereotype. That image helps you identify doctors in your everyday life and will impact your understanding of people who are doctors. If that’s what stereotypes are, they’re required for concept formation and use—and also capable of doing serious damage, especially when warped by ideology.¹⁷ Other researchers argue that stereotypes are “schemas” (i.e., webs of associations or beliefs that accompany our concepts).¹⁸ Schemas are invaluable cognitive tools, which we need to reason about people in an uncertain social world, and which can encapsulate knowledge. An alarming implication is that stereotyping shapes endless aspects of our cognitive and emotional lives, whether we know it or not: desire, imagination, memory, attention, and implicit and explicit cognition. With the advent of machine learning and new technologies, computer scientists and philosophers of computing have observed that algorithms stereotype individuals and may even be able to have something like group stereotypes in their computational architecture.¹⁹

Sociologists are likely to chime in here. In a society’s visual and material culture, as well social discourse, stereotypes find a sustained existence independent of individual minds and utterances. Stereotypes “live” in culture. They take the form of what sociologist and feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins calls “controlling images and ideas” that function as “cultural techne,” a term used by Sally Haslanger to refer to a suite of ideological tools that justify and solidify a society’s status quo.²⁰ What a sociological perspective shows is that group dynamics and stereotyping are inextricably linked. Stereotypes are socially powerful tools, which dominant groups use to appropriate resources, justify acts of violence, exploit people’s labor, and commit injustice of all kinds.

Chapter 1 introduces readers to the variety ways in which the phenomenon of stereotyping may be understood, each of which is rooted in a distinctive disciplinary framework. It also discusses the history of the term, which is has its roots in the printing industry. To capture stereotyping in its full complexity, I argue that a philosophical definition of the phenomenon must be pitched at a very high level of generality. Generality is the only way that stereotyping in speech, psychology, computational systems, and culture all fall under the relevant definitional rubrics. To stereotype a group, I’ll suggest, is to characterize a group as a collective entity. To stereotype an individual is to judge that person by group membership. Stereotyping is thus a kind of generalizing.

Though these two definitions may sound milquetoast, they are in fact incredibly powerful. In any explanatory project, the first step is to delineate the phenomenon under investigation. Ideally, theorists proceed with a noncontroversial definition. With stereotyping, this is impossible. What counts as stereotyping is itself a hotly contested question. In such a context, a theorist must proceed in a principled way. I do so by advancing a notion of stereotyping that integrates scientific research across a range of disciplines and is consistent with commonplace linguistic usage. Not only do psychologists, linguistics, and computer scientists often define stereotyping in a nonmoralized way (e.g., as when linguists refer to stereotypes as generics or psychologists conceptualize them as schemas), but often everyday people say things like, “I’m stereotyping, but it’s true” or “It’s a stereotype but it’s not wrong.” These data entail that our concept of stereotyping does not include a stipulation that all stereotyping is inherently morally wrongful—or always irrational, for that matter. Nonmoralized definitions are also consistent with the fact that stereotyping is known to perpetuate unjust practices and institutions and can sometimes be intrinsically wrong. They suggest that unjust stereotyping involves the hijacking of generalizing tendencies that are not in themselves immoral and which in fact are essential to human functioning.

For those who remain committed to a moralized view of stereotyping, who want to keep the term stereotyping reserved for unjust generalizing, I offer an olive branch. No matter how you define stereotyping, what I will be calling the puzzle of stereotyping exists. It is a philosophically sticky, fascinating puzzle about the ethics of thought, perception, and reasoning—whether done by humans, algorithms, or nonhuman beings. It can be represented as follows in Figure I.1.

Figure I.1 The Puzzle of Stereotyping. Drawing by Jacob Rivkin.

The puzzle of stereotyping can be framed in two ways. Some readers might prefer to apply the term stereotyping exclusively to the morally wrongful cases (i.e., those within the smaller, shaded circle). On this view, the puzzle of stereotyping is this: when does generalizing become “stereotyping” (i.e., the morally bad, unjust kind of social generalizing)? On my view, the term stereotyping refers to the bigger circle, and the key question is this: when is stereotyping wrong?

This visualization reveals why it’s easy for people—laypeople and researchers alike—to talk past each other when arguing about the ethics of stereotyping. Moralized notions of stereotyping refer to a narrower class of cases: the morally wrongful ones. Nonmoralized views characterize stereotyping in a broader way: as something that happens in thought and culture, which is related to generalization, categorization, and induction. Not all stereotyping in this sense is morally wrongful, and this manuscript will be filled with examples. Dutch bicyclists will run you over—that’s a stereotype, but it’s also true—and, if you go to Amsterdam, you’d be wise to watch out for the bike lane, lest you get injured.²¹ There’s no slippery moral slope here either. If you adopt a nonmoralized view that says stereotyping is a form of social generalizing, you’re not forced into a blasé ethical stance. Delineating when and why stereotyping is wrong requires meticulous ethical analysis, as Chapters 4–8 will demonstrate. Even if the puzzle of stereotyping were better framed as a puzzle about the ethics of induction, it wouldn’t make the project any easier. It would only underscore how difficult the ethical questions at the heart of this book are.

I.2 Stereoyping as Discrimination: The Constitutive Claim

Though Chapter 1 provides an adequate starting point for my purposes, it also leaves something crucial unsaid. Stereotyping is related to another phenomenon of interest: discrimination. But how? One possibility is that their relationship is best understood in causal terms. Stereotyping causes discrimination because people with views like “Jewish people are wealthy” often articulate stereotypes in speech and act on them. A second possibility, which Chapter 2 explores, is that stereotyping itself constitutes a form of discrimination.

Du Bois’s childhood memory provides proof of concept. When his classmate thought lesser of him because he was Black, she was in effect treating him as lesser. One could also analyze this in terms of a counterfactual: the classmate would have judged him differently—and more favorably—had he been white. This claim isn’t yet about how his classmate acted. It concerns how, and what, she thought about him. Even before she acted, she exercised discriminatory cognition and, arguably, in a way that wronged him.

I don’t introduce “the constitutive claim” lightly. I am fully aware that it will be polarizing. For some readers, it will seem uncontroversial, even boring. Others will find it alarming. Regardless of your initial take, there will be something of interest for you in this chapter. For those aghast at the idea that stereotyping constitutes discrimination, prepare to be converted. Walking readers through a series of arguments, I’ll argue that stereotyping is almost always discrimination in a nonmoralized sense. Nonmoralized definitions of discrimination—commonplace in discrimination theory as well as psychology—emphasize that to discriminate is to differentiate between kinds of people, to treat them differently on the basis of a characteristic. Legal theorist Deborah Hellman offers the example of a mother who forces her toddler to nap but doesn’t impose on her teenager.²² Is that discrimination? Yes, in a neutral sense of the word, Hellman explains. Is it wrongful? Absolutely not. The same point applies to stereotyping. Sometimes discrimination in thought or culture is morally permissible. Sometimes it’s wrongful. Though one may hate the constitutive claim, the arguments in its favor are solid.

The constitutive claim is philosophically significant, and I use it in Chapters 4–7 to analyze the wrongs of stereotyping with the help of discrimination theory. It also entails something that will be surprising—even disturbing—to some readers, namely, that we can (sometimes) wrong people in virtue of how we perceive them or what we believe about them, even if we don’t act on discriminatory cognitions.²³

I.3 Methodology

Chapter 3 is a bridge chapter. The first step of any explanatory project is to delineate the phenomenon under investigation. With this task accomplished in Chapters 1 and 2, normative analysis is the next step. I pause, however, to reflect on what’s distinctive about my methodology.

Analytic philosophy—the discipline in which I am trained—is famous for methods that involve herculean idealizations and mind-bending thought experiments. In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues that the best way to choose distributive principles for a just society is to imagine that we are stuck behind “a veil of ignorance,” which robs us of all information about our social position.²⁴ Judith Jarvis Thompson analyzes the ethics of abortion by asking readers to imagine they find themselves surgically attached to an unconscious master violinist whose kidneys have failed.²⁵ Imaginary desert islands.²⁶ Brains split in half and placed in separate bodies.²⁷ Scientists discovering a pill that, once taken, could render a person homosexual or heterosexual.²⁸ Analytic philosophers are perhaps some of the most imaginative, creative academics out there.

Given my training, some readers—those who don’t know me personally and are unfamiliar with my work—might expect this book to analyze what’s wrong with stereotyping using only these methods. But that’s not me. I’m part of a new generation that turns away from idealizations.²⁹

Let me explain how I’ve arrived here. I am a first-gen college student who grew up on a dairy farm in rural Pennsylvania and attended a vocational institute for the jewelry industry before college. I am also an undergraduate history major, who later turned to philosophy but never lost my historicizing impulses. My first encounter with research on stereotyping didn’t happen until I was a PhD student. In hopes of pinning down a dissertation topic, I enrolled in a seminar at UC Berkeley’s School of Law with social psychologist Victoria Plaut in 2009. During that semester, I was fascinated by the empirical research we read in class. I couldn’t figure out what, exactly, stereotypes were supposed to be. In every article, psychologists seemed to define the term differently. The paper I wrote for that class became the basis of my dissertation. As I looked for philosophical research to engage with, I noticed that philosophers—feminist philosophers, mostly—had recently started to publish on implicit bias and stereotyping.³⁰ Little did I know, my discipline was in midst of what is now being referred to as “the social turn.”³¹ The social turn, writes Kevin Richardson, “is especially concerned with non-ideal (in the sense of actual or actually bad) conditions.”³² Over the last decade, I’ve increasingly immersed myself in non-ideal analyses of stereotyping that have long animated Africana philosophy, women of color feminisms, trans philosophy, queer theory, and disability studies.³³ Through the work of authors that I’ll be discussing at length in this book, including philosophers who have vibrantly critiqued our discipline’s status quo and colonizing tendencies, I’ve wrestled with how to ethically navigate the philosophical space as a relatively-privileged white, American scholar.³⁴

Chapter 3 explains the approach at which arrived after much reflection: a methodology rooted in standpoint theory. Standpoint theory is associated with feminist philosophers of science like Sandra Harding and Helen Longino as well as women of color feminists like the Combahee River Collective, Patricia Hill Collins, María Lugones, Gloria Anzaldúa, and bell hooks.³⁵ It holds those with less social power—because they are forced to grapple with ugly aspects of the world that dominant groups often ignore and can’t directly access in their everyday lives—are more likely to have an accurate understanding of social reality. The idea is simple and compelling. Life under oppression yields tragic, intimate knowledge of stereotyping’s wrongs and its role in domination. Positionality also matters.³⁶ Different intersectional social groups have unique histories of disenfranchisement and domination. They may therefore possess distinct experiences of, and perspectives on, wrongful stereotyping.³⁷ Accordingly, when I analyze objections to stereotyping, I adopt an approach that amplifies a “kaleidoscopic” chorus of voices, as José Medina puts it.³⁸ I treat lived experience as a source of knowledge and as something to which theory is accountable. Thus, in the analysis that follows, I’ll thus be creating a conversation.

Each of this book’s core chapters examines what activists and theorists of liberation have to say about what’s wrong with stereotyping. Canvasing different interpretations of activists’ central objections, I evaluate their strengths and limitations, putting them in conversation with discrimination theory. Philosophical theories, I argue, have the potential to enhance the insights of lived experience. However, the reverse is also true and, in some ways, the more important. Lived experience enhances—and often challenges the adequacy of—philosophical theories. The theory for which I ultimately argue respects, and amplifies, the diversity of ethical objections to stereotyping found in lived experience.

I.4 What’s Wrong with Stereotyping?

One thing I’ve loved about writing this book is how it’s allowed me to scrutinize the wrongs of stereotyping while, at the same time, learning more about the history of liberation movements in the United States. Each chapter—4 through 7—centers a historical case study in which activists have articulated ethical objections to stereotyping.³⁹ Each chapter explores the power of a specific ethical objection or, sometimes, two. It’s an approach that involves zeroing in, scrutinizing deeper meanings.

Chapter 4 begins with the observation that judging persons by group membership can be a fast way to form beliefs, expectations, and predictions. When people have the option to form judgments in a more conscientious way but don’t take it, and end up stereotyping, those targeted for judgment have an ethical complaint at their fingertips. We all have a right—a moral right, the thought goes—to be treated as individuals. Stereotyping can violate this right, thereby wronging others.

Not only have activists pressed this ethical objection (including those from the early homophile movement in the U.S. whom I profile in this chapter), but it has been posited as “the wrong” of all stereotyping by philosopher Lawrence Blum.⁴⁰ Though the objection is intuitive, its philosophical details are surprisingly slippery—and politically treacherous. What might a moral right to being treated as an individual consist in? How should its requirements be articulated, exactly? Political conservatives (making points that resonate with Jussim on the validity of social stereotypes) argue that the existence of such a right would entail that all generalizing is immoral and, thus, is an absurdity. Liberals are liable to agree with the conclusion, but for a different reason. Calls to treat persons as individuals smack of “color blindness,” an incoherent and morally corrupt ideal that has been used to eliminate policies designed to protect marginalized groups and promote social equity. Here I enter the fray, seeking a middle way: an interpretation of activists’ demands to be treated as individuals that avoids both pitfalls and could play a role—however, small—in the best theory of wrongful stereotyping.

I identify two promising views advanced by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Benjamin Eidelson.⁴¹ Each has a similar gist. That is, treating someone as an individual requires judging them based on reasonably available, relevant information. “Reasonably available” and “relevant” introduce important moral caveats to the discussion. If personalized information about someone isn’t “reasonably available,” the moral right in question isn’t trespassed by mere generalizing and, ergo, allows for morally permissible acts of stereotyping. Though it’s not entirely clear how to interpret the demand for relevance, it seems clear that a person’s group membership can be informative and, also, of great practical and existential importance. So, treating persons as individuals does not demand difference blindness with respect to gender, race, age, or any other important aspect of identity. Avoiding both gambits, two plausible versions of the ideal survive. But, because of their caveats, they have limitations. They cannot be used to condemn all wrongful stereotyping, only cases in which someone fails to use relevant, reasonably available information. Here I find my first normative building block. Though “failing to treat persons as individuals” cannot be the wrong of all stereotyping, I argue that it has a limited role to play in the best theory of wrongful stereotyping; moreover, it is tethered to deeper moral values, such as respect for persons and social equality, suggesting that its role will be articulated through these values.

Chapter 5 analyzes prejudice-focused objections to stereotyping in testimonies of American AIDS activists in the 1980s and 1990s. I begin by exploring classic prejudicial stereotyping, a flagrant form of wrongful stereotyping that involves false, morally vicious group representations.⁴² I then examine a putative limitation of prejudice-focused critiques. Not all discriminators—and not all people who stereotype—have vicious attitudes. Statistical discrimination occurs when people treat others in ways that are driven by real or perceived statistical differences. A case in point: an employer who refuses to hire women employees, not because they dislike women, but because of cold, hard facts. Women employees have been more likely to quit in the past, and their clients prefer to work with men. Citing statistical discrimination, discrimination theorists tend to argue that prejudice is “morally irrelevant” because not all wrongful discrimination is caused by morally bad prejudice and, thus, prejudice cannot be “the wrong” of discrimination.

Like prejudice skeptics, I argue that there are philosophical limits to what prejudice-focused critiques can do; however, I argue that any theory of wrongful stereotyping that ignores prejudice will be both incomplete and misleading. Though prejudice doesn’t always explain what’s morally wrong with stereotyping, it sometimes does, revealing a distinctive way in which acts of stereotyping can wrong individuals, and the groups to which they belong, by disrespecting them. Prejudice-focused objections also highlight the connection between stereotyping and morally-problematic vices (such as close-mindedness and arrogance).

Chapters 4 and 5 begin to lay the foundation for pluralism. You can disrespect someone by failing to treat them as an individual. But you can disrespect someone in a different (and arguably even worse) way if you judge them based on dehumanizing stereotypes that reflect vicious habits of mind. Disrespect takes many different forms: it’s not a monolith. Second, harm bursts onto the scene as an important element of what’s wrong with stereotyping. In Chapter 5, one sees AIDS activists protesting the pain and suffering caused by prejudice-fueled judgments, actions, and policies. Thus, it appears that stereotyping can be wrong—when it is—because of its downstream consequences.

In Chapter 6, I turn to Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color to develop a modestly pluralistic theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping based on these insights.⁴³ Its contributors amplify two themes: the disrespect of stereotyping and the harms associated with stereotyping. To model the analysis, I turn to discrimination theory and find what is, in effect, the most popular theory of what’s wrong with discrimination: the disrespect or harm theory. According to this theory, wrongful discrimination can hurt people in two ways: by disrespecting them or by harming them. These wrongs can also come apart (and, hence, wrongful stereotyping may sometimes be harmful but not disrespectful or vice versa).

By combining disrespect and harm, the theory marries two seemingly incompatible ethical theories: Kantian ethics and consequentialism. This is not arbitrary choice, however. While philosophers committed to a specific ethical theory might demand a choice between the two objections, there is no good rationale for an ultimatum from the perspective of lived experience. From the perspective of lived experience, stereotyping is often disrespectful and harmful, and these wrongs are not in opposition.⁴⁴ Furthermore, modest pluralism of the kind I’m describing is the dominant view in analytic discrimination theory.⁴⁵ It’s the dominant view because theorists, when they survey cases of wrongful discrimination, generally find that its wrongs can’t be reduced to a single ethical framework. In combining elements of both, they acknowledge what an important truth: that moral reality is complex.

Despite moving in the right direction, gaping holes exist in the disrespect or harm theory. Where is equality? Where are exploitation, subordination, cultural imperialism, and other trappings of oppression so frequently intertwined with wrongful stereotyping? When one digs deeper, it becomes apparent that the disrespect or harm theory sidelines—and thus partially obscures—key ethical objections to stereotyping made by Bridge contributors and others. These objections concern group inequality and the social function of wrongful stereotyping, most notably its tendency to keep marginalized groups “in their place” and to justify morally horrific injustices.

Chapter 7 examines Du Bois’s trenchant critique of stereotyping in Darkwater: Voices Within the Veil and develops an equality- and freedom-focused theory of wrongful stereotyping.⁴⁶ In Darkwater, Du Bois offers explanations of wrongful stereotyping irreducible to harm or disrespect. He observes that stereotyping facilitates economic exploitation of brown and Black people globally, motivates acts of racialized violence (including rape and sexual assault, mob killings, and acts of colonialist genocide), expresses an inherently domineering white worldview, and fosters internalized racism. Sometimes Du Bois amplifies intrinsic wrongs. The little girl who stereotyped him as a child, for example, was putting herself above Black people, seeing whites as inherently better and of higher moral stature. However, he takes special care to highlight stereotyping’s extrinsic wrongs, especially how it greases the wheels of economic exploitation. Whether focusing on intrinsic or extrinsic wrongs, he represents stereotyping as an assault on the moral equality of persons and freedom.⁴⁷

In discrimination theory, one finds analogues of Du Bois’s view, and this chapter highlights one of them. In Faces of Inequality, Sophia Moreau argues that discrimination wrongs people when it fails to treat them as equals.⁴⁸ Like the disrespect or harm theory, this is a modestly pluralistic view. Moreau argues that discrimination can wrong people in three ways: by subordinating them, by undermining their “deliberative freedom,” and by robbing them of basic goods. I observe that Du Bois’s view precedes Moreau’s by about a century but nonetheless generates very similar explanations of why (and when) stereotyping is wrong. On the other hand, their theories diverge in significant ways. Moreau subsumes freedom under the rubric of equality whereas Du Bois’s view is more robustly pluralistic, allowing freedom and equality equal explanatory footing.

Chapter 7 ends with an observation. While equality- and freedom-focused theories do valuable explanatory work, they also have limitations. In Moreau’s work, one doesn’t find juicy definitions of disrespect or harm. By emphasizing social processes, these theories place less emphasis on individuals. They therefore shove into the background careful analyses of individual psychologies and lifepaths. They also sideline the possibility that stereotyping could wrong oppressors in some cases.

Chapter 8—the book’s final chapter—summarizes where the argument stands and argues for a novel solution to the puzzle of stereotyping. As I have investigated the lived experiences of activists described in this book, I’ve unearthed neither a single wrong, nor two or three ethical objections, but a plethora of overlapping, interconnected ethical complaints. If a unified explanation of wrongful stereotyping is impossible, and modest pluralism won’t work either, what options remain for theorizing wrongful stereotyping and, thus, solving this book’s puzzle?

Here I suggest that ethicists would benefit from (re)conceptualizing stereotyping in a novel way.⁴⁹ Messy kinds exhibit complexity, as suggested by philosopher of science Joyce Havstad. They lack an essence, defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Wrongful stereotyping is, if I’m right, a messy kind, as are many other ethically interesting phenomena. Perhaps normative kinds, and moral reality writ large, are not complex in the exact same ways as biological or mineral kinds, but that’s no roadblock to exploration. In philosophy of science, theorists have innovated frameworks for modeling complexity. In what ways might their theories, created to model the natural world’s complexity, help us to better understand ethically complex normative phenomena such as stereotyping?

Cluster theory provides a good test case. In the 1990s, Richard Boyd sparked a renaissance of cluster theory when he used it to model biological species.⁵⁰ Cluster theories—of which there are now many flavors—embody a certain way of thinking about kinds, which philosopher Zina Ward characterizes with three claims: (1) individuals of a kind share many properties in common; (2) many or most kinds do not possess an essence and cannot be characterized in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions; and (3) kinds are characterized by cooccurring properties that cluster together in “property space.”⁵¹ Delving into a specific set of requirements for the applicability of a cluster analysis suggested by philosopher Matthew Andler, I argue that wrongful stereotyping meets these requirements.⁵²

This result is exciting. Cluster theory suggests a view—which I dub radical pluralism—that combines the modest pluralisms described in Chapters 6 and 7; it does so by embracing an open-ended list of properties that can make stereotyping wrong:

Being a judgment that fails to treat someone as an individual and, thereby, disrespects them.

Being a false or misleading judgment.

Being a judgment that publicly expresses a demeaning message to the effect that some groups are morally less than or not fully human.

Being a judgment that exists because of moral vices in the person who makes it such arrogance.

Being a judgment that makes people worse off, causing harm.

Being a judgment that fails to treat persons as equals by representing them as intrinsically lesser because of membership in a historically subordinated group.

Being a judgment that entrenches group-based exploitation, political domination, violence, etcetera.

Being a judgment that limits or undermines freedoms.

In this list, one finds ethical objections associated with “the big three” ethical theories in Western philosophy: virtue ethics, consequentialism, and Kantian ethics. Instead of pigeonholing itself into a single ethical framework, radical pluralism contends that each framework captures something true and important, without which one cannot tell the full story of what’s morally wrong with stereotyping. It is also open-ended and, for that reason, amenable to yet other objections ensconced in different ethical frameworks, including non-Western ones.

To better understand radical pluralism, start with this observation. Despite its messiness, the above list has a logic. It’s not a mere disjunction of random properties. Wrong-making properties on the list “travel together,” tending to co-occur in real-life cases. Consider property (d): being a judgment that exists because of moral vices in the person who makes it. If an act of wrongful stereotyping is an expression of vicious character traits like arrogance, it’s likely to have other properties on the list, such as being judgment that causes harm (e). That’s for a simple reason. Humans are bad at keeping their thoughts to themselves, especially when deeply prejudiced. Think pejorative thoughts or be an arrogant perceiver—and you have just raised the probability you’ll act in a way that publicly reveals you’ve stereotyped someone. Publicly acting on stereotypes will tend to cause downstream harms and enact subordination if marginalized groups are targeted such as when the classmate described earlier utters a gender stereotype to chastise a peer. Causal relationships between properties on the list also exist. Discriminatory thoughts cause discriminatory actions. A bevy of wrongs thus cluster together in ways that support prediction. Let me pause to emphasize the exciting philosophical upshot now emerging. Radical pluralism does something which is utterly unique vis-à-vis the existing options in discrimination theory. It “defines” wrongful stereotyping in terms of a cluster of wrong-making properties with probabilistic and causal relationships to one another.

The theory on offer also does something else of great value. Like all cluster theories, it calls attention to the ways in which social environments give rise to, and sustain, the distinctive properties associated with particular kinds. In this way, it generates powerful explanations of why wrongful stereotyping persists over time. It’s no accident that wrongs on the above list travel together, according to radical pluralism. Wrong-making properties described above (and yet others) are parasitic on social relationships and, thus, on structural features of the environment such as institutions, norms, legal structures, and so on. As with biological and mineral kinds, the world supports stable property clusters. Though no universal environmental scaffolding for wrongful stereotyping exists across all time and place, uniform environmental mechanisms may support certain kinds of wrongful stereotyping at specific times and places. Such was the case for racist stereotyping in the South during the early twentieth century as described by Du Bois, sustained as it was by Jim Crow laws and social norms that required absolute deference to whites. Notice that this analysis frames wrongful stereotyping in a naturalistic way, a living breathing psychosocial and cultural phenomenon that arises in social environments racked by social hierarchy.

After clarifying radical pluralism’s content, I argue that it satisfies the two desiderata for a successful theory:

The identification condition: the best theory of wrongful stereotyping must reliably identify cases of wrongful stereotyping.

The explanatory condition: the best theory of wrongful stereotyping must adequately explain why stereotyping wrong, when it is.

Think about the identification condition. Unlike a unified theory, radical pluralism doesn’t articulate a simple diagnostic rule for identifying all wrongful stereotyping. Nor can its criteria be boiled down to an elegant disjunction consisting of two or three properties. Instead, radical pluralism mimics cluster theories used for diagnostic purposes in medicine, gemology, psychiatry, and biology. If property clusters provide diagnostic standards in these other domains and experts use them for the purposes of identifying unknown “specimens,” they have the potential to work well in the ethical domain too. For a cluster theory, the key principle is family resemblance. When act of stereotyping has many or most properties in the cluster associated with paradigmatic instances of wrongful stereotyping, it qualifies as wrongful stereotyping. Here I call readers’ attention to an example that plays an outsized role in the book from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Chapters 1 and 2). It is a paradigmatic instance of morally wrongful stereotyping, exemplifying every single wrong on the list and, thus, constitutes a benchmark against which other cases are judged. The closer the family resemblance of a “mystery” case to the paradigm, the more likely it is wrongful. At the same time, members of kinds can have properties quite different from the paradigm so long as a distant family resemblance obtains.

Next, turn to the explanatory condition. Rather than dumbing-down or artificially simplifying wrongful stereotyping, radical pluralism embraces normative complexity, seeks to illuminate it. When explaining why a particular case of stereotyping is wrong (if it is), the theory combines distinct explanations of what’s wrong with stereotyping—such as those highlighted in Chapters 4 through 7—into a synergistic, integrated explanation that exceeds its constituent parts. These explanations are far richer and more informative than those enabled by unified or modestly pluralistic theories, faithfully mirroring the real-life complexity of wrongful stereotyping.

“Radical pluralism” strikes me as a fitting name for the theory. The “radicalness” of radical pluralism, I explain, lies not only in its appeal to property clusters but, also, potentially, in its embrace of taxonomic pluralism. I hypothesize that there are, in fact, multiple kinds of wrongful stereotyping (see Chapter 8, Figure 8.1). Though I focus primarily on oppressive, wrongful stereotyping in this book, I invite readers to imagine what other kinds of wrongful stereotyping there might be. It’s possible that marginalized individuals could wrongfully stereotype their oppressors, something that James Baldwin in fact suggests in The Fire Next Time.⁵³ Moreover, radical pluralism has the potential to embrace multiple, nonoverlapping taxonomical systems. (Readers who would like a visual representation of different taxonomies might consult Chapter 8, Figures 8.2 and 8.3.) Taxonomical species of wrongful stereotyping can be stitched and unstitched, revealing different patterns in normative space. The theory’s explanatory power grows exponentially as a result.

I.5 The Point of an Explanatory Project

Why does an explanatory project about stereotyping matter? For this project, there is a straightforward answer.

Stereotyping fuels social inequality. The activists whom I will profile protested oppressive stereotyping as they contested institutional segregation, challenged governmental negligence, objected to misogynist and racist violence, fought for healthcare access and fair working conditions. As you read this book, you’ll be invited to reflect on the reasons they found stereotyping problematic.

While this book does not argue for specific interventions that could reduce or eliminate wrongful stereotyping, I will nonetheless be highlighting models for change.⁵⁴ That’s one beauty of standpoint theory. Lived experience doesn’t just provide plausible philosophical hypotheses about what’s wrong with stereotyping. It illustrates active resistance to stereotyping. Studying This Bridge Called My Back, readers will see the importance of self-reflection and interpersonal dialogue. Bridge contributors argue that recognizing the psychological and emotional impacts of internalized stereotypes is a precondition for building healthy, just relationships in an unjust world. They argue that liberatory struggle requires not just structural change that targets laws and institutions, but also personal transformation. Contemplating early AIDS activism in the United States, readers will glimpse guerilla protest tactics, media and visual arts campaigns designed to undercut harmful stereotyping, and on-the-ground organizing. In the work of Du Bois, they will see the importance of organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and public-facing projects that raise awareness about racist stereotyping, including Darkwater itself.

This book is also a comment on the liberatory possibilities of explanatory projects. As I investigate the puzzle of stereotyping, I’ll be bumping up against the limits of traditional philosophical methodology. Understanding what’s wrong with stereotyping, I’ll argue, is not something that can be done from an ivory tower, using artificial thought experiments and neat-and-tidy philosophical theories that “clean up” normative reality. Cleaning up normative reality sidelines marginalized groups and silences their voices, along with compelling explanations of why and how unjust generalizing wrongs individuals and the groups to which they belong. Only a philosophical methodology that centers lived experience avoids these epistemic and moral pitfalls.

My approach also insists on the importance of the past and, also, collaboration. As new forms of stereotyping emerge in technology in large language models, image generators, and other predictive algorithms, we must resist the urge to think that this is all so new, all so different. Stereotyping is a phenomenon as old as the human species. Though new technologies may wrongfully stereotype in distinctive ways, the ethical implications of stereotyping are as old as dirt. Algorithms are simply the new printing presses, engines of information and efficiency—but also of social inequality. Over the last few centuries, the puzzle of stereotyping has deepened, becoming ever more urgent. This book is an invitation to collaborate in solving this puzzle. Though an unmistakable work in analytical philosophy (with many of the hallmarks of analytic methodology), this book endorses—and, I hope, models—a collaborative vision of ethical theorizing as an all-hands-on-deck explanatory project, requiring the input of philosophers, scientific experts, social theorists, engineers, historians as well as everyday experts and activists. Each of us has a role to play.

¹ W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994), 2.

² Judith Heumann, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021), 13.

³ ibid.

⁴ Kathryn Stockton, “Ezra Klein Interviews Kathryn Bond Stockton,” by Ezra Klein, New York Times. Last modified August 5, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-kathryn-bond-stockton.html [Accessed November 15, 2022].

⁵ Lee Jussim, “Gender Stereotypes Are Inaccurate If You Ignore the Data,” Psychology Today. Last modified June 5, 2016. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201806/gender-stereotypes-are-inaccurate-if-you-ignore-the-data [Accessed November 15, 2022].

⁶ ibid. Note Jussim’s collapse of the sex/gender distinction.

⁷ Lee Jussim, Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 272–3.

⁸ ibid, 323–69. For a striking example of a philosopher embracing a racial stereotype, see this blog post: https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.96/0441.html. In it, Nick Bostrom asserts, “Blacks are more stupid than whites.” He then says: “I like that sentence and think that it is true.” For analysis, see Émiles Torres, “Nick Bostrom, Longtermism, and the Eternal Return of Eugenics,” Truthdig, 2023. https://www.truthdig.com/dig/nick-bostrom-longtermism-and-the-eternal-return-of-eugenics [Accessed January 25, 2023].

⁹ Jussim, “Gender Stereotypes Are Inaccurate.”

¹⁰ For discussion of “explanatory projects” and the methodology surrounding them, see Sarah Stroud, “Lying as Infidelity: A Quasi-Rossian Account,” in Mark Timmons (ed), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Vol. 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 73–97. For a canonical example of an explanatory project in action, see, Plato, “Euthyphro,” in G. M. A. Grube (trans), Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, Second Edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2002), 5–22. This dialogue showcases the assumption that philosophy aims to identify normative “essences.” In this book, I build on explanatory projects in discrimination theory, including Deborah Hellman, When is Discrimination Wrong? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Discrimination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Benjamin Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Sophia Moreau, Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). For an explanatory project about what’s wrong with oppression, see Serene Khader, “Why is Oppression Wrong,” Philosophical Studies 181, no. 4 (2024), 649–69.

¹¹ For examples, see Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2016); Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, Lauren Kirchner, and Julia Angwin, “How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm,” Propublica. Last modified May 23, 2016. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm [Accessed November 15, 2022]; Katie Paul and Akanksha Rana, “U.S. Charges Facebook with Racial Discrimination in Targeted Housing Ads,” Reuters. Last modified March 28, 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-advertisers/u-s-charges-facebook-with-racial-discrimination-in-targeted-housing-ads-idUSKCN1R91E8 [Accessed November 15, 2022]; Robert Bartlett, Adair Morse, Richard Stanton, and Nancy Wallace, “Consumer-Lending Discrimination in the FinTech Era,” Journal of Financial Economics 143, no. 1 (2022), 30–56.

¹² “Stereotype,” Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stereotyping [Accessed May 24, 2024].

¹³ “Stereotype,” Merriam-Webster Online. Available at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stereotype [Accessed May 24, 2024].

¹⁴ “For philosophical purposes” is an important qualification. Different conceptions of stereotyping might be useful in different scholarly and political projects.

¹⁵ See, for example, Sarah-Jane Leslie, “Generics and The Structure of the Mind,” Philosophical Perspectives 21, no. 1 (2007), 375–403; Sarah-Jane Leslie, “Real Men: Polysemy or Implicature?,” Analytic Philosophy, Special Issue on Slurs, Forthcoming. For additional discussion and references, see Chapter 1.

¹⁶ Sally Haslanger, “Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground,” in Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 446–75. For a fascinating discussion of the relationship between generics and essentialist belief, see Kevin Reuter, Eleonore Neufeld, and Gillermo Del Pinal, “Asymmetry Effects in Generic and Quantified Generalizations,” Proceedings of the 45th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45 (2023), 1–6. Reuter et al. argue that generics statements don’t have a privileged relationship to essentialism. They review empirical evidence that suggests even quantified statements can generate essentialist beliefs in hearers.

¹⁷ For further discussion, see Katherine Puddifoot, How Stereotypes Deceive Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). For an example of how stereotypes of doctors contribute to marginalization, see Chapter 2.

¹⁸ Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, Social Cognition, Second Edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 1991), 98; Eliot Smith and Jamie DeCoster, “Dual Process Models in Social and Cognitive Psychology: Conceptual Integration and Links to Underlying Memory Systems,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 4, no. 2 (2000), 108–31, at 113; Tamar Gendler, “Alief in Action and Reaction,” Mind and Language 23, no. 5 (2008), 552–85, at 557; Jerry Fodor, LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), 150; Eric Schwitzgebel, “Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs or the Gulf Between Occurrent Judgment and Dispositional Belief,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91, no. 4 (2010), 531–53; Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011); Jussim, Social Perception and Social Reality; Jules Holroyd and Joseph Sweetman, “The Heterogeneity of Implicit Bias,” in Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul (eds) Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 80–103; Eric Mandelbaum, “Attitude, Inference, and Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit Bias,” Noûs 50, no. 3 (2015), 629–58; Alex Madva and Michael Brownstein, “Stereotypes, Prejudice, and the Taxonomy of the Implicit Mind,” Noûs 50, no. 4 (2016), 611–44; Jussim, “Gender Stereotypes Are Inaccurate If You Ignore the Data.”

¹⁹ For example, see Gabbrielle Johnson, “Proxies Aren’t Intentional, They’re Intentional,” unpublished manuscript.

²⁰ Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge Classics, 2008), 5.

²¹ Thanks to John Francis for this example and to Leslie Francis for encouraging me to be clearer on the relationship between stereotyping and generalizing.

²² Hellman, When is Discrimination Wrong? 3.

²³ Thus, one discovers an underappreciated route to the ethics of belief, one that passes through radical activists and theorists of liberation, rather than through the Victorian philosopher William Clifford.

²⁴ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Original Edition (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press, 2005).

²⁵ Judith Jarvis Thompson “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1971), 47–66.

²⁶ Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

²⁷ Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

²⁸ Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal, 108.

²⁹ Recent examples include Heidi Elizabeth Grasswick and Nancy Arden McHugh, Making the Case: Feminist and Critical Race Philosophers Engage Case Studies (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021; Robin McKenna, Non-Ideal Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023); Asa Burman, Non-Ideal Social Ontology: The Power View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

³⁰ Sally Haslanger, “Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not By Reason (Alone),” Hypatia 23, no. 2 (2008), 210–23; Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: The Power and Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Louis Antony, “Different Voices or the Perfect Storm: Why Are There so Few Women in Philosophy?” Journal of Social Philosophy 43, no. 3 (2012), 227–55; Jennifer Saul, “Women in Philosophy: On The Psychological Biases Adversely Affecting Philosophy and What We Can Do About It,” The Philosopher’s Magazine 59 (2012), 38–43; Amy Olberding, “Subclinical Bias, Manners, and Moral Harm,” Hypatia 29, no. 2 (2014), 287–302.

³¹ Kevin Richardson, “The Social Turn in Analytic Philosophy,” Daily Nous blog, August 8, 2023. https://dailynous.com/2023/08/08/the-social-turn-in-analytic-philosophy-promises-and-perils-guest-post [Accessed May 24, 2024].

³² ibid.

³³ Impactful work in this space includes Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fifth Edition (San Francisco: aunt lute books, 1987); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); María Lugones, Pilgrimages = Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia 22, no. 3 (2007), 43–65; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008); Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, Fourth Edition (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015); George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America, Second Edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017); Adam Cureton and David Wasserman (eds), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

³⁴ More specifically, I’m writing as a white, mostly able-bodied queer woman from a rural American background whose family has “moved up” socioeconomically. As someone who believes in a more inclusive, intersectional version of feminism, and is keen to understand my own potential biases, I’ve benefited from Serene Khader’s insightful critiques of white feminism, Kristie Dotson’s writing on epistemic oppression, Janine Jones’s exploration of racialized imagination and the Black imaginary, Shelley Tremain’s continued platforming of disabled philosophers. See, for example, Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence: Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011), 236–57; Kristie Dotson, “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 33, no. 1 (2012), 24–47; Serene Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Serene Khader, “The Feminist Case Against Relational Autonomy,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 15, no. (2020), 499–526; Janine Jones, “Review of Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique,” Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, American Philosophical Association 13 (2013), 19–25; Janine Jones, “Dreadlocked Logics of Impossibility,” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 6 (2023) http://www.politicalconcepts.org/dreadlocked-logics-of-impossibility-janine-jones/; Shelley Tremain, Dialogues on Disability https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/dialogues-on-disability/. For another influential platforming project, see Meena Krishnamurthy’s Philosopher. https://politicalphilosopher.net/author/meenakrishnamurthy2013.

³⁵ For a fabulous collection featuring (many of) these theorists, see Sandra Harding, The Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual & Political Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2004).

³⁶ H. M. Collins and Robert Evans, “The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience,” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 2 (2002), 235–96.

³⁷ Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 252.

³⁸ José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

³⁹ It’s worth mentioning that the objections featured in my analysis have their roots in Western ethical systems, most notably Kantian ethics, Aristotelian virtue ethics, and consequentialism. For this reason, it’s a fair criticism that this book is very “Western” focused. However, the theory that I’ll be defending is open-ended and capable of accommodating ethical objections from global ethical traditions, as well as indigenous philosophies of the West.

⁴⁰ Lawrence Blum, “Stereotypes and Stereotyping: A Moral Analysis,” Philosophical Papers 33, no. 3 (2004), 251–89, at 251.

⁴¹ Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, “‘We Are All Different’: Statistical Discrimination and the Right to Be Treated as an Individual,” Journal of Ethics 15, no. 1 (2011), 47–59; Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect.

⁴² For discussion of how vicious prejudices are intertwined with stereotyping, see Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in The Sovereignty of the Good (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 1–45; Fricker, Epistemic Injustice; Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance; Heather Battaly, The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (New York: Routledge, 2020); Ian James Kidd, Heather Battaly, and Quassim Cassam, Vice Epistemology (London: Routledge, 2021); Alessandra Tanesini, The Mismeasure of the Self: A Study in Vice Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

⁴³ Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back.

⁴⁴ For additional empirical evidence for the disrespect or harm theory, see Andreas Albertsen, Bjørn Hallsson, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, and Viki M. L. Pederson, “Does Harm or Disrespect Make Discrimination Wrong? An Experimental Approach,” Philosophical Psychology (2023), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.20.23.2289451.

⁴⁵ For articulations of the disrespect or harm theory, see Larry Alexander, “What Makes Wrongful Discrimination Wrong? Biases, Preferences, Stereotypes, and Proxies,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 141, no. (1992), 149–219; Thomas Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect. For other modestly pluralistic views see, Moreau, Faces of Inequality. Deborah Hellman is now also a modest pluralist, though she started out arguing for a unified theory. See Hellman, When is Discrimination Wrong? for her unified theory. For her pluralistic addendum, see Deborah Hellman, “Indirect Discrimination and the Duty to Avoid Compounding Injustice,” in Hugh Collins and Tarunabh Khaitain (eds), Foundations of Indirect Discrimination Law (London: Hart Publishing, 2018), 105–21; Deborah Hellman, “Big Data and Compounding Injustice,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 21, no. 1–2 (2023), 62–82.

⁴⁶ W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (Garden City, NY: Dover, 1999).

⁴⁷ For discussion of the role of moral equality in Du Bois’s work, see Charles Mills, “W. E. B. Du Bois: Radical Political Liberal,” in Nick Bromell (ed), A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2018), 19–56; Elvira Basevich, The Lost and Found: W. E. B. Du Bois (Black Lives) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).

⁴⁸ Moreau, Faces of Inequality.

⁴⁹ Joyce Havstad, “Messy Chemical Kinds,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69, no. 3 (2018), 719–43 at 720. I thank Havstad for recommending this framing.

⁵⁰ See Richard Boyd, “Realism, Anti-foundationalism, and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds,” Philosophical Studies 61, no. 1–2 (1991), 127–48; Richard Boyd, “Homeostasis, Species, and Higher Taxa,” in Robert A. Wilson (ed), Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 141–85. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Fourth Edition, translated by P. M. S. Hacker (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2009).

⁵¹ Zina Ward, “William Whewell, Cluster Theorist of Kinds,” Hopos: Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13, no. 2 (2023), 362–86.

⁵² Matthew Andler, “What Is Masculinity?” Synthese 202, no. 3 (2023), 1–16.

⁵³ James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 66–76.

⁵⁴ In this book, I’ll be laser focused on what’s wrong with stereotyping. Questions of wrongness are logically prior to questions about blame, responsibility, and punishment. Suppose I believe that someone should be blamed for an action. They lied to me, let’s imagine. Behind this impulse to blame is a presupposition: lying to me was wrong. Without the presupposition of wrongness, the need for blame, responsibility, punishment never arises. In this book, I am interested in the conditions under stereotyping is morally wrong and, hence, can be legitimated targeted for judgments of blameworthiness, responsibility, etcetera.

1 A Starting Point for Theorizing

What is a Stereotype? What is Stereotyping?

In Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, the narrator, a Black man, arrives at a swanky club filled with Communist Party members, all of whom are white. Hired to advocate for the Party’s cause among New York City’s Black community, the narrator is there to meet his superiors. As he is making small talk, an embarrassing scene unravels:

A short broad man saw me and waved the others to a halt. “Say, Brother,” he called, “Hold the music boys, hold it!”

“Yes, uh . . . Brother,” I said.

“You’re just who we need. We been looking for you.”

“Oh,” I said.

“How about a spiritual, Brother? . . .”

“The brother does not sing!” Brother Jack roared staccato.

“Nonsense, all colored people sing.”¹

If asked to explain what the short, broad man was doing, one might reply, “he was stereotyping.”

In any explanatory project, the first step is to delineate the phenomenon under investigation, clarifying what the project is about. What is a stereotype? What is stereotyping? To answer these questions, I will use Ellison’s example—a paradigm case of stereotyping—as an anchor. By analyzing the details of this case and soon others, I’ll develop a view of stereotyping that provides a reliable foundation for philosophical theorizing and is especially well suited for an explanatory project like this one. To stereotype a group, I’ll suggest, is to characterize that group as a collective entity. To stereotype an individual is to judge that person by group membership. While these definitions may seem weak, they are in fact powerful. They ensure that this project targets wrongful stereotyping in all its manifestations. Whether one is concerned with language, human psychology, algorithmic bias, or culture, stereotyping can be objectionable. It can be a slap in the face, as the scene in Ellison’s novel tells us, and cause harm. As I elaborate on the psychology of stereotyping, I explain that stereotyping relates to generalization and induction, core aspects of rationality. It is, nonetheless, inextricable from power dynamics. Building on the work of Patricia Collins, I contend that stereotypes in culture take the form of controlling ideas and images. These images and ideas are used to keep people, like Ellison’s narrator, in their place. Wrongful stereotyping, the analysis suggests, involves the deployment of generalizing tendencies that are not intrinsically immoral, and which are essential to human functioning.

1.1 What is a Stereotype?

Speech acts provide a clear example of stereotypes, as in Ellison’s example in Invisible Man. “All colored people sing,” says the white partygoer. That’s a stereotype. It takes the form of a universal generalization. Ellison’s example is not as paradigmatic as it seems, however. Stereotypes expressed in speech tend to take the form of what linguists call generics. Generics lack quantifiers like “some,” “most,” or “all,” and they do not make claims about specific individuals. Instead, they state claim of form “Fs are G”: “Tigers have stripes”; “boots are made for walking”; “chickens lay eggs”; and “mosquitos carry the West Nile virus.”² Stereotypes might be characterized as a subclass of generics that make claims, specifically, about social kinds.

Not only do stereotypes expressed in speech often not take the form of universal generalizations because they do not feature the quantifier “all,” they do not seem to be universal generalizations in disguise either. Competent language-users often endorse generics while rejecting the corresponding universal generalization. So, for example, a speaker may endorse the claim “women have babies” while granting that not all women have babies. This indicates that generics are not equivalent in meaning to universal generalizations and have different truth conditions.

One prominent theorist—philosopher Sarah-Jane Leslie—is a pluralist about the meaning and truth conditions of stereotypes. Leslie divides generics into three types: majority generics, characteristic generics, and striking-property generics.³ Majority generics express statistical claims, and thus have statistical truth conditions. “Police officers wear blue uniforms” is true, on Leslie’s view, if and only if “a large majority”—for example, sixty percent—of police officers wear blue uniforms. Characteristic generics make descriptive claims about typical group members, claims often related to a group’s function or social role. “Women cook and clean” could be a case in point. The third kind of generic asserts claims about dangerous or appalling characteristics. For example, “mosquitos carry West Nile disease,” and “Muslims are terrorists.” These sentences don’t make claims about typical or most group members. These generics are true, on Leslie’s view, if and only if some group members have the property and those that don’t are disposed in the right conditions to have it. In more recent work, she further adds to her theory, arguing that generics can have normative meanings as well.⁴ For example, “women cook and clean” might express the claim that good or ideal women cook and clean.⁵

Other theorists carve up the domain differently. Linguist Ariel Cohen, for example, argues that generics are of two types: absolute and relative.⁶ Both kinds of generics have probabilistic truth conditions. Absolute generics, on his view, are true if and only if fifty percent or more of group members have the property in question. Relative generics are true, roughly, if and only if group members possess the relevant trait at a rate higher than nongroup members. Yet other theorists argue that there is only one set of truth conditions that apply to all generics. A common claim here is that generics are true if and only if “normal” group members in “normal circumstances” possess the ascribed property.⁷

One upshot of a linguistic analysis is that the claims associated with stereotypes—while often false or misleading—have the potential to be both true and justified. If so, falsity and lack of justification cannot be essential to the very idea of a stereotype. What is essential to the idea of a stereotype seems just to be that stereotyping groups involves characterizing groups as collective entities.

So far, I’ve proceeded as if stereotypes can be thought of as propositions expressed in speech. But they can take other forms too. Stereotypes can influence people’s plans, expectations, and actions even if they are never expressed in public, directly or indirectly. To capture the phenomena in which we are interested, stereotypes must therefore be given a psychological reality independent of speech. It thus becomes tempting to think of them as psychologists do, namely, as concepts or as psychological items related to the formation or use of concepts.

Think about acts of social categorization. You’re walking down the street, and you instinctively see someone as a certain gender. This is Kathryn Stockton’s experience when she reports walking down the street and feeling her brain “firing away” as she classifies people as “white or male or this or that.”⁸ Acts of categorization involve recognizing things as members of kinds. Social categories apply to people. They include things like “man,” “woman,” “Black person,” “white person,” “professor,” “bank teller,” “friend,” and “enemy.” Nonsocial categories include things like “tree,” “water,” “tropical storm,” “red,” and “square.” One popular view is that both social and nonsocial categories are constituted by prototypes. The category “red,” for instance, is defined by the most typical example of red we can imagine. The category of “game” is defined by our vision of the most representative game. On this view, when we compare something to our categories, we consider its features, then we consider our prototypes. When something is sufficiently similar to one of our prototypes, we classify it as the same kind of thing. Classification isn’t a cut-and-dried matter here: it’s a matter of resemblance, which can be a matter of degree.

Theorists sometimes refer to prototypes as “stereotypes.”⁹ To figure out what prototypes a person has, you might ask them to think of something: a doctor, for example. The image that pops into their head, the prototypic doctor with a white coat and stethoscope, that’s a stereotype. Philosophers tend to reject this way of thinking about concepts. They are more apt to say that stereotypes are required to form or use concepts though they themselves are not concepts. Jerry Fodor offers the following hypothesis:

Although it’s quite true that acquiring a concept can’t be the same thing as acquiring a stereotype, it needn’t be that learning a stereotype is just a by-product of acquiring the concept; it could rather be a stage in concept acquisition. Or, to put the suggestion the other way around, concept acquisition might proceed from stereotype formulation to concept attainment.¹⁰

If Fodor’s hypothesis is correct, stereotypes are necessary for acquiring concepts of social kinds and, also, for seeing individuals as members of those kinds.

A second view is that stereotypes do more than just permit us to acquire and use concepts. Once we categorize people, we often form further expectations about them based on their group membership. Because stereotypes play this cognitive role, some theorists identify them with the informational structures associated with concepts, rather than with concepts themselves. Psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor, for example, argue that stereotypes are schemas. Schemas are cognitive structures that “represent knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among attributes.”¹¹ On this view, stereotypes contain information about social groups, including typical and striking group properties, as well as facts about what group members “ought” to be like. It is tempting to think of schemas—and, hence, stereotypes—as a web of mental representations with generic content, which could be analyzed as having semantic meanings that parallel generics in speech.

If stereotypes were schemas as Fiske and Taylor argue, they would have incredible impacts on our everyday cognitive lives. Categorical information processing is the term Fiske and Taylor give to our automatic, unconscious mode of cognition. They distinguish it from what they call individuated information processing. Individuated information processing requires more effort, in part, because it involves paying attention to the detailed, unique features of the people around us. Schemas still play a role in individuated information processing. They function like hypotheses that we can proceed to confirm or reject, and they color our perception of evidence, as well as our attention.

Eliot Smith and Jamie DeCoster present a competing view. According to them, stereotypes are web-like associations stored in slow-learning memory. The job of slow-learning memory is to retain and deploy information about what our environment is typically like. This information is stored in the form of network-like associations. For instance, we may associate “the visual appearance of an object, its name, the action one performs with it, one’s emotional reactions to it, and so on.”¹² These associations tend to reflect our perception of frequently co-occurring properties or events. When we encounter something new in our environment, we deploy these associations to help us understand it. Indeed, we normally do so involuntarily and unconsciously. On their view, stereotypes would be networks of associations with social groups. However, the content of stereotypes may not be accurately expressed in the form of a generic proposition, or even a conjunction of propositions. Their content consists of an associative web—a web that may feature properties, images, and emotions—that does not have the logical form or structure of a proposition. Only when we engage in more careful modes of thought do we find that our stereotypes can be expressed in propositional terms.

Even when we are not actively trying to judge individuals, associative networks are supposed to permit us to form expectations about persons, just like schemas. Associative processing is the name that Smith and DeCoster give to the implicit, automatic mode of cognition that makes use of associative networks. Rule-based processing, in contrast, is the name they give to effortful and deliberate information processing. It “occurs optionally” and makes use of, as the authors put it, “symbolically represented and intentionally accessed knowledge.”¹³ During rule-based processing, they write, an individual may “effortfully examine a persuasive argument to determine its validity . . . [or] form an impression of an acquaintance by considering not only her gender but also available individuating information.”¹⁴

Does it matter if we think of stereotypes as schemas or as networks of associations? In one way, it might seem to. Stereotypes are a major contributor to implicit bias. Suppose stereotypes “lack symbolic content,” as Smith and DeCoster suggest, by which they seem to mean that stereotypes lack propositional content.¹⁵ If that were true, stereotypes couldn’t be described as implicit beliefs.¹⁶ Nor could they be accurately depicted as any other kind of mental state with generic content, for example, an “in-between belief.”¹⁷ Instead, stereotypes would have to be thought of as mere associations. Some of them would likely fit Tamar Gendler’s description of an “alief” (i.e., “a mental state that is arational, automatic, and associative”) or of “mutually co-activating semantic-affective-behavioral clusters” as Alex Madva and Michael Brownstein put it.¹⁸ However, if Fiske and Taylor’s view is right, that wouldn’t be true. Stereotypes could be described as beliefs.

Though it seems that we may have to choose between these views, for the purposes of most ethical and political theory, we actually don’t. A tempting idea is that stereotyping fails to treat persons as individuals and that failing to treat persons as individuals is an intrinsic moral wrong. If this is correct, the relevant wrong would occur whether the stereotypes used to judge individuals are beliefs or mere associations, whether they are schemas with propositional content or networks of implicit associations. The moral problem would arise from seeing persons through the lens of group membership and would occur regardless of how stereotypes are psychologically realized. Similarly, if there is no intrinsic wrong of stereotyping and there are only extrinsic wrongs, we can simply rely on the idea that stereotypes are associations with social categories that play an important role in categorizing individuals and making inferences about them. All parties in the debate can agree about the negative effects of stereotyping without agreeing on the exact nature of the mental states that cause them. Return to Stockton. She reports having snap judgments and trying to nip them in the bud. It doesn’t matter whether these judgments are underwritten by beliefs or implicit associations. She knows that “surface presentations can be misleading,” and that relying on them can do serious moral damage.¹⁹

The view at which I’ve arrived is this: stereotypes in psychology play a special role in categorizing individuals and forming expectations about them. We can think of them either as concepts of social groups or as psychological items necessary for the formation and use of such concepts, for example, schemas. Were we to express the content of our stereotypes, we would typically describe them in generic terms.

A part/whole ambiguity accompanies this view of stereotypes. For example, we may call the entire informational structure associated with a concept like “woman” a stereotype, while also calling individual parts of that structure, associated with specific claims like “women are empathetic,” stereotypes. This ambiguity is not a problem but a feature of ordinary language that any adequate view should accommodate.

Adopting this view of what a stereotype is, one can remain neutral on the underlying psychological architecture of stereotypes. Moreover, one can accommodate the possibility that the underlying processes and mental states associated with stereotyping are heterogeneous, as philosopher Jules Holroyd and psychologist Joseph Sweetman have argued.²⁰ One can also remain unbiased on the question of whether or not stereotypes are always epistemically or morally problematic. A psychological view specifies the phenomena in purely psychological terms. A stereotype, according to the view on offer, is either a concept of a social group or an informational structure necessary for the formation or use of such concepts.

1.2 What is Stereotyping?

Given the psychological view of stereotypes on offer, how should we conceptualize stereotyping as a psychological activity? There are several possibilities.

1.2.1 View #1: Stereotype Activation as Stereotyping

In social psychology, theorists distinguish stereotype activation and stereotype application. When people activate stereotypes, they gain access to type-relevant information, either consciously or unconsciously.²¹ In one study, for example, when research participants thought of Black women, words like “aggressive” and “too many children” sprang to mind.²² You might think that these people are stereotyping, even though they are merely reporting information associated with a concept. Activation of such stereotypes doesn’t necessarily imply their application or use. One might be able to prevent such associations from influencing later thoughts and actions. One might consciously disavow associations and regret their mental presence. Still, the fact remains that one’s mind would contain these associations, and one would have access to this information when thinking of the social category. On the view being considered, when one gains access to such information, even if the information has no further effects on one’s cognitive states or emotions, one counts as having stereotyped.

1.2.2 View #2: Stereotype use as Stereotyping

Another view denies that stereotype activation counts as stereotyping. Consider the research participants just mentioned. They have associations with Black women, but in order for their associations to count as stereotyping, you might think, the participants must do something with those associations. They can’t just activate their associations and proceed to ignore them. They have to use them. For instance, an employer might consciously endorse the idea that Black women are aggressive and use this piece of information when she is hiring. Or she may consciously disavow the idea but nonetheless be influenced by it, feeling on guard and defensive around job candidates who are Black women.

According to the most basic version of this view, stereotyping occurs when people use stereotypes as reasons, or when, in a more passive way, stereotypes play a causal role in their cognition and behavior. On this view, making use of stereotypes in any way whatsoever, even in the smallest possible way, would count as stereotyping.

1.2.3 View #3: Primary Influence View of Stereotyping

A third—and, in my opinion, more plausible—kind of view sets the bar for stereotyping higher, taking a cue from discrimination law. In employment discrimination cases, a prosecutor must show not only that the employer has thought about stereotypes or that a person’s group membership had some influence on their employment decisions. They must provide evidence that group membership explains the employer’s decision or judgment, that the decision or judgment happened because of an employee’s or prospective employee’s membership in a legally protected class. This idea leads in two directions.

Stereotyping happens—on one version of the view—when a person’s real or apparent group membership justifies judgments about them. To figure out whether someone has stereotyped, one would first ask a person to carefully reflect on their motives. Group membership—real or perceived—might be the sole reason for a judgment. With full awareness, a misogynist employer might reject a woman job candidate because he expects that she will be an ineffective manager based on gender stereotypes such as “women are not as assertive as men.” Stereotyping can also occur when stereotypes are not a person’s sole reason for judgment. Late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan writes: “In saying that gender played a motivating part in an employment decision, we mean that, if we asked the employer at the moment of the decision what its reasons were and if we received a truthful response, one of these reasons would be that the applicant or employee was a woman.”²³ Justice Brennan is not endorsing the primary influence view here. He is merely noting that people can have multiple motives for discrimination. Yet the court decided in the case cited above that an employer with multiple motives could rebut a charge of discrimination only if it could show that its decision would have been the same even if the plaintiff’s gender were not taken into account. In other words, an employer must prove that gender—though a relevant factor to the employer—did not play a crucial, justificatory role in its decision. Similarly, we might say that stereotyping happens when stereotypes play a crucial, justificatory role in a person’s expectations, predictions, beliefs, and decisions.

According to a variation of the third view, stereotyping happens when stereotypes play a primary causal role in people’s thoughts and actions. This view includes the kind of case that Justice Brennan has in mind, where an individual either does or would cite group membership when justifying her expectations or behavior; however, it also includes the kind of case where an individual does not and would not cite such information. After all, how we categorize others can affect what one pays attention to and ignores, how one interprets evidence, what one remembers, and one’s immediate inferences about others.²⁴ Sometimes people will not be aware that stereotypes are playing this role: the exact causal role played by stereotyping is not accessible on the basis of reflection alone. The latter view recognizes that stereotypes can drive judgment implicitly, as well as explicitly, and it counts both cases as instances of stereotyping. It is also compatible with the existence of statistical stereotyping, which occurs when people are judged based on statistical or probabilistic information associated with group membership.

1.2.4 View #4: Stereotyping as Communication

A fourth view draws on the idea that stereotyping involves communication. We stereotype, the view says, when we publicly express the generalized views of groups associated with our concepts or with their formation or use. Public expression of stereotypes can take many forms. A cartoonist might give visual expression to stereotypes, drawing Polish babushkas, American fraternity boys, or Italian lotharios. A screenwriter might create characters that embody stereotypes. A woman might whisper to a friend—“Persians are such materialists”—as they pass a Persian woman in Beverly Hills bedecked in designer clothing. On TikTok, videos lampooning (purported) group idiosyncrasies are plentiful. Regardless of the mode in which the stereotype is expressed, we can call the act of expressing it “stereotyping.” Communication of stereotypes can also be indirect. Instead of saying “Asians are bad drivers,” someone might simply say, “Steer clear of that guy,” pointing to an Asian person driving alongside them on the freeway. His utterance conveys to his interlocutor that he is forming an expectation based on the person’s apparent group membership. In such a case, we refer to both the act of forming the expectation and its expression in speech as “stereotyping.”

The four views I’ve just described can be seen as mutually exclusive. Indeed, many people might be disposed to understand them in this way. However, one can also understand them as complementary—for example, as different stages in a process. Each stage adds something new to the last. At the first stage, a person’s stereotypes are activated; at the second, a person uses the activated information in cognition; at the third stage, stereotypes become a primary cause or justification for further thoughts, emotions, or action; at the fourth stage, the stereotypes are publicly expressed. At every stage, people do something that can be considered “stereotyping,” but at each stage they are doing something unique.

Understood in this way, this nonmoralized, psychological view of stereotyping is powerful. Recall the earlier-mentioned scene from Invisible Man, where a short, broad man rudely demands a song from the novel’s narrator. When he shouts out his request, the man has not personally heard the narrator sing, nor is he relying on testimony from his comrades, nor has he witnessed anything that would indicate that the narrator sings spirituals. He simply spots an unfamiliar Black man and yells out his request. Clearly, the sight of Ellison’s narrator activated the man’s stereotypes, which he put right to use. When Jack faults him for it, the man is defensive: “Nonsense,” he replies, “all colored people sing.”

In this scene, we find all four kinds of stereotyping. The short, broad man explicitly utters a universal generalization: “all colored people sing” to justify calling out the narrator. This is an obvious case of stereotyping as communication. The thought process leading up to the utterance can also be described as stereotyping. The man expects that Ellison’s narrator sings spirituals because he is a Black man. He explicitly justifies his expectation by citing a universal generalization. Of course he would ask a random Black man to sing, he says: all Black people sing. Here we’ve got a clear case of stereotyping in the third sense: stereotypes are the primary justification for someone’s expectations. Stereotyping in the two earlier senses immediately follow: because stereotypes are the primary reason for the short, broad man’s judgments, he also must be accessing and using stereotypes.

Contrast this with Assata Shakur’s first encounter with Communist Party members, described in her autobiography. At the time, she associated communists with trench coats, salt mines, and, implicitly, with whiteness. These associations were clearly in her mind when she met actual communists. Yet her expectations were frustrated. Her new acquaintances were normal-looking students, Black men who grew up in Africa; they had never seen salt mines and did not slink around in trench coats. She quickly realized that her stereotype was a caricature, and she writes, “I felt like a bona fide clown.”²⁵

Unlike Ellison’s character, Shakur does not stereotype in all four senses. Though she begins with stereotypes, she does not automatically and thoughtlessly rely on them. She pays attention to her new acquaintances. She listens to them and tries to get a sense of them as individuals. She doesn’t say “Oh, these people are communists. They must be like this and that.” She has a critical attitude toward her stereotypes. She tests them, and, in the end, rejects them. Stereotypes were therefore not a primary cause of or justification for her ultimate judgments. Nor does she provide us any evidence that she communicated her stereotypes to her friends at the time, either directly or indirectly. However, she does report that she initially formed expectations about her friends based on the fact that they were communists. This provides evidence that she both accessed her stereotypes and used them in cognition.

A four-part view of stereotyping allows us to carefully think through these cases. In a sense, Shakur stereotyped. She accessed and used her stereotypes, and she initially formed judgments about her new acquaintances based on them. However, she did not end up stereotyping in a full-fledged sense. She relied primarily on individuating information and not on generalities about communists when she made up her mind. Compare this to the short, broad man. He stereotyped in every possible sense.

Shakur’s case also reveals something important: synchronic influence is not the same thing as diachronic stubbornness.²⁶ At the moment she meets her new friends, Shakur exhibits the third level of stereotyping. Yet she reaches this level of stereotyping in a way that is open to change over time. She is not stuck relying primarily on stereotypes. As time goes by, she gathers more evidence about her friends as individuals, revising her expectations of them, as well as her view of communists in general.²⁷

Given this analysis, here is what I propose as definitions suited for the purposes of an explanatory project:

To stereotype a group is to characterize a group as a collective entity.

To stereotype an individual is to judge that person by group membership.

A strength of these definitions is that they are broad enough to cover stereotyping in (nearly) all its forms.

1.4 Objection—But Stereotyping is Morally Bad, Always!

Some may object to this way of understanding stereotyping. A morally neutral view of stereotypes and stereotyping, you might think, misses something essential. As Lawrence Blum puts it, “to call something a ‘stereotype’, or to say that someone is engaging in stereotyping, is to condemn what is so characterized.”²⁸ If he is right, stereotypes and stereotyping are “thick” concepts. The latter term, famously coined by Bernard Williams, is meant to apply to concepts like courage, cruelty, and kindness. These concepts are not merely descriptive; they have a moral valence. To call someone courageous is to praise them; to call someone cruel is to condemn their behavior. Similarly, one might think, to say that someone is stereotyping entails that that person is worthy of moral criticism.

As a historical matter of fact, it’s worth pointing out that the term did not always have negative connotations. In the late eighteenth century, French printers developed a new technology that allowed books, journals, and newspapers to be cheaply and easily mass-produced.²⁹ They fashioned thin metal plates, affixing images and words to them, in effect, creating stamps, which could then be used in printing presses. Printers called the metal plates stereotypes, and the process of printing with them stereotyping. While misinformation and prejudice were spread by this technology, it also had positive social impacts, enabling the amplification of marginalized voices and, with them, the messages of burgeoning social movements, including the antislavery and women’s rights movements. Abolitionists sent stereotypes bearing antislavery propaganda South. Their intended audience: Southern whites. In an 1847 letter, Northern abolitionist James Fuller reports to a compatriot that a popular antislavery treatise was out of print, but that “Stereotyped plates may be used by any persons free of cost—that the work can be thus obtained at a cost of three cents.”³⁰ He emphasizes the good that stereotyping this document would achieve. By 1850, you would be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t know what a stereotype plate was. Metaphorical uses of the term began to crop up. Anything that was continually repeated could be a stereotype, including images and ideas on the page. It became possible to think of people as embodying stereotypes.

In 1922, in a monograph called Public Opinion, Walter Lippman, a Pulitzer-winning journalist and a former student of Harvard Psychologist William James, referred to stereotypes as “the pictures inside the heads of human beings.”³¹ His book was a reflection on the power of propaganda and social media; but, just as much, it was a reflection on the nature of the human mind. For the most part, stereotyping comes off as a corrupt process, something that keeps us from perceiving what is true and beautiful and real in the world, something that leaves us vulnerable to manipulation at the hands of others. However, Lippmann also emphasizes stereotyping’s epistemic and cognitive utility. “Were there no practical uniformities in the environment,” he writes, “there would be no economy and only error in the human habit of accepting foresight for sight. But there are uniformities sufficiently accurate, and the need of economizing attention is so inevitable, that the abandonment of all stereotypes for a wholly innocent approach to experience would impoverish human life.”³² This is a stunning endorsement, despite its ambivalence. Without stereotypes and stereotyping, life would be impoverished.

In the 1920s and 1930s, stereotyping became a subject for the burgeoning field of social psychology, where it was linked closely to prejudice. At the same time, printing technology advanced. Stereotype plates became outmoded technology much like cassette tapes and compact discs in the music industry decades later. In 1935, in the Handbook of Social Psychology, Gordon Allport wrote about stereotypes, calling them “attitudes that result in gross over-simplifications of experience and in pre-judgements.”³³ By Allport’s account, stereotypes were the epistemically and morally suspect kind of generalizations, and stereotyping was the bad kind of generalizing. By midcentury, the psychologized terms entered popular lexicon, and earlier terminology faded from view.

Because the terms stereotype and stereotyping still have negative baggage, some theorists may want to avoid adopting a view that is nonmoralized and takes no stand on the epistemic or moral characteristics of stereotyping. For example, in her groundbreaking book Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women, Virginia Valian frames her discussion of gender inequality in terms of schemas rather than stereotypes. “The term schema is broader and more neutral than the term stereotype,” she writes, “which tends to connote an inaccurate and negative view of a social group.”³⁴ Such usage, you might think, accords better with a common-sense understanding of stereotyping. In a world where people often use stereotyping to refer to the bad kind of social generalizing, why swim against the tide?

Here is what I think is true: many people have a moralistic impulse when they hear the word stereotype. They tend to jump to the conclusion that whatever is being described is objectionable. But rarely do they hold this position firmly. Someone will call something a stereotype, then add “but it’s true” or “but it’s not bad.” Such amendments suggest that people are not closed off to thinking of stereotypes in a more neutral way, that is, as group associations that can be good or bad, true or false, or neither. They also suggest that falsity and moral objectionableness are not built into the very idea of a stereotype. The idea, in common sense, merely seems to be that stereotypes are often epistemically or morally problematic, not that they are by definition that way. A nonmoralized view of stereotypes is well suited to capturing this aspect of ordinary ways of thinking and speaking about stereotypes.

One may object, “But you are begging the question! Theorists like Blum say that stereotypes and stereotyping are always bad, and you are merely presupposing that they are not.” I would argue that no normative questions are being begged. The definitions that I am defending say that to stereotype someone is to judge that person by presumed or real group membership and to stereotype a group is to characterize it as a collective entity. For people who adopt this view, it can—and should—be an open question whether stereotyping someone always involves epistemic or moral failure. The view itself says nothing about this. It is neutral on normative questions. Its neutrality is consistent both with the conclusion that stereotyping is sometimes morally and epistemically problematic and with the conclusion that it is always morally and epistemically problematic. Neither conclusion is initially ruled out. Both are possible, pending further analysis.

We have come to the heart of the matter. The initial objection to my view was that it leaves out an important thought, namely, that stereotyping is inherently problematic. But why should we endorse this thought? If it is to have any persuasive force and not be a mere stipulation, it must be supported by arguments. We can’t simply think in a circle: defining stereotyping as the bad kind of generalizing and then explaining what makes certain cases of generalizing bad by saying, “that’s stereotyping.” This kind of strategy explains nothing. A better strategy would be to argue that the very act of stereotyping involves moral or epistemic failure. Notice, however, that this strategy succeeds only if the substantive, normative claims justifying it are correct. Since one cannot be sure what’s morally wrong with stereotyping in advance, a psychological view of the phenomena tentatively stands, pending further philosophical investigation.

1.5 Objection—The Account is Too Broad

Let me now circle back to my original definitions. To stereotype a group, according to my first definition, is to characterize a group as a collective entity. To stereotype an individual is to judge that person by real or apparent group membership. One might object that these definitions are overbroad. Yet broadness is a virtue, in my view. These definitions are pitched at a high level of generality because there is no other way to identify the common thread in an otherwise diverse set of cases. Acts of stereotyping may be spontaneous or calculated. They may be epistemically defective or promote knowledge.³⁵ In terms of who can be stereotyped, the same kind of complexity holds. People can be targeted for stereotyping on the basis of membership in socially salient groups such as race or gender, or on the basis of membership in groups that are not socially salient, such as professional affiliation.³⁶ It is even possible that people can be stereotyped on the basis of novel, gerrymandered social groups created in experimental conditions.³⁷

Only expansive definitions like the ones that I am proposing are able to capture the full range of phenomena that fall under the label stereotyping, and which ought to be considered in an ethical investigation of stereotyping. These definitions have other benefits too. Despite their generality, they convey crucial and even surprising information. They announce that stereotyping involves “judgment” and is connected to core features of human rationality, including categorization, generalization, and induction.³⁸ Moreover, the locution of “judging” people by group membership also flags the evaluative nature of stereotyping, thereby calling attention to the fact that stereotyping has two intertwined dimensions: a thin, epistemic aspect and a thicker evaluative aspect (Chapter 2).

One might press the complaint further, however. Think about the Fodor citation I used earlier. In that quote, Fodor doesn’t say that stereotypes pertain to social kinds. He says something more radical, namely that we need stereotypes to form any kind of concept whatsoever. To have a concept of a chair, we need a stereotype of chairs. To have a concept of a lightning storm, we require a stereotype of lightning storms. Views that associate stereotypes with schemas are similar. We have schemas associated with almost any concept. Widening the view threatens to dilute the focus on my inquiry, one might argue, taking us away from the common-sense view that stereotypes concern social groups specifically.

This objection does not worry me. Quite the opposite, actually. While I am asking a more limited question about stereotyping social groups and the individuals in them, I am also interested in the more expansive question. When and why is it wrong to generalize about nonhuman animals, events, objects, and processes that we find in the world? Is there anything morally wrong with stereotyping Pitbulls as cold-hearted killers, or chickens as dim-witted? What about dandelions? Is it morally problematic to conceptualize them as weeds? My theory of wrongful stereotyping is likely to cover these cases too, explaining why and when generalizing and kind-based induction is morally wrong. That’s an exciting possibility, as far as I am concerned. It reveals that the puzzle of stereotyping can be reframed as a puzzle about the ethics of generalizing.

It’s also worth noting that my view is broad in a third sense. Through this chapter, I’ve sometimes referred to my view of stereotyping as “psychological.” But humans are not the only kind of agents that can stereotype. Nonhuman animals might stereotype too, classifying certain kinds of animals as prey or predators, for example. Other kinds of computational systems can also stereotype. My definitions of stereotyping are compatible with these facts. Algorithms may form and use group generalizations based the datasets on which they’ve been trained. Hence, they can stereotype groups. They can also judge persons by group membership. Indeed, they are often explicitly designed to do so. Researchers working on “algorithmic bias” and “algorithmic discrimination” make this point repeatedly.³⁹ It is a positive feature of my view, from my perspective, that it has the potential to classify judgments made by nonhuman agents as instances of stereotyping.

1.6 Stereotypes and Stereotyping in Culture

Here is a final objection to my definitions of stereotypes and stereotyping: they seem to ignore the cultural existence of stereotypes and stereotyping. A purely psychological account of stereotyping, the objection goes, makes it seem as if stereotypes occur “in the heads” of individuals. Yet stereotypes are social and cultural in nature. They aren’t simply concepts or informational structures located in people’s heads.

Return to the definitions on offer. To stereotype a group is to characterize a group as a collective entity. To stereotype an individual is to judge that person by group membership. These definitions are compatible with the claim that stereotyping exists in culture. Indeed, that’s one of my key arguments in their favor. When investigating the ethics of stereotyping, one requires a definition that encompasses stereotyping in language, psychology, computational systems, and culture.

One can find stereotypes embodied in film and novels. They exist in posters, postcards, and advertising campaigns. Stereotypes can also manifest in in visual art.⁴⁰ In Invisible Man, soon after the narrator is confronted by the short broad man, he returns to home to notice an object in his rented space: “a cast iron figure of a very black, red-lipped, wide-mouthed Negro, whose white eyes stared up at me form the floor, his face an enormous grin.”⁴¹ Not only does this artifact take the physical form of a stereotype; it enacts stereotyping. The object makes a claim about what Black people are like, and especially what their social role is vis-à-vis white people. “It was a bank, a piece of Americana,” explains the narrator, “the kind of bank which, if a coin is placed in the hand and a lever pressed upon the back, will raise its arm and flip the coin into a grinning mouth.”⁴² He seizes the object in a fit of rage and smashes it against a pipe.⁴³ Ellison’s narrator knows the meaning of a minstrel image.

In this spirit, Patricia Hill Collins argues that stereotypes are “controlling” cultural images and ideas.⁴⁴ They are controlling, in part, because they are used to maintain the social order and, even, enact domination. Proof in point is the bank encountered by Ellison’s narrator. This object sparks a full-blown emotional meltdown. Paul Taylor explains why when he observes that, “stereotypes and stock figures eclipse Black personalities and render them invisible.”⁴⁵ They also serve as “mirrors, fetishes, or markers of deviance,” serving as foils for the alleged virtues of whiteness.⁴⁶

Cultural stereotypes often exert a power over people, whether one endorses them or not. In The Imperative of Integration, Elizabeth Anderson describes pulling into a gas station in Detroit to check her car’s oil and being approached by a Black man. “Don’t worry, I’m not here to rob you,” he tells her, holding his hands in the air.⁴⁷ He then offers to check her car’s oil. She accepts. “This encounter,” writes Anderson, “illustrates the public standing of racial stereotypes as default images that influence the interactions of Black and white strangers in unstructured settings, even when both parties are prepared to disavow them.”⁴⁸ Both she—a white woman—and the Black stranger reject stigmatizing racial stereotypes of Black men. Yet they still have to enact “a little ritual” in order to demonstrate to one another that this was the case, a fact that underscored the stereotype—and their unequal relationship.⁴⁹

Conceptualizing cultural stereotypes as controlling in nature is incredibly helpful. The account puts front and center the prescriptive elements of stereotypes, as well as their ideological function. Stereotypes are about power, and they exert power.⁵⁰ This fact can be easily lost if you adopt a purely psychological analysis of stereotypes and stereotyping. Cultural stereotypes don’t simply describe the world in ways that can be deemed true or false; their function is to shape the world—and individuals—in particular ways.⁵¹ Often their function is to reinforce oppressive social hierarchies, as Collins emphasizes. On the other hand, cultural stereotypes have the potential to control in ways that are not morally bad—and may even be morally good. “Grandparents are wise” is a stereotype, for instance, but it is one that seeks to “raise up” rather than oppress older people by cultivating respect for them. Nonetheless, it aims to direct how people are seen and treated in society, hence, to control in a broad sense.

The upshot of this analysis is that my definitions of stereotypes and stereotyping must be understood through at least two complementary frameworks. The sociological frame deployed by Collins is necessary for explaining why certain kinds of stereotyping in individual psychology can be widespread and how they relate to group dynamics, including the maintenance of group hierarchies. The psychological frame that I spent most of this chapter elaborating is required to fully analyze the impacts of stereotyping on individual experience and social interactions. Both frames are required to fully understand how stereotypes and stereotyping function, including how they facilitate oppression.

¹ Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 311–12.

² The kind of generic on which I focus here is called a bare plural generic. There are two other kinds of generics: habitual generics, such as “John smokes,” and definite generics, such as “the computer is responsible for students’ short attention span.”

³ Leslie, “Generics and The Structure of the Mind.”

⁴ Leslie, “Real Men: Polysemy or Implicature?”

⁵ Leslie does not offer an account of when generics of this kind are true. She says only that certain generic statements will have dual senses, making claims that are both descriptive and normative.

⁶ Ariel Cohen, Think Generic: The Meaning and Use of Generic Sentences (Stanford: Stanford University Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1999).

⁷ For variants on this view, see Jeffrey Pelletier and Nicholas Asher, “Generics and Defaults,” in J. van Benthem and A. Ter Meulen (eds), Handbook of Logic and Language (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997), 1125–77, and Michael Thompson, “Apprehending Human Form,” in Anthony O’Hear (ed), Modern Moral Philosophy: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 47–74.

⁸ Stockon, “Ezra Klein Interview Kathryn Bond Stockton.”

⁹ For a classic articulation of the prototype view of concepts, see Eleanor Rosch, “Principles of Categorization,” in Eleanor Rosch and Barbara Lloyd (eds), Cognition and Categorization (Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum), 27–48. A competing view is that exemplars define our categories. The category of game, for example, is constituted by a set of specific examples that, although different from one another, all count as paradigm cases of games. For an example of such a view, see Edward Smith and Douglas Medin, Categories and Concepts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Other psychologists adopt a hybrid view in which some of our categories are fixed by prototypes while others are fixed by exemplars. See Eliot Smith and M. A. Zarate, “Exemplar and Prototype Use in Social Categorization,” Social Cognition 8, no. 3 (1990), 243–62.

¹⁰ Fodor, LOT 2, 150.

¹¹ Fiske and Taylor, Social Cognition, 98.

¹² Smith and DeCoster, “Dual Process Models,”113.

¹³ ibid, 111.

¹⁴ ibid, 111–12.

¹⁵ ibid, 111.

¹⁶ For an argument that stereotypes are implicit beliefs, see Mandelbaum, “Attitude, Inference, and Association.”

¹⁷ Schwitzgebel, “Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs.”

¹⁸ Gendler, “Alief in Action and Reaction”; Madva and Brownstein, “Stereotypes, Prejudice, and the Taxonomy of the Implicit Mind,” 629.

¹⁹ Stockton, “Ezra Klein Interviews Kathryn Stockton.”

²⁰ Holroyd and Sweetman, “The Heterogeneity of Implicit Bias.”

²¹ Contemporary research about stereotypes is built on the distinction between access and application. See, for instance, Patricia Devine, “Stereotypes and Prejudice: Their Automatic and Controlled Components,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56, no. 1 (1989), 5–18; Ziva Kundra and Lisa Sinclair, “Motivated Reasoning with Stereotypes: Activation, Application, and Inhibition,” Psychological Inquiry 10, no. 1 (1999), 12–22. For a helpful philosophical discussion, see Alex Madva, “Virtue, Social Knowledge, and Implicit Bias,” in Jennifer Saul and Michael Brownstein (eds), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 191–215.

²² Rose Weitz and Leonard Gordon, “Images of Black Women Among Anglo College Students,” Sex Roles 28, no. 1–2 (1993), 9–34, at 26.

²³ Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 288 (1989), 250; see note 84.

²⁴ Here are four ways in which stereotypes affect cognition. (1) Attention. Humans have limited attention. We can’t focus on everything in our visual or auditory field at once. Stereotypes affect what we end up paying attention to and what we ignore. See Dennis White and D. Carlston et al., “Consequences of Schemata for Attention, Impressions, and Recall in Complex Social Interactions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, no. 3 (1983), 538–49. (2) Interpretation of Ambiguous Behavior. Stereotypes also affect our impressions of other people and how we interpret their behavior. See Birt Duncan, “Differential Social Perception and Attribution of Intergroup Violence: Testing the Lower Limits of Stereotyping of Blacks,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34, no. 4 (1976), 590–8; Andrew H. Sagar and Janet Ward Schofield, “Racial and Behavioral Cues in Black and White Children’s Perceptions of Ambiguously Aggressive Acts,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39, No. 4 (1980), 590–8; Joshua Correll, B. Park, et al., “The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 6 (2002), 1314–29; Keith B. Payne, “Conceptualizing Control in Social Cognition: How Executive Functioning Modulates the Expression of Automatic Stereotyping,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89, No. 4 (2005), 488–503; Anthony Greenwald et al., “Targets of Discrimination: Effects of Race on Responses to Weapons Holders,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 39, no. 4 (2003), 399–405. (3) Predictions about Individuals. Stereotypes also help us to make predictions about individuals. Sometimes these predictions are even self-fulfilling. For experiments showing this phenomenon at work, see Mark Snyder, et al., “Social Perception and Interpersonal Behavior: On the Self-Fulfilling Nature of Social Stereotypes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35, No. 9 (1977), 656–66. For criticisms of this research, see Jussim, Social Perception and Social Reality; (4) Memory. Research also shows that stereotypes affect our memories. A classic study on the subject, whose results have been widely replicated, see Reid Hastie and P. Kumar, “Person Memory: Personality Traits as Organizing Principles in Memory for Behaviors,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37, no. 1 (1979), 25–38. In certain circumstances, however, the results have been found not to hold. See Charles Stangor and D. Ruble, “Strength of Expectancies and Memory for Social Information: What We Remember Depends on How Much We Know,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 25, no. 1 (1989), 18–35. Stangor and Ruble find that people with considerable knowledge in a particular domain will tend to better remember stereotype-consistent information in that domain.

²⁵ Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books and Zed Books, 1987), 151.

²⁶ I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer at Hypatia.

²⁷ Not all cases will be as clear as the two I’ve mentioned. We might think of cases as inhabiting points on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, there will be clear cases in which people rely primarily on stereotypes in cognition; on the other end of the spectrum, there will be clear cases in which people rely on individuating information. A range of mixed cases will exist in the middle.

²⁸ Blum, “Stereotypes and Stereotyping: A Moral Analysis.”

²⁹ The Oxford English Dictionary states the first recorded use of the term stereotype in 1798. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/189956?rskey=uHbEVK&result=1&isAdvanced=false [Accessed December 18, 2014]

³⁰ Thank you to Hollis Robbins for pressing me on the history of stereotypes in print media and its connection to Black voice, and for offering this example. See Fuller, James C. to Gerrit Smith, January 19, 1847, in Syracuse University Library, Special Collections Research Center Website. https://library.syracuse.edu/digital/exhibits/u/undergroundrr/case4.htm [Accessed June 26, 2024].

³¹ Lippman, Public Opinion.

³² ibid, 60.

³³ Gordon Allport, “Attitudes” in Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by C. Murchison (Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1935), 798–844. In his 1954 treatise The Nature of Prejudice, Allport linked stereotypes and prejudice, and he identified prejudice as a negative attitude. See Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (New York: Basic Books, 1972). See also Rupert Brown, Prejudice: Its Social Psychology (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010).

³⁴ Virginia Valian, Why so Slow: The Advancement of Women (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 104.

³⁵ For arguments that entail stereotyping can promote knowledge, see Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow; Endre Begby, “The Epistemology of Prejudice,” Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (2013), 90–9; Louise Antony, “Bias: Friend or Foe? Reflections on Saulish Skepticism,” in Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul (eds), Implicit Bias and Philosophy: Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 157–90; Erin Beeghly, “Bias and Knowledge: Two Metaphors,” in Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva (eds), An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind (New York: Routledge, 2020), 77–98; Endre Begby, The Epistemology of Prejudice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

³⁶ For a definition of social salience, see Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal, 30. He writes: “A group is socially salient if perceived membership of it is important to the structure of social interactions across a wide range of social contexts.” It should go without saying that social groups can be intersectional in nature. See Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”; Garry, “Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender.”

³⁷ For examples of stereotyping involve gerrymandered groups, see Marjorie Rhodes, Sarah-Jane Leslie, and Christina M. Tworek, “Cultural Transmission of Social Essentialism,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101, no. 34 (2012), 13526–31.

³⁸ Fiske and Taylor, Social Cognition; Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

³⁹ Gabbrielle Johnson, “Algorithmic Bias: On the Implicit Biases of Social Technology,” Synthese 198 no. 10 (2020), 9941–61; Paul and Rana, “U.S. Charges Facebook with Racial Discrimination in Targeted Housing Ads.”

⁴⁰ Shen-yi Liao and Bryce Huebner, “Oppressive Things,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103, no. 1 (2021), 92–113, at 98.

⁴¹ Ellison, Invisible Man, 319.

⁴² ibid.

⁴³ Myisha Cherry, The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

⁴⁴ Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 5.

⁴⁵ Paul C. Taylor, Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 52.

⁴⁶ ibid, 55. See also Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

⁴⁷ Anderson, The Imperative of Integration, 53.

⁴⁸ ibid.

⁴⁹ ibid.

⁵⁰ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

⁵¹ Tadeusz Wiesław Zawidski, Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013); Victoria McGeer, “Mind-Making Practices: The Social Infrastructure of Self-knowing Agency and Responsibility,” Philosophical Explorations 18, no. 2 (2015), 259–81; Sally Haslanger, “Cognition as a Social Skill,” Australasian Philosophical Review 3, no. 1 (2019), 5–25.

2 To Stereotype Is to Discriminate

Though Chapter 1 provides an adequate starting point for an explanatory project, it also leaves something crucial unsaid. Stereotyping is related to another phenomenon of interest: dscirimination. Stereotyping causes discrimination when people articulate stereotypes in speech and act on them. A second possibility, which this chapter will explore, is that stereotyping itself constitutes a form of discrimination. Call this the constitutive claim.

For some, the constitutive claim will sound like a truism. In “Two Kinds of Discrimination,” Adrian Piper distinguishes between political and cognitive discrimination.¹ Both are psychological in nature, on her view, and relate to stereotyping. The former—political discrimination—is “a manifest attitude” that represents someone as inferior based on apparent group membership. The latter—cognitive discrimination—is a capacity “to distinguish between properties.”² In Born Free and Equal, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen says—picking up on Piper’s second definition—that his theory of what’s morally wrong with discrimination applies to “cognitive discrimination” in the exact same way as discriminatory behaviors and policies.³ In Routledge Handbook to the Ethics of Discrimination, Katherine Puddifoot labels stereotyping a form of “epistemic discrimination.”⁴ Not everyone is happy with this kind of language, however. Steeped in legal definitions that require action for discrimination, some may find the constitutive claim absurd. The constitutive claim entails something that will be surprising—even dangerous—to some, namely, that we can (sometimes) wrong people in virtue of how we perceive them or what we believe about them, even if we don’t act on discriminatory cognitions.⁵ How could it possibly be discrimination to stereotype someone “in your head,” one might think, if you keep your thoughts to yourself and don’t act on them?

In this chapter, I will argue that the constitutive claim has compelling arguments in its favor. To stereotype really is to discriminate. Evidence supporting the constitutive is multifaceted. We can treat people in a discriminatory way in virtue of what we think about them, how we judge them (quickly or slowly), how we act or fail to act toward them, and the standards and rules to which we subject them. This result puts a stamp of approval on the constitutive claim and reveals its deeper philosophical foundations. But it also has implications for the puzzle of stereotyping.

2.1 What It Means to Stereotype

Let me begin by reminding readers how I define stereotyping. In psychological terms, stereotyping refers to a range of cognitive acts and processes that bear a family resemblance to one another.⁶ Groups as a whole can be stereotyped. To stereotype a group is to characterize a group as a collective entity. Characterizations might take the form of beliefs about typical group traits, mental imagery, or webs of associations with informational significance.⁷ Individuals can also be stereotyped. To stereotype an individual is to judge that person by real or apparent group membership.

This last definition—simple as it may sound—hides a great deal of complexity. Consider a camp counselor at a new summer camp who categorizes my six-year-old as a boy because they are wearing athletic shorts and a cap. This person stereotypes my child, according to the above definition. Here is what that means in the context: they categorize my child as a social type based on mere appearances. When you categorize someone as a social type—for example, as a certain gender—based on how they look, you’re stereotyping someone. Stereotyping in this sense involves presumptive classification.

Often individuals are stereotyped in ways that go beyond presumptive classification. In Ellison’s Invisible Man, the white partygoer does not just categorize someone as Black; he also believes that this person sings spirituals because of his race. At the Apple store, an employee might classify a customer as elderly but also suspect that they are technologically inept because of their age. Running into an emergency room, a panicked parent might presume that a person in a white coat is a doctor and can save his child’s life. Knowing that a colleague identifies as genderqueer, one might expect that their pronouns are likely they/them.⁸ What unifies these diverse instances of stereotyping—which involve a range of cognitive states such as beliefs, expectations, hunches, and suspicions—is that they involve “judging” persons by group membership in a broad sense.

Some theorists contend that stereotyping occurs in perception as well.⁹ A fellow philosopher once told me that she grew up believing that she was a loud person. Often people would comment on the loudness of her voice. Sometimes they suggested that she try to quiet down. As woman of Asian descent, she was expected to be soft-spoken and deferential. There are at least two ways to analyze what she experienced. One possibility is that people around her registered the decibel-level of her voice and then judged it to be too loud for an Asian woman. A second possibility is that people literally heard her voice as louder than they would have because of her presumed social identity. If so, their aural experiences were warped by stereotyping. Though it is unclear how best to analyze the case, we have an intriguing possibility on our hands. Stereotyping someone might consist in hearing or seeing that person in ways that are driven by their real or perceived group membership. If so, stereotyping may manifest as distinctive sensory experience.

So far in this book, I’ve mostly documented the “thin” epistemic dimension of stereotyping. To judge an individual by group membership in a thin sense is to classify them as a social type and, typically, to form further cognitions or perceptions related to them as a result. However, stereotyping also has a second, “thicker” dimension. To judge also means to “make an assessment, evaluation, or appraisal.”¹⁰ When we stereotype people, we judge them in this more loaded evaluative sense as well.

The evaluative dimensions of stereotyping derive from two sources. In How the Body Shapes The Mind, Shaun Gallagher observes: humans have “a pragmatic way of being in the world.”¹¹ For this reason, we invariably take up “an evaluative understanding” of others, the world, and ourselves.¹² The white partygoer in Ellison’s novel is a perfect example. His goals impact the stereotypical property he attributes to the narrator (i.e., an aptitude for singing). He is at the party to have a good time. As a result, he notices the narrator and invests his presumed ability to sing with positive significance. For agents with different goals, this ability might have been perceived in a neutral or even negative light. So it goes for all acts of cognition, if Gallagher and others are right.¹³ Goals and interests shape what we think, pulling our thoughts in certain directions and giving them valence. The social world writ large also infuses our cognition with meaning. When we judge others by group membership, we situate them in particular “places” within the social world. Group hierarchies and power relations often—if not always—structure the normative expectations associated with these places. The white partygoer in Invisible Man is a case in point. He presumes that the narrator will—and perhaps even should—embrace a stereotypical role: the role of a happy-go-lucky Black entertainer, eager to cater to the whims of a white audience. Though acts of stereotyping differ in their evaluative and prescriptive implications, all acts of stereotyping involve placing people in norm-laden and prescriptively charged social locations.

2.2 Stereotyping as Discrimination

In this section, I discuss two ways to define discrimination. Both definitions entail that acts of stereotyping—even in thought—constitute a form of discrimination, either sometimes or always.

2.2.1 Discrimination as Perceiving, Noting, or Making Distinctions

The first definition of discrimination in the Oxford English Dictionary reads as follows: “the action of perceiving, noting, or making a distinction between things.”¹⁴ Definitions in this vein stretch back to at least the seventeenth century. In 1678, E. Phillips offers the following characterization: “Discrimination, putting a difference between one thing and another.”¹⁵ In 1864, F. C. Bowen talks of “a conscious discrimination of those respects in which it [a thing] is similar to others from those in which it is unlike them.”¹⁶ When contemporary theorists investigate the ethics of discrimination, they sometimes adopt definitions in this family. Deborah Hellman provides one example. In When Is Discrimination Wrong? she argues that to discriminate is “to draw a distinction between people on the basis of a certain trait: race, the letter of a person’s last name, sex, appearance, ability, age, or another attribute.”¹⁷ Hellman offers the example of a mother who forces her toddler to take a nap but doesn’t impose on her teenager.¹⁸ Is that discrimination? Yes, in a morally neutral sense of the word, Hellman explains. Is it morally wrongful? Absolutely not.

If drawing distinctions entails discriminating, stereotyping is always a form of discrimination. That’s because acts of stereotyping necessarily require “perceiving or noting or making a distinction” between allegedly different social kinds. The camp counselor who stereotyped my child as a boy, for example, noted gendered patterns of dress among kids. But they did something else as well. They carved up the social world in a particular way and assigned my child a specific, evaluatively charged place within it.¹⁹ The same goes for stereotyping when it takes other forms. The white partygoer in Ellison’s novel believes that “all” Black people sing spirituals. He does not have this belief about white people. Group-specific distinctions such as this are always in the background when people stereotype. One might therefore characterize stereotyping in human psychology and other computational systems as a kind of cognitive discrimination, or classify it as a variety of epistemic discrimination, as writers increasingly have done.²⁰ The American Psychological Association (APA), the premier professional organization of psychologists in the United States, already recognizes the existence of cognitive discrimination. The organization defines the term as follows: “cognitive discrimination: the ability to make distinctions between concepts and to distinguish between examples and non-examples of a particular concept.”²¹ According to the APA definition, a person would discriminate if they categorized an unfamiliar person as female based on their gender presentation. On my view, cognitive discrimination can also happen after categorization too, for example, when people use gender or racial stereotypes to make predictions about individuals. My suggestion builds on and extends an official definition.²² For that reason, readers shouldn’t see the constitutive claim as a philosophical curiosity. The largest organization of psychologists in the United States already embraces it.

2.2.2 Discrimination as Differential, Unequal, or Disadvantageous Treatment

A second family of views defines discrimination in terms of treatment. One popular view is that to discriminate is to treat people in a disadvantageous way because of their presumed group membership.²³ This view blossoms into a range of competing views when theorists either (a) make it more specific or (b) challenge its adequacy and advance alternatives to it. A more expansive view is that discrimination consists in differential treatment based on group membership. The key issue for evaluating the constitutive claim is this: what counts as treatment?

Start with this observation. It’s commonly said that laws and policies “treat” different groups differently. When a claim like this is advanced, the suggestion is not that these entities—for example, the laws themselves—are literally behaving in particular ways. Treatment here consists in the articulation or imposition of group-specific norms, permissions, obligations, or regulations. For instance, Executive Order 9066—signed by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1942—treated Japanese Americans in a distinctive way by mandating that they relocate to internment camps. Voting laws in the U.S. South treated Black citizens in a distinctive way by requiring them to pass poll tests before voting. Corporate policy at 1950s law firms treated women in a particular way by prohibiting their hire. Call this the regulative view of discriminatory treatment. In each of the above cases, the treatment in question was not just differential. It was profoundly unequal.

A second paradigmatic kind of “treatment” occurs in behavior. Call this the behavioral view of discriminatory treatment. In an interview, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor once offered the following example.²⁴ When she graduated from Stanford Law School in 1952, she could not find a job. Every firm that she called told her the same thing: “We don’t hire women.” It made no difference that she had graduated at the top of her class. This is a paradigmatic example of discriminatory treatment in the behavioral sense. If you were a white man who graduated at the top of your class at Stanford in the 1950s, you weren’t turned away with a few words when you inquired about a job. You were spoken to politely, sought after, courted. If you appeared to be an American of Japanese heritage in 1942, police would ask you for your papers. If you were a Black person trying to vote in 1950, you may have a poll test pushed on you. In such cases, people are being treated in discriminatory ways in a literal behavioral sense owing to their group membership, reflecting wider social practices. Given these two paradigmatic senses of discriminatory treatment, the constitutive claim may seem dubious. But further investigation dispels the impression. Below I present three arguments in its favor. Together these arguments reveal a rich, multifaceted basis for the constitutive claim.

The epistemic shortcut argument. The first argument notes that stereotyping is often a shortcut, and it goes as follows:

To stereotype is—often if not always—to take a shortcut.

Taking a shortcut with respect to someone can be discriminatory.

Stereotyping—qua shortcut—can constitute discriminatory treatment.

Start with premise 1: to stereotype someone is—often if not always—to take a shortcut.²⁵ The claim here is plausible. Stereotyping is a comparatively fast way of judging individuals. Instead of having to seek out personalized information about individuals, stereotyping allows us to judge persons (e.g., form beliefs, expectations, and predictions about them) based on their presumed group membership. The method is efficient, and it obviates the need to pursue person-specific information.

Premise 2 is also intuitive: Taking a shortcut with respect to someone can be discriminatory. To illustrate the premise, consider a case described by Frantz Fanon.²⁶ On a train, a Black man is looking for the dining car. He asks another passenger for directions: “Excuse me, could you please tell me where the restaurant car is?” The man—who is white— responds in pidgin: “Sure sonny, you go corridor, you go straight, go one car, go two car, go three car, you there.”²⁷ What has just happened? One possibility is that the white passenger has been intentionally rude. He knows that he is interacting with a fluent French speaker but responds in pidgin in order to express racial contempt. A second possibility—and the one on which I will focus here—is that white passenger mistakenly presumes that the Black man lacks fluency in French because he has not been paying sufficient attention. Instead of stopping for a minute and carefully listening, he stereotypes. Was taking this shortcut discriminatory? If it were, a hypothetical would be true. Had a fellow white man approached him, the white train passenger would have listened more carefully, perhaps put down his newspaper. When racially motivated, taking epistemic shortcuts constitutes discriminatory treatment.

One might wonder what notion of “discriminatory treatment” underlies premise 2. According to one line of thought, it is the behavioral notion. The idea here is not that stereotypic snap judgments constitute behavior per se. Rather, the view is that shortcuts must be contrasted with the relevant alternative (i.e., more laborious and careful ways of judging individuals). More laborious methods of judgment involve doing things in a literal behavioral sense: asking questions, listening carefully, looking up information online, and so forth. Keeping this contrast in mind, here is the proposal. If stereotyping were discriminatory for the reasons articulated in this argument, the white train passenger would have taken a longer epistemic route, hence would have behaved differently, if a visibly white stranger had approached him. The counterfactual behavior is what grounds the claim that stereotyping constitutes discriminatory treatment. According to a second line of thought, shortcuts are best understood as failures of action. Instead of gathering more information, the white passenger “stays in his head” and stereotypes. This failure to act and pursue better information is discriminatory because it is racially motivated.²⁸

Together these two premises provide an elegant, relatively uncontroversial argument for the constitutive claim. If acts of stereotyping involve taking shortcuts and taking shortcuts can constitute discriminatory treatment, then stereotyping can sometimes constitute discriminatory treatment. The “sometimes” here is a result of two scenarios. In some cases, people stereotype because they are pressed for time and would have used an epistemic shortcut no matter what the presumed social identity of the stereotyped person. In other cases, people stereotype because they are making judgments in conditions of extremely limited information and would be forced to stereotype anyone. Even so, Fanon’s example gives us reason to believe that people who stereotype are sometimes discriminating. They judge people from socially marginalized groups in fast ways that disadvantage them, rather than using more attentive, careful epistemic methods that would require more effort.

The converse also happens. Consider the experience of Fatima Cody Stanford, a Black doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. Stanford recounts being on a flight when a fellow passenger began exhibiting signs of medical distress.²⁹ She went into triage mode. Cabin staff approached her and asked whether she was a doctor. Stanford produced her medical license with her name and the title “M.D.” printed clearly on it. The flight attendant perused it, then sent another flight attendant to take a second look. Stanford was barraged with further questions as she helped the passenger in distress. While annoyed, she was not surprised. “When you Google a doctor,” she explains, “most of the pictures that come up are of white men.” Had she been a white man, the flight attendant would likely never have taken a second glance and would not have bothered to gather more evidence. However, because she was a Black woman, she didn’t get the benefit of being judged by an epistemic shortcut. In this case, stereotyping—qua epistemic shortcut—constitutes a form of unequal, discriminatory treatment; however, unlike in the Fanon’s case, quick judgment is a benefit given to privileged groups.

The embodied mind argument. A second argument rests on the claim that stereotyping is a form of embodied cognition. It goes as follows:

Cognition is embodied.

The embodiment thesis: “the agent’s beyond-the-brain body plays a significant causal role, or a physically constitutive role, in that agent’s cognitive processing.”³⁰

Acts of stereotyping—qua cognitive activity—may be partially constituted by a person’s body and their behavior, including discriminatory behavior.

Stereotyping can constitute discriminatory treatment.

To motivate premise 1 (i.e., the claim that cognition is embodied), start with this observation. When humans perceive the world via sense modalities, we necessarily use our bodies. Seeing requires eyes, for example. We cannot see without numerous bodily movements, voluntary and involuntary. When a stranger perceives my child to be a boy, or the white person on the train classifies his interlocutor as Black, these judgments are not just happening in someone’s head. To see someone in these ways, and in even richer ways, requires bodily movements, as well as orientation vis-à-vis other people and one’s environment.³¹ Moreover, acts of seeing, and thinking, are done by agents with particular kinds of bodies, who inhabit social positions that are more or less constrained, whose experiences, histories, and interests may radically differ. If cognition is embodied, it follows that stereotyping—qua cognitive activity—is also embodied.

Premise 2 draws out what it means for cognition to be embodied. The wording for the premise is borrowed from Robert Wilson and Lucia Foglia. Laying out the basics of embodied cognition, they argue that the above thesis—which they dub “the embodiment thesis”—articulates “the working hypothesis of embodied cognitive science.”³² It is also the working hypothesis of phenomenologists who use embodiment as a lens to explore the lived realities of those targeted for prejudicial judgment.³³ The body plays two key roles in cognition, according to the embodiment thesis. First, the body plays a significant causal role in cognition: the body shapes the mind and, in turn, the mind shapes bodily orientations and behavior. Second, the body plays a constitutive role in thought: bodily dispositions and behavior function as elements of cognition. This second claim is particularly important when one contemplates the possibility that stereotyping constitutes discriminatory treatment.

Premise 3 applies the embodiment thesis to stereotyping: acts of stereotyping may be partially constituted by a person’s body and behavior, including discriminatory behavior. To illustrate the premise, consider a person who stereotypes my colleague of Asian heritage. What is happening when they perceive her voice as loud? The stranger’s eardrums vibrate. They notice her voice. If they notice her voice, that means they are paying some attention to her. Paying attention is a bodily enterprise, just as much as a mental one. Maybe the person looks up from what they are doing. Maybe instead the stranger tries to ignore my colleague because she is interrupting their concentration as they try to work. They keep their head down and try to focus, though they struggle. The idea is not just that a person’s thoughts accidentally “leak out” in body language or speech. Rather, the idea is that the act of hearing someone as loud is partially constituted by a range of physical reactions and dispositions, as well as micro- and macro-behaviors.³⁴

Consider a key thought behind premise three. According to the embodiment thesis, to stereotype someone is not just to judge that person “in your head” because of their presumed group membership. To stereotype is also to do something—and not just in a metaphorical sense. Acts of stereotyping are “embodied actions.”³⁵ If acts of stereotyping—qua embodied cognition—are actions plain and simple, they will sometimes constitute discriminatory treatment in a behavioral sense. Stereotyping will constitute discriminatory treatment if and only if the person who stereotypes behaves in a distinctive way toward someone because of that person’s presumed group membership.

This argument does not entail that stereotyping always constitutes discrimination. Consider my personal experience on the bus. I stare out the window and my mind wanders as I think about my fellow passengers. I presume that one is a doctor and will get off at the hospital stop. The person sitting next to them is an undergraduate on their way to class. Though I stereotype, my behavior is the same as if I were thinking about something else entirely: what to have for lunch or how to spend my weekend. Because thoughts and behavior come apart in this way, the embodied mind argument could never show that stereotyping always constitutes discriminatory treatment in a behavioral sense. At most, the argument applies in a wide range of cases, where the contents of discriminatory thoughts express themselves in discriminatory behaviors, and vice versa.

Some readers will reject the claim that cognition and perception are embodied; hence they will be skeptical of this argument from premise 1. I direct such readers to the empirical and philosophical literature on embodied cognition where premise 1 is fully defended.³⁶ Even though I cannot fully settle the matter here, one thing should be clear: embodied mind argument deserves to be taken seriously. From the perspective of many theorists, the argument provides a compelling rationale for the constitutive claim.

The regulative mind argument. A final argument for the constitutive claim goes like this:

It is discriminatory to articulate or put into effect group-specific norms, rules, evaluative standards, etcetera.

Stereotyping involves articulating or putting into effect group-specific norms, rules, or evaluative standards.

Stereotyping constitutes discriminatory treatment.

Premise 1 offers a partial gloss of the regulative view of discriminatory treatment, introduced earlier. It says: it is discriminatory to articulate or put into effect group-specific rules, norms, or evaluative standards. Since the present argument hinges on how one understands the regulative view, its details must be examined. Start with this observation. Discriminatory rules very often have the following feature: people act on them, putting the rules into practice. Examples include Presidential Executive Order 9066 and Jim Crow laws mandating racial segregation. Yet consider the Briggs Initiative. In 1978, this ballot measure sought to ban gay people from working as public school employees in the state of California.³⁷ Gay rights activists argued that the measure treated gays and lesbians people in a discriminatory way. It would have required school districts to fire employees who engaged in “public” homosexual conduct, and it prohibited their hire as well. Ultimately, the Briggs Initiative was voted down. Even so, it is perfectly appropriate to say that the ballot measure treated gays and lesbians in a discriminatory way. It articulated disadvantageous rules that targeted them but not heterosexual people. What this reveals is that rules, norms, and evaluative standards can be discriminatory, even if they are not put into practice or acted upon by individuals.

The Briggs Initiative suggests another lesson as well: there is no knowledge or awareness condition on discriminatory treatment in the regulative sense. Consider a gay high school teacher in 1978 Los Angeles. Maybe he isn’t aware of the Briggs Initiative. Even so, it treats him in a discriminatory way: the ballot measure says that his school district should fire him and implies that he is deviant. One might object that this example is too farfetched. No gay man in 1978 would be so clueless. Even so, the hypothetical highlights an entirely general feature of discriminatory treatment. Discrimination can happen to you, even if you don’t realize it. Employers may have “hidden” discriminatory hiring policies, for example.³⁸ Even when such information is concealed from job candidates, they can experience discrimination. Receptionists might smile and happily accept their resumes, knowing all the while that applicants’ information will be shredded.

Though these remarks do not fully clarify the content of the regulative view of discriminatory treatment, they tell us quite a lot. Indeed they reveal why thoughts may be discriminatory. First, discriminatory treatment is possible even when group-specific rules, norms, and standards are not acted on. It is thus no objection to the constitutive claim that thoughts exist “in the head.” Even if this were true, cognitive acts have the potential to possess the exact property that makes regulative tools like social norms, speech acts, and laws discriminatory. Like norms, speech, and laws, thoughts can articulate and enact group-specific rules, norms, or evaluative standards.³⁹ Second, persons need not be aware of or know how they are being treated in order to experience discriminatory treatment. You might suspect that someone has discriminated against (or in favor of) you in virtue of what they think about you, but you can’t know for sure because you are not a mind reader.⁴⁰ You might never find out that someone thinks less of you because of your presumed group membership because they intentionally hide that information from you. Even so, there is a matter of fact—independent of your knowledge or awareness—regarding whether you have been treated in a discriminatory way.

Premise 2 says this: stereotyping involves articulating or putting into effect group-specific norms, rules, or evaluative standards. Empirical research comes in handy when defending this premise, including research in psychology on “dual character concepts.”⁴¹ Examples of such concepts include “woman,” “Catholic,” “doctor,” “undocumented person,” and “disabled person.” What dual character concepts share in common is that they have a descriptive dimension, as well as a normative one. Hence, they contain two kinds of meaning. Consider the concept “Catholic.” The concept includes a set of features that can be specified in purely descriptive terms. Catholics are Christians, for example, and they have a distinctive set of religious beliefs and practices. However, the concept of “Catholic” also specifies the abstract values associated with being a Catholic, as well as norms and rules that go along with being a “good” Catholic. Because of the concept’s dual character, anyone who falls under its heading is subject to group-specific evaluations. Researchers who study dual character concepts hypothesize that we have them for all socially salient social groups: age, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and even socioeconomic status. Indeed any social group that performs characteristic tasks or has a dedicated social role ought to have a dual character concept associated with it, including concepts like “elementary school teacher,” “artist,” “knitter,” “anti-vaxxer,” “detective,” “Tesla owner,” “Cross-Fit enthusiast,” and many others.⁴² If all such concepts have a dual character, all stereotyped individuals will be targeted by group-specific norms and rules simply in virtue of how they have been socially categorized. It follows that norms and rules can be “put into effect” in thought alone.

The conclusion stands independently any particular research paradigm. In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard suggests why, when she introduces the notion of a practical identity.⁴³ Korsgaard explains that a practical identity is “a description under which you value yourself.”⁴⁴ On her view, each of us has a practical identity. I may see myself simultaneously as “a human being, a man or woman [or a person whose gender identity does not fit neatly within the binary], an adherent of a certain religion, a member of an ethnic group, a member of a certain profession, someone’s lover or friend.”⁴⁵ “All of these identities,” Korsgaard notes, “give rise to reasons and obligations.”⁴⁶ By seeing myself under a certain description, I am necessarily committed to seeing myself as answerable to norms, rules, and obligations associated with my identities. A parallel claim also holds. When I see other people—even strangers—under a certain description, I see them as answerable to norms, rules, and obligations that correspond to their identities too. Further, in socially placing someone, I am situating that person in a particular social location vis-à-vis myself, as well as others. Norms, rules, and evaluative standards govern the ways in which people in various social locations interact and understand one another.

One can also pan out and look at the bigger social picture. Our views of groups don’t come from thin air. They fit into wider narratives about why people are the way they are and how they ought to be. Such narratives imply, if not entail, that certain types of people have a “natural” or “proper” place in the social order, and they delineate how people of certain types are supposed to act, feel, and think. To stereotype someone is thus not just to expect something of them, as if one were a scientist forming a reasoned prediction or hypothesis. It is to draw people into these wider narratives.⁴⁷

These reflections underscore what philosopher Victoria McGeer has called “the regulative nature” of the human mind.⁴⁸ On McGeer’s view, the function of cognition is not just drawing distinctions, making predictions, or forming hypotheses. Cognition—how we think and what we think—is inherently normative. Each of us is trained to see the world in particular ways that are laden with prescriptive and ideological significance.⁴⁹ Even when these thoughts are not articulated out loud, they have emotional impact, and they serve to shape the option-spaces of social interaction and opportunity, often in ways that entrench the status quo. To stereotype is therefore not just to expect things; it is to make judgments using concepts that place people into social frameworks with prescriptive and normative significance.

With these two premises, a powerful argument for the constitutive claim reveals itself. If it is discriminatory to articulate or put into effect group-specific rules, norms, evaluative standards, etcetera, and all acts of stereotyping do this (i.e., they articulate or put into effect group-specific rules, norms, evaluative standards, etcetera), all acts of stereotyping involve treating people in discriminatory ways.

2.2.3 Bringing It All Together

If my analysis is correct, the full rationale for the constitutive claim is multifaceted. Stereotyping is not discriminatory for one reason, but for many. We can treat people in a discriminatory way in virtue of what we think of them, how we judge them (quickly or slowly), how we act or fail to act toward them, and the standards and rules to which we subject them.

Though it would be impossible to reduce this multidimensional picture to a single argument for the constitutive claim, it would also be a mistake to ignore the common thread between these diverse forms of treatment. Each aspect of discriminatory treatment pinpoints a distinctive way in which we relate to others. These forms of treatment—how see and perceive each other, our instinctive judgments—are partially constitutive of our relationships with others, making these relationships what they are (for discussion of this point in the writing of women of color feminists, including Audre Lorde, see Chapter 6).⁵⁰

2.3 Stereotyping as Wrongful Discrimination

A moralized version of the constitutive claim is easy to motivate, given the arguments in the last section. Its justification takes the form of a conditional. If an act of stereotyping:

qualifies as discriminatory in a nonmoralized sense and

is morally wrong, then

stereotyping in that instance constitutes wrongful discrimination.

In the last section I showed that the conditional’s first part (a) can be satisfied. Stereotyping will count as discriminatory treatment in a nonmoralized sense, either sometimes (in a behavioral sense) or always (in a distinction-drawing and regulative sense). The conditional’s second part (b) becomes now crucial. When, if ever, is it wrong to stereotype?

Start with a skeptical perspective. In “Is Racism in the Heart?” Tommie Shelby argues that racial prejudices are beliefs. He writes: “Beliefs aren’t the kind of thing that can be immoral; they can be true or false, warranted or unwarranted, rational or irrational, but certainly not virtuous or evil, just or unjust, at least not in themselves.”⁵¹ Shelby seems to be saying that ethical norms do not apply to beliefs and, by extension, to cognitive states such as expectations, beliefs, predictions, and suspicions. If so, stereotyping someone “in your head” could never be wrongful discrimination. Ethical norms don’t legitimately apply to cognitive states or processes.

The contention is hard to believe. For millennia, ethical theories have criticized thoughts and ways of thinking. For virtue ethicists like Aristotle, ethical life is about living well (i.e., flourishing). To flourish as human, one must cultivate certain virtues, including intellectual virtues. If you judge someone in a way that is closeminded, your belief and way of forming it could be ethically vicious.⁵² In Christian ethics, thoughts and desires can be sinful. “Thou shalt not covet” is listed as one of the Ten Commandments, for example.⁵³ Coveting is first and foremost a sin that consists in desiring things that aren’t yours. However, it can also have cognitive elements. For example, you might covet something because you believe that you are entitled to it. Such a belief could be sinful and hence wrong, according to The Old Testament. Perhaps oddly, consequentialists can say similar things, a fact Shelby implicitly acknowledges. Cognitive and perceptual acts—just like actions in the more traditional sense—can have bad consequences, so they may be extrinsically wrong.⁵⁴ Extrinsic wrongness is not a fake or second-tier kind of wrongness. If it’s extrinsically wrong to eat meat because of the harmful environmental consequences, eating meat is wrong and you shouldn’t do it. The same goes for thoughts and thinking, according to a consequentialist view. While Kantians have a different story to tell, the moral is similar. Suppose that ethics mandates respect for persons. If you judge someone based on demeaning, cruel, or patronizing stereotypes, you are disrespecting them.⁵⁵ Even if your outward behavior were perfect, you would be failing to recognize the limitless value of a rational being and, hence, failing to treat someone as an end. Your thoughts would therefore be wrongful.⁵⁶

The consensus across many ethical theories is that being a good person and treating others’ fairly are not just matters of how we behave. They are also about our emotional responses, the way in which we think about others, and much more.

Theorists of responsibility underscore this consensus. A control-based account of moral responsibility offers one perspective among many.⁵⁷ According to control-based theories, we are responsible only for those things that we can control; hence only controllable aspects of what we do and think have the potential to be right or wrong. Theorists interested in this tradition note that human have the capacity to learn and grow. The very fact that teachers give students exams and bother teaching them in the first place shows that we have a great deal of indirect control over what we automatically know (and what we don’t), as well as how we think.⁵⁸ The issue is not just about individual control, either. How we think and what we think reflect ways in which we have been collectively trained to think about and perceive others.⁵⁹ Yet other theorists of responsibility focus on the so-called deep self.⁶⁰ According to deep-self theories, even if thoughts or actions were uncontrollable and spontaneous, we would still be responsible for them if and when they reflect aspects of ourselves that we have cultivated over time, which connect to our core values and our specific “take” on the world. Despite the diversity of views, theorists agree on one thing: the human mind—what we think and how we think—is shaped by and infused with agency. Where there is agency, there is a potential for responsibility and moral evaluation.

The positive claim in the background here—which is largely independent of any particular philosophical theory—is that ethical norms apply to actions, laws, and policy, as well as to elements of our inner lives, including cognitive states and processes. If so, stereotyping can sometimes be wrongful, even if it happens “in the head.” A moralized version of the constitutive claim is thereby vindicated. If an act of stereotyping constitutes discriminatory treatment and is also wrongful, stereotyping constitutes wrongful discriminatory treatment. Stereotyping will therefore sometimes be a form of discriminatory injustice, as feminist theorists and critical theorists of race and ethnicity have long argued. For readers who are still skeptical, know that the rest of this book provides supporting arguments. Objections crafted by discrimination theorists to explain what’s wrong with discrimination apply seamlessly to stereotyping. Chapters 4 through 7 each demonstrate this.

2.4 Why the Constitutive Claim Matters

The constitutive claim is philosophically sound, and it has the potential to be incredibly illuminating. Consider three of its big payoffs.

Payoff 1: The constitutive claim helps us to better understand the moral psychology of stereotyping.

The constitutive claim conveys a powerful message. If someone stereotypes you, they may be wrongfully discriminating against you. The wrong in question is not just about how someone has acted. Discrimination can happen in thought and reasoning, too. Because the constitutive claim makes this answer possible, it opens up a novel way of thinking about what goes awry when people (or algorithms) wrongfully stereotype. The constitutive claim thus has the potential to serve as a useful hermeneutical resource, giving marginalized individuals a powerful frame for interpreting their experiences of injustice. It also lets people who stereotype (i.e., all of us) see exactly what we are doing, even if we manage to keep stereotypical expectations to ourselves. To stereotype someone is not just to think about that person in a way that may or may not have downstream discriminatory impacts. By stereotyping, we may be literally engaging in a form of wrongful discriminatory treatment, even if we are just thinking about someone “in our head.”

Payoff 2: The constitutive claim reveals normative resources that can be used to solve ethical puzzles associated with stereotyping.

The constitutive claim also unlocks philosophical resources that could help to answer the puzzle of stereotyping: When and why is stereotyping wrong? If stereotyping were a form of discrimination, the best theory of wrongful discrimination might be able to explain when and why is it wrong to stereotype too. As the book progresses, I reveal the explanatory mileage that can be gained from this insight. I invite readers to keep track of my use of the constitutive claim throughout the book, evaluating its utility. On the other hand, the constitutive claim will be like a ladder that I eventually push away. Not because of limitations intrinsic to the claim itself, but because discrimination theorists limit themselves to very traditional philosophical theories, which are unified or modestly pluralistic. I’ll introduce a radically pluralistic theory of which there is currently no prototype in discrimination theory, but which would be quite useful in that space.

Payoff 3: The constitutive claim calls attention to the difficulty of living up to ethical norms in an unjust world.

A final benefit of the constitutive claim is that it underscores the ethical challenges we face in living in an unjust world. Living ethically means cultivating a certain kind of ‘inner’ life and avoiding pernicious habits of thought, no matter how culturally pervasive.

The observation evokes what Iris Murdoch has called the idea of perfection. “As moral agents,” she argues, “we have to try to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection.”⁶¹ Writing about the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Taylor refers to this kind of ideal as “tragic.”⁶² The tragedy lies in our persistent inability to live up to our own moral standards and to transform society into a more just, equitable place. “We struggle and fail,” writes Taylor, describing King’s message, “. . . and the failures are discouraging. But ‘that is the story of life.’”⁶³ Taylor suggests that King’s perfectionism sounds “very much like what [Christopher] Lebron’s project of mobilizing civic shame means for democratic citizens . . . I’ve failed, by my own lights, we’re meant to say. I can and will do better.”⁶⁴ One thinks of Fanon here too. “My true wish,” he writes in Black Skin, White Masks, “is to get my brother, or white, to shake off the dust from that lamentable livery built up over centuries of incomprehension.”⁶⁵

The demand is a heavy one: How does one rid oneself of the baggage associated with oppression, when the world and other people will not let you forget, and in which you yourself cannot forget? It is clear that one must try. But it is equally clear that one will often fail. The constitutive claim provides a special frame for understanding what we are struggling against. The most intimate aspects of our selves, including our ways of thinking, agency, and modes of embodiment, are among the mechanisms of group oppression.⁶⁶ Our fight against injustice is, therefore, not only against evil political forces, unjust laws, or oppressive social norms. We must also battle the intransigence of discriminatory hearts and minds, including—at least sometimes— our own, as we push toward justice. The constitutive claim throws this quandary into high relief, forcing us to recognize that unjust discrimination is not just a matter of action, policy, law, or culture; it is also a matter of thought.

¹ Adrian Piper, “Two Forms of Discrimination,” in Bernard Boxill (ed), Race and Racism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 193–237; Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 1991), 57. See also Vrinda Dalmiya and Linda Alcoff, “Are ‘Old Wives Tales’ Justified,” in Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (eds), Feminist Epistemologies (New York: Routledge, 1993), 217–44, at 217.

² ibid, 193.

³ Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal, 41–2.

⁴ Katherine Puddifoot, “Epistemic Discrimination,” in Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (ed), The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination (New York: Routledge, 2017), 54–67, at 54. Along these same lines, see Miranda Fricker, “Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice,” in Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice (New York: Routledge, 2017), 53–60, at 53. Fricker refers to testimonial injustice as a form of “discriminatory injustice.” This entails the constitutive claim since testimonial injustice consists in stereotyping someone in a way that unjustifiably deflates their credibility. Stereotyping, in other words, is discriminatory.

⁵ Thus, one discovers an underappreciated route to the ethics of belief, one that passes through radical activists and theorists of liberation, rather than through the (white, male) Victorian philosopher William Clifford.

⁶ For a survey of how psychologists define stereotyping, see Erin Beeghly, “What Is a Stereotype? What Is Stereotyping?” Hypatia 3, no. 30 (2015), 675–91. I defend a “descriptive” (i.e., nonmoralized) view of stereotyping that stays neutral on controversial questions about cognitive architecture. For an even more schematic, functionalist account of stereotyping, see Gabbrielle Johnson, “The Structure of Bias,” Mind 129 (2020), 1193–236. According to Johnson, stereotyping is biased thought that takes the form of kind-based induction. Both of us argue that people can be stereotyped on the basis of generics, universal generalizations, or statistical information. See also Katherine Puddifoot, How Stereotypes Deceive Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

⁷ For defense of the claim that stereotype-driven biases are heterogeneous in nature, see Holroyd and Sweetman, “The Heterogeneity of Implicit Bias.” The same kind of heterogeneity is found in explicit biases. For exploration of the claim that stereotypes exist as mental imagery, see Bence Nanay, “Implicit Bias as Mental Imagery,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 no. 3 (2023), 329–47.

⁸ Robin Dembroff, “Beyond the Binary: Genderqueer as a Critical Gender Kind,” Philosophers Imprint 20, no. 9 (2020), 1–23.

⁹ Dustin Stokes, “The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception,” Philosophy Compass 8, no. 7 (2013), 646–63; Katherine Tullman, “Experiencing Gendered Seeing,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 55, no. 4 (2017), 475–99.

¹⁰ “Judgment,” Oxford English Dictionary, Definition 1 (c) and 3. https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.lib.utah.edu/view/Entry/101888?rskey=YSbW6P&result=2#eid.

¹¹ Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 212.

¹² ibid.

¹³ Other theorists who take this view include Alcoff, Visible Identities; Victoria McGeer, “Mind-Making Practices.”

¹⁴ “Discrimination,” Oxford English Dictionary. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/54060?redirectedFrom=discrimination#eid.

¹⁵ ibid.

¹⁶ ibid.

¹⁷ Hellman, When Is Discrimination Wrong?

¹⁸ Hellman, When Is Discrimination Wrong? 3.

¹⁹ Ásta, Categories We Live By.

²⁰ For references, see notes 2–4.

²¹ “Cognitive Discrimination,” APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/cognitive-discrimination [Accessed November 19, 2022].

²² For more on this question, see Alex Madva, “(What) Are Stereotyping and Discrimination and (What) Do We Want Them to Be,” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10, no. 11 (2021), 43–51 https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-6iI; Erin Beeghly, “The Constitutive Claim: Payoffs and Perils,” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 11, no. 2 (2021), 52–60. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-6zh.

²³ Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal, 45–6; Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect, 17; Frej Clem Thompson, “Direct Discrimination” in Kasper Lippert Rasmussen (ed), The Routledge Handbook to the Ethics of Discrimination (New York: Routledge, 2017), 19–29, at 24.

²⁴ Interview with Sandra Day O’Connor, Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross, National Public Radio, March 5, 2013, at 31.08. https://www.npr.org/2013/03/05/172982275/out-of-order-at-the-court-oconnor-on-being-the-first-female-justice.

²⁵ For exploration of this metaphor and its prominence, see Beeghly, “Two Metaphors.”

²⁶ Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 14–19.

²⁷ Fanon, Black Skin, 18.

²⁸ For contemporary examples, see Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance.

²⁹ Christine Hauser, “‘Are You Actually an M.D.?’: A Black Doctor Is Questioned as She Intervenes on a Delta Flight,” New York Times, November 2, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/us/delta-black-doctor-racial-profiling.html.

³⁰ Robert Wilson and Lucia Foglia, “Embodied Cognition,” in Edward Zalta (ed), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/embodied-cognition.

³¹ For more on the notion of orientation, see Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, and Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

³² Wilson and Foglia, Embodied Cognition. For research within this paradigm, see Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004); Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017); Benoit Hardy-Vallée and Nicolas Payette (eds), Beyond the Brain: Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition (New Castle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind.

³³ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Eleventh Edition, translated by Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2001); Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Alcoff, Visible Identities; Yancy, Black Bodies; Helen Ngo, The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (New York: Lexington Books, 2018); Céline Leboeuf, “The Embodied Biased Mind,” in Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva (eds), An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind (New York: Routledge: 2020), 41–56.

³⁴ Noë, Action in Perception; Yancy, Black Bodies, 21. Yancy writes: “deep-seated racist emotive [and cognitive] responses may form part of the white bodily repertoire.”

³⁵ Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 173.

³⁶ See notes 29 and 30 for references.

³⁷ For the Initiative’s details, see https://repository.uchastings.edu/ca_ballot_inits/324.

³⁸ In some cases, employers may not even know that they have a discriminatory policy (e.g., a racially motivated double standard for hiring or firing) or have treated employees in a discriminatory way. For examples from case law, see Linda Hamilton Krieger, “The Content of Our Categories: A Cognitive Bias Approach to Discrimination and Equality Opportunity,” Stanford Law Review 47, no. 6 (1995), 1161–248.

³⁹ The term putting into effect has multiple meanings. To put into effect can be to put something into practice via action or speech. For more on how norms can be enacted in speech, see Mary Kate McGowan, Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Sara Bernstein, “Biased Evaluative Descriptions,” Journal of the American Philosophy Association (2023), https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2023.5. My point here is that speech and action are not necessary for enacting norms. Norms and rules can be “put into effect” in thought alone. A person might apply a social rule or cultural norm to someone without saying so and, indeed, judge someone harshly indeed. In doing so, they activate the norm and apply it to someone, hence “putting it into effect.”

⁴⁰ This kind of uncertainty is characteristic of discriminatory treatment in a wide range of cases, especially those involving “microaggressions.” For examples see Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (New York: Graywolf Press, 2014); Regina Rini, The Ethics of Microaggression (New York: Routledge, 2020), esp. 39–70.

⁴¹ Joshua Knobe, Sandeep Prasada, and George Newman, “Dual Character Concepts and the Normative Dimension of Conceptual Representation,” Cognition 127, no. 2 (2017), 242–57; Guillermo Del Pinal and Kevin Reuter, “Dual Character Concepts in Social Cognition: Commitments and the Normative Dimension of Conceptual Representation,” Cognitive Science 41, no. 3 (2017), 477–501.

⁴² For skepticism regarding this point, see Sarah Jane Leslie, “Hilary Clinton Is the Only Man in the Obama Administration,” Analytic Philosophy 56, no. 2 (2015), 111–41.

⁴³ Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101.

⁴⁴ ibid.

⁴⁵ ibid.

⁴⁶ ibid.

⁴⁷ Hilde Lindemann, Holding and Letting Go: Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

⁴⁸ McGeer, “Mind-Making Practices.” For a related view, see Zawidzki, Mindshaping.

⁴⁹ Haslanger, “Cognition as a Social Skill”; Erin Beeghly, “What’s Wrong with Stereotypes? The Falsity Hypothesis,” Social Theory and Practice 47, no. 1 (2021), 33–61.

⁵⁰ One finds a version of this view in Lindemann, Holding and Letting Go. Discussing Carl Elliot’s interpretation of Wittgenstein, Lindemann suggests that to treat someone as a person is a matter of “taking up a certain attitude or stance towards her” (12). Lindemann’s insight here suggests that treating someone as an equal—hence relating to them as an equal— has a necessary attitudinal component. See also Elizabeth Anderson, “What’s the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999), 287–337.

⁵¹ Tommie Shelby, “Is Racism in ‘The Heart?’” Journal of Social Philosophy 33, no. 3 (2002), 411–20, at 416.

⁵² See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Christopher Rowe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 176–89 (Book VI).

⁵³ Exodus 20:17.

⁵⁴ For analyses along these lines Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal; Endre Begby, “Doxastic Morality,” Philosophical Topics 46, no. 1 (2018), 155–72.

⁵⁵ For discussion of this point as it relates to judgments of credibility, see Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 44–5. Fricker argues that testimonial injustice insults people’s humanity qua knowers. See also Rima Basu, “The Wrongs of Racist Beliefs,” Philosophical Studies 176 (2018), 2497–515; Rima Basu, “What We Epistemically Owe Each Other,” Philosophical Studies 176 (2019), 915–31.

⁵⁶ Kantian discussions of self-respect emphasize something similar, namely, that treating oneself “as an end” requires properly appreciating your own intrinsic value. See Cynthia Stark, “The Rationality of Valuing Oneself: Kant on Self-Respect,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 35, no. 1 (1997), 65–82, at 69–70.

⁵⁷ For an overview of competing approaches, see Noel Dominguez, “Moral Responsibility for Implicit Biases: Examining Our Options,” in Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva (eds), An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind (New York: Routledge, 2020), 153–73.

⁵⁸ Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”; Jules Holroyd, “Responsibility for Implicit Bias,” Journal of Social Philosophy 43, no. 3 (2012), 274–306; Alex Madva, “Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility,” Pacific Philosophy Quarterly 99, no. 1 (2018), 53–78; Elinor Mason, Ways to Be Blameworthy: Rightness, Wrongness, and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

⁵⁹ Nancy Arden McHugh and Lacey J. Davidson, “Epistemic Responsibility and Implicit Bias,” in Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva (eds), An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind (New York: Routledge, 2020), 174–90.

⁶⁰ Pamela Hieronymi, “Responsibility for Believing,” Synthese 161, no. 3 (2008), 357–73; Michael Brownstein, The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

⁶¹ Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” 40.

⁶² Paul C. Taylor, “Moral Perfectionism,” in Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry (eds), To Shape A New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press, 2018), 35–57, at 45.

⁶³ ibid, 44.

⁶⁴ Taylor, “Moral Perfectionism,” 45. Christopher J. Lebron, The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 19–28.

⁶⁵ Fanon, Black Skin, xvi.

⁶⁶ For articulations of this view, see Ida B. Wells, The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, edited by Mia Bay (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014); Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1953); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984); Mills, The Racial Contract; Lugones, Pilgrimages = Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions); David Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

3 Lived Experience and the Wrongs of Stereotyping

In Chapters 1 and 2, I developed two crucial elements of an explanatory project about stereotyping. Chapter 3 provides the last piece of groundwork before normative analysis can begin.

3.1 Intellectual Lineages

To give readers a better sense of what they are in for as I transition to analyzing what’s wrong with stereotyping, I sketch three books that have shaped my methodology. I note convergences and divergences with my approach, offering to readers a clearer picture of my approach and the values guiding it. The tradition that I am writing against will also come into view.

3.1.1 Frantz Fanon—Black Skin, White Masks

Fanon is one of the towering figures in Africana philosophy and “one of the actual parents of postcolonial philosophy,” as philosopher Lewis Gordon notes.¹ He grew up in what was then known as the French Antilles, leaving to pursue medical studies in France as a young adult. An interlocutor of John Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he’s known for bringing existentialism to bear on questions of race, racial identity, and the self. In Black Skin, White Masks, he explores the psychology of colonialism, documenting the indelible mark left by racialized stereotyping on the psyches of European colonizers and those whom they colonized. In the book’s most famous passage, he describes walking down the street in France and hearing a white child yell out: “Look, a Negro!” He knows that he has been stereotyped. The child trembles with fear. “I cast an objective glance over myself,” he writes, “discovered my blackness, my ethnic features, deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania.”² In other passages, Fanon describes the everyday humiliations faced by people of color living in France. You are spoken down to. You are not recognized as French—and are continually “othered.” People express surprise at how intelligent you are. Every foray into the world, no matter how short or benign, is accompanied by the specter of racial stereotyping.³

Fanon’s methodology is incredibly personal. His work deploys an existentialist understanding of the self as an evolving creation. In the passage just cited, Fanon describes a phenomenon that scholars now call “double consciousness,” a term first introduced by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk when discussing an experience of discrimination described in the opening paragraph of this book.⁴ “Double consciousness” refers to the dual perspective that oppressed peoples are forced to adopt, whereby they take on a vision of themselves through the eyes of their oppressors. Before this moment, Fanon was walking down the street, absorbed in his own thoughts.⁵ When the child calls out, he is paralyzed. His body transforms into a canvas onto which Europeans project racist fantasies.⁶ He emphasizes the embodied aspects of being stereotyped. “Shame. Shame and self-contempt. Nausea. When they like me,” Fanon writes, “they tell me my color has nothing to do with it. When they hate me, they add that is not because of my color. Either way, I am a prisoner of a vicious cycle.”⁷

Fanon’s work underscores the importance of first-person qualitative data in understanding social injustice. A white European might be able to use behavioral clues to intuit how Fanon is being wronged by stereotyping. But only Fanon can detail the contours of his psychic anguish and how it builds across a lifetime. Accordingly, Black Skin, White Masks is suffused with normative insight as Fanon reflects on his and others’ experiences.

His analysis reveals an imperative for theorists pursuing explanatory projects like mine. Explanatory projects about phenomena associated with social injustice—such as the one I am pursuing—must proceed by consulting people who are impacted by the phenomenon. Their first-person perspectives offer invaluable, essential data that are needed to create a full normative picture.

Fanon’s work also contains other lessons. “My true wish,” he writes, “is to get my brother, black or white, to shake off that lamentable livery built up over centuries of incomprehension.”⁸ Notice the implication: stereotyping inflicts moral injury on dominant groups too.⁹ In his work, white Europeans blithely stigmatize colonized people. They embody arrogance and inflict harm.¹⁰ “If you are white,” George Yancy argues, drawing inspiration from Fanon, “Black people don’t need you . . . ‘to save’ us and ‘to civilize’ us . . . [they need] something greater from you . . . to see the real you, the one for whom it is possible to demonstrate greater humanity and humility, a greater sense of integrity, a greater sense of genuine relationality.”¹¹ Fanon refers to this project as one of “disalienation.” Explanatory projects have the potential to reveal how selves are warped in an unjust world because of oppressive social dynamics, spurring projects of self-transformation. To honor this goal, and following Fanon, in addition to using of phenomenological data to understand the wrongs of stereotyping, my analysis will be sensitive to the broad moral impacts of social injustice (i.e., on oppressors and the oppressed alike).

3.1.2 Gloria AnzaldÚA and Cherríe Moraga—This Bridge Called My Back

When I was nineteen, I dropped out of college. I moved to the Bay Area hoping to find work. Brick and mortar bookstores still lined Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue during the late 1990s. I didn’t know anyone, so books were my companions. One day, I found a used copy of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. It made me feel less alone. It also educated me—a white girl who grew up in rural America. It’s a book that I now teach and whose feminist spirit shines through in this project.

In the preface to the fourth edition, Cherríe Moraga recounts starting the project in 1979 with Gloria Anzaldúa, a fellow Chicana lesbian and philosopher. “Bridge,” she explains, “is an account of U.S. women of color coming to late-twentieth century social consciousness through conflict—familial and institutional—and arriving a politic, a ‘theory in the flesh,’ that makes sense of the seeming paradoxes of our lives; that complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.”¹² Moraga and Anzaldúa weave visual art with interviews, personal essays, poetry, and political statements. The volume’s many contributors—including Audre Lorde, Kate Rushin, the Combahee River Collective, Yolanda López, Mitsuye Yamada, and Barbara Cameron—offer intersectional analyses of sexist-classist-racist oppression, often drawing on their personal experiences. Many contributors are first-generation writers from working-class backgrounds. Most are lesbians. They include Black women, Indigenous women, Chicanas, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans. Since Bridge’s publication, at least a handful of contributors have come out as transgender, nonbinary, or two-spirit. As writers and artists, they demonstrate the “physical and psychic struggle” for feminist liberation and solidarity—including how they resist acts of stereotyping. Moraga writes about the book: “It is about intimacy, a desire for life between all of us, not settling for less freedom even in the most private aspects of our lives.”¹³

This Bridge Called My Back contains valuable lessons for theorists pursuing explanatory projects like mine. Moraga and Anzaldúa know that sexism targets Black women in different ways than white women, Chicana women in different ways than Japanese American women, Indigenous women different ways from Muslim women. Accordingly, they adopt an intersectional mode of analysis, amplifying the voices of diverse women of color feminists. “What is needed,” writes José Medina, arguing for the value of such an approach “is a kaleidoscopic consciousness that remains forever open to being expanded . . . to acknowledge and engage new perspectives, and always open to strive toward a better balance among possible perspectives.”¹⁴ Following Moraga and Anzaldúa’s lead, as well as Medina’s advice, I embrace a multiperspectival, “kaleidoscopic” methodology for analyzing what’s wrong with stereotyping. This approach embraces “epistemic friction.”¹⁵ Views will bump up against one another, will be criticized and scrutinized, and sometimes rejected or modified.

Throughout Bridge, there is also incredible humbleness, a feature which I hope also suffuses my analysis. Moraga writes: “Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside us, no authentic, non-hierarchal connection can be found.”¹⁶ The emphasis is not on recrimination. It is on self-reflection and the creation of less oppressive, fundamentally liberatory relationships. In a similar spirit, Audre Lorde urges “each of us to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there.”¹⁷ She argues that we must learn “how to take our differences and make them strengths.”¹⁸ This requires an honest accounting of the ways in which we wrong others. Years later, the writer Kiese Laymon puts it like this: “there can be no liberation when our most intimate relationships are built on—and really inflected by—deception, abuse, misdirection, antiblackness, patriarchy, and bald-faced lies.”¹⁹ Explanatory projects bring these wrongs to light and help us to better understand them so that unjust structures—manifesting both in us and outside of us—can be challenged and changed.

3.1.3 Sophia Morea U: Faces of Inequality—A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination

Faces of Inequality provides the most straightforward philosophical model for this book. It is a classic explanatory project about wrongful discrimination. Moreau offers a theory of wrongful discrimination at once unified and pluralistic. While all wrongful discrimination fails to treat persons as equals, it does so in three distinctive ways, on her view: via subordination, through impairment of “deliberative freedom,” and by unjustifiably robbing people of access to basic goods.

Mainstream discrimination theory provides the book’s foil. Theorists in this tradition—mostly analytic philosophers and legal theorists—tend to value abstraction. Fantastical thought experiments are common. “There is a serious risk,” Moreau argues, “in trying to analyze discrimination in abstraction from its social context and without paying particularly close attention to the views of those who have experienced it.”²⁰ By ignoring lived experience, traditional methodologies silence and disempower underprivileged groups. While silencing is unjust, it also has epistemically bad consequences. “When we try to test a theory of discrimination by appealing to happenings of fictitious societies,” she writes “. . . or scenarios of discrimination that are so abstract . . . we bracket the complex social contexts in which real acts of discrimination occur. And these social contexts are, I shall argue, the key to understanding discrimination.”²¹

Though Moreau and I both believe that theorists must use lived experience when analyzing injustice, we operationalize this imperative differently. Moreau tends to focus on legal narratives. Occasionally, litigants are quoted. She is careful to acknowledge that she is building on the knowledge of marginalized groups. For example, when introducing the concept of “deliberative freedom,” she writes:

Part of the reason that I am drawn to include denials of deliberative freedom in an account of what makes discrimination wrongful is that the loss of deliberative freedom is a salient feature of the lives of people who suffer from systemic discrimination. It is something that they mention very often when describing their experiences . . . For instance, if you are African American, you can never enjoy the luxury of forgetting about your race. You carry the burden of other people’s assumptions about race wherever you go. . . . It affects the way in which African Americans make their decisions and the options available to them.²²

In this passage and others, Moreau describes the suffering of African Americans. Yet these individuals remain nameless and, therefore, anonymous. References to theorists like Fanon, Moraga, and Anzaldúa are rare.

There is “a cautionary tale” here, as Kristie Dotson once put it when critiquing Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice.²³ Despite her insistence on the value of lived experience, important data about people’s lived experiences of discrimination are hidden from view.²⁴ First on the list: people who choose not to litigate. Litigation is costly, stressful, and can revictimize victims. Many people choose to walk away, and for good reason. Catharine MacKinnon aptly observes:

The law . . . was not written by women, white or Black, rich or poor. It has not been based on women’s experiences of life, everyday or otherwise. No one has represented women’s interests as women in creating it, and few have considered women’s interests as women in applying it. Unlike men . . . no women had voice or representation in constituting this state or its laws, yet we are presumed to consent to its rule. It was not written for our benefit, and it shows.²⁵

If MacKinnon is right, discrimination law was never meant to amplify the voices of marginalized groups. The most vulnerable in society are perhaps the least likely to have their interests protected by the legal system, and for their grievances to be heard. Their lives are also likely to be shaped by unjust discriminatory treatment that is perfectly legal and, hence, would never show up in lawsuits. If theorists are looking to amplify marginalized voices beyond the privileged few, a less legalistic methodology is required.

A more direct, nonlegal approach enables analysis of everyday discriminatory wrongs. Accordingly, I will use a broad range of primary source materials: fiction, personal essays, interviews, poetry, political statements, and protest art. With these sources, one unlocks a more authentic, expansive window into people’s insights about wrongful stereotyping and discrimination. I also strive to create a maximally inclusive conversation, a “kaleidoscopic” chorus of voices. Long before analytic philosophers arrived on the scene, theorists like Fanon, Moraga, Anzaldúa, and many others were working to raise consciousness about the wrongs of stereotyping and discrimination, calling out thinking and perception as wrongful and unjust. Their intellectual labor deserves recognition. I propose to harness and broaden their insights and, in so doing, witness the wrongs of stereotyping, both within and outside the law’s domain.

3.2 Standpoint Theory and the Value of Lived Experience

In the three texts just mentioned, there is a common thread: the value of lived experience. In this section, I dive deeper into that idea. I do so, in part, to answer an objection to my methodology. As I explore this objection, I introduce the tenets of standpoint theory.

Let me start with the objection. To many analytic philosophers, a methodology that privileges lived experience will sound ridiculous. As Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen notes, false beliefs are incredibly common.²⁶ Some people may believe that they were wronged by stereotyping, but not know why. Others might passionately—but incorrectly—claim that they are victims of unjust stereotyping. If “lived experience” is shot through with errors, theorists pursuing explanatory projects would be foolish to use it as the basis for testing and developing theories. The method will inevitably result in a hot mess of a theory.

When introducing her methodology, Moreau attempts to head off this critique. “The perceptions of victims of discrimination,” she writes, “are appropriately treated as a check on theories of discrimination.”²⁷ She also tells readers: “victims of wrongful discrimination are likely to have some insights into the nature of their complaints.”²⁸ Indeed she grants their complaints presumptive legitimacy, noting “it is difficult for me to see how they [i.e., people who are treated in discriminatory ways] could be wholly mistaken about the nature of their complaints.”²⁹ However, Moreau does not delve into why these claims might be true. I am keen to do that and, thereby, defend the philosophical foundations of a methodology premised on the epistemic value of lived experience.

These deeper foundations are provided by standpoint theory. Standpoint theory’s core insight is that all knowledge is perspectival, arising from particular social locations. If knowledge is always perspectival, there is no “view from nowhere,” “objective,” or “god’s eye” point of view. One must always ask: Who is speaking? What is their position in the social world? What possibilities and barriers do they face as they attempt to gain knowledge and have other people take their views seriously? By asking these questions, standpoint theory invites us to explore the relationship between knowledge and power. A key finding of standpoint theory is that different standpoints are likely to be more or less reliable in virtue of the power relations operative in society. Its practitioners argue that those with less social power—perhaps ironically—are likely to have a more accurate understanding of social reality, as well as a greater propensity toward epistemic virtue.

Marxist theory inspired early standpoint theorists.³⁰ On a Marxist view, oppressors have a hard time seeing reality for what it is. Alison Jaggar puts it like this: “Because the ruling class has an interest in concealing the way in which it dominates and exploits the rest of the population, the interpretation of reality it presents will be distorted in characteristic ways. In particular, the suffering of the subordinate classes will be ignored, redescribed as enjoyment, or justified as freely chosen, deserved or inevitable.”³¹

For the oppressed, it is easier to see through these fictions. “[W]hereas the condition of the oppressed groups is visible only dimly to the ruling class,” explains Jaggar, “the oppressed are able to see more clearly the ruled as well as well as the relation between them.”³²

Philosopher María Lugones explains the phenomenon in terms of “world travelling,” referring to the practice of moving fluently between different social worlds.³³ On her view, marginalized people—unlike those in privileged groups—are forced to inhabit multiple worlds, some of which demand their economic and social subordination. In a world where subordination is required of you, seeing the world from the perspective of the powerful is not a luxury. It is a skill necessary for survival. Describing her own childhood, bell hooks writes:

Living as we did—on the edge [of a rural, segregated town]—we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both . . . Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an acknowledgement that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole.

This sense of wholeness impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us with an oppositional world-view—a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity³⁴

José Medina argues that this capacity to appraise social reality “lucidly” (such as that illustrated by Lugones and hooks in their respective bodies of work) is “the main cognitive asset” of the oppressed.³⁵ He underscores its epistemic value as well as its “critical and subversive potential.”³⁶

In one sense, standpoint theorists are sympathetic to the objection in the background of this discussion. False beliefs about social dynamics are incredibly common, as they recognize. According to standpoint theory, belonging an oppressed group simply makes a person more likely to be able to see the truth of social reality. It does not guarantee accuracy. Medina explains: “Although oppressed subjects can indeed fall victim to socially generated illusions, they often have more resources to undo these illusions, they have a richer (or more heterogeneous) experiential life that they can use to dismantle the accepted description of reality that rules the day.”³⁷

It’s a point emphasized repeatedly by standpoint theorists.³⁸ Simply experiencing the world as a marginalized person is not enough to guarantee that one’s first-person appraisal of reality is correct. A “standpoint” is an enlightened perspective. “The vision available to an oppressed group,” writes Nancy Hartsock, “must be struggled for and represents an achievement that requires both systematic analysis and the education that can only grow from political struggle to change those relations.”³⁹ When a person has not yet done this work, they may have experiences that brim with norming meaning. However, they will not yet be in a position “to read” their lived experience in a way that reveals the deeper truths of oppression.⁴⁰ A significant goal of liberation movements over the last century has been to raise the consciousness of individuals so that they can achieve this aim.

Because lived experience brims with normative insight, I use it as a springboard for analyzing the wrongs of stereotyping. My task is partially interpretative. Though individuals may protest being stereotyped, they may not explain what they mean when they make certain objections. In other cases, stereotyped persons advance analyses of how they have been wronged. As I explore the diversity of objections to stereotyping in lived experience, I test their strengths and weaknesses. Often this will mean taking the objection much farther than the people who advanced them originally intended. Counterexamples will aid me in this enterprise.⁴¹ As much as possible, I draw these counterexamples from realistic scenarios as well as the actual objections advanced by activists. Sometimes, however, I introduce hypotheticals.

Hypotheticals are not out of bounds in a methodology rooted in the value of lived experience. Following Charles Mills, I contend that: “The problem is not abstraction as such but a problematic mode of idealizing abstraction that abstracts away from social oppression, and in that way both conceals its extent and inhibits the development of the conceptual tools necessary for understanding and dealing with its workings.”⁴²

To look at Mills’s oeuvre is to see the kind of work that I hope to be doing in this book. When Mill uses thought experiments to test the viability of theories, he does so judiciously, in ways that provoke deep conversations about real-world injustice, rather than diverting them.⁴³

Lived experience also plays a second role in my methodology: it shapes how I interpret and apply the desiderata for a successful theory of wrongful stereotyping. There are two desiderata, as I see it:

The identification condition: a successful theory must identify paradigmatic cases of wrongful stereotyping as such.

The explanatory condition: a successful theory must adequately explain why wrongful cases of stereotyping are morally wrong.

The identification condition says that a successful theory must be able to reliably distinguish cases of wrongful and nonwrongful stereotyping. Fulfilling this condition requires a general characterization of wrongful stereotyping as a category. The explanatory condition says that a successful theory of wrongful stereotyping must adequately explain what’s wrong with stereotyping. It cannot simply provide an effective heuristic for identifying cases as morally wrongful (or not).

The explanatory condition serves two functions. It provides a way to evaluate and rank theories of wrongful stereotyping relative to one other, namely, with respect to how well they explain wrongful stereotyping. It can also justify the outright rejection of theories. On the view I am suggesting, lived experience bears on the explanatory condition. No one, the argument goes, is in a better position to explain what’s morally wrong with stereotyping than stereotyped persons belonging to marginalized groups who have (a) engaged in collective struggle and (b) developed an analysis of their situation. These individuals are reliable sources, according to standpoint theory. As persistent targets of wrongful stereotyping, they have direct, first-person knowledge of the harms and wrongs associated with stereotyping. Accordingly, the bar for ignoring or rejecting their objections is high.

Let me say more to motivate this constraint. Individuals persistently subject to wrongful stereotyping may have, as H. M. Collins and Robert Evans put it, “special technical expertise in virtue of experience that is not recognized by degrees or other certificates.”⁴⁴ Collins and Evans refer to such people as “experience-based experts.”⁴⁵ In psychiatry, patients with conditions such as schizophrenia arguably qualify as experience-based experts on the diseases that shape their lives.⁴⁶ Indigenous peoples may be experience-based experts on fire-management practices, having spent hundreds of years managing fire-prone ecosystems.⁴⁷ As a Black man who had grown up in Martinique, Frantz Fanon was constantly on the receiving end of racist stereotyping and discrimination when he moved to Europe. In his capacity as a psychiatrist during World War II, he witnessed other colonized people suffering in ways that mirrored his own. Based on these data, he developed an analysis of racial stereotyping and why it was wrongful. Fanon is an experience-based expert, as well as a credentialed expert. So are many contributors to Bridge. Some express themselves in poetry, others in prose. Some prefer fiction, others nonfiction. Expertise about wrongful stereotyping comes in a range of literary and even visual forms.

Everyday people—those whose names may be lost to history—can be “experience-based experts” too. In “Learning from the Outsider Within,” Patricia Hill Collins observes: “Countless numbers of Black women have ridden buses to their white ‘families,’ where they not only cooked, cleaned, and executed other domestic duties, but where they also nurtured their ‘other’ children, shrewdly offered guidance to their employers, and frequently became honorary members of their white ‘families.’”⁴⁸ In their role as “the help,” they could see injustices that their white employers could not. Kimberlé Crenshaw cites her mother as a case in point.⁴⁹ Her mother was a “race woman,” she explains, an activist who cared deeply about women’s rights. As Crenshaw became an adult, her mother warned her about what might be “coming at her” as a Black woman, including unwanted sexual advances from white male employers. Working-class Black women could easily see sexual harassment and assault as problems in their everyday lives. They were also fully aware that Black women were stereotyped as “jezebels,” women with loose morals. They recognized this ideology for what it was: a justification for sexual abuse.

Vested interests claim that research should be left to ‘real’ experts. But so-called real experts have done great damage to marginalized groups over the last two hundred years. In the 1950s, Fanon was already skewering scientists who claimed to vindicate the biological and moral inferiority of colonized peoples using “objective” methods. Disability activists and Indigenous activists press the slogan: nothing about us, without us.⁵⁰ It is not just that the marginalized groups deserve a voice for political reasons. They deserve a voice because they are experience-based experts whose knowledge is crucial in developing both accurate and just research. Standpoint theory also vindicates the importance of positionality with respect to expertise. Though people from different marginalized groups might all count as experts when it comes to wrongful stereotyping, they may take different views about why, and why stereotyping harms them. For this reason, a kaleidoscopic methodology makes the most sense. Experts might converge, but they might also diverge. It’s impossible to know in advance.

Grounding this project in “lucid” lived experiences of marginalized individuals promises to grow philosophical knowledge about wrongful stereotyping. It permits a real-world, empirical check on theory, so that theorists don’t float off in their own imaginative headspaces, untethered to the phenomena they are supposed to be analyzing. My hypothesis is that it will lead to more accurate and illuminating work on what’s wrong with discrimination, including discriminatory treatment that takes the form of stereotyping. Some readers might object that the methodology is biased and overly political.⁵¹ From its inception, standpoint theory has been subject to this critique. Time and again, its practitioners have responded by producing work that shows that “certain kinds of politics do not block the growth of knowledge but, rather, can stimulate and guide it.”⁵² Standpoint theory also, helpfully, emphasizes the emotionally and politically charged nature of explanatory projects. This is not something to be denied or hidden. Carrying out such projects involves a form of witnessing: both theorists, and readers, bear witness to—and hear testimonies of—violence and domination, pain, and suffering.⁵³

3.3 Ready for Action

The stage is now set for normative analysis. Each chapter will highlight a specific ethical objection or objections to stereotyping, each of which is rooted in the lived experiences of marginalized groups. I’ll interpret these objections and test whether they generalize across cases of different kinds. What are the explanatory strengths and limitations of various objections? Does closer investigation support the idea that stereotyping, even if it happens “in one’s head,” could constitute wrongful discriminatory treatment? And, perhaps most crucially, could any of these ethical objections—or perhaps more than one of them—serve as the basis for a plausible theory of what’s morally wrong with stereotyping?

Because philosophers tend the presume that the best possible theory will be unified, and because this presumption is so powerful in our discipline, I pay it respect. Chapters 4 and 5 target an objection with the potential to serve as the basis for a unified theory. A unified theory would posit one wrong-making property or set of wrong-making properties shared by all cases of wrongful stereotyping. I believe that unity is a pipe dream. But it is a dream that dies hard in philosophy. Even discrimination theorists who have largely abandoned unified theories of wrongful discrimination stick closely to the ideal of unity. They suggest modestly pluralistic theories, two of which I will be exploring in Chapters 6 and 7. Modestly pluralistic theories are disjunctive. Instead of a single wrong of discrimination, they posit two or at most three wrongs, none of which are shared across all wrongful cases. I will argue that modest pluralism is too modest. It can’t account for true complexity of what’s wrong with stereotyping.

¹ Lewis Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 81.

² Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92. His emphasis.

³ For examples, see Ngo, Habits of Racism; Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes.

⁴ Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk.

⁵ For discussion, see Nathifa Greene, “Stereotype Threat, Identity, and the Disruption of Habit,” in Erin Beeghly and Alex Madva (eds), An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind (New York: Routledge, 2020), 134–52.

⁶ Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92.

⁷ ibid, 96.

⁸ ibid, xvi.

⁹ James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012); Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999); Angela Onwuachi-Willig, “Reconceptualizing the Harms of Discrimination: How Brown v. Board of Education Helped to Further White Supremacy,” Virginia Law Review 105, no. 2 (2019), 343–69.

¹⁰ Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 28.

¹¹ ibid. His emphasis.

¹² Cherríe Moraga, “Catching Fire: Preface to the 4th Edition,” in Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back: Writing By Radical Women of Color, Fourth Edition (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), xv–xxvi, at xix.

¹³ Cherríe Moraga, “La Jornada,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, xxxv–xlii, at xii.

¹⁴ Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 200. Medina takes this idea in an individualistic direction, positing kaleidoscopic consciousness as something that individuals should develop. I interpret it as a methodological directive.

¹⁵ ibid, 50–52.

¹⁶ Cherríe Moraga, “La Güera,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 22–9 at 24.

¹⁷ Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 94–7, at 97.

¹⁸ ibid, 95.

¹⁹ Kiese Laymon, Heavy: An American Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2019), 239.

²⁰ Moreau, Faces of Inequality, 30.

²¹ ibid, 29.

²² ibid, 85–6.

²³ Dotson, “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression.”

²⁴ For illustration of what the law leaves out with respect to people’s lives and experiences, see Martha Minow, “Forming Underneath Everything That Grows: Toward a History of Family Law,” Wisconsin Law Review 1985, no. 4 (1984), 819–98.

²⁵ Catharine MacKinnon, Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (Cambridge: Belnap Press, 2007), 33.

²⁶ Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, “Moreau on Discrimination: Pluralism, Equality, and the Experience of Discrimination,” Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought 12, no. 4 (2022), 579–90, at 586.

²⁷ Moreau, Faces of Inequality, 28–9.

²⁸ ibid, 28.

²⁹ ibid, 28–9.

³⁰ Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); Nancy Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).

³¹ Alison Jaggar, “Feminist Politics and Epistemology: The Standpoint of Women,” in Sandra Harding (ed), The Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual & Political Controversies (New York: Routledge, 2004), 55–66, at 56.

³² ibid, 57.

³³ María Lugones, Pilgrimages = Peregrinajes, 16–20.

³⁴ bell hooks. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Third Editon (New York: Routledge, 2015), xvii–xviii; see also bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Harding (ed), The Standpoint Theory Reader, 153–68; Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” in Harding (ed), The Standpoint Theory Reader, 103–26.

³⁵ Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 47.

³⁶ ibid.

³⁷ ibid, 46.

³⁸ Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back, 210–8, at 211; Alison Wylie, “Why Standpoint Matters,” in Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding (eds), Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology (New York: Routledge, 2003), 26–48, at 37; Jaggar, “Feminist Politics and Epistemology,” 57; Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity’?” in Harding (ed), The Standpoint Theory Reader, 127–40, at 128.

³⁹ Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint, Revisited, 229.

⁴⁰ For an example, see Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage International, 2018); Paul Taylor, “Malcolm’s Conk and Danto’s Colors: Five Logical Petitions Concerning Race, Beauty, and Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 1 (1999), 16–20. The Bluest Eye is narrated, in part, from the perspective of a little girl, Pecola Breedlove. Though Pecola lacks understanding of wider social dynamics, astute readers such as Taylor can and do decipher the greater significance of her experiences.

⁴¹ Cory Aragon, “Building a Case for Social Justice: Situated Case Studies in Non-Ideal Social Theory,” in Heidi Elizabeth Grasswick and Nancy Arden McHugh (eds), Making the Case: Feminist and Critical Race Philosophers Engage Case Studies (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021), 23–46.

⁴² Charles Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), xv.

⁴³ For examples of Mills’s thought experiments, see “‘But What Are You Really?’ The Metaphysics of Race,” in Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 41–66.

⁴⁴ Collins and Evans, “The Third Wave of Science Studies,” 238.

⁴⁵ ibid.

⁴⁶ Şerife Tekin, “Patients as Experienced-Based Experts in Psychiatry: Insights from the Natural Method,” in Eddy A. Nahmias, Thomas W. Polger, and Wenqing Zhao (eds), The Natural Method: Essays on Mind, Ethics, and Self in Honor of Owen Flanagan (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), 79–97; Şerife Tekin, “Participatory Interactive Objectivity in Psychiatry,” Philosophy of Science 89, no. 5 (2022), 1–20; Bennett Knox, “Exclusion of the Psychopathologized and Hermeneutical Ignorance Threaten Objectivity,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 29, no. 4 (2022), 253–66.

⁴⁷ Will Smith, Timothy Neale, and Jessica K. Weir, “Persuasion Without Policies: The Work of Reviving Indigenous Peoples’ Fire Management in Southern Australia,” Geoforum 20 (2021), 82–92.

⁴⁸ Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within,” 103; Norimitsu Onishi, “To Fight Climate Change Canada Turns to Indigenous People to Save Its Forests,” New York Times. Last modified November 16, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/16/climate/canada-climate-change-indigenous-people.html [Accessed November 16, 2022]. “Within the last five years,” reports Mandy Gull-Masty, the grand chief of the Cree National government in Canada, “I have seen a shift and openness, particularly at the federal level, where I think they’re starting to understand that traditional knowledge acquired over sometimes millennia is as valid as Western science.”

⁴⁹ Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Kimberlé Crenshaw Discusses ‘Intersectional Feminism,’” Interview by Sarah Hayet. YouTube. Last modified October 15, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROwquxC_Gxc [Accessed November 4, 2022].

⁵⁰ Rebecca Yeo and Karen Moore, “Including Disabled People in Poverty Reduction Work: ‘Nothing About Us, Without Us,’” World Development 31, no. 3 (2003), 571–90; James I. Charlton, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment, Third Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Bob Weber, “‘Nothing About Us, Without Us’: First Nations Want Say in Climate Change Policy,” Global News. Last modified March 2, 2016. https://globalnews.ca/news/2554145/nothing-about-us-without-us-first-nations-want-say-in-climate-change-policy [Accessed November 4, 2022]; Dev Kumar Sunumar, “Nothing About Us Without Us: The Struggle for Inclusion of Indigenous Women with Disabilities,” Cultural Survival. Last modified June 3, 2019. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/nothing-about-us-without-us-struggle-inclusion-indigenous [Accessed November 4, 2022].

⁵¹ Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 47.

⁵² Sandra Harding, “Introduction: Standpoint Theory as the Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate” in Harding (ed), The Standpoint Theory Reader, 1–16, at 2.

⁵³ Lugones, Pilgrimages, 7. Wanda Pillow, “Epistemic Witnessing: Theoretical Responsibilities, Decolonial Attitude, and Lenticular Futures,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 32, no. 2 (2019), 118–35, at 123.

4 Failing to Treat Persons as Individuals

Photo 4.1 Barbara Gittings in Picket Line (1966 or 1967). Photographed by Kay Tobin. Permission from the New York Public Library.

For five days in the spring of 1965, the Janus Society of Philadelphia distributed leaflets outside Dewey’s lunch counter, a hamburger joint that had become a social hub for rowdy, queer youth.¹ Management had told employees: don’t serve troublemakers. Employees interpreted the directive to mean—don’t serve anyone who looks queer. Gay, lesbian, transgender, and gender nonconforming patrons argued that the new policy was discriminatory. A sit in was organized. Over one hundred and fifty people showed up, and three teenagers were arrested for disorderly conduct. For the next week, the protest continued. Over fifteen hundred flyers were distributed in front of Dewey’s. The flyers explained why, according to one of the country’s earliest gay rights groups, it was unjust to refuse public accommodations to queer people. “The Janus Society is concerned,” the pamphlet says, “with the worth of an individual and the manner in which she or he comports himself.” The implication was this. By refusing to serve anyone who looked queer, Dewey’s employees were failing to treat queer people as individuals.

This objection was, and remains, a popular one. In a photo taken during the annual “Reminder Day” picket in 1966 or 67, Barbara Gittings hoists a sign that says: “Homosexuals should be judged as individuals.” Reminder Day pickets—annual, pre-Stonewall protest events that were held around American Independence Day—were intended to call attention to the fact that gays and lesbians lacked civil rights enjoyed by other Americans. Carrying this sign, Gittings objected to this discriminatory treatment and advanced a specific explanation of why it was wrong.

This chapter is devoted to understanding the statement on Gitting’s placard. Not only have gay rights activists invoked this objection making it worthy of further investigation, but it has also been advanced as “the wrong” of stereotyping and, thus, as a solution to the puzzle of stereotyping. I begin by interpreting the objection. Then I raise a serious problem for any theorist hoping to explain what’s wrong with stereotyping and other forms of discrimination by appealing to it. Simply put, it is implausible that people are automatically wronged when they are presumptively classified as social types or when kind-based expectations, beliefs, or predictions are formed about them based on appearances. Such a claim would imply—absurdly—that generalized thinking is always in itself disrespectful. To overcome this objection, discrimination theorists have advanced at least two novel views of what it means to fail to treat persons as individuals. Both views emphasize that we ought to judge people in conscientious ways. Yet both carve out moral permission to make group-based judgments in certain scenarios and, moreover, are compatible with recognizing that group identities may be extremely important to individuals and for social policy.

4.1 A Familiar Objection

The objection at the center of this essay is likely to be familiar to readers. It is commonly assumed that we ought to treat persons as individuals and that failing to do so is morally problematic. Philosopher Lawrence Blum even suggests the following: “being seen as an individual is an important form of acknowledgment of persons, failure of such acknowledgment is a moral fault and constitutes a bad of all stereotyping.”² Blum’s suggestion suggests a unified theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping.

Despite its familiarity, the idea in question is disarmingly slippery. What does the (alleged) moral right to be treated as an individual consist in? And under what conditions is it violated?

4.1.1 Responding to Individuals Based on False or Inaccurate Group Generalizations

Start with the following assertion, made by psychologist Valerie Braithwaite:

In the case of stereotyping, the core issue is inaccurate labeling because group homogeneity is assumed and individuality is not taken into account . . . imperfect knowledge renders the individual invisible.³

Braithwaite’s idea could be this. When people stereotype, they deploy false or inaccurate views of groups, according to which all members of a group are the same.

The Janus Society does not frame their objection to Dewey’s policy in these terms, and this is telling. People don’t always perceive groups as homogeneous when they stereotype. More often than not, stereotypes take the form of generics. “Women are empathetic” and “Doctors wear white coats” are examples. Generic statements lack quantifiers like “some,” “most,” or “all.” They are statements of the form: “Fs are G.” Generics have been analyzed as implicitly referring to “most” people of certain kind; “typical” or “normal” group members; as well as “real” or “good” group members.⁴

The complexity of generics has implications for how we evaluate people who stereotype in speech, reasoning, and policymaking. First of all, one can’t assume that everyone means the same thing when they stereotype. If I assert, “queer youth are rowdy,” I might be making a claim about typical or normal queer youth or I might be advancing a statistical claim, for example, most queer youth are rowdy; or I could be saying that “real” or “good” queer youth are rowdy. Second, if stereotypes take the form of generics, they will sometimes be accurate or true. People who use stereotypes will thus not always have false or inaccurate beliefs about groups, even though they might. The stereotype “women are empathetic” is a case in point. When women are raised to value empathy and actually tend to self-describe as empathic, when they tend to fill social roles where empathy is required or beneficial, when the social benefits of displaying empathy disproportionately go to women, women as a group will have a greater disposition for empathy than men and one that is stable over time.⁵ Third, we will often not have decisive evidence that stereotypes are true or false, warranted or unwarranted. For example, if a manager at Dewey’s believed that queer youth were rowdy, he might appeal to personal experience as evidence that the belief is true. But one may wonder. Is his sample size sufficient? Is it representative of the population? Is he merely calling up examples consistent with the stereotype and ignoring other cases?

All this is to say: Braithwaite’s apparent understanding of the conditions under which people fail to treat others as individuals is too limited. One could fail to treat someone as an individual even if one were using a true, warranted group generalization. For example, one could fail to treat a woman as an individual by stereotyping her as empathetic, even if it is true that most or typical women have that property. Likewise, one could fail to treat a queer teenager as an individual by stereotyping her as a rule-breaker, even if it were true that most queer teens rebel against socially imposed rules, including gender norms. Similarly, you could fail to treat someone as an individual by stereotyping, even if you are fully aware that the group to which they belong is not homogeneous. “I’m merely using a heuristic,” you might think. Or “this person seems to fit the stereotype, though many group members will not.”

Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted Braithwaite’s objection. She says that “inaccurate labeling” is the problem with stereotyping. It could be that inaccuracy lies not in the underlying belief or mental imagery, but in the epistemic results of stereotyping such as beliefs, predictions, and flawed expectations regarding individuals that we make. Maybe these are inaccurate.

This interpretation is no better than the first, however. If one is in fact using a reliable heuristic, one’s downstream expectations, beliefs, and predictions about individuals could be accurate in many cases. Even so, stereotyped persons would be entitled to complain that they have not been treated as individuals. It might have been true, for example, that Dewey’s young, queer patrons were generally rowdier and were, in fact, scaring away a more staid, heterosexual clientele. Even so, the charge stated in the flyer would still stand. The Janus Society asks Dewey’s to adopt a policy according to which individuals are refused service if and only if their actual behavior warrants it.

4.1.2 Responding to Individuals Based on Group Membership

The problem with stereotyping might be reframed as follows: stereotyping involves judging individuals based on real or apparent group membership. This framing resonates with definitions of stereotyping as “pigeonholing.”⁶

Consider the employees at Dewey’s. Let’s say they reasoned as follows:

Queer youth are troublemakers.

This person is or is likely to be queer.

This person is or is likely to be a troublemaker.

What has gone wrong here? The problem, you might think, lies in how stereotypic reasoning works and the kind of evidence we use when we stereotype. When people stereotype, they prioritize “category-level” information. Category-level information is generic in nature. If you judge individuals by generic information, you ignore or discount other potential sources of information. From an epistemic point of view, what matters is that individuals are—or appear to be—members of particular groups. But, the objection goes, an even more reliable and fairer approach would be to judge individuals based on facts about them, specifically. The idea here echoes Martin Luther King’s injunction to judge persons “not by the color of their skin but on the content of their character.”⁷

If you look at the Janus Society flyer, one finds claims in this exact ballpark. “The Janus Society,” the pamphlet states, “is concerned with the worth of an individual and the manner in which she or he comports himself.” The purported problem with the discriminatory policy is, in other words, that it is not sufficiently individualized. Why? Because the policy as interpreted by employees is motivated by a generalization: queer youth are troublemakers. Even if this stereotype were true because queer clientele were statistically more likely to commit expulsion-worthy offenses and even if applying it to individuals led to accurate predictions in the majority of cases, the Janus Society suggests, the policy of refusing service to anyone who looks queer would fail to treat persons as individuals. You should judge individuals by how they actually behave. If someone actually behaves in a way that warrants expulsion, throw that person out. Otherwise, don’t.

Here, then, we find the first fitting interpretation of what it means to fail to treat persons as individuals. You fail to treat persons as individuals, according to this view, if you judge them by group membership.

4.1.3 Treating Someone as a Number

There is yet a third way to think about what it means to fail to treat someone as an individual. This third interpretation is highlighted by the following recollection, offered by Miné Okubo, a survivor of World War II Japanese internment camps in the United States. In her memoir, Okubo describes registering for the camps in 1942. She writes,

As a result of the interview, my family name was reduced to No. 13660. I was given several tags bearing the family number, and was then dismissed. At another desk, I made the necessary arrangements to have my household property stored by the government . . . Our destination was Tanforan Assembly Center, which was at the Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno, a few miles south of San Francisco.⁸

Okubo was citizen 13360. Reducing someone to a number is a way of failing to treat that person as an individual.

In the Janus Society flyer, one does not find this complaint. Moreover, it’s hard to see how the complaint could gain traction. Dewey’s employees did not assign queer clients numbers, like the U.S. government assigned numbers to families of Japanese heritage. For this reason alone, I would be disposed to set aside this interpretation of the objection if what we are looking for is a unified objection to all wrongful stereotyping.

But there is something else, as well. Fairness can require treating persons as numbers. I treat my undergraduate students as numbers when I use anonymous grading programs that reduce them to labels like “Student 61” or “Student 4.” Crowded delis treat customers as numbers when they require people to take numerical tickets as a way to enforce the first-come-first-served rule. Therefore, one cannot explain what’s wrong with stereotyping simply by appealing to the idea that it involves treating persons as numbers. Treating persons as numbers is not inherently wrong. It is only sometimes wrong, and one must dig deeper in order to know what makes cases like the one described by Okubo normatively bad. What jumps to mind immediately is that she is describing a practice adopted by the American government to dehumanize Japanese Americans in the context of a wider campaign of oppression. Chapter 7 explores a theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping centered on social inequality and oppression. It is within that theory her objection has significance, not within a theory according to which what’s wrong with stereotyping is that it involves the intrinsic bad of failing to treat persons as individuals.

4.1.4 Treating Someone as a Token of a Type

One strategy for investigating the question—and for procuring a more a widely applicable view of failing to treat persons as individuals—is to consider the idea of treating someone as a token of a type. Like treating someone as a number, treating someone as a token of a type implies a kind of depersonalization. However, tokenizing someone is a more general idea, and it fits the phenomenon of stereotyping better.

It is perhaps worth disambiguating what I mean here from a common understanding of tokenization. In the business world, an organization may “tokenize” minority employees if they put these employees in public view—for example, on the cover of their company brochures—to signal that they have inclusive values while, at the same time, not making substantive institutional changes that promote equity. To tokenize is to use marginalized individuals as pawns. This not the sense of tokenize that I’ll be using to make sense of this objection. The idea that I’m reaching for involves treating people as “tokens,” that is, generic instances of wider social types.

What might it mean to treat someone as a token of a type? Several possibilities present themselves:

If you categorize an individual as a member of a social kind, you treat that person as a token of a type.

If you care about only one aspect of an individual’s social identity to the exclusion of others, you treat that person as a token of a type.

If you pay attention to only one aspect of an individual’s identity to the exclusion of others, you treat that person as a token of a type.

If you conceptualize an individual as a generic type whose specific identity does not matter, you treat that person as a token of a type.⁹

This list is not exhaustive, and it focuses on psychology, not tokenizing behaviors or social practices.

Interpretation A does not match the Janus Society’s analysis of Dewey’s policy. Its flyer did not admonish Dewey’s employees simply for categorizing people as queer based on looks. The objection was closer to this: Dewey’s policy had the effect of making individuals’ queer identity the dominant thing that mattered from the point of view of employees. The youth were seen and treated as nonconformist troublemakers and nothing more. Moreover, their failure to conform to gender norms was stigmatized. “The masculine woman and the feminine man,” the flyer says, “are looked down upon.”¹⁰ Accordingly, the Janus Society encouraged Dewey’s staff to look beyond the stereotypes.

Looking beyond stereotypes would require avoiding B through D. That is, it would have required employees to conceptualize queer clients in a fuller way, in part, by paying attention to and caring about facts about them beyond presumed group identity. Because the token of a type interpretation nicely fits the case, we can tentatively move forward with it.

4.2 The Problem of Absurdity

Two distinctive theories of wrongful stereotyping are suggested by the analysis so far.

Interpretation 1: Judged by Group Membership

The judged-by-group-membership conception—X fails to treat Y as an individual if and only if X judges Y by group membership.

Failure-to-individualize theory of wrongful stereotyping—stereotyping is wrong if and only if it involves judging individuals by group membership.

Interpretation 2: Tokenizing

Tokenizing conception: X fails to treat Y as an individual if and only if X treats Y as a token of a type.

Failure-to-individualize theory of wrongful stereotyping—stereotyping is wrong if and only if it involves treating individuals as tokens of a type.

When evaluating these two theories, two desiderata are relevant:

The identification condition: a successful theory must identify paradigmatic cases of wrongful stereotyping as such.

The explanatory condition: a successful theory must adequately explain why wrongful cases of stereotyping are morally wrong.

Both versions of the theory mentioned above are off to an equally good start with respect to the identification condition. Both classify stereotyping as ethically wrongful in the Dewey’s case. However, a theory that satisfies (1) must do more than get one case right. It must identify a feature that allows us to survey the whole range of cases in which people judge others by group membership and then select those cases in which stereotyping is wrong. We cannot yet be sure that either theory does this. Secondly, a successful theory must be able to adequately explain why cases of wrongful stereotyping are wrongful. We cannot yet be sure that our theory offers adequate explanations in all—or even most—cases.

The Tokenizing Theory. Start by considering the tokenizing version of the theory. It says that stereotyping is wrong if and only if it involves treating individuals as tokens of types. Were this theory correct, stereotyping would always wrong individuals by tokenizing them.

To see the problem with this theory, consider a case which I call Help. A five-year old child loses her mother in a crowded grocery store. The child sees someone wearing an official-looking uniform. She classifies this person as an employee and expects that the person will be eager to help her. Notice that the child has engaged in stereotyping, according to the definition of stereotyping on offer. She forms an expectation about—hence judges—someone based on real or apparent group membership. The uniformed person might work somewhere else and simply be shopping for groceries on a lunch break. Or the person might actually be an employee of the grocery store.

Has she engaged in wrongful stereotyping? If we accept the tokenizing theory articulated above, the answer is yes. The girl categorizes an unfamiliar individual as a grocery store employee based on looks. She cares about and pays attention exclusively to that aspect of the person’s identity. She also conceptualizes this person as a generic employee: any employee would have done equally as well. Therefore, she wrongfully stereotypes someone, according to the theory in question.

This result is problematic. The child’s expectation was not motivated by ethically bad prejudice. No one was harmed. Moreover, her view of the person as a generic store employee was not disrespectful nor did it entrench oppressive social relationships. The girl was using a uniform as a heuristic, nothing more. Because none of these objections apply, it is hard to believe that the child did something ethically bad, much less wrongful.

The unbelievable results continue. Consider these examples:

A Kantian perceives an unfamiliar individual as a rational being whose autonomy must be respected.

A Buddhist perceives an unfamiliar individual as a sentient being whose natural state is suffering.

If seeing persons as tokens of types were intrinsically wrong, the people just described would be doing something ethically wrong. Moreover, even in formulating the sentence using the locution “a Kantian” or “a Buddhist,” I would have done something ethically wrongful because I am conceptualizing individuals as generic types and am focusing on only one aspect of their identity to the exclusion of others. These implications reduce the theory in question to absurdity. Just as it is not intrinsically wrong to treat persons as numbers, it is not intrinsically wrong to treat individuals as tokens of a type.¹¹

In light of this result, the tokenizing version of the theory could be revised. Maybe treating persons as tokens of a type is not intrinsically wrong but treating them merely as tokens of a type is. The claim here would be analogous to a familiar Kantian idea. According to Kant’s principle of humanity, it’s not wrong to use persons as means; however, it is intrinsically wrong to treat them merely as means. The challenge would then be to specify what differentiates treating persons as tokens from treating them merely as tokens. One promising strategy appeals to what I call “diachronic stubbornness.”¹² A disposition or view is diachronically stubborn if it is incapable of, or resists, change over time. In contrast, a disposition or view is diachronically open if it is readily capable of changing over time.

All the earlier views of treating persons as tokens of types (A–D) could be revised to incorporate this idea. Consider the original statement of B: if you care about only one aspect of an individual’s social identity to the exclusion of others, you treat that person as a token of a type. B could be modified as follows: if you care about only one aspect of an individual’s social identity to the exclusion of others and that disposition to care is diachronically stubborn, you treat that person merely as a token of a type.

This modification seems helpful. In Help, we saw a child who cared solely about one aspect of someone’s identity. Yet this same child could be open to thinking and caring about the person in a broader way, especially if given opportunities for further interaction. If she were open in the relevant way, she would not be treating the uniform-wearing person merely as a token of a type. Hence, she would not have failed to treat the employee as an individual, according to the revised theory, despite the fact that she stereotyped.

With the revised theory in hand, we can now return the main question of this section. Could a tokenizing theory of wrongful stereotyping satisfy the desiderata for a plausible theory of wrongful stereotyping? The answer to this question is still no. To satisfy the identification condition, a theory must be able to reliably identify cases of wrongful stereotyping. With the original tokenizing theory, the problem was over-inclusiveness. Morally benign cases of stereotyping like Help were incorrectly classified as wrongful. With the new-and-improved version of the theory, the opposite problem emerges.

To see why, return to the Dewey’s case. Suppose that Dewey’s employees would have been open to seeing their queer clients in a fuller and more complex way if they had the opportunity to interact with them outside a work environment. If so, they would not have been treating queer clients merely as tokens of types. Accordingly, they would have done nothing wrong by stereotyping them as troublemakers in the actual case.

This result is revealing. Perhaps the worst kind of stereotyping always involves people who refuse to change their view of others, no matter what. Nonetheless, epistemic or emotional stubbornness is not necessary for wrongful stereotyping. If you judge someone to be “less than” owing to pejorative stereotypes or statistical information associated with group membership, you have done something ethically problematic. This is the case even if you are potentially open to revising your view or developing a caring disposition toward that person in the future.

Perhaps the lesson is this. A revised tokenizing theory could provide a partial account of wrongful stereotyping. Wrongful stereotyping sometimes involves views, dispositions, and conceptions that are diachronically stubborn. However, a partial theory would not vindicate the claim that stereotyping is wrong if and only if it involves failing to treat persons as individuals. It would only show that, sometimes, wrongful stereotyping can be explained by appealing to this failure.

Judging individuals by group membership. Setting aside the tokenizing theory, we find a second theory of wrongful stereotyping waiting in the wings. According to it, stereotyping is wrong if and only if it involves judging individuals based on group membership.

Historically, this version of the theory and its analogue theory of wrongful discrimination have received a great deal of critical attention, much of it negative. For example, in “What is Wrongful Discrimination?” Richard Arneson argues that treating persons as individuals is not a moral imperative. He asserts that, “there is nothing morally untoward about responding to individuals on the basis of statistical indicators their broad characteristics suggest.”¹³ In Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes, Frederick Schauer says something similar. “All human beings . . . deserve to be treated as individuals and not simply as members of a group,” he muses, “or so the argument goes.”¹⁴ “But,” he continues, “although this belief in the wrongfulness of reliance on even statistically sound but non-universal generalizations is widespread, it still may not be correct. Indeed, it may not even be plausible.”¹⁵ In an article on racial profiling, Michael Levin repeats the refrain. “I have been arguing so far,” he says, “as if there is an acceptable principle of individualism, the only question being who has a right to it. There is in fact no such principle. People are and must always be judged by the classes to which they belong, the traits they share with them.”¹⁶

The identification condition partially motivates these objections. Recall this diagram in Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1 The Puzzle of Stereotyping. Drawing by Jacob Rivkin.

According to the diagram, stereotyping is only sometimes ethically wrong. The diagram articulates what is seemingly absurd about the theory under investigation. It collapses the above two circles into one, which entails that all instances of judging persons by group membership are wrongful.

Call this the problem of absurdity. The problem of absurdity manifests in numerous cases of misidentification. Any number of cases could be used to argue for the point, including Help. In Help, readers will remember, a five-year old is separated from her mother at a busy grocery store. She forms an expectation about an unfamiliar individual—namely that the person is an employee and is likely to help her—after classifying that person as a store employee. The girl stereotypes this person, making a judgment based on group membership. According to the theory on offer, she has wronged the person by failing to treat them as an individual.

Thinking about the explanatory condition reveals what has gone awry. A theory’s explanations cannot be adequate if they rest on a false presumption. In this case, the theory in question rests of the false presumption that judging persons by group membership is in itself intrinsically wrong.

Help reveals this, but other cases do so even more clearly. Think about one I call Protestor. Imagine that an employee at Dewey’s sees the activist featured in the photo at the beginning of this chapter picketing outside of the restaurant. The employee stereotypes the woman above as a lesbian. On what grounds? The individual appears to be a woman. Add to that her short haircut and the fact that she is protesting in favor of gay rights. She very well could be a lesbian.

It is hard to see what one would have done wrong by expecting that the individual pictured in the photo at the beginning of this chapter is a lesbian. The woman—Barbara Gittings—did in fact identify as a lesbian. She was the long-time partner of the photographer who took the picture, Kay Tobin Lahusen. When she attended protests in support of gay rights, Gittings wanted people to identify her as a lesbian.

How do we know? This picture was taken a Reminder Day picket. Every year from 1965 to 1969, members of the East Coast Homophile Association gathered outside of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on July Fourth, with the aim of reminding people that gays and lesbians still lacked civil rights. These events were highly choreographed. Signs were vetted for content, and protestors were required to adhere to a strict dress code. “Let me assure you,” wrote organizer Craig Rodwell to Frank Kameny, “that if anyone does show up at the bus dressed in sneakers, blue jeans, or outlandish clothing, we will promptly return their $5.00 and remind them that participants in such a demonstration are not there to assert their individual egos, but rather as representative of millions of homosexual citizens.”¹⁷ This quote underscores that participants at the event were putting themselves forwards as “representatives.” The protests were meant to send the message: queer Americans are perfectly upstanding citizens, and we deserve civil rights like anyone else.

A defender of theory under investigation could respond that we must think of acts of stereotyping in a more global way. In crafting my counterexample, I have focused on an apparently innocuous inference. But what if we panned back? What if we looked at the concept of a lesbian on which the employee was relying when she judged the protest? We’d likely see that the concept was ethically compromised. Having been formed in a sexist and homophobic context, it would undoubtedly include ethically objectionable elements, as would the stereotypes associated with the concept. Thus, it is not so odd to think that stereotyping in the case above is problematic. Ethically compromised cognitive resources motivated the expectation.¹⁸

This response is potentially helpful. If one pans back and looks at the bigger cognitive and social picture, perhaps one can get behind the idea that judging individuals by their real or apparent membership is intrinsically problematic. There is always, the thought goes, something wrong with using compromised cognitive resources and, in a world as unjust as ours, our cognitive resources are always ethically compromised.

On the other hand, imagine a hypothetical situation in which someone has a concept of “lesbian,” but that concept does not include ethically problematic elements. Perhaps the world has radically changed, so that sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are things of the past. Suppose that someone raised in this context sees the picture above and believes that the woman featured in it is a lesbian. The person infers that she was a social justice warrior in her time and faced discrimination for being “out.” Such a person would be doing something ethically wrong, according to the theory under investigation.

This implication highlights an important fact. It does not matter whether a person’s concepts are ethically compromised or not, according to the present theory. An act of stereotyping is wrong simply because it involves judging persons by group membership. This claim returns us to the problem of absurdity. There is no reason to think that judging persons by real or presumed group membership is always intrinsically wrong. Instead, we have every reason to think that the wrong in question only presents itself when the judgment enacts a subordinating view of groups (Chapter 7).

4.3 Reconceptualizing the Failure to Treat Persons as Individuals

For some theorists, the upshot is this. We must stop explaining what’s wrong with stereotyping—as well as what’s wrong with discrimination—by saying that it fails to treat persons as individuals. The claim is philosophically corrupt. However, other theorists take the analysis so far as a challenge. The challenge is to articulate a new interpretation of failing to treat person as individuals that does not generate the problem of absurdity.

In “We are All Different: Statistical Discrimination and the Right to be Treated as an Individual,” Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen offers the following suggestion:

X treats Y as an individual if, and only if, X’s treatment of Y is informed by all relevant information, statistical or non-statistical, reasonably available to X.¹⁹

Call this the use-all-your-information conception of treating persons as individuals. According to this conception, we fail to treat others as individuals if and only if our treatment of that person is not informed by all the relevant information reasonably available to us.

A theory of wrongful stereotyping that deploys the use-all-your-information conception avoids the problem of absurdity. Responding to persons based on their group membership is wrong, according to this conception, only when a person ignores relevant, reasonably available information when judging others. In conditions where individualized information is not relevant or reasonably available, there is nothing wrong with forming one’s judgment about someone on the basis of group membership. Therefore, were we to use this interpretation as the basis for a theory of wrongful stereotyping, not all generalizing would violate the relevant right and, thus, not all generalizing would be wrongful.

In “Treating People as Individuals,” Benjamin Eidelson articulates a second way of interpreting the principle of treating persons as individuals. He writes:

In forming judgments about Y, X treats Y as an individual, if and only if,

(Character Condition) X gives reasonable weight to evidence of the ways Y has exercised her autonomy in giving shape to her life, where this evidence is reasonably available and relevant to the determination at hand.

(Agency Condition) if X’s judgments concern Y’s choices, these judgments are not made in a way that disparages Y’s capacity to make those choices as an autonomous agent.²⁰

Call this the respect-for-autonomy conception of treating persons as individuals.

The respect-for-autonomy conception’s character condition mirrors the use-all-your-information conception in one way. Its character condition says: when judging others, we must give reasonable weight to relevant evidence about individuals’ character, values, and personal history when such evidence is reasonably available. If personalized information is irrelevant or not reasonably available, stereotyping does not wrong people by failing to treat them as individuals. Moreover, when individuals present themselves publicly in ways that intentionally foreground their group membership and express its centrality in their lives, the above principles condone—and perhaps even require—recognizing that. So not all stereotyping would violate the character condition.

What about the agency condition? One could argue that stereotyping people always disparages their autonomy. By stereotyping, we act as if people don’t have any choice about how they are or what they do. Interpreted in this way, the agency condition invites the problem of absurdity. It invites the problem because it entails that stereotyping always involves failing to treat persons as individuals, thereby collapsing the distinction between stereotyping and wrongful stereotyping.

To avoid the problem of absurdity, the agency condition must be interpreted more narrowly. Suppose you predict that I will pick up a baby at a party because I am a woman, and you believe that women love babies, and such love is biologically necessitated. Your way of judging me would violate the agency condition and, therefore, be disrespectful. Even if you were correct that I love babies, you would judge my choices in a way that presumes that I have no say in the matter, thereby disparaging my autonomy. However, suppose you expect that I will pick up a baby based on a generic claim about women: women love babies. This generic claim leaves open the possibility that I will choose not to pick that baby up. Statistical claims are only claims about what is likely to be the case. So you would not be disparaging my capacity for autonomy if you formed an expectation of me based on a stereotype. Likewise, if you thought that I was a defective woman because I don’t pick up the baby, your belief does not entail or presuppose that my choice wasn’t free.

Though I have not yet developed a precise criterion for distinguishing agency-violating cases of stereotyping from cases that do not violate the agency condition, this much is clear. One could articulate the agency condition in a way that does not invite the problem of absurdity.

4.4 The Failure-to-Individualize Theory of Wrongful Stereotyping

Both new conceptions of treating persons as individuals—the use all your information conception and the respect-for-autonomy conception—avoid the problem of absurdity and can recognize the importance of group-based information. Accordingly, either might be used as the basis for a unified theory of wrongful stereotyping and, thus, vindicate the claim expressed by Blum.

Here is how one would articulate the first new version of the theory:

Interpretation 3: Use All Your Information

The-use-all-your-information conception: X fails to treat Y as an individual if, and only if, X’s treatment of Y is not informed by all relevant information, statistical or nonstatistical, reasonably available to X.

Failure-to-individualize theory of wrongful stereotyping: stereotyping is wrong if and only if it involves treating someone in a way that is not informed by all relevant, reasonably available information.

To test this version of the theory, return to the Dewey’s case. Imagine that an unfamiliar teen enters Dewey’s on the day of the protest. Behind the counter, an employee sizes up the teen. He has never seen this person before. The employee perceives the kid as a type: “one of the gays.” Immediately he stereotypes him as the kind of person who engages in raucous, disruptive behavior. Call this case At A Glance. Has the employee done anything ethically wrong by stereotyping the teen, according to the theory under investigation?

On the one hand, the answer seems to be yes. This employee could try to chat up the teen and get a better read on them. He might also observe the teen from a distance, seeing how they behave at the lunch counter. Such information is relevant to the question of whether or not this person is actually a troublemaker and deserves to be thrown out, and it would take little effort to gather. Doing so would express concern for “the worth of the individual and the manner in which she or he comports himself,” just as the Janus Society recommends.

On the other hand, information may not be reasonably available. Sure, the employee could chat up the teen or let them loiter in defiance of the policy. However, failure to comply with store policy could result in being fired. For some employees, losing their job could be financially devastating. The more vulnerable the employee, the riskier it would be to gather information in the ways that directly contravened store rules.

The problem here generalizes. Reasonable availability is a practical notion. Whether or not information is reasonably available depends on how easy it is to access, and the costs involved in getting it. In an unjust world, gathering information about others can put our lives and livelihoods at risk. Likewise, practical constraints bear down on us. Sometimes we see people from a distance and couldn’t talk to them to figure out who they are, even if we wanted to. Moreover, people in the grip of ideologies may be incapable of accessing relevant information because of their warped vision.

The theory’s implications thus get even worse. Think about a case that I call Bigot. A man is riding a bus past Dewey’s. He sees the store thronged with queer protestors. He silently thinks to himself, “Degenerate pedophiles.” Obviously, he is judging protestors on the basis of stigmatizing stereotypes. There is something ethically wrong with stereotyping queer protestors in this way. Despite the glaring moral wrongness of this case, the present theory doesn’t necessarily identify the man’s stereotyping as wrongful. The bigot wrongfully stereotypes, according to the theory, if and only if he ignores relevant information, which was reasonably available to him. Ironically, the more we describe this person as deep in the grip of sexist, homophobic, and transphobic ideologies, the more sheltered his life is, the less able he is to exit the bus due to practical constraints, the stronger case we have for thinking that he treated the protestors as individuals.

Some readers might object that the bigot must have had reasonable access to information challenging his stereotypic presumptions. Feminist and critical race theorists have long argued that ignorance is an expression of agency.²¹ Perhaps the typical bigot could thus be faulted for failing to use relevant, reasonably available information.

This line of thought has its limits. One can tweak the example such that relevant information about queer people was not reasonably available to the bigot, given his history and social position. Perhaps he was intensely indoctrinated. Raised in a cultish setting, he was taught that gay people were degenerate pedophiles. Now an adult, the bigot rides the bus to and from work every day. He remains psychologically and emotionally incapable of stepping outside of his sect’s fundamental beliefs. More details could be piled on. Pile on as many as you like. He still engages in wrongful stereotyping, even if he couldn’t have realized that his stereotypes were false, as well as morally repugnant.

The same critique applies to Eidelson’s theory:

Interpretation 4—Respect for Autonomy

The respect-for-autonomy conception: in forming a judgment, X fails to treat Y as an individual if (violation of character condition) X does not give reasonable weight to evidence of the ways Y has exercised her autonomy in giving shape to her life, where this evidence is reasonably available and relevant to the determination at hand or (violation of agency condition) if X’s judgments concern Y’s choices, these judgments are made in a way that disparages Y’s capacity to make those choices as an autonomous agent.

Failure-to-individualize theory of wrongful stereotyping: stereotyping is wrong if and only if it violates either the character condition or agency condition (see above).

Once again, Bigot reveals gaps in the theory. Whizzing by on a bus, this man cannot stop to gather evidence about the specific ways in which the protestors have exercised autonomy throughout the course of their lives. Even if he could exit the bus, gathering the relevant evidence could be prohibitively costly. Specify the practical stakes however you like. The protestors themselves might block the bigot’s access to personalized information. I, for one, would not share information about myself with a potentially hostile stranger. So long as the bigot lacks reasonable access to personalized information that is relevant to judging the protestors, he satisfies the character condition. If we interpret the agency condition narrowly, as I have argued we must, the bigot could satisfy it as well. Many people who share the bigot’s attitudes believe that queer people have chosen to act on “perverted” desires. Such people would say that the protestors are defective by nature (since they possess morally bad desires) and that they have made bad choices (since they have chosen to indulge these desires).²² Judgments such as these do not disparage anyone’s capacity for agency; rather, they criticize the content of people’s choices.²³

It follows that the bigot does not necessarily fail to treat protestors as individuals, according to the current theory. Indeed, he could very well succeed in treating persons as individuals, despite stereotyping them.

This result is beyond belief. Bigot is a case around which nearly all other theories of wrongful stereotyping converge. Morally bad prejudice is to blame for the man’s expectations (Chapter 5). The bigot’s thoughts are also disrespectful (Chapter 6). Moreover, his way of thinking is one that persists, continuing to harm and oppress queer individuals to this very day (Chapter 7).²⁴ So we have very good reason to think that the bigot—no matter what kind of information is reasonably available to him and no matter what his views on queer agency—has wronged queer protestors by stereotyping them.

One could respond to this conclusion by going down a rabbit hole. The thought is this: I must have made some mistake in how I’ve interpreted the terms informed by, reasonably available, or relevant.²⁵ Perhaps one could play around with different interpretations of these concepts, until we find a version of one of the above theories that satisfies the identification condition and classifies stereotyping in cases like Bigot as wrongful. I agree that getting clearer on these terms would be a good thing. But I am not going down that rabbit hole. I don’t believe that ethical objection in question can—or should—bear the entire weight of a theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping. This doesn’t mean that aspersions ought to be cast on it. In my view, the objection that stereotyping fails to treat persons as individuals ought to be given a role to play in the best theory of wrongful stereotyping. It should not be ignored. What must be rejected is only a very strong claim, namely, that failing to treat persons as individuals is, as Blum puts it, “a bad of all stereotyping.”²⁶

Notice how the constitutive claim is shining through. Throughout this chapter, I’ve used theorists writing about discrimination to understand what’s wrong with stereotyping. Every claim, every objection, every principle that has been advanced by discrimination theorists has applied equally well to stereotyping, even though stereotyping involves judgments that people don’t necessarily act on.

4.5 The Objection’s Explanatory Power

I began this essay with a real-life objection. “All too often,” the Janus Society stated in its pamphlet: “[. . .] there is a tendency to be concerned with the rights of homosexuals as long as they somehow appear to be heterosexual, whatever that is. The masculine woman and the feminine man are looked down upon . . . but the Janus Society is concerned with the worth of an individual and the manner in which she or he comports himself.”²⁷

This objection resonated with Barbara Gittings’ protest sign: “Homosexuals should be judged as individuals.” Until now, I’ve paraded readers through a variety of interpretations of what it might mean to fail to treat persons as individuals, evaluating them in gory detail. Is there an explanatory payoff?

The analysis has revealed something surprising. The simplest and most intuitive ways of understanding the failure to treat persons as individuals do not stand up to scrutiny. Despite what one first might have thought, it’s not intrinsically wrong to treat someone as a number, judge them by group membership, or “tokenize” them. In response to the problem of absurdity, I canvassed two novel views of failing to treat persons as individuals. I’m not in love with the conceptions that I’ve discussed. I lament how distant they are from the snappy, intuitive slogans found on gay rights protest signs and manifestos. Even so, there is something incredibly compelling about these novel conceptions, something essential that they capture from a normative perspective.

That special something, I suspect, is related to the concepts of relevance and reasonable availability.

In emphasizing these concepts, theorists underscore the ways in which living ethically requires epistemic responsibility.²⁸ Eidelson implies that we wrong people when we fail to use relevant, reasonably available information about someone’s character and their agency. Lippert-Rasmussen says that the wrong occurs when we ignore any relevant information, statistical or nonstatistical, that is reasonably available. Both accounts cohere nicely with the claim that stereotyping can fail to treat persons as individuals by treating them as mere tokens of a type (i.e., by refusing to consider personalized evidence about them, especially over time). Yet other views could be advanced.²⁹ All such views of failing to treat persons as individuals emphasize the moral importance of epistemic agency. People who wrongfully stereotype could have been more conscientious and less negligent, using better or more information.³⁰

While my analysis vindicates the objection in question, it also highlights the limitations of critique focused on the failure to treat persons as individuals. Chief among these are the following two:

Limited scope—The objection that stereotyping fails to treat persons as individuals will not apply in all cases of wrongful stereotyping. It will only ever apply in a subset of wrongful cases.

Normative dependence—the force of the objection that stereotyping fails to treat persons as individuals will always depend on other ethical objections to stereotyping.

I’ve already made the case for (a), so I’ll focus strictly on (b) here. Normative dependence makes the following observation. If you are going to include the wrong of failing to treat persons as individuals in your theory of wrongful stereotyping, you must normatively tether it to something else. That’s because, even when the objection applies, it does not fully specify the most fundamental normative values driving the objection. Only when the objection is connected to these more fundamental values will we know what’s wrong with stereotyping in the deepest sense.

Readers might have noticed that Eidelson appeals to Kantian concepts like autonomy and agency when articulating the ideal of treating persons as individuals. On his view, failing to treat persons as individuals is disrespectful. But it is only one way in which people can be disrespected by discriminatory treatment. Lippert-Rasmussen is harder to pin down. He doesn’t include any ethical concepts in his analysis. To explain why there is an ethical imperative to judge persons (but not cups or trees) as individuals, we’d need to look outside his objection that stereotyping fails to treat persons as individuals. For example, one could appeal to the ideal of respect for persons and argue that respect for persons requires that we judge individuals using all relevant information reasonably available to us. Work of groundbreaking feminist philosophers like Iris Murdoch and Lorraine Code could come in handy here, as well as more recent feminist work on moral encroachment.³¹

A tantalizing possibility, moreover, is that power dynamics matter and must be accounted for in the final analysis. My argument has proceeded as if a standing moral right to be treated as an individual exists, which we all have. That assumption is questionable. It might be that members of dominant groups have no right to be treated as individuals in certain contexts. Being treated as an individual is perhaps a privilege that members of dominant groups must earn when interacting with marginalized groups. I’m thinking here of viral videos depicting privileged white women behaving badly, calling the police on Black people enjoying public spaces in ways that they deem inappropriate. These women might object to being perceived as “Karens.” They are individuals, after all! They have a right to be judged based on personalized information about them and not seen as racist white women. But do they?

Fascinating questions bubble to the surface, but here is what to notice for present purposes. Adequate explanations of what’s wrong with stereotyping emerge only when the wrong of failing to treat persons as individuals is connected to a background theory about why and when our epistemic treatment of others matters, ethically and politically. To fully explain what’s wrong with stereotyping, one must look outside the idea of treating persons as individuals and toward values that are more fundamental, such as respect and treating persons as equals. Especially with the latter value, stereotyping’s connection to wider social inequalities and oppression comes into sharper focus and, with it, the possibility that power dynamics are crucial in understanding when, and why, we should treat persons as individuals.

¹ Stryker, Transgender History, 62–3.

² Blum, “Stereotypes and Stereotyping,” 282.

³ Valerie Braithwaite, “Reducing Ageism,” in Amy Cuddy and Susan Fiske (eds), Ageism: Stereotyping and Prejudice Against Older Persons (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 311–7, at 317.

⁴ Leslie, “Generics and the Structure of Mind”; Leslie, “The Original Sin of Cognition”; Wodak, Leslie, and Rhodes, “What a Loaded Generalization”; Cohen, Think Generic, 55; Pelletier and Asher, “Generics and Defaults”; Thompson, “Apprehending Human Form.”

⁵ For empirical research confirming this suggestion, see Kristi Klein and Sarah Hodges, “Gender Difference, Motivation, and Empathic Accuracy: When It Pays to Understand,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27, no. 6 (2001), 720–30; William Ickes, Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel (New York: Prometheus, 2003).

⁶ Stereotype,” Cambridge Dictionary.

⁷ Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream,” 1963. For an audio recording of speech as well as its text, see http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm.

⁸ Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 19–20.

⁹ Some of these interpretations suggest that treating persons as tokens is the same thing as judging them by group membership. If so, this conception could collapse (at least partially) into the previous one. However, the idea that we should care about people as individuals is distinct from the claim that we should judge persons by facts about them as individuals. So not all understandings of the relevant objection (and corollary moral demand) are collapsible.

¹⁰ Stryker, Transgender History, 62.

¹¹ Other examples support of this point as well. See, e.g., Fanon, Black Skin, 92. After being stereotyped, Fanon explains to readers, “I quite simply wanted to be considered a man among men.”

¹² Beeghly, “What Is a Stereotype?” 9–10.

¹³ Arneson, “What Is Wrongful Discrimination?” 787.

¹⁴ Frederick Schauer, Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (New York: Belnap Press, 2003), 19.

¹⁵ ibid.

¹⁶ Michael Levin, “Responses to Race Differences in Crime,” Journal of Social Philosophy 23, no. 1 (1992), 23.

¹⁷ Cited in Eric Cervini, The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. The United States of America (New York: Picador, 2021), 233 (see also 208–9).

¹⁸ For an argument to this effect, see Andy Egan, “Comments on Gendler’s ‘The Epistemic Costs of Implicit Bias,’” Philosophical Studies 156, no. 1 (2011), 65–79. See also Katharine Jenkins, Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

¹⁹ Lippert-Rasmussen, “‘We Are All Different’: Statistical Discrimination,” 54.

²⁰ Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect, 216.

²¹ See Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, Race and the Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).

²² This is, roughly, the official position of the Catholic Church. It is also the presupposition behind so-called gay conversion therapy, whereby gay people “learn” to cultivate heterosexual desires and to refrain from acting on their homosexual ones.

²³ Thanks to Cynthia Stark for this point.

²⁴ After one of the largest mass shootings to date in U.S. history, which occurred at a gay bar in Orlando Florida on June 12, 2016, a Baptist minister celebrated the murders in a sermon to his congregation: “Hey, are you sad that fifty pedophiles were killed today? No . . . I think it’s great. I think that helps society. . . .” Tribune Media Wire, “Baptist Pastor on Orlando Attack: Are You Sad That 50 Pedophiles Were Killed Today? June 14, 2016; for discussion of cases like this, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 61–5. Violence, as Young notes, is one of the five “faces” of oppression.

²⁵ For a view according to which we have “reasonable access” to a great deal of information that seems to escape us in any given moment, see Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection.” For a discussion of how this relates to moral responsibility, see Cheshire Calhoun, “Responsibility and Reproach,” Ethics 99, no 2 (1989), 389–406; Natalia Washington and Daniel Kelly, “Who’s Responsible for This? Moral Responsibility, Externalism, and Knowledge of Implicit Bias,” in Michael Brownstein and Jennifer Saul (eds), Implicit Bias & Philosophy: Responsibility, Structural Injustice and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford, 2016), 11–36; Elinor Mason, Ways to Be Blameworthy: Rightness, Wrongness, and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

²⁶ Blum, “Stereotypes and Stereotyping,” 282.

²⁷ Stryker, Transgender History, 62–3.

²⁸ Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1987).

²⁹ Xiofei Liu and Ye Liang, “What it Means to Respect Individuality,” Philosophical Studies 178, no. 8 (2020), 2579–98. Clinton Castro, “What’s Wrong with Machine Bias?” Ergo 6, no. 15 (2019), 405–26.

³⁰ A parallel critique could be advanced about cultural stereotyping. See Lewis Gordon, Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 75; Diana Tietjens Meyers, Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women’s Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

³¹ Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”; Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility; Rima Basu, “What We Epistemically Owe to Each Other”; Sarah Moss, Probabilistic Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Renée Jorgensen Bolinger, “Varieties of Moral Encroachment,” Philosophical Perspectives 34, no. 1 (2020), 5–26.

5 Prejudice and the Problem of Statistical Stereotyping

Photo 5.1 AIDS Awareness Poster, New Zealand AIDS Foundation, 1990s. Permission from Burnett Foundation Aotearoa (formerly New Zealand AIDS Foundation).

Thousands, Many thousands,

Many thousands gone.

Melvin Dixon¹

In May of 1983, Michael Callen testified before the United States Congress. “I am a gay man with AIDS,” he began, “and I have been asked to speak to you today to personalize the tragedy of AIDS.”² At the time, AIDS diagnoses were rising. Over seven hundred people had already died of AIDS-related complications.³ That number would vault into the hundreds of thousands within a decade. As he spoke, Callen sketched indignities faced by people living with AIDS. Hospitals often refused to admit patients presumed to have the disease. Employers freely fired sick employees, canceling their healthcare. Friends and family stopped returning calls. Everywhere the specter of AIDS went, stigma followed.

Stereotyping played a role in this disaster, and Callen knew it. He told members of Congress that people with AIDS experienced two kinds of suffering. “We suffer from a life-threatening illness,” he said, “and we suffer the stigma attached to being diagnosed with AIDS.” People with AIDS were stereotyped as dangerous libertines who engaged in risky and immoral behaviors—gay sex, promiscuity, and drug use—which foreseeably invited disease. Years later, David France put it like this: “many outside the gay community saw gay men as reckless and foolhardy, driven by self-destructive carnal urges, just as the right-wing always assumed.”⁴ To have AIDS, Callen argued, was to be perceived as “morally, if not literally, contagious.”⁵ “[P]rejudice and bigotry,” he warned, “ultimately poison the whole society—and not just those at whom it is directed.”⁶

To this day, prejudice remains a rallying cry for those defending the rights of people living with HIV and AIDS. In the 1990s, the New Zealand AIDS foundation put this message on a poster: “AIDS attacks the body. Prejudice attacks the spirit. One is caused by a virus. One is caused by ignorance. Both can kill.”⁷ In 2021, activist Gina Brown added: “The biggest thing, I think, for people living with HIV . . . is our internalized stigma. It’s all the stuff we say to ourself.”⁸ “But,” she continues, “we also have externalized stigma, the stuff we hear in our community, right?”⁹ “This still happens in 2021. People go to their family members house, sit down and have something to eat, and they give them a paper plate, throwaway fork, and a plastic cup, and everybody else has glass stuff.”¹⁰ Even now that so much is known about HIV and AIDS, and preventive and therapeutic treatments exist, prejudice has incredibly psychological and social power.

This chapter uses testimonies like these as a launching pad to explore the connection between prejudice and wrongful stereotyping. What do prejudice-focused critiques of stereotyping reveal? What do they hide? How far can such critiques be pushed? After adding voices to the mix, I describe four ways in which philosophers and social scientists have conceptualized prejudice. These conceptions are at our fingertips when trying to identify the role that prejudice might play in the best theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping. To test prejudice’s explanatory power, I develop a realistic case of wrongful statistical stereotyping, which I call SF General*. SF General* is set in a San Francisco emergency room in 1985. Knowing that the AIDS is ongoing global health crisis, I use an example from the pandemic’s early years because the era was unique. In the beginning, medical professionals were forced to use probabilistic reasoning when diagnosing patients. Individual blood tests for HIV were not available until 1987. Despite having special moral leeway to stereotype, I argue that medical professionals could—and very likely did—wrong patients by statistically stereotyping them. As I dig into the example, I make the case that wrongful stereotyping is a complex phenomenon. One of the biggest challenges for a theory of wrongful stereotyping is being able to function effectively across a diverse set of cases, not just in situations where people have vicious motives. While prejudice cannot do this ambitious explanatory work on its own, exploring its power reveals entanglements with deeper moral wrongs such as disrespect, harm, and subordination, pointing us toward pluralism.

5.1 Three Snapshots

Let me start by presenting three snapshots that further illustrate prejudice-focused critiques in the context of the AIDS crisis.

5.1.1 Snapshot 1: Ryan White

By 1983, the year that Callen testified to Congress, epidemiologists widely agreed that you could not get AIDS from shaking someone’s hand, sharing a desk, or using a toilet after them.¹¹ Still many laypeople refused to believe it. A thriving, national market in antiviral toilet spray flourished.¹² School boards across the country banned children with AIDS from attending classes. One mother recounted the hateful messages she received after her teenage son—Ryan White—was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984. “People were really cruel,” she notes, “people said that he had to be gay, that he had to have done something bad or wrong, or he wouldn’t have had it. It was God’s punishment. . . .”¹³

Ryan White’s experience illustrates the intensely prejudicial social climate of the 1980s and 1990s. Many Americans presumed that gay people deserved to die and AIDS was God’s divine punishment. At the same time, his appearance in national media motivated commentators to distinguish “innocent” victims of AIDS from those who allegedly deserved what they got: injection drug users, sex workers, and queer men, among others. The press framed Ryan White as one of the innocents, a young white boy from the Midwest, a hemophiliac who had done nothing wrong. In that capacity, he was invited to the White House and became the face for AIDS in America. He met with officials, asking for increased funding for AIDS research, something that activists like Callen had been relatively unsuccessful in achieving. When he died in 1990, Time magazine announced his death on its cover, a smiling picture of White splashed across the front page.

5.1.2 Snapshot 2: Essex Hemphill

In 1990, the organization ACT UP [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power] hosted a conference themed, “AIDS and the Responsibility of The Writer.”¹⁴ Essex Hemphill was one of the keynotes. In his speech, Hemphill rails against prejudices faced by Black gay men: homophobia from within the Black community and racism from the predominantly white gay community. From his perspective, queer artist Robert Mapplethorpe exemplifies the latter problem. Hemphill observes:

In many of his images, black males are only shown as parts of the anatomy—genitals, chests, buttocks—close-up and cropped to elicit desire. Mapplethorpe’s eye pays special attention to the penis at the expense of showing us the subject’s face, and thus, a whole person. The penis becomes the identity the black male, which is the classic racist stereotype re-created and presented as “art” in the context of gay vision.¹⁵

“The best gay minds of my generation,” he continues, “believe that we speak as one voice and dream one dream, but we are not a monolith. We are not even respectful of each other’s differences.”¹⁶ On his view, Black gay writers have a responsibility to “work diligently and to utilize honesty and discipline” to document queer lives in all their complexity.¹⁷

Hemphill’s speech, emotionally fierce and intellectually powerful, illuminates the intersection of racism and sexism in the lives of Black gay men during the 1980s and 1990s. It was an era where Black communities perceived AIDS as a white problem. When sociologist Cathy Cohen interviewed queer Black men about their experiences, research participants told her that Black-run community organizations preferred to look the other way while they died.¹⁸ During the funeral of writer Donald Woods, Pamela Sneed recalls poet Assotto Saint sauntering to the pulpit, slamming a hand down on the Bible and announcing: “Donald Woods was a proud Black gay man, he did not die of heart failure. He died of AIDS. If you agree with me, stand up.”¹⁹ At the same time, in white-dominated queer spaces, Black gay men struggled for visibility and respect. This is especially worth noting because Hemphill gave his speech at an ACT UP event with a predominantly white audience.

Unshy about his HIV diagnosis, Hemphill advocated for writerly resistance to stereotyping. When the poet Joseph Beam died from AIDS-related complications in 1986, Hemphill moved in with Beam’s mother. They worked, alongside Barbara Smith, founding member of the Black feminist Combahee River Collective and head of Kitchen Table Press, to complete the unfinished edited volume on which Beam was working at his time of death, a project that showcased the work of queer Black male writers.²⁰ In the volume’s introduction, Hemphill describes being a teenager, struggling with his sexuality. “What there was to read for me in 1969,” he writes, “was in no way affirming of the sexual identity germinating within me.”²¹ If Beam’s work had been out there, says Hemphill, he would have felt less lonely—and perhaps less ashamed. He issues a call to action.²² Future generations of gay Black men need to see themselves reflected on the page. “Our immediate task,” he argues, “as black gay men creating our own literary tradition, is to work diligently and utilize honesty and discipline as our allies. If we commit ourselves to strive for excellence and nothing less, we will create evidence of being. And the silence and invisibility that we self-imposed, or often accepted, will give way to the realization of how fierce and necessary we are. SNAP!”²³

Resistance to stereotyping, for Hemphill, as this quote suggests, comes in the form of documenting authentic Black gay male experience—its joys and its hardships—and articulating in his poetry “the positive longing for futures beyond the forces of antiblackness and antiqueerness,” as literary scholar Darius Bost puts it, a future unmarked by the scourge of AIDS.²⁴ Though Hemphill and others wouldn’t live to see that future, their work provided, in Hemphill’s words “evidence of being,” proof that one can love, live, and create art amid plague and hate-mongering.

5.1.3 Snapshot 3: Katrina Haslip

The last snapshot I’m sharing belongs to Katrina Haslip. Haslip was a pioneering Black AIDS activist who discovered that she had HIV while incarcerated at Bedford Hills Prison in New York. After receiving a positive blood test in 1987, she kept her HIV status a secret for over a year. The anxiety was crushing. She reports: “Women were dying in their cells and in the hospitals. They were dying because they were giving up and because they felt there was no hope.”²⁵ After coming out, she collaborated with Judith Clark and Kathy Boudin to start AIDS Counseling and Education Program, an organization devoted to educating incarcerated women about AIDS, lessening their stigma, and improving material conditions at the prison.

One thing that Haslip saw firsthand: getting an AIDS diagnosis was hard. She knew why. Testing positive for HIV and having severe health problems weren’t sufficient for a diagnosis. To officially count as having AIDS, a person needed to manifest at least one symptom from a preapproved United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) list.²⁶ The CDC’s list was developed exclusively based on observations of males. Common AIDS-related ailments in female bodies—including cervical cancer and persistent yeast infections—were excluded as qualifying symptoms. When Haslip and other activists brought this to the CDC’s attention, its leadership argued that female-specific ailments couldn’t definitively be linked to AIDS, while at the same time refusing to study AIDS in females.²⁷ For years, they stonewalled. Haslip told the New York Times: “I am, and have been, a woman with AIDS despite the C.D.C. not wishing to count me.”²⁸ Two days before she died in December 1992, the CDC announced that it was expanding its definition of AIDS. The press asked her for a statement. Haslip replied: “This [change] is only happening because of us, and you let us die.”²⁹

These three snapshots drive home something important, namely, that there’s no singular experience associated with prejudicial stereotyping. Prejudicial stereotyping is an intersectional phenomenon. Black gay men living with AIDS, like Hemphill, had different complaints about stereotyping and discrimination compared to poor and working-class Black poor women like Haslip and white, middle-class teenagers like Ryan White. National media never rallied around people like Haslip and Hemphill. Hemphill and Haslip also faced a greater struggle to meet their basic medical and material needs. And, yet, each person, despite the specificity of their experiences, objected to being judged based on prejudice.

5.2 Prejudice: A Conceptual Taxonomy

The objection that wrongful stereotyping is caused by prejudice sounds simple enough. Yet many conceptions of prejudice of exist. This section provides a brief taxonomy, revealing the options.

5.2.1 Individual Psychology

The most popular way to think of prejudice is as a feature of individual psychology. The idea is this: prejudice exists in individuals’ hearts, minds, or both. Within an individualistic frame, two kinds of view predominate. The first understands prejudice as a purely cognitive phenomenon.³⁰ Kwame Anthony Appiah, for example, argues that prejudices are essentializing beliefs that generate unjustified moral judgments of groups, such as the belief that gay men are by nature promiscuous. He describes prejudices as “the deformation of rationality in judgment.”³¹ According to a second kind of view, prejudice is a psychological state or disposition with both cognitive and affective elements.³² “Almost without exception,” writes sociologist David Wellman, “people studying prejudice describe it as a combination of hostility toward and faulty generalizations about racial groups.”³³ Since Wellman made this statement in the early 1990s, psychologists have increasingly studied positive prejudices and the ways in which they scaffold hostility and keep marginalized groups in their place.³⁴

5.2.2 Group Psychology

Prejudice has also been conceptualized in terms of group psychology. When sociologists understand prejudice in this way, they often cite Herbert Blumer. In 1952, Blumer asked theorists to “shift study and analysis away from preoccupation with feelings as lodged in individuals to a concern with the relationships of racial groups.”³⁵ He characterizes prejudice as “a sense of group position.”³⁶ This sense of group position, he says, “supplies the dominant group with its framework of perception, its standard of judgment, its patterns of sensitivity, and its emotional sensitivities.”³⁷ In a similar vein, Charles Mills argues that white domination requires “consensual hallucination.” “There will be white mythologies,” he writes, “invented Orients, invented Africas, with a correspondingly fabricated population, countries that never were, inhabited by people who never were. . . .”³⁸ When Mills mentions the “white mythologies,” he is referring to what others might call “the racial imaginary.”³⁹ He specifies the contents of white imaginary—some of which are certainly prejudices—in largely cognitive terms.⁴⁰ They take the form of group-level beliefs, theories, expectations, impressions, and so on.

5.2.3 Ideology and Social Structures

Structural conceptions of prejudice present a third option. Sally Haslanger argues, for example, that prejudices are a constitutive part of social structures.⁴¹ This view of prejudice—though it rejects a psychological conceptualization—does not deny that prejudice manifests in collective or individual psychology.⁴² Rather its advocates argue that prejudice at its most fundamental level is an ideological tool that enables the functioning of social systems and enjoys a cultural existence. This resonates with Patricia Hill Collins’s claim that stereotypes exist as controlling images and ideas. In a similar vein, César Cabezas defines prejudice in terms of the functional role it plays in systems of oppression.⁴³

5.2.4 Social Environments

A fourth view characterizes prejudice as a feature of embodied social space. In a 2018 paper, Mary Murphy et al. argue for “a social-contextual theory of prejudice,” which they refer to as “prejudice in places.”⁴⁴ “A view of prejudice in places,” they explain, “requires examining value, norms, models, hierarchies, and behaviors that organizations cultivate and how these settings support biased (and unbiased) individuals.” In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne argues for a related view, according to which misogyny is best understood as, “a property of social environments in which women are liable to encounter hostility due to the enforcement and policing of patriarchal norms and expectations—often, though not exclusively, in so far as they violate patriarchal law and order.”⁴⁵

Like structural views of prejudice, these conceptualizations embrace the claim that individuals and groups can have prejudiced mindsets. What they reject is that prejudice is a stable psychological attitude. On an environmental view, individuals may become more or less prejudiced in a psychological sense as they enter (and leave) social environments which are differently prejudiced.

Trekking through this taxonomy is vital. It reveals that competing conceptions of prejudice make distinct claims about what’s wrong with prejudice. Some theorists locate the primary wrongs within the hearts or minds of individuals. Others locate the primary wrongs in intergroup dynamics, culture, or social environments. These details—and more—matter when we are interpreting and evaluating claims about what’s wrong with stereotyping.

5.3 The Problem of Statistical Discrimination

What role should prejudice play (if any) in the best theory of wrongful stereotyping? Turning to discrimination theory, here is what one finds. Very few theorists go “all in” on the claim that prejudice explains wrongful discrimination.

Swimming against the current, one finds philosopher J. L. A. Garcia. Garcia is happy to endorse a prejudice-focused theory of wrongful discrimination. “Discrimination goes wrong,” he argues, “—becomes immoral . . . when its agent turns against somebody on account of the discerned difference.”⁴⁶ “Turning against” needn’t involve hostility, on his view. It can consist in “ill-will, indifference, and disdain or condescension, as well as paltriness of solicitude.”⁴⁷ “So conceived,” Garcia explains, “[discriminatory] actions are then immoral in that they are vicious, that is, distant from and opposed to virtuous traits in the actor’s motives.”⁴⁸

Statistical discrimination creates a problem for a theory like Garcia’s. To illustrate the problem, I’ll use an AIDS-relevant example.⁴⁹ It’s an example that was brought to my attention by a friend, whose partner died of AIDS in late 1990s and with whom I worked in the jewelry industry for over a decade. Richard arrived in San Francisco in the 1970s after stints in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. Like many queer transplants, he grew up in the American Midwest. Of all places, San Francisco was perhaps the city in the United States where employers were most likely to be queer friendly and amply educated about HIV transmission by the mid-1980s. Even so, he told me that it wasn’t unusual for employers to ask gay men about their HIV status. Richard framed these questions as reasonable. Statistically speaking, HIV-positive individuals were more likely to call in sick, miss work for extended periods, and take time off for doctor’s appointments. We worked for a small business. We knew how disruptive it was for even one person to call in sick. Even though discrimination against gay men based on their HIV status based on such considerations was not motivated by bigotry, it was harmful. Since most healthcare in the United States is acquired through employers, being cut off from a job meant that a person couldn’t get healthcare coverage and, hence, could not reliably access medical care. Not having a job also meant an inability to make rent or mortgage payments on your own. It was also isolating. Though employment discrimination against people with HIV and AIDS became illegal in 1990, covered under the Americans with Disability Act, the practice continued.

Statistical discrimination explains why the prejudice theory is so unpopular among discrimination theorists. Being targeted for statistical discrimination can ruin a person’s life, causing serious harms. It can be subordinating, violating people’s rights in ways that disproportionately impact historically marginalized groups. Statistical discrimination can disrespect people by failing to treat them as individuals and can publicly stigmatize vulnerable groups. These objections do not depend on discriminators having vicious prejudices in their hearts and minds when they discriminate.⁵⁰

Two camps of thought exist about how to deal with statistical discrimination. Some argue it reveals that prejudice should be entirely excised from the best theory of wrongful discrimination. Kasper-Lippert Rasmussen, for example, contends that the best theory of what’s wrong with discrimination ought to be unified.⁵¹ If prejudice can’t play this unifying role, it is morally irrelevant. A second response—by far the more common one in discrimination theory—is to move away from unification and toward pluralism. Though prejudice can’t always explain what’s wrong with discrimination, its presence is highly relevant in some cases. When prejudice causes wrongful discrimination, a pluralistic theory could recognize that and use it for explanatory purposes while also making use of other ethical objections.⁵²

5.4 Prejudice-Free, Wrongful Statistical Stereotyping?

I mention discrimination theory because it provides a model for theorizing wrongful stereotyping. How good of a model, one might wonder? Do the same analytic moves apply when it comes to stereotyping? If they do, one should be able to find cases of statistical stereotyping in which prejudice plays no role, but in which it is nonetheless wrongful to stereotype.

The first order of business in testing this parallel is to identify an example of prejudice-free statistical stereotyping. Call the case that follows SF General (1985). In When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, AIDS activist Cleve Jones reports being diagnosed with shingles in a San Francisco hospital. “A nurse told me coldly,” he reports, “that I probably had AIDS.”⁵³ In 1984, it was estimated that half of gay/bisexual males in the city were HIV positive.⁵⁴ Shingles—a viral infection accompanied by painful rashes—was a common precursor to more serious infections experienced by individuals with AIDS. The nurse statistically stereotypes Jones on that basis: gay male, in the hospital, shingles = probably has AIDS. At the time, reasoning of this kind was the best that medical practitioners could do. Blood tests for HIV in the United States were not yet available for individual use. The adjective, “cold,” suggests that Jones perceives her reasoning as clinical, detached. She simply tells him: you probably have the disease. She doesn’t sugarcoat his situation. Or try to comfort him.

This case is a helpful start, though it doesn’t exact fit the bill. A wrongful case of statistical stereotyping is required for the parallel to hold. If we take Cleve Jones’s perspective seriously, the nurse didn’t wrong him by stereotyping. For one thing, she was right. He did have AIDS. Second, her reasoning didn’t ignore relevant facts about him. The consequences of her correct diagnostic judgment were also incredibly beneficial. Because she stereotyped, Jones was able to inform potential sexual partners of the risks and take steps to prevent the further infections. He was able to access treatments that were most effective when taken early on. He also gained a lot of clarity in that moment, and he seems appreciative for it, though he leaves the hospital racked with anxiety.

Though SF General (1985) isn’t what the argument requires, it gets the gears turning. Consider a variation on the case, SF General*. Imagine that Cleve Jones’s nurse sees a new patient later in emergency room: a white, heterosexual female in her early forties. The patient has a painful rash on her neck, which turns out to be shingles. In 1984, females accounted for about 7% of people with AIDS in the United States, according to government statistics.⁵⁵ Of that group, 27% were white.⁵⁶ Because the patient is a heterosexual white female, the nurse expects that the patient’s immune system is compromised from overwork. She tells the patient: “Go home and rest. Take some Ibuprofen. You’ll feel better soon.” Had the female patient been a gay male like Cleve Jones, the nurse would have expected HIV to be the root of the problem and told the patient as much. In fact, the female patient has AIDS.

Since this is an imagined case, we can’t consult the stereotyped person to get their view on whether they have been wronged by the nurse’s judgment. Even so, we have another kind of testimonial evidence at our disposal. Though this case is hypothetical, SF General* describes a scenario that drew intense criticism from feminist AIDS activists like Katrina Haslip. Terry McGovern, an attorney who provided legal services to Haslip and others, recalls:

I was seeing this really weird phenomenon where these women were coming in, and they had fallen into a complete state of everything going wrong. They couldn’t qualify for Medicaid and disability. If you take a case because somebody’s been denied Social Security disability, you appeal, you get their medical records. That was the context in which I saw all these cases. T-cells are basically a marker for how healthy your immune system is. And in the early days, it was a marker of how long you were gonna live. And these women [out of a normal range of 500–1,600] had like six T-cells, ten T-cells, and all over their records, there would be all these gynecological conditions, bacterial pneumonia, tuberculosis, all kinds of stuff. But their records would say “Doesn’t have AIDS.” And then I would go to hearings with them and basically the administrative judge would kind of accuse them of overstating their illness. So you couldn’t win the cases. And often women would die before I got the rejection.⁵⁷

McGovern’s testimony suggests a rationale for condemning statistical stereotyping as wrongful in SF General*. Being statistically stereotyped seriously harms the female patient. Without a diagnosis, the female patient cannot inform sexual partners of the risks they face, will not receive appropriate medical care, and will lack access to a community of support and governmental resources such as housing and childcare benefits.

SF General* is the kind of case we’re looking for: a case of putatively wrongful statistical stereotyping in which prejudice appears to be absent. If prejudice is playing no causal role in bringing about the judgment, it is unclear how prejudice could explain the wrong of stereotyping. If the act of stereotyping is in fact wrong as feminist AIDS activists suggest, it must be wrong for other reasons, such as that it causes harm or contributes to women’s subordination. The implications for a theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping: either prejudice is morally irrelevant or it’s not the only thing that makes stereotyping wrong.

5.5 Uncovering Prejudice in Cases of Statistical Stereotyping

I want to confess something. I’m not persuaded that prejudice is usually absent in morally wrongful cases of statistical discrimination. It seems an outright fantasy that the statistics behind racial profiling policies are untainted by prejudice, for example. I suspect the same may be true when it comes to other cases of wrongful statistical stereotyping. What if prejudice only appears to be absent but, upon closer examination, is hiding in plain sight?

To uncover prejudice in SF General*, begin with this quote. “At the vortex of the conceptual, moral, and policy dimensions of statistical discrimination,” writes legal theorist Frederick Schauer, “is the question of how and when, if at all, to employ non-spurious but non-universal indicators for the purpose of making decisions that have real consequences on individuals.”⁵⁸ On Schauer’s view, the puzzle of statistical discrimination is how, and when, people should use probabilistic information associated with group membership in decision making. Statistical stereotyping—qua discriminatory thought—involves judgment and not decisions per se, but the issue it raises is the same.

Schauer’s way of describing the puzzle of statistical discrimination contains a tell with respect to my query. He refers to “non-spurious but non-universal” indictors that guide decisions and judgments. One could perhaps rephrase this simply as, “probabilistic or statistical information associated with group membership.” Such data is “nonuniversal” for a straightforward reason: it conveys information about likelihood of group members having traits that is below 100%. However, there’s another key adjective in that phrase: “non-spurious.” An intuitive way to think about spuriousness is in terms of falsity or inaccuracy.⁵⁹ A spurious belief is a false or inaccurate belief. By saying that discrimination generates ethical puzzles only when it is based on “non-spurious” indicators, he is arguing that these puzzles arise only when people have true and accurate beliefs.

The first strategy for discovering prejudice emerges. Test for spuriousness. If a person’s view of the probabilities doesn’t match reality, as will often be the case, there’s a question about why. Personal prejudices may be lurking in the background. Indeed, a person’s statistical presumptions may have all the hallmarks of prejudice and, hence, might constitute prejudices.

Return to SF General*. My original exposition sidestepped questions of accuracy. I implied that CDC statistics were “on the nurse’s side.” But I didn’t say that she used these statistics; nor did I specify her exact view of the probabilities with respect to the likelihood of AIDS in gay male and straight white female populations. Consider this possibility. From the nurse’s perspective, God created AIDS primarily to punish homosexual males. She believes that 80% of gay males have HIV, and the ones that don’t are ticking time bombs. Had this been her reasoning, prejudice would explain why she statistically stereotyped in the way she did; moreover, her statistical beliefs themselves would qualify as morally vicious prejudices. Though this is not the only scenario, it plants the seeds of skepticism. How likely is it that the nurse’s view of the probabilities matched reality and, if they did not, how likely it is that prejudice explains why?

Prejudice may also hide elsewhere. In statistics, “the reference class problem” refers to the problem of deciding which category/class to use when reasoning probabilistically. While most philosophers are interested in the reference class problem because they are investigating norms of ideal reasoning, it interests me for a different reason: reference class selection is another place where prejudice can hide when people reason.⁶⁰ SF General* could be an example. The nurse presumes that “female” is the most appropriate reference class in which to place her patient. But why? There are other reference classes that she could have used. What if this patient used injection drugs? “Female injection drug user” would be the more appropriate reference class in that case. As it is, the nurse simply presumes that “female” and perhaps implicitly “white female” is the most appropriate reference class. Though prejudice as Garcia defines it doesn’t necessarily explain why she selects the relevant reference class, it could. Indeed, it’s very plausible that it could. Maybe the female patient didn’t fit the nurse’s stereotype of an injection drug user because she was white and middle-class.

Here is another possibility. One hallmark of prejudicial belief is evidence insensitivity. “Evidence insensitivity” refers to a kind of epistemic rigidity whereby a belief or expectation doesn’t budge in the face of conflicting data. Notice the implication. Even if a person’s statistical belief is true and was formed in response to reliable evidence at a certain time, it could still be a prejudice so long as the belief would remain unchanged in the face of counterevidence. If so, acts of statistical stereotyping must be subjected to additional scrutiny to determine whether they are motivated by prejudice.

With respect to SF General*, the question would be this: would the nurse have modified her statistical beliefs or expectations if the world radically changed? If the nurse described in SF General* boarded a plane in 1985 and flew to South Africa, for example, where the AIDS crisis was raging but primarily among heterosexuals, would she have stereotyped a female patient in the same way? If the answer is yes, her original statistical belief would fail the counterevidence sensitivity test. It would thus qualify as a prejudice even if it were accurate and supported by evidence in the nurse’s home environment.

This kind of prejudice is not necessarily the result of vicious character flaws. Philosopher Jessie Munton explains it like this. Humans never simply “see” whatever is in front of our faces.⁶¹ What we perceive is always a product of immediate experience plus statistical data based on past experiences. Cognition is similar. We don’t judge each person we see from scratch, as if every person were novel. Prior experience—and “the categories we live by”— always play a role.⁶² What this means is that belief and perception are always shaped by prior experience, where this is often tied to a specific environmental niche.

Munton introduces the concept of “gerrymandering.” An experience is gerrymandered, she explains, “if its accuracy is covertly dependent on manipulation of the environment.”⁶³ To better understand the idea, consider an example. Suppose I go into a jewelry store and the salesperson shows me a blue topaz ring. Though I don’t know it, my visual experience has been gerrymandered. Like nearly all topaz gemstones I’ve seen in the past, the gemstone in front of me started out as a muddy brown color and was later irradiated to achieve a vibrant light blue hue. Though I correctly perceive that the gemstone as blue, the accuracy of my visual experience and beliefs about the gemstone’s color depend on a covert environmental manipulation. The manipulation is “covert” because what makes it blue is not obvious from just looking, and jewelry stores do not typically disclose the modification to customers. What goes for gemstones goes for people too. The nurse in SF General*, for example, correctly expects that Cleve Jones had AIDS. She also knows that her hospital is full of gay men dying of AIDS. What she may not realize is that her social environment—and, hence, the accuracy of her perceptual evidence—was produced by the genocidal negligence of government officials.⁶⁴

To say that a person’s experience or statistical evidence is gerrymandered is not yet to show that they are prejudiced. So, Munton says more. One of her key thoughts is that using gerrymandered evidence is “unsafe” in that it renders a person’s visual system prone to error. If one leaves a gerrymandered context and enters a new one, a person is vulnerable to false beliefs and perceptual illusions.⁶⁵ The problem here is a kind of perceptual and cognitive rigidity. The visual system—owing to its reliance on prior information—is stuck using the old priors that have been manipulated to hold in one environmental niche only. We have thus arrived in the vicinity of something that seems like cognitive prejudice. But prejudice is not rooted in moral vice but in intrinsic features of human cognition and perception. Moreover, this prejudice exists even in cases when a person’s visual experience is accurate and vindicated by evidence in her current environment.

With social environments at the center of the conversation, the gears start spinning faster. Suppose the nurse in SF General* used CDC statistics when stereotyping the female patient. These statistics were arguably the most reliable informational tool available to the medical community at the time. Nonetheless, they were prejudiced. In a book produced by the feminist wing of ACT UP, one activist—poet Risa Denenberg—pointed out, “Since the CDC definition for AIDS was developed from observations of men, women often die of an opportunistic infection before they are even considered eligible for an AIDS diagnosis. Women are thus excluded from the statistical picture. . . . Statistics, in other words, only count women who fits the CDC’s narrow definition for AIDS; all other women remain invisible.”⁶⁶

This undercounting was a predictable result of prejudices within the CDC. For years, high-ranking officials ignored feminist activists who objected to the suffering caused by a male-centric definition of AIDS. CDC officials’ behavior—their foot dragging and dismissiveness—betrayed prejudice as defined by Garcia: “ill will, indifference, and disdain or condescension, as well as paltriness of solicitude.”⁶⁷ When the CDC expanded its definition in 1993, the number of women with AIDS doubled overnight.⁶⁸ Until then, anyone who deployed CDC statistics in diagnostic settings was using a prejudicial informational tool.

One might object that the nurse is using statistical information from her specific environmental niche, not from the CDC. But this objection is moot. The emergency room is a space where quick decisions must be made. People are in dire need, some at risk of dying. Staffing is often short. Environmental features like these disadvantage female patients living with AIDS. If medical professionals engage in quick thinking as is likely, they will tend to classify female patients’ ailments—shingles, for example—as owing to causes other than AIDS. Norms operative in the space cause further disadvantage. CDC statistics and its definition of AIDS were mandated for use in medical contexts. These diagnostic tools were created under the sexist presumption that male bodies represent all bodies. They were kept in place even when their inaccuracy and harmful impacts were made crystal clear. The nurse’s individual psychology is, therefore, largely—though not entirely—beside the point. No matter whom female patients living with AIDS encountered, they were likely to be ignored, misdiagnosed, and mistreated in medical spaces, even when interacting with well-meaning, good-intentioned people. The space itself, with its norms and institutional practices, conspired against them.

Ultimately, this is the source of my skepticism. I see little reason to believe that real-world examples of wrongful statistical stereotyping are ever prejudice-free. Prejudice is remarkably insidious: it hides in our social environment and within our own thinking and ways of being in the world. Its power is remarkable. Not only do our own prejudices move us, but individuals may also channel other people’s prejudices, especially when serving in institutional roles where prejudicial norms and practices dominate.

5.6 Baby Steps Toward Pluralism

What are the implications of this analysis for the role of prejudice in the best theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping? In this final section, I draw conclusions for readers, which set the agenda for the rest of this book.

One thing that statistical stereotyping underscores is that prejudice takes many forms, not all of which are manifestations of personal moral vice. This observation is a small but crucial building block. It’s easy to start with preconceived notions. If I say the words “wrongful stereotyping,” hateful cases jump immediately to my mind. It’s like when someone says “rapist,” and a mental image of a guy sitting in windowless white van appears. The scariest cases capture our attention. They seem to capture the essence of the thing. Yet it’s too simple. Most rapists know their victims. They are their dates, friends, family members, neighbors. The face of wrongful stereotyping is likewise more complex. It’s not just rabid, ignorant homophobes. It’s also a nurse, acting in good faith toward her patients. It is CDC officials who used their institutional power to defend a criterion for AIDS that they sincerely believed would serve the interests of most people.

This more complicated picture of prejudice forces one to rethink why stereotyping is wrong. If a theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping must explain not only hateful acts of stereotyping but also cases of wrongful statistical stereotyping like SF General*, there is an imperative to seek out what, if anything, unifies these seemingly disparate cases. Prejudice cannot effectively do this. Though it’s not hard to find prejudice in wrongful stereotyping, not all psychological prejudices are morally vicious in themselves, and channeling environmental prejudice (such as when the nurse statistically stereotypes Cleve Jones) isn’t always morally wrongful either.

Disrespect, by contrast, seems well suited to play a unifying role across diverse cases. Vitriolic stereotyping is disrespectful. It represents people as less than human or as inherently inferior to others. Disrespect—perhaps of a different kind—may also be present in wrongful statistical stereotyping. Instead of being treated as an individual, a person is judged based on information about “most” or “typical” group members. Even though disrespect manifests differently, one finds a unified explanation at one’s fingertips. All wrongful stereotyping is alleged to have the property of being disrespectful.

Though statistical stereotyping leads directly to a disrespect-focused theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping, it also pulls in the opposite direction: toward stereotyping’s bad consequences. Because the nurse misdiagnoses the patient, the female patient suffers. In addition to the pain of shingles, the patient is now saddled with false expectations about their own health. Even if the shingles heal, new symptoms are inevitable: persistent yeast infections, painful boils, cuts that won’t mend. The patient won’t be able to recognize these as manifestations of AIDS. When discussing her own experience, Katrina Haslip laments the fact that medical practitioners were so poorly informed. In the years before she tested positive for HIV, she experienced chronic yeast infections. “I knew it wasn’t normal for me,” she said, “I could have been treated two years earlier if someone had known this was an early sign of H.I.V. infection.”⁶⁹ The consequences of not getting a correct diagnosis were profound. People diagnosed at later stages of illness were less likely to benefit from treatments available at the time. They were unable to inform sexual partners about potential risks and ran the risk of infecting others. The respect theory seems to ignore all of this.

Lived experiences of other activists confirm this. In Callen’s Congressional testimony, while he objects to being targeted for prejudicial judgment, he emphasizes stereotyping is literally killing people with AIDS. He describes the emotional burden of stigmatizing judgments, the financial strain of being unemployable because of one’s HIV status, and the experience of isolation from one’s family and friends. If you read the Congressional transcripts, he talks most about the negative impacts of stereotyping. Similarly, for the feminists of ACT UP, it was essential to articulate the how women with AIDS—especially poor women and women of color—were harmed by stereotyping. “Not only won’t they [women with AIDS] get counted;” explains Denenburg, “they also won’t get treated; they won’t qualify for health benefits, childcare, rent subsidies, or other support services for people with AIDS that AIDS activists have pressured the government to provide, and they won’t be provided with information on how to take care of themselves and how to protect the people with whom they are having sex or sharing needles.”⁷⁰

ACT UP posters put the critique in stark terms. “The government has blood on its hands,” says one, “One AIDS death every half hour.” “No more invisible women,” says another, “We’re dying for data.” Activists underscored the fact that AIDS was killing people, thereby tearing apart communities, friends, lovers, and families.⁷¹

Stereotyping’s normative complexity rises into view. Within a pluralistic theory, there is room for both harm and disrespect. Stereotyping could be wrong when it is either harmful or disrespectful. If it were possible to statistical stereotype someone in a way that caused serious harms but was respectful (such as in a possible variant of SF General*), the theory could latch onto to these extrinsic consequences. It would entail that they make stereotyping wrong. Furthermore, the theory’s explanations are built to be mix-and-match. When a case of stereotyping is both harmful and disrespectful, as was often the case for homophobic stereotyping during the AIDS crisis, the theory can capture this complexity. It doesn’t boil down what’s wrong with stereotyping to a single factor only. The theory recognizes that an act of stereotyping can be wrong in different ways and for different reasons.

Lovers of unity are thus put on notice. If a theory of wrongful stereotyping puts all the explanatory weight on one factor, it will violate the second desideratum for a successful theory: the explanatory condition. According to the explanatory condition, a successful theory must adequately explain why wrongful stereotyping is wrong. The respect theory can’t do this because its explanations ignore harm. An exclusively harm-focused theory can’t do this because it ignores disrespect. Both wrong-making properties must be included in the best theory’s conceptual repertoire if its explanations are to adequately explain why stereotyping is wrong in specific cases.

SF General* illustrates this point exceptionally well. You can’t explain what’s wrong with statistical stereotyping that renders females with AIDS invisible if you can’t talk about the harm that it does. Likewise, vicious acts of stereotyping don’t just wrong the targets by disrespecting them because people are being judged in hateful ways. Hateful stereotyping of people with AIDS caused harm and was also wrong for that reason.

I began this chapter by asking the following question: what is the role of prejudice in the best theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping? I now have an answer. Prejudice will play a role in the best theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping. But its role will be both indirect and limited. To the extent that prejudice sometimes has explanatory power, it is tethered to deeper moral wrongs. Accordingly, the rest of the book shifts focus. Chapter 6 explores the disrespect or harm theory, according to which stereotyping wrongs people by either disrespecting them or causing them harm. In Chapter 7, I ask what might be gained from adopting a wider social analysis focused on inequality and freedom. Both chapters showcase the myriad ways in which prejudice matters.

In closing, I want to return to the problem of statistical stereotyping. Its value, I would argue, lies in underscoring the normative complexity of wrongful stereotyping. Wrongful stereotyping doesn’t just occur when hateful people judge others based on false, unjustified, morally repulsive group prejudices. People can be wronged by stereotyping when they are judged based on probabilistic reasoning. They can be wronged by being judged by true, justified beliefs. By publicizing this complexity, statistical stereotyping challenges the view that there’s only one thing morally wrong with stereotyping.

¹ Melvin Dixon, “One by One,” in Michael Klein (ed) Poets for Life: Seventy-Six Poets Respond to AIDS (New York: Crown Publishers, 1989), 63–4. Dixon’s emphasis.

² U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Michael Callen speaking to the New York Congressional Delegation on the trauma of living with AIDS, 98th Con., 1st sess. Congressional Record 129, no. 69 (May 28, 1983). http://michaelcallen.com/mikes-writing/congressional-record-on-aids/ [Accessed January 4, 2019].

³ U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Intergovernmental Relations and Human Resources Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, Federal Response to AIDS: Hearings Before A Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, Opening Statement by Chairman Weiss, 98th Cong., 1st sess., August 1, 1983, 1. “The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control reveals almost 2,000 reported cases and 730 fatalities in this country alone.”

⁴ David France, How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS (New York: Vintage Books, 2017), 160. For an example of this ideology, see William F. Buckley Jr., “Crucial Steps in Combating the AIDS Epistemic; Identify All the Carriers,” New York Times, March 18, 1986.

⁵ Callen, “On the Trauma of Living with AIDS.”

⁶ ibid. A Presidential Commission on AIDS was not formed until 1987, and Ronald Reagan did not officially recognize the epidemic until 1985. For a sense of the callous, homophobic response to AIDS in the early years of the epidemic, see Scott Calonic, “When AIDS was Funny” (2015). Video. https://video.vanityfair.com/watch/the-reagan-administration-s-chilling-response-to-the-aids-crisis [Accessed January 31, 2019].

⁷ New Zealand AIDS Foundation, “AIDS Attacks the Body, Prejudice Attacks the Spirit,” Advertisement, #669577i, Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/r2n5htfz [Accessed January 25, 2023].

⁸ Gina Brown, “Women Living with HIV Are Seemingly Invisible. This Activist Is Trying to Change That,” Interview by Jeffrey Masters, Glaad website. Last modified May 18, 2021. https://www.glaad.org/blog/women-living-hiv-are-seemingly-invisible-activist-trying-change [Accessed January 24, 2023].

⁹ ibid.

¹⁰ ibid.

¹¹ In 1983, scientists discovered that the cause of AIDS was a human retrovirus. The epidemiological consensus described above was premised on this discovery. For an example of propaganda that stoked fear of AIDS, see William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 82–94. Masters and Johnson—prominent sexologists—argued that HIV could be transmitted via toilet seats and restaurant food.

¹² Veronique Mottier, Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 69–70.

¹³ Jeanne White Ginder, “Who Was Ryan White?” webpage, maintained by Health and Resources Service Administration of the U.S. government. https://hab.hrsa.gov/about-ryan-white-hivaids-program/who-was-ryan-white [Accessed January 8, 2019].

¹⁴ See Outwrite, “AIDS and The Responsibility of the Writer,” Plenary Session. https://vimeo.com/8183353 [Accessed August 16, 2023].

¹⁵ Essex Hemphill, Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men, conceived by Joseph Beam (Washington, DC: Red Bone Press, 1991), xxxix. Hemphill published his Outwrite speech as the introduction to this edited volume.

¹⁶ ibid, xlii.

¹⁷ ibid, liiii

¹⁸ Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 96. See also Ernest Quimby and Samuel R. Freidman, “Dynamics of Black Mobilization Against AIDS, in New York City,” Social Problems 36, no. 4 (1989), 403–15.

¹⁹ Pamela Sneed, Funeral Diva (San Francisco: City Lights, 2020). For other accounts of this event, see B. Michael Hunter (ed), Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS, Other Countries Collective Volume II (New York: Other Countries Press, 1993).

²⁰ For a wider discussion of how Black lesbians fought against AIDS, see Darius Bost, “Black Lesbian Feminist Intellectuals and the Struggle Against HIV/AIDS,” A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 21, nos. 2–3 (2019), 169–91. Hemphill’s introduction contains a moving tribute to Smith.

²¹ Hemphill, Brother to Brother, xxxv.

²² For a sense of his audience, this volume is helpful guide: Hunter, Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Ages of AIDS. Other Countries Collective was a New York City–based artist collective created to support Black male writers and give them their own meeting space. Though Hemphill did not contribute to it, he did participate in Other Countries Collective events.

²³ Darius Bost, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), liii.

²⁴ Bost, Evidence of Being, 60. For a biographical account of Hemphill’s life, as well as the life of Michael Callen, see Martin Duberman, Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS (New York: The New Press, 2014).

²⁵ Cited in Mireya Navarro, “Conversations: Katrina Haslip; An AIDS Activist Who Helped Women Get Help Earlier,” New York Times. Last modified November 15, 1992. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/15/weekinreview/conversations-katrina-haslip-an-aids-activist-who-helped-women-get-help-earlier.html [Accessed January 24, 2023].

²⁶ Michael Adler, “ABC of AIDS: Development of the Epidemic,” British Medical Journal 322, no. 7296 (May 19, 2001), 1226–9.

²⁷ For discussion and examples, see Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT-UP New York from 1987-1993 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021); Alexis Shotwell, “‘Women Don’t Get AIDS, They Just Die from It’: Memory, Classification, and the Campaign to Change the Definition of AIDS,” Hypatia 29, no. 2 (2014), 509–25.

²⁸ Cited in Navarro, “Conversations: Katrina Haslip.”

²⁹ As reported by Terry McGovern, Interview by Sarah Schulman, Interview #076 (May 25, 2007), Transcript (New York: AIDS Oral History Project), 41. https://actuporalhistory.org/numerical-interviews/076-terry-mcgovern [Accessed January 23, 2023]. Permission granted to use interview.

³⁰ W. E. B. Du Bois, “Race Prejudice,” (Typed Notes, with corrections, of a speech possibly given at the Republican Club about the perceptions of race and the basic rights all people should be able to enjoy without prejudice, 5 March 1910), 1; Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Racisms” in David Goldberg (ed), The Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 3–17. While Appiah deploys a moralized notion of (racial) prejudice, other theorists argue that prejudice in general is not necessary morally wrong. Endre Begby, “The Epistemology of Prejudice,” Thought 2 (2013), 91. Begby endorses a cognition conception of prejudice and argues the wrong of prejudice is epistemic insidiousness. The insidiousness of prejudice lies in how it embeds itself in people’s cognitive lives and affects their beliefs, what they see, what they pay attention to and ignore, and so on. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: The Power and Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 33. Frederick Schauer, Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press, 2003), 15. Both Schauer and Fricker argue that prejudices are judgments made or maintained without proper regard for evidence. For an argument that a nonmoralized view is the best starting point for thinking about prejudice, see Charles Mills, “‘Heart Attack’: A Critique of Jorge Garcia’s Volitional Conception of Racism,” Journal of Ethics, Special Issue on Race, Racism, and Reparations 7, no. 1 (2003), 29–62, at 58. Mills writes: “the question of the nature and significance of a social phenomenon (e.g., its social sources, functional role, historical evolution, and distinctive features) is a different question from its moral status, and to use morality as a preliminary filter is likely to have unfortunate theoretical consequences.”

³¹ Appiah, “Racisms,” 8.

³² Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 35. However, Fricker argues that “not all prejudices involve ethical flaws on the part of the subject” (34). For examples of other nonmoralized hybrid views of prejudice, see Alex Madva and Michael Brownstein, “Stereotypes, Prejudice, and the Taxonomy of the Implicit Mind,” Noûs 52, no. 3 (2018), 611–44. Madva and Brownstein argue that prejudices are affective-cognitive-behavioral bundles. Such a definition is nonmoralized: it says nothing about when and why prejudices are ethically bad; it also remains neutral on epistemic questions such as whether prejudices are always true or false, justified or unjustified. The same goes for the common view that prejudices are “negative attitudes towards social groups,” a definition endorsed by the psychologists running The Project Implicit website. See Project Implicit Website, “Frequently Asked Questions.” https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/faqs.html [Accessed January 8, 2019]. For an overview of common definitions in the psychological literature, see Rupert Brown, Prejudice: Its Social Psychology, Second Edition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 4–7. None of the definitions cited by Brown are explicitly moralized.

³³ David T. Wellman, Portraits of White Racism, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30. He also gives some of the history behind the term in sociology: “W.I. Thomas was one of the first sociologists to explain the inferior social position of blacks in terms of race prejudice, which he defined as ‘a horror of the external aspect of the Negro’”(1904: 610) (39). One could argue that W. E. B. Du Bois beat Thomas to the punch. See Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 7. For an example of the identification of phobias with prejudice, see Julie Nagoshi et al., “Gender Differences in Correlates of Homophobia and Transphobia,” Sex Roles 59 no. 7 (2010), 521–31.

³⁴ Peter Glick and Susan Fiske, “An Ambivalent Alliance: Hostile & Benevolent Sexism as Complementary Justifications for Gender Inequality,” American Psychologist 56, no. 2 (2001), 109. See also, Mary Jackman, The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 11. Jackman persuasively argues that positive emotions—love, admiration, liking, and so on—reinforce oppressive social conditions just as much as negative ones. Hence, they deserve to be seen as the root of prejudice, just as much as negative emotions. See also Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic, “Gender Stereotypes and Attitudes Toward Women and Men,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 15, no. 4 (1989), 543–58.

³⁵ Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review 1, no. 1 (1958), 3–7, at 3.

³⁶ ibid.

³⁷ Blumer, “Race Prejudice,” 4. See Wellman, Portraits of White Racism, xi; Lawrence Bobo, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan A. Smith, “Laissez-Faire Racism: A Kinder, Gentler Antiblack Ideology,” in Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (eds) Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change (London: Praeger, 1997), 15–42. Wellman argues that racial prejudices are “culturally sanctioned beliefs which . . . defend the advantages whites have because of the position of subordinated racial minorities” (xi). Bobo et al. contend that, “the real object of prejudice . . . is beliefs about the proper relations between groups” (38).

³⁸ Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18–19.

³⁹ See, for example, Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffred, “The Racial Imaginary,” in Rebecca Hazelton and Alan Michael Parker (eds), The Manifesto Project (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2017), 162–72. They explain that “what we mean by a racial imaginary is something we all recognize quite easily: the way our culture has imagined over and over again the narrative opportunities, the kinds of feelings and attributes and situations and subjects and plots and forms ‘available’ both to characters of different races and their authors” (172).

⁴⁰ Mills, Racial Contract, 19.

⁴¹ Sally Haslanger, “What is a (Social) Structural Explanation?” Philosophical Studies 173 (2015), 113–30, at 118 and 125. Haslanger defines structures as “complex entities whose parts are constrained by their relation to other parts” and social structures as “networks of relations.”

⁴² For an exploration of the ways in which social structures become internalized in human psychology, see Robin Zheng, “Bias, Structure, and Injustice: A Reply to Haslanger,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4, no 1 (2018), 10–30; Lacey Davidson and Daniel Kelly, “Minding the Gap: Bias, Soft Structures, and The Double Life of Social Norms,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 32, no. 2 (2018), 190–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.12351.

⁴³ Cesar Cabezas, “Racism: A Moral or Explanatory Project,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2021), 651–9. See also Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, Vintage Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Rethinking Racism: Towards a Structural Conception,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 3. (1997), 465–80; Alberto Urquidez, (Re-)Defining Racism: A Philosophical Analysis (London: Springer, 2020).

⁴⁴ Mary C. Murphy, Kathryn M. Kroeper, and Elise M. Ozier, “Prejudiced Places: How Contexts Shape Inequality and How Policy Can Change Them,” Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5, no 1 (2018), 66–74, at 67. They define a prejudiced place as follows: “prejudiced contexts are places with predictable, systematic inequalities in experience and outcomes based on people’s social group membership—advantaging people from some social groups while disadvantaging people from others” (68). For a similar view, Keith Payne, Heidi A. Vuletich, and Kristjen B. Lundber, “The Bias of Crowds: How Implicit Bias Bridges Personal and Systemic Prejudice,” Psychological Inquiry 28, no 4. (2017), 233–48, at 236.

⁴⁵ Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 19. For further exploration of the ways in which prejudice exists environmentally, see Murphy et al., 68–70; Mary C. Murphy and Carol S. Dweck, “A Culture of Genius: How an Organization’s Lay Theory Shapes People’s Cognition, Affect, and Behavior,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36, no. 3 (2010), 283–96. For examples of common situations in the United States that elicit racialized responses, see George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America.

⁴⁶ J. L. A. Garcia, “Wrongful Racial Discrimination in Moral Analysis: Some Recent Accounts, An Alternative Conception, and Attempts to Extend Theoretical Models,” The Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy 16, no. S (2018), 697–729, at 703. In this chapter, I am not framing Garcia’s view on wrongful discrimination in the way that is maximally faithful to his terminology, as I am collapsing the difference between racism and prejudice as he sees it. Still, the view I’m describing is recognizably his. See J. L. A. Garcia, “The Heart of Racism,” Journal of Social Philosophy 27, no. 1 (1996), 5–46. For critique of Garcia’s view, see Mills, “‘Heart Attack’,” 29–62; Shelby, “Is Racism ‘In The Heart’?”

⁴⁷ Garcia, “Wrongful Racial Discrimination,” 704.

⁴⁸ ibid.

⁴⁹ Other examples of statistical discrimination potentially include racial profiling policies in policing, hiring decisions in which male job candidates are preferred over female candidates, and airline policies that force mandatory retirement for pilots at the age of fifty-five. Legitimately valuable goals may lie behind these policies: making cities safer, hiring only the most reliable employees, reducing the risk of airline accidents, and so on.

⁵⁰ Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect, 175. “The task facing critics of much statistical discrimination, then,” writes Eidelson, “is to explain why discrimination may be wrong even if it manifests no disrespectful attitude and constitutes an effective means to a legitimate goal.”

⁵¹ Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal.

⁵² Richard Arneson, “What is Wrongful Discrimination?” San Diego Law Review 43, no. 4 (2006), 775–808, at 779.

⁵³ Cleve Jones, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement (New York: Hachette, 2017), 204. In April 1985, the FDA approved a test for HIV, but it was designed to test blood products only. The government prohibited using these tests on individuals for diagnostic purposes. Medical professionals like the nurse were forced to use heuristics during initial visits. The first FDA approved blood test for individuals was offered in 1987. See Michael Adler, “ABC of AIDS: Development of the Epidemic,” British Medical Journal 322, no. 7296 (May 19, 2001), 1226–9.

⁵⁴ Warren Winkelstein, et al., “The San Francisco Men’s Health Study: Reduction in Human Immunodeficiency Virus Transmission among Homosexual/Bisexual Men,” American Journal of Public Health 76, no. 9 (1987), 685–9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3646848 [Accessed January 8, 2019]; Dennis Osmond et al., “HIV Infection in Homosexual and Bisexual Men 18 to 29 Years of Age: The San Francisco Young Men’s Health Study,” American Journal of Public Health 84, no. 12 (1994), 1933–7, at 1936.

⁵⁵ Institute of Medicine (U.S.) Committee on Prenatal and Newborn Screening for HIV Infection. “HIV Screening of Pregnant Women and Newborns,” edited by L. M. Hardy (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1991) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234066 [Accessed April 19, 2023].

⁵⁶ ibid.

⁵⁷ Cited in Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 89–90.

⁵⁸ Frederick Schauer, “Statistical Discrimination,” in Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (ed), The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination (London; Routledge, 2018), 42–54, at 47.

⁵⁹ Cécile Fabre, “Doxastic Wrongs, Non-Spurious Generalizations, and Particularized Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 122, no. 1 (2022), 47–69.

⁶⁰ Alan Hájek, “The Reference Class Problem is Your Problem Too,” Synthese 156 (2007), 563–85.

⁶¹ Jessie Munton, “Perceptual Skill and Social Structure,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2017), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12478.

⁶² Ásta, Categories We Live By.

⁶³ Munton, “Perceptual Skill,” 18.

⁶⁴ AIDS activists like Callen eloquently voiced this critique repeatedly. For documentation of prejudice and apathy within the government, see France, How to Survive a Plague, and Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).

⁶⁵ Munton, “Perceptual Skill,” 20. For similar lines of critique, see Susanna Siegel, The Rationality of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), esp. 157–69.

⁶⁶ Risa Denenberg, “What the Numbers Mean,” in Cynthia Chris and Monica Pearl (eds), Women, AIDS, and Activism by The ACT UP/New York Women and AIDS Book Group (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 1–4, at 3. See also Corea, The Invisible Epidemic, 76–9.

⁶⁷ Garcia, “Wrongful Racial Discrimination,” 704.

⁶⁸ Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “Update: AIDS Among Women—United States, 1994,” MMWR Recommendations and Reports 44, no. 5 (1994), 81–4. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00035899.htm#00000513.gif.

⁶⁹ Cited in Navarro, “Conversations: Katrina Haslip.”

⁷⁰ Denenberg, “What the Numbers Mean,” 3.

⁷¹ For archival video footage from ACT UP protests and further confirmation that activists advanced impact-focused critiques of AIDS-related injustices (including unjust stereotyping and discriminatory treatment), see James Wentzy, “Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP” (2002). https://vimeo.com/90722188 [Accessed February 21, 2019].

6 Disrespect and Harm

Photo 6.1 This Bridge Called My Back Reading, Arlington Street Church, Boston, Massachusetts, June 5, 1981. Back: Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Cameron, Rosario Morales. Front: Aurora Levins Morales, Barbara Smith, Kate Rushin, Beverly Smith, Nellie Wong, Hattie Gossett. Photo by Susan Fleischmann.

In 1981, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga published This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, a transformative anthology centering queer, working-class women of color and their vision for feminism. This chapter uses the testimony of Bridge contributors to develop a modestly pluralistic theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping. I begin by documenting two themes that run throughout the volume: the disrespect of stereotyping and the harms of stereotyping. Then I introduce a theory that formalizes Bridge contributors’ insights:

The disrespect or harm theory: stereotyping is wrongful when it is disrespectful or causes harm.

Keeping discrimination theory in conversation with contributors’ reflections on wrongful stereotyping, I argue that the best theory of when and why stereotyping is wrong must feature hybrid understandings of disrespect and harm. What emerges is a novel philosophical theory of wrongful stereotyping that riffs on existing theories of wrongful discrimination while also challenging them. Though this theory is ultimately not pluralistic enough, it lays the groundwork for a theory that recognizes an even richer array of ethical objections to stereotyping in lived experience.

6.1 What’s Wrong With Stereotyping? The View From Bridge

For some readers, Bridge needs no introduction. It is a beloved book and canonical text in intersectional feminism. For others, this may be a first encounter. If this is your first time hearing about this book, let me orient you.

The anthology bears the mark of a particular historical moment: after the rise of liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s, but before the advent of AIDS. Its contributors were young, queer, working-class women of color. Many had participated in social movements of the previous decade: the Anti-War Movement, Black Power, the Chicano Movement, the American Indian Movement. As queer women of color, they had grown tired of sexism and homophobia in activist spaces.¹ Feminism and gay rights spoke to them. Yet, when they had gotten involved, they experienced relentless racial microaggressions and sidelining. By the mid-1970s, women of color feminists began creating their own groups, including the path-breaking Combahee River Collective. Barbara Smith—one of Combahee’s founders—reports:

Some of the issues we have worked on are reproductive rights, equal access to abortion, sterilization abuse, health care, child care, the rights of the disabled, violence against women, rape, battering, sexual harassment, welfare rights, lesbian and gay rights, educational reform, housing, legal reform, women in prison, aging, police brutality, labor organizing, anti-imperialist struggles, anti-racist organizing, nuclear disarmament, and preserving the environment.²

This ambitious set of priorities is typical of Bridge contributors.³ “We named this anthology ‘radical,’” the editors explain, “for we were interested in the writings of women of color who want nothing short of revolution in the hands of women. . . . ”⁴

For anyone working on the ethics of stereotyping, Bridge is an invaluable resource. Its vision is kaleidoscopic—and incredibly personal. Over thirty contributors submitted work: some wrote essays; others shared poetry; yet others sent visual art. Its pages are filled with reflection and honest assessment of the state of feminism in the late-twentieth century, personal anecdotes and cultural critique.

Across its six thematic parts, stereotyping is a throughline. In “Speaking in Tongues,” Anzaldúa recalls “the arrogant, racist teachers who thought all Chicano children were dumb and dirty.”⁵ “When you come knocking on our doors with your rubber stamps to brand our faces with DUMB, HYSTERICAL, PASSIVE PUTA, PERVERT,” she writes, “. . . we will vomit the guilt, self-denial, and race-hatred you have force-fed us right back into your mouth.”⁶ She celebrates women of color’s anger and collective power to “shake and often break whites’ comfortable stereotypic images.”⁷ Even in feminist spaces, stereotyping is recognized to be a problem. “No matter what we say or do,” writes Mitsuye Yamada, “the stereotype [of Asian American women as passive and nonpolitical] still hangs on . . . I am weary of starting from scratch each time I speak or write . . . as if there were no history behind us, of hearing that among the women of color, Asian women are the least political, or the least oppressed, or the most polite.”⁸ Often contributors grapple with their own complicity. “Racism is not easy for me to talk about,” explains Barbara Cameron (Hunkpapa Lakota), “because of my own racism toward other people of color, and because of a complex set of ‘racisms’ within the Indian community. . . .”⁹ When we acquire such stereotypes, Bridge contributors suggest, we internalize social structures. From this perspective, structures are not separate from individual psychology. Individual thinking enacts controlling images and ideas in culture (stereotypes in a cultural guise), giving them continued life. Structures also manifest in individual cognition because thoughts are patterned: both within and across an individual’s cognitive life and across different individuals’ lives. Time and again, contributors document collective, habitual ways of thinking, perceiving, and feeling that fuel oppressive social dynamics.

Audre Lorde’s contributions to the volume are particularly striking in this respect. In “A Letter to Mary Daly,” Lorde notes “a grave reluctance to reach out” to Daly—a white feminist—because her perspective might not be well received.¹⁰ Yet, she says, “for me to assume that you will not hear me represents not only history, but an old pattern of relating between white and Black women . . . which we, as women shaping our future, are in the process of shattering, I hope.”¹¹ Lorde could have judged Daly based on stereotypes of white women, according to which they are snowflakes who melt at the first sign of criticism. However, if she is to have any relationship with Daly, or white women like her, she knows that she must challenge her own stereotypic presumptions. At the same time, it’s not all on her. White feminists need to work on themselves, she argues, putting an end to epistemic practices that marginalize women of color and reinforce white supremacy. Lorde frames the labor of writing this letter—and the emotional effort of deciding to write at all—as the necessary work of transforming “old patterns of relating.”¹² For Lorde and others, the personal was political; hence, the realm of interpersonal relationships, thus of ethics, is also a political matter.

What’s wrong with stereotyping, according to Bridge contributors? For one thing, its harms. Meditations on the negative consequences of stereotyping occur frequently in the volume. “By the age of five,” reports Cameron, “I had seen one Indian man gunned down in the back by the police and was a silent witness to a gang of white teenage boys beating up an elderly Indian man.”¹³ Another contributor, Naomi Littlebear Morena, recalls being attacked by a gang of boys in elementary school.¹⁴ Racial stereotyping, they know, makes Indian life seem worthless to whites. Both she and Cameron report ongoing mental health struggles because of their traumas. Cameron shares, “Because of experiencing racial violence, I sometimes panic when I’m the only non-white in a roomful of whites, even if they are my closest friends. I wonder if I’ll leave the room alive . . . I think to myself that it’s truly insane for me to feel the panic. I want to scream out my anger and disgust with myself for feeling distrustful of my white friends. . . .”¹⁵ These observations—and many others—gesture toward the cascading harms associated with acts of stereotyping. Decades after a body has healed, long after one’s dead have been buried, stereotyping haunts survivors. When stereotyping causally contributes to such harms, especially when these harms would not have occurred but for stereotyping, Bridge contributors imply, stereotyping is wrong for that reason.

Disrespect is also invoked by contributors as they use words like “insulting,” “disrespectful,” “arrogant,” “dehumanizing,” and “ugly and distorted” to describe acts of stereotyping.¹⁶ Cameron shares:

A few years ago, a white lesbian telephoned me requesting an interview, explaining that she was taking Native American courses at a local university, and that she needed data for her paper on gay Native Americans. I agreed to the interview with the idea that I would be helping a “sister” and would also be able to educate her about Native American struggles. After we completed the interview, she began a diatribe on how sexist Native Americans are, followed by a questioning session in which I was to enlighten her mind about why Native Americans are so sexist. I attempted to rationally answer her inanely racist and insulting questions. . . . Later it became very clear how I had been manipulated as a sounding board for her ugly and distorted views about Native Americans. Her arrogance and disrespect were characteristic of racist white people in South Dakota.¹⁷

In this passage, Cameron describes a common stereotype held by white feminists, namely, that communities of color are more sexist—and, thus, less enlightened—than white communities. Cameron describes such beliefs as “ugly and distorted,” “inanely racist and insulting.”¹⁸ They express “arrogance and disrespect.”¹⁹

A theory of wrongful stereotyping incorporating these two objections to stereotyping would say this:

The disrespect or harm theory: stereotyping is wrong when it is disrespectful or causes harm.²⁰

According to this theory, though disrespect and harm may coexist when stereotyping occurs, one problem is sufficient to make it prima facie wrong.

By combining disrespect and harm, the theory marries two seemingly incompatible ethical theories: Kantian ethics and consequentialism. This is not an arbitrary choice, however. Bridge contributors object to both problems when protesting wrongful stereotyping. While philosophers committed to a specific ethical theory might demand that they choose between the two objections, there is no good rationale for an ultimatum from the perspective of lived experience. From the perspective of lived experience, stereotyping is often disrespectful and harmful, and these are wrongs are not in opposition. Furthermore, modest pluralism of the kind I’m describing is the dominant view in analytic discrimination theory.²¹ It’s the dominant view because theorists, when they survey cases of wrongful discrimination, generally find that its wrongs can’t be reduced to a single ethical framework. In combining elements of both, they acknowledge what an important truth: that moral reality is complex.

6.2 The Disrespect of Stereotyping

The most straightforward way to explore this theory is to examine each of its elements. Let me start by jumping right into the theory’s first big concept: disrespect. Three main conceptions of disrespect exist within discrimination theory, each of which is tied to a distinctive claim about the conditions under which discrimination is wrong.²²

6.2.1 Mental-State Views

According one view, discrimination is disrespectful—when it is—because of discriminators’ mental states.²³ Think about the white feminist described by Cameron in the passage above. Cameron tells readers that this woman’s questions were “racist and insulting,” expressing “disrespect” for Native peoples, including her own. Why is that? Perhaps because the questions stereotyped white people as more enlightened and culturally advanced compared to people of color. For Cameron, patronizing racial beliefs are no better than—and are of a piece with—hostile beliefs that represent indigenous Americans as dirty, stupid, lazy, and immoral.

This conception of disrespect is a classic in discrimination theory. In his 1999 article, “Why is Wrongful Discrimination Wrong,” legal theorist Lawrence Alexander argues for what might be the first disrespect or harm theory in the literature. Though he doesn’t spend a lot of time defining disrespect, he says a few telling things. First, when describing paradigm cases of disrespectful discrimination, he points to white supremacists: nazis and defenders of segregation in the American South. Second, he says that discrimination disrespects people by judging them “incorrectly to be of lesser moral worth.”²⁴ The beliefs in question demean, hence disrespect, groups. So does the treatment that flows from them, which enacts “a failure to show the moral respect due the recipient.”²⁵ Though he never discusses subtler examples involving implicit prejudices or “positive” prejudices, his view could potentially accommodate them. Indeed, recent scholarship on doxastic wrongs adopts a variant of his view.²⁶ The root of disrespect lies in cognition and, specifically, in how groups are represented in the minds of discriminators.

6.2.2 Process-Oriented Views

Process-oriented views of disrespect shift analysis from the insulting content of mental states to dynamic epistemic processes. Disrespect is framed as a moral problem that emerges in the activity of judging others, forming predictions, deciding how to regulate people, and more.

In Discrimination and Disrespect, Benjamin Eidelson advances a canonical version of the view when he defends his own version of the disrespect or harm theory. “An act [of discrimination] is wrong,” he argues, “because of its roots in a certain kind of deliberative failing and wrongful because it is disrespectful.”²⁷ He explains:

You might discriminate against someone because you value her interests at a discounted rate relative to somebody else’s. Or you might discriminate against her because the choice you will make will affect you in some way, and (for example) you prefer contact with one kind of person rather than another. In yet other cases you might discriminate against a person on the basis of a judgment about what he is like that you form by appeal to your beliefs about a wider class of people. Despite their structural differences, we nevertheless perceive a common potential moral violation. . . .

Disrespect, I will argue, is the common thread.²⁸

Deliberative failures can take many forms, on his view, but all involve failures to recognize moral worth. Some such failures are rooted in prejudices that reflect insulting beliefs about groups and the individuals in them. Homophobic beliefs, for example, may cause agents to form discriminatory preferences (e.g., “for contact with one kind of person rather than other” or may lead to agents to value certain people’s interests “at a discounted rate relative to somebody else’s”). However, prejudice is not required for disrespectful discrimination. When a person is judged by statistical information associated with group membership or by prejudicial stereotypes, stereotyping can be insulting because it involves ignoring individual differences in favor of group-based generalizing. On his view, failing to treat persons as individuals is one of many manifestations of disrespect.

Note a key difference between process-focused and mental-state views of disrespect. According to mental-state views, stereotyping could only ever be disrespectful if it is rooted in beliefs, imaginings, expectations, predictions, or perceptions that represent groups in insulting ways. Jewish people are represented as greedy. Women are represented as irrational. Shifting to a process-focused perspective, the frame changes. The insult here lies not necessarily in the representational content of beliefs (e.g., whether the group is represented in a pejorative way), but in how those who stereotype reason about others. A richer array of factors become relevant: how the person who stereotypes arrives at their judgment, the evidence they use and don’t use, what evidence they have access to, what they pay attention to and ignore, and how they weigh various pieces of evidence. Within this analytical frame, the wrong of failing to treat persons as individuals (explored at length in Chapter 4) becomes legible, as do the various ways in which prejudice can insinuate itself into processes of judgment (as discussed in Chapter 5).

6.2.3 Expressivist Views

A third view takes disrespect “out of the head” and locates it in the social meaning of actions, speech, policies, and laws. Deborah Hellman is a vocal advocate for the view. She argues that discrimination is wrong when it is demeaning. Demeaning treatment, she argues, is disrespectful “in an especially strong way as it is an expression of a lack of respect for the equal humanity of the other.”²⁹ Hellman explains:

There are conventional methods of expressing respect—taking off one’s hat when entering a room, writing a thank you note to one’s dinner host, looking someone in the eye when speaking . . . In a similar way, albeit less formalized and defined, there are conventions for disrespect as well—giving someone the finger, spitting on someone, looking over someone’s shoulder when she is speaking to one, and so on. Demeaning is, in part expressing disrespect (in an especially strong way as it is an expression of a lack of respect for the equal humanity of other) and as such depends on conventions regarding how disrespect is expressed in a particular culture.³⁰

A defining feature of Hellman’s view is that people can engage in disrespectful discrimination no matter what they are thinking. Wrongful discriminatory behaviors and speech acts communicate social prejudices, regardless of whether a discriminator endorses these messages or relies on prejudicial attitudes when reasoning.

Expressivist views of disrespect generalize to stereotyping—with an important caveat. In Chapter 1, I distinguished four “levels” of stereotyping in individual psychology: stereotype activation, use, primary use, and communication. Disrespect exclusively occurs in the final stage, according to Hellman’s theory and others like it.³¹ People do not disrespect anyone if they keep racist or homophobic thoughts to themselves. On Hellman’s view, an act of stereotyping is disrespectful if only if one’s thinking is (a) publicly expressed, (b) sends the message that a group is morally less than or not fully human, and (c) is performed by someone with social power.

Usually, discrimination theorists treat these three views of disrespect as competitors. They pick exactly one concept and use it in their theory, setting aside other options. Lived experience, I believe, recommends something else. It shows us that disrespect takes many forms in social interactions, not all of which fall under a single concept.

Bridge contributors sometimes lodge objections to stereotyping that concern how groups are represented. This is the gist of Anzaldúa condemnation of “arrogant, racist teachers who thought all Chicano children were dumb and dirty.”³² On her view, the moral problem with stereotyping is not just that racist teachers say things that insult the intelligence of their Chicano students or behave in ways that communicate racist messages. It’s also that they perceive and think of Chicanos as inferior in the first place, something that mental-state views of disrespect bring into clear focus.

In other cases, Bridge contributors take issue with epistemic processes. “How many white women really think about the stereotypes they retain as truth about women of color?” asks Merle Woo.³³ “They don’t even look at history,” Woo tells readers, “At the facts. How we as Asian American women have always been fighting for more than mere survival.”³⁴ She argues that white feminists have not sufficiently reflected on their beliefs and fail to seek out reasonably available, relevant evidence about nonwhite cultures and people. Other contributors call out white feminists for their ignoring their testimony. “I’m sick and tired of continually hearing about the destructive aspects of Latin American culture,” writes Judit Moschkovich, “especially from women who don’t know the culture and can only repeat well-known and worn out myths.”³⁵ “Listen to what I have to say about my culture,” pleads Moschkovich, “rather than believe hearsay, myths, or racist stereotypes.”³⁶ On her view:

the process of learning about other cultures must be a sharing experience. An experience where American woman learn on their own without wanting to be spoon-fed by Latinas, but don’t become experts after one book, one conversation, or one stereotype. It is a delicate balance which can only be achieved with caring and respect for each other.³⁷

This is an idea found throughout Bridge, namely, that knowledge and respect are connected. In situations where knowledge is systematically lacking, there is often disrespect in how people are learning and forming judgments. Because a process-oriented view of disrespect captures this element of disrespect, it too must be included in the best theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping.

Bridge contributors often remark upon the expressive—and, hence, public—dimensions of disrespect as well. Returning to Cameron’s anecdote, one finds a layered critique. Cameron implies that the beliefs being expressed would have been disrespectful even if the feminist running the interview would have kept them to herself. These beliefs disrespected indigenous Americans. To have these beliefs in themselves was objectionable. But, to rant at Cameron, and to treat Cameron “as a sounding board” for them, was even more disrespectful. Expressive conceptions of disrespect are best positioned to explain this observation because they emphasize the public meanings associated with certain speech acts and behaviors, regardless of people’s best intentions.

Based on this evidence, it would be an utter mistake to choose a single concept of disrespect for the theory under investigation. Bridge contributors identify at least three ways in which disrespect manifests when people stereotype:

In the representational content of what people think, expect, predict, or perceive about others.

In the epistemic processes associated with thinking, perceiving, reasoning, imagining, etcetera.

In how groups are publicly characterized and controlled via speech, behavior, social norms, policy, and law.

A maximally plausible theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping—and, by extension, what’s wrong with discrimination—must recognize disrespect in all its forms.³⁸ Only by dynamically combining these conceptions do we stand a chance of adequately explaining the many ways in which stereotyping is disrespectful.

6.3 The Harms of Stereotyping

Harm is the other concept in the theory under investigation. In Section 6.1, I noted that Bridge contributors often reflect on the harms of stereotyping. I now return to discrimination theory to see what philosophical frameworks are available for conceptualizing their objections.

6.3.1 Comparative Views of Harm

In discriminatory theory, harm is often defined “comparatively.”³⁹ The basic idea is this: if someone is harmed by discrimination, they end up worse off than they otherwise would be because of how they were treated. For theorists who adopt this view, a long list of questions awaits. What is the proper metric for measuring whether someone is “worse off” in virtue of discriminatory treatment? Is it subjective wellbeing? Can a person be made worse off by discrimination even if they don’t know it? For an act of discrimination to cause harm, for how long does it have to make a person worse off: for a few minutes, for a month, a year, one’s whole life? Other details are also up for debate. How should one evaluate hypothetical claims about how a person’s life would have gone had they not experienced discrimination? And whose harms count? Individuals targeted by discrimination certainly matter. Yet groups as a whole—nations, communities—can be made worse off by discriminatory actions and policies. Discriminators might also harm themselves. To specify the conditions under which discrimination causes harm, and hence qualifies as wrongful, these questions must be answered.

6.3.2 Noncomparative Views of Harm

In discrimination theory, harm is also sometimes understood in a noncomparative way. On a noncomparative view, harm is conceptualized as a categorical violation (e.g., of a person’s rights, interests, or autonomy).⁴⁰ Scanlon writes, “the wrong of discrimination lies in the moral objection to this kind of harm. No one can be asked to accept a society than marks them out as inferior in this way and denies them its principal benefits.”⁴¹ On Scanlon’s view, Jim Crow laws were intrinsically harmful for two reasons: they publicly proclaimed a message of inferiority and denied Black people the full benefits of citizenship because of this alleged racial inferiority. The consequences of Jim Crow were also categorically harmful. Millions of people had their rights violated over decades. Proof of wrongful discrimination consists in evidence that categorical injury occurred as a result of discriminatory treatment. One benefit of this view is its straightforwardness. If you insist on a comparative view of harm, proving harm requires evidence about what life was like before and after discrimination, or imagining what the targeted groups experiences would have been like had discrimination never occurred. For a noncomparative view, all you need is evidence (a) of a moral injury and (b) that it was caused by the discrimination.

Two definitional options thus present themselves. Harm could be defined comparatively, noncomparatively, or both. Read Bridge, and this is what jumps out. These two conceptions refer to substantively different ways of harming people. Both appear to have wrong-making power. When Barbara Cameron recalls a Native elder being gunned down by racist police, she implies that this event left a range of people comparatively worse off: the man targeted, the community who grieved for him, even herself. At the same time, she frames the event as a categorical moral violation: a person’s life was unjustly destroyed. Two harms are caused by one and the same act of stereotyping: the harm of an unjustified killing (a categorical moral injury) and the harm of creating massive pain and suffering that wouldn’t otherwise have existed and which made those impacted worse off (a comparative harm). Both help to explain why the police were wrong to stereotype the Native elder. If lived experience is our guide, the lesson is that these two conceptions of harm aren’t mutually exclusive.

What might it look like if both conceptions of harm were incorporated into the disrespect or harm theory? Discrimination theory offers clues. Katharina Berndt Rasmussen argues that people can be harmed by discrimination in two ways:

When discrimination makes them worse off by decreasing their wellbeing relative to what it would have been.

When discrimination treats persons as inferior.⁴²

The first view of harm is comparative and embraces a consequentialist view argued for—with some qualifications—by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen.⁴³ The downstream consequences of stereotyping are what matter, on the first view. The second view articulates a noncomparative conception of harm: to harm someone is to treat them as an inferior.

There’s a lot to say about Berndt Rasmussen’s view, but I’m going to use it to highlight a problem that exists for both of us. Only with a clear definition of harm, it would seem, can we really understand and precisely specify the conditions under which stereotyping is harmful and hence wrongful. Yet the above definitions are constraining. By advancing them in concert, Berndt Rasmussen asserts: there are two, and only two ways, in which discrimination—and, by extension, acts of stereotyping—can cause harm.

To see the limitations of her analysis, return to a key theme of Bridge: the value of relationships. When contributors describe the harms of stereotyping, they often invoke relational harms. Earlier I shared Barbara Cameron’s feelings of anxiety in majority-white spaces. Even in a room where it’s only her and her closest white friends, her heart starts to race. She knows that these friends would never hurt her. This is presumably why Cameron says that she wants to “scream out my anger and disgust at myself for feeling distrustful.”⁴⁴ She perceives that she is sabotaging relationships that could otherwise be sources of joy. In sharing this experience, she highlights two kinds of relational harms associated with stereotyping: harms to relationships with others and harms to one’s relationship with oneself. These harms are intertwined because how we see and feel toward ourselves are inextricable from how others perceive and treat us. “To assess the damage is a dangerous act,” writes Cherríe Moraga, “. . . I have so wanted to ignore my own homophobia, my own hatred of myself for being queer . . . there is no easy way around these emotions. Similarly in a white-dominated world, there is little getting around racism and our own internalization of it. It’s always there, embodied in someone we least expect to rub up against.”⁴⁵ Moraga is not only worried about “subjective wellbeing” in this quote. She describes having a damaged relationship with herself. Having internalized homophobia, she experiences “hatred of myself for being queer” but also wants to ignore that feeling.

This gap in Berndt Rasmussen’s theory is not coincidental, and I want to say a little more about why it occurs. When defining harm comparatively, Berndt Rasmussen adopts what she calls “the orthodox view of harm.”⁴⁶ “Orthodox” might sound like a good thing in this context, a way of signaling that she is using a relatively uncontroversial, plausible definition of harm. However, it ought to set off alarm bells. The orthodox view is associated with a classic utilitarianism as developed by Jeremy Bentham. According to Bentham, “utility” is the only thing of moral value in the universe. Utility is defined in terms of pain and pleasure. Nothing else is valuable in itself, on Bentham’s view: not relationships, knowledge, opportunities, or freedom. By embracing this restrictive view of what is morally valuable, Berndt Rasmussen is committed to ignoring the many ways in which people can be robbed of things with moral value—such as relationships—by discrimination. In this context, her second definition of harm is a consolation, but a small one. It doesn’t solve the core problem. If people can be made worse off by discrimination in a multitude of ways, a more expansive comparative notion of harm is necessary.

Bridge teaches us that the harms of stereotyping are complex. Sometimes contributors frame their concern in terms of negative impacts on welfare, including health outcomes and stress levels.⁴⁷ But welfare is not their only worry. They describe the limitation of opportunities and freedom, the undermining of collective and individual knowledge, the public expression of stigmatizing messages about social groups, the damage done to their personal relationships, and the moral injuries inflicted on stereotyped persons.⁴⁸ They decry spectacular public acts of violence as well as intimate partner violence.⁴⁹ It’s as if the feminists of Bridge were describing death by a thousand cuts. Being denied candy at a Halloween celebration by a racist mom,⁵⁰ being referred to as “articulate” for speaking fluent English,⁵¹ having a professor specializing in the history of slavery defend practices of rape to your class with the argument: “Black women are always ready,”⁵² being told that lesbianism is “a white” thing and that you’re a race traitor for being gay.⁵³ One cut doesn’t kill a person. It may not even hurt that much. But cut someone a thousand times, and these cuts—together—will eventually bleed a person dry.

Because these harms are so wide ranging, what I need is an exemplar in discrimination theory with a very open conception of harm. In Benjamin Eidelson’s work, one finds a model of this kind. Eidelson’s theory of says that discriminatory treatment is wrongful under two conditions: it is disrespectful or harmful. When he analyses the harms of discrimination, he never defines harm, leaving the concept entirely open. Instead, he does two things. First, he focuses on the “who” question: whose harms count? According to one view, the best way to analyze harmful discrimination is to narrowly focus on the people targeted by discriminatory treatment. According to another view, a broader constellation of people also matters: the family and friends of those impacted, community members, perhaps even on the discriminator.⁵⁴ Second, he offers concrete examples of harm, some of which could be analyzed in comparative terms, others of which are framed as noncomparative harms. He refers to the harm of being insulted behind one’s back, the harm of being waylaid by a police officer who stops you because you look suspicious to them, the harm of experiencing anxiety and stress, the harm of depressing the wellbeing of certain social groups relative to others, and the harm of reinforcing oppressive stereotypes. One could criticize his analysis for playing “fast and loose” with what it means to harm someone. Yet “fast and loose” is exactly what one needs in this situation. Unlike Berndt Rasmussen, Eidelson can do something that Bridge contributors deem essential. He can recognize the wide array of potential harms associated with discrimination.

Using Eidelson as a model, here is what I propose. When interpreting the disrespect or harm theory, I will adopt a hybrid view of harm. According to this view, stereotyping can cause harm—hence, wrong people—in two ways: first, by making people worse off by stereotyping and, second, by causing moral injury, both in itself and because of its consequences. Beyond this general characterization, I will leave all the philosophical specifics open. Examples of harmful stereotyping can be brought to the theory and litigated on a case-by-case basis.

The disrespect or harm theory in its most comprehensive form has now emerged. One of the theory’s most distinctive features is that it embraces hybrid definitions of harm and disrespect. This is for a straightforward reason. Harm and disrespect manifest in a variety of forms, not all of which may fall under a single concept. The solution to this “problem” is not to double-down on one definition of harm or disrespect. Such a move would ignore the insights of lived experience. It would amount to saying: simplicity trumps accuracy. A simpler theory would be not only be less accurate but would also unjustly deny and cover up the existence of significant wrongs done to marginalized groups.

6.4 Evaluating the Disrespect or Harm Theory

In the final section of this chapter, I want to speak to the question of just how reliable the disrespect or harm theory is.

6.4.1 Wrongful Stereotyping

Earlier in the book, I advanced two desiderata for a successful theory of wrongful stereotyping: the identification condition and the explanatory condition. The identification condition says that a successful theory must be able to reliably identify cases of wrongful stereotyping. The explanatory condition says that a successful theory must offer adequate explanations for when and why stereotyping is wrong. Already there is evidence that the disrespect or harm theory will do a pretty good job at satisfying these desiderata.

Because it recognizes two wrong-making properties, the theory will reliably identify wrongful stereotyping of many different kinds. Hateful acts of stereotyping will tend to be both disrespectfully and harmful. Yet the theory can also identify implicitly biased acts of stereotyping as wrongful, as it recognizes that disrespect can take subtle forms. Perhaps most impressively, the theory can identify cases of stereotyping as wrongful even if the person who stereotypes is not being disrespectful, so long as the act of stereotyping causes significant harm. If there were cases of prejudice-free wrongful statistical stereotyping, a disrespect or harm theory would cover them. For philosophers, this been the biggest selling point of the disrespect or harm theory. The disrespect or harm theory doesn’t miss a beat here. If you stereotype someone in a way that causes them serious harm, that person can ethically object to how they’ve been treated on those grounds (i.e., that they have been seriously harmed), no matter how respectfully they’ve been treated.

Turning to the explanatory condition, one finds an even stronger case to be made. The disrespect or harm theory generates rich, multilayered explanations of what’s wrong with stereotyping. Its core concepts reveal that disrespect and harm are “gradable” properties, which means they come in greater and lesser degrees. Had the Cameron’s interlocutor stereotyped indigenous Americans as more sexist than white Americans but kept her mouth shut, for example, she would still disrespected Cameron (according to the mental-state and epistemic process conceptions of disrespect) and may have even caused intrinsic harm (because stereotyping treated indigenous Americans—and, by extension, Cameron as inferior). But this hypothetical is less disrespectful and harmful than what in fact happened. In the actual case, Cameron’s interlocutor rants about Native Americans’ sexism. Though both cases of stereotyping qualify as disrespectful, they don’t disrespect people to the same degree or in all the same ways.

This brings out a unique feature of the disrespect or harm theory. The version of the theory for which I am arguing embraces hybrid conceptions of disrespect and harm. This makes it special. No other version of the theory is quite so pluralistic. Hence, I would argue, no other version of the theory generates explanations that are equally nuanced and attentive to manifold ways in which stereotyping disrespects people and causes harm. The theory offers a flexible, mix-and-match approach to explanation.

6.4.2 Morally Permissible Stereotyping

The theory not only can identify cases of morally permissible stereotyping but also offers plausible explanations of why and when stereotyping sometimes is morally permissible. Here is what it says: so long as no harm is done, and it’s not disrespectful, stereotyping is permissible. This would explain why it’s not immoral to have a healthy sense of fear as a pedestrian when approaching bike lanes in Amsterdam because you believe Dutch bikers run people over. It’s not inherently disrespectful to have this expectation or to apply it a biker who is coming your way, given the criteria discussed in this chapter, and it’s not harmful. Indeed, stereotyping benefits all parties involved. Bikers are happy you stay out of their way; you avoid a trip to the emergency room.

6.4.3 Morally Required/Morally Good Stereotyping

The disrespect or harm theory does something else that is extremely valuable. It calls attention to the converse of wronging people by stereotyping: doing right by them. To do right by someone, you’d have to stereotype them in a way that is respectful and leads to downstream benefits.

Recently I came across an interview with M. Gessen that stopped me in my tracks. Gessen began their career in 1990s as a journalist covering gay rights and AIDS-related news in Russia. In 2013, they fled Russia for New York City. In the interview, Gessen explains that their experience as a transgender person has radically changed in the last decade. For most of their life, they didn’t have the words to describe their gender identity, and neither did others. They tell the interviewer:

I remember getting on my bike [recently] and suddenly realizing that this sense that I am unrecognizable, unintelligible to the world in which I live, was gone. I would bike down the Hudson River Greenway, and people would see a transgender, or gender-nonconforming, person riding down the Hudson River Greenway. And maybe there would still be children tugging their parent’s sleeves and saying, Is that a man or a woman? But fewer. And the parent would probably be able to say, “Well, that’s probably a transgender person.”⁵⁵

Perceiving someone to “probably” have a specific gender identity based on looks? That’s stereotyping.

Gessen takes an approving stance toward the parent’s imagined explanation. As someone who intentionally cultivates a gender expression that frustrate gender binaries, they feel seen. Acts of stereotyping like this, they say, makes it possible for them to be socially intelligible and, hence, to live authentically. They tell the interviewer: “I haven’t changed that much in appearance in my life. But, into my fifties, I was somebody who was unintelligible to the world.”⁵⁶ Gessen emphasizes stereotyping’s benefits. Intelligibility means social recognition. Social recognition means living with greater freedom and understanding. I see this same attitude toward stereotyping in my own gender-creative child. When people expect that my child is a boy based on their gender presentation, my child feels affirmed. If we analyzed Gessen’s case in greater depth and found that the act of stereotyping was both respectful and beneficial, we’d have a strong argument in our hands. Stereotyping wouldn’t just be morally permissible for the parent, facing a child’s query. It would be morally the right thing to do.

I expect this to be a polarizing implication. Gender stereotyping is a controversial issue within the transgender community. There is no single way that transgender people feel about it. Instead, there is a lot of disagreement. Arguments are beautiful things because they can be scrutinized for errors. Maybe the argument I’ve just made is missing something. Maybe not. I hope readers will grant that it’s at least plausible that, sometimes, using gender presentation as a heuristic for gender identity can be affirming and, moreover, is arguably the respectful thing to do, given that people often cultivate certain gender expressions to signal to others how they would prefer to be perceived and treated. Ignoring social signaling can be disrespectful and harmful.

For readers who prefer a different example, here it is. Suppose a new staff member in the philosophy department is hired at the University of Utah. I hope to bring them up to speed on a departmental project. If I lived in any other state, I would propose grabbing coffee. However, I know this could be a jerk move in the present context. Many of our staff belong to the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). I have stereotypes about people in the LDS church: they love sugar, and they don’t drink coffee. So, in this imagined scenario, I wouldn’t mention coffee, and I’d choose a cafe on campus known for its delicious cookies. That’s the culturally sensitive thing to do, given that I know basically nothing about this person. Perhaps it turns out that this person is ex-LDS and loves coffee. Maybe they’re in the church but don’t have a sweet tooth. Even if stereotyping leads me astray, it is the respectful thing to do in the situation. It’s rude to ask people if they are LDS. No one does that in a situation like this, and no one should. It’s better to navigate the social domain in a way that is sensitive to potential cultural or religious differences. Operating without generalized expectations, I would argue, is like driving blindfolded. You could hurt people, run them over. Making sure that people get important benefits can also require stereotyping, such as when social workers serve populations with cultural or religious sensitivities. One can begin to see the ways in which stereotyping could be the right thing to do, and have strong moral reasons in favor it, in certain circumstances.

6.5 Two Objections

In closing, I raise two objections to the disrespect or harm theory. While one of the objections has legs, the other does not. Both reveal significant insights about the theory.

6.5.1 The Double Counting Objection

Start with this observation. While the disrespect or harm theory enables rich, multifaceted explanations, it appears to double count wrongs. Think about the stereotype cited by Anzaldúa: “all Chicano children are dumb and dirty.” According to the disrespect or harm theory, teachers who endorse this stereotype disrespect, hence wrong, their Chicano students by representing them as morally less than. However, from another perspective, this belief wrongs students by categorically harming them (i.e., because students are being treated as inferior in virtue of how they are being represented). If the theory counts this as two independent wrongs instead of one, that’s a problem. It means that the theory’s explanations will end up being repetitive and will, moreover, have misleading metaphysical implications. There’s only one wrong here, being described in two ways: first, as a wrong of disrespect and, second, as a harm.⁵⁷

This is an interesting objection. But I don’t think that it is a fatal flaw in the disrespect or harm theory. Indeed, it turns out to highlight one of the theory’s strengths. Readers will no doubt be familiar with the duck-rabbit “illusion.”

Photo 6.2 The duck-rabbit illusion. Unknown creator. Image appears courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Some people see a duck when they look at this picture. Some people see a rabbit. Most can switch back and forth, seeing the illustration in either way. First, as a duck, then a rabbit, and back again. One and the same image represents both a duck and a rabbit. It would be manifestly ridiculous to say: No, it’s really a duck!

It is a superpower of the disrespect or harm theory that it resists simplistic reductions. Its hybrid notions of disrespect and harm help us see that the same wrong can sometimes be perceived in two competing ways: as a wrong of disrespect and as wrong of harm. When this happens, the disrespect or harm theory counts only one wrong, but recognizes that the wrong can be described in two different ways, each of which adds something to the other. Instead of simplistically reducing disrespect to harm (or vice versa), the theory reveals the interdependence of harm and disrespect in certain cases of stereotyping. In this way, it is better suited to recognizing the complexity of normative reality.

Why does this matter? For one thing, it makes the theory more user-friendly. If a Bridge contributor comes to the disrespect or harm theory with a respect-focused objection, that objection doesn’t have to be translated into the language of harm to be made tractable. The theory meets people where they are. It gives them considerable autonomy over how they would like their complaints heard. At the same time, the theory can “duck-rabbit” objections when appropriate. Both objections coexist, threaded together, on equal footing. That’s because they are not in fact two distinct wrongs but one and the same wrong, perceived under the guise of different conceptual frameworks.

6.5.2 The Gaping Holes Objection

A bigger sign of trouble is what I have suppressed to keep readers’ attention focused so intently on disrespect and harm. Maybe you have noticed? Saliently absent or, rather, submerged in the dialectical background are other ethical objections (e.g., that stereotyping fails to treat persons as equals and robs them of freedom). These absences are telling.

Digging deeper, it becomes apparent that the disrespect or harm theory sidelines—and thus partially obscures—key ethical objections to stereotyping made by Bridge contributors and others. Where are freedom and equality? Where are exploitation, subordination, cultural imperialism, and other trappings of oppression so frequently intertwined with wrongful stereotyping? These objections concern group inequality and the social function of wrongful stereotyping, most notably its tendency to keep marginalized groups “in their place” by, for example, by creating animosity amongst workers of different races and ethnicities who would otherwise organize to fight capitalist exploitation. If what we are after is a theory capable of capturing the rich variety of objections to stereotyping in lived experience, other ethical objections—including objections explicitly framed in terms of equality and freedom—must brought to the fore and examined.

¹ Though Bridge contributors identified as women when the volume was published, this is no longer universally true. For example, Max Wolf Valerio chronicles his transition in The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male (New York: Seal Press, 2006). Chrystos and Barbara Cameron identify as two-spirit. This is not an exhaustive list. In the years since Bridge, the sex/gender binary has come under critique in a way that it hadn’t before. In a 2021 interview, Beverly Smith says this about the Combahee statement, for example: “Looking back, the thing that bothers me is that there are things that we don’t discuss in the statement that are also oppressive to people. We were talking about our racial identities, homophobia, and heterosexism, but the statement doesn’t specifically address the issues of transgender people and people with nonconventional gender identities. There are just a lot of different things that we don’t cover, like disabled and immigrant rights. There is far too much oppression in the world that the statement does not address.” See Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith, Interview with Marion Jones, “‘If Black Women Were Free’: An Oral History of the Combahee River Collective,” The Nation, October 29, 2021. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/combahee-river-collective-oral-history [Accessed March 6, 2023].

² Barbara Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), xxxv.

³ Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Fourth Edition (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 210–18.

⁴ Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldùa, “Introduction, 1981,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, xliii–xlvii, at xliv.

⁵ Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 163–72, at 163.

⁶ ibid, 165.

⁷ ibid.

⁸ Mitsuye Yamada, “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 68–72, at 68.

⁹ Barbara Cameron, “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like An Indian,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 41–7, at 44.

¹⁰ Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 90.

¹¹ ibid.

¹² ibid. Bridge contributors also critiqued other women of color for exclusionary behaviors and divisive thinking. For two examples, see Martha Quintanales, “I Paid Very Hard for My Immigrant Experience,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 146–54, at 151; Cameron, “Gee, You Don’t Seem like an Indian,” 45. Quintanales shares painful experiences being perceived as white—and, hence, not a “real” woman of color—because she is light-skinned. “Many of my Latina sisters have had similar experiences,” Quintanales says, “and the big question is always there—Will we ever really be accepted by our Black American sisters?” Cameron shares what it was like to attend the Third World Gay Conference in 1979. “The conference glaringly pointed out to us,” she writes, “the narrow definition held by some people that third world means black people only.”

¹³ Cameron, “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like an Indian,” 41.

¹⁴ Naomi Littlebear Morena, “Dreams of Violence,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 14–15, at 14.

¹⁵ Cameron, “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like an Indian,” 42. See also Chrystos, “I Don’t Understand Those Who Have Turned Away from Me,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 65–7, at 65.

¹⁶ In the passage cited in the text, Cameron uses most of these descriptors. See also Doris Davenport, “The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Women,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 81–6, at 82 and 84.

¹⁷ Cameron, “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like an Indian,” 46. My italics.

¹⁸ ibid.

¹⁹ ibid.

²⁰ For examples of theorists who embrace the disrespect or harm theory as it applies to wrongful discrimination, see Alexander, “What Makes Wrongful Discrimination Wrong?”; Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect; Scanlon, Moral Dimensions.

²¹ For articulations of the disrespect or harm theory, see Alexander, “What Makes Wrongful Discrimination Wrong?”; Scanlon, Moral Dimensions; Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect. For other modestly pluralistic views see, Moreau, Faces of Inequality. Deborah Hellman is now also a modest pluralist, though she started out arguing for a unified theory.

²² Erin Beeghly, “Discrimination and Disrespect,” in Kasper Lippert Rasmussen (ed), The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination (London: Routledge, 2017), 83–96.

²³ I say “mental state” here, but computational states of any kind are also included in the argument.

²⁴ Alexander, “What Makes Wrongful Discrimination Wrong?” 158–9.

²⁵ ibid.

²⁶ E.g., see Mark Schroeder, “When Beliefs Wrong,” Philosophical Topics 46, no. 1 (2018), 115–28; Mark Schoeder, “Persons as Things,” in Mark Timmons (ed), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Volume 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 95–115; Basu, “The Wrongs of Racist Beliefs.”

²⁷ Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect, 86.

²⁸ ibid, 75.

²⁹ Hellman, When Is Discrimination Wrong? 36.

³⁰ ibid.

³¹ For further discussion, see Elizabeth Anderson and Richard H. Pildes, “Expressive Theories of Law: A General Restatement,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 148, no. 5 (2000), 1503–75; Christine Bratu, “Toward an Expressive Account of Disrespect,” Inquiry (2023), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2023.2211431.

³² Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 163–72, at 163.

³³ Merle Woo, “Letter to Ma,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 138–45, at 141.

³⁴ ibid.

³⁵ Judit Moschkovich, “—But I Know You, American Woman,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 73–7, at 75.

³⁶ ibid.

³⁷ ibid, 77.

³⁸ I would note that this approach is novel. No currently existing version of the disrespect or harm theory embraces a hybrid conception of disrespect.

³⁹ For comparative account of harm as applied to discrimination, see Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal; Alexander, “What Makes Wrongful Discrimination Wrong?”; Richard Arneson, “Discrimination and Harm,” in Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (ed), The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination (London: Routledge, 2018), 151–63. For discussion of comparative views of harm in ethics more generally, see Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Judith Jarvis Thomas, The Realm of Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Stephen Perry, “Harm, History, and Counterfactuals,” San Diego Law Review 40, no. 4 (2003), 1283–649.

⁴⁰ For discussion of noncomparative views of harm in ethics, see Seana Shiffrin, “Harm and Its Moral Significance,” Legal Theory 18, no. 3 (2012), 357–98 at 383; Endre Begby, “Doxastic Morality: A Moderately Skeptical Perspective,” Philosophical Topics 46, no. 1 (2018), 155–72.

⁴¹ Scanlon, Moral Dimensions, 73.

⁴² Katharina Berndt Rasmussen, “Harm and Discrimination,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22, no. 4 (2018), 873–91.

⁴³ Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal, 154–5. He writes: “An instance of discrimination is wrong, when it is, because it makes people worse off, i.e., they are worse off given the presence of discrimination than they would have been in some suitable alternative situation in which the relevant instance of discrimination had not taken place.”

⁴⁴ Cameron, “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like an Indian,” 42.

⁴⁵ Cherríe Moraga, “La Güera,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My, 22–9, at 28.

⁴⁶ Berndt Rasmussen, “Harm and Discrimination,” 882.

⁴⁷ For recent empirical work on how discrimination damages Black wellbeing, see William Smith et al. “Racial Battle Fatigue: the MisEducation of Black Men: Racial Microaggressions, Societal Problems, and Environmental Stress,” Journal of Negro Education 80, no. 1 (2011), 63–82.

⁴⁸ Beyond Bridge, these are recognized as harms as well. For reflection on stereotyping’s impacts on collective knowledge, see Fricker, Epistemic Injustice; Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance. Expressive harms associated with pejorative social messages are often discussed in the literature, see Andrea Sangiovanni, Humanity Without Dignity: Moral Equality, Respect, and Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Annabelle Lever, “Why Racial Profiling is Hard to Justify: A Response to Risse and Zeckhauser,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, no. 1 (2005), 94–110; Adam Omar Hosein, “Racial Profiling and a Reasonable Sense of Inferior Political Status,” Journal of Political Philosophy 26, no. 3 (2018), 1–20. For examples of relational harm and how it relates to stereotyping, see Sarah-Clark Miller, “Moral Injury and Relational Harm: Analyzing Rape in Darfur,” Journal of Social Philosophy 40, no. 4 (2009), 503–23; Ruth Thompson-Miller and Joe Feagin, “Continuing Injuries of Racism: Counseling in a Racist Context,” The Counseling Psychologist 35, no. 1(2007), 106–15. For an exploration of moral harm with respect to segregation and white supremacy, see Angela Onwauchi-Willig, “Reconceptualizing the Harms of Discrimination: How Brown V. Board of Education Helped to Further White-Supremacy,” Virginia Law Review 105, no. 2 (2019), 343–69. See also Hilde Lindemann, Holding and Letting Go: Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 156–8; David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011), 226–38.

⁴⁹ Shatema Threadcraft, “North American Necropolitics and Gender: On #blacklivesmatter and Black Femicide,” South Atlantic Quarterly 166, no 3. (2017), 553–79, at 566. See also Shatema Threadcraft, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). See also Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, & Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Thekia Cheeseborough, Nicole Overstreet, and L. Monique Ward, “Interpersonal Sexual Objectification, Jezebel Stereotype Endorsement, and Justification of Intimate Partner Violence Towards Women,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2020), 203–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684319896345.

⁵⁰ Cameron, “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like an Indian,” 42

⁵¹ ibid, 43.

⁵² Beverly Smith, “Interview,” in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 82.

⁵³ Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith, “Across the Kitchen Table: A Sister—To—Sister Dialogue,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 111–25, at 122.

⁵⁴ Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect, 197.

⁵⁵ Masha Gessen, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Trans Rights,” Interview with Adam Remnick, The New Yorker, March 11, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-trans-rights [Accessed May 30, 2023].

⁵⁶ Gessen, “What We Talk About.”

⁵⁷ Hellman, When Is Discrimination Wrong?; Eidelson, Discrimination and Disrespect, 207. In When Is Discrimination Wrong? Hellman argues that demeaning messages associated with, for example, racial profiling policies are disrespectful. She embraces an expressive conception of disrespect. In Discrimination and Disrespect, Eidelson categorizes these demeaning messages as “expressive harms” and argues that discrimination sending such messages isn’t necessarily disrespectful, though it is harmful. Across discrimination theory, theorists appear to presumptively categorize demeaning expressive messages as either harmful or disrespectful. However, this appears to be a matter of mere preference in framing.

7 Freedom and Failing to Treat Persons as Equals

Photo 7.1 “Occupations of Negroes and Whites in Georgie” Infographic Created by W. E. B. Du Bois for “Exhibit of American Negroes” at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. Work is ink and watercolor, mounted on 28˝ × 22˝ board. Image appears courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

In 1920, W. E. B. Du Bois published Darkwater: Voices Within the Veil. The book opens with “Credo,” a statement of beliefs. First among these:

I believe in God, who made of one blood all nations that on earth do dwell. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and the possibility of infinite development.¹

It is telling that Du Bois begins here, framing “the moral equality of persons” as his foundational, guiding belief. As he elaborates other aspects of his worldview, he builds on this core principle, connecting it to his belief in Black excellence, the value of hard work, the evils of colonialist exploitation, and the imperative of “Liberty for all.”²

In this chapter, I argue that Du Bois weaves a trenchant, equality- and freedom- focused critique of stereotyping into the fabric of Darkwater. Section 7.1 documents the contours of this critique. In Section 7.2, I argue that Du Bois’s analysis of wrongful stereotyping anticipates by nearly a hundred years a prominent, equality-focused theory of wrongful discrimination argued for by Sophia Moreau. Though Moreau applies her theory to discriminatory actions, policies, and laws, it generalizes to stereotyping in thought and culture. Both views suggest that racist stereotyping can wrong people by failing to treat them as equals, both intrinsically and because of its consequences.

In closing, I examine the broader implications for developing a theory of wrongful stereotyping. Equality-focused objections are special, I suggest, because they highlight the wider social processes that perpetuate group inequality in which acts of stereotyping play a role, including practices of economic exploitation, social segregation, and group-based violence. Failing to treat persons as equals is, moreover, a unique wrong that can’t be reduced to the wrong of disrespect or the wrong of causing harm. Nor can these other wrongs be reduced to it. Freedom-focused objections are also unique. They invoke a fundamental right to chart our own lifepaths, to use our capabilities and develop our potentials in ways that create a life worth living, collectively. Pairing objections rooted in these two ideals, one finds a second kind of modest pluralism standing alongside the disrespect or harm theory (explored in Chapter 6), stubbornly irreducible to it.

7.1 Du Bois on What’s Wrong with Stereotyping

Let me begin by flagging something important. If you read Darkwater, you won’t find the terms stereotype or stereotyping. In 1920, these terms were still associated with printing press technology. Stereotyping was not a term frequently invoked by antiracist writers of the era.³

Though Du Bois never adopted the language of stereotyping—neither in Darkwater, nor in his later work, he certainly had things to say about phenomena falling under its rubric. When analyzing stereotyping, he reaches for terminology more popular at the time: prejudice. He describes prejudice as a “vicious habit of mind” and argues that “millions of honest, modern men” have been “unconsciously trained . . . into the belief that black folk are sub-human.”⁴ This belief, he argues, “is not based on science . . . not based on history . . . It is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage that can be moved by neither argument nor fact.”⁵ He likewise notes racist ideas and images “continually rung in picture and story, in newspaper heading and moving picture, in sermon and school book.”⁶ Du Bois expresses hope that “faith in humanity will lead the world to rise above its current color prejudice.”⁷ By analyzing his views on prejudice as it manifests in culture and thought, one can ascertain what he has to say about wrongful stereotyping.

7.1.1 Insight 1: Economic Exploitation

Throughout Darkwater, Du Bois argues that prejudice rationalizes economic exploitation and is problematic, in part, for that reason.⁸ He writes:

Slowly but surely white culture is evolving the theory that “darkies” are born beasts of burden for white folks . . . The supporting arguments grow and twist themselves in the mouths of merchant, scientist, solider, traveler, writer, and missionary: Darker people are dark in mind as well as in body; of dark, uncertain, and imperfect descent; of frailer, cheaper stuff; they are cowards in the face of mausers and maxims; they have no feelings, aspirations, and loves; they are fools, illogical idiots,—“half-devil and half-child” . . . To the very limited extent of their shallow capacities lift them to be useful to whites, to raise cotton, gather rubber, fetch ivory, dig diamonds,—and let them be paid what men think they are worth—white men who know them to be well-nigh worthless.⁹

This narrative will be familiar to readers.¹⁰ Racism as we know it emerged with capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as European powers sought to justify their expropriation of native lands and brutal colonial labor practices, including slavery. Their horrific treatment of non-European peoples required a justifying logic. Cultural stereotyping provided that logic, serving the economic interests of white Europeans. “[L]abor,” Du Bois observes, “is kept cheap and helpless because the white world despites ‘darkies.’”¹¹

Rewind a few decades. For the 1900 Paris Exhibition, Du Bois and a team of students crafted gorgeous maps and data visualizations “designed to illustrate the development of the American Negro in a typical state in the United States.”¹² The materials were displayed in a special exhibit located within the American Pavilion. Though the exhibit’s overall message was positive, emphasizing Black progress since the U.S. Civil War, it also underscored continuing racial disparities. “Du Bois and his design team,” explain Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Brit Russert, “used clean bright lines, bright color, and a sparse style to visually convey the American color line.”¹³ In one graphic, Du Bois contrasts racial differences in Georgia’s labor force using data from 1890. (See Photo 7.1) One of the most prominent datapoints: 28% of Black males in Georgia worked as domestic or personal servants whereas only 5.5% of white males held jobs of this kind. Though he doesn’t raise the issue of racist stereotyping, it’s an elephant in the room. The exhibit offers a counternarrative. Letting pictures speak for themselves, it conveyed Black ambition and capability. Visitors could see before their very eyes increasing levels of education, capital, and professional achievement among the Black population in Georgia. Charts were paired with dignified photography of Black Americans, photographs that undercut stereotypes of Black servility and inferiority.¹⁴

In Darkwater, Du Bois returns to Black labor statistics and explores their social significance. Though the data since 1890 shows a modest reduction in Black home service work, Du Bois sees stalled progress.¹⁵ He argues that Black Americans were not being allowed to rise and were being forced, under threat of starvation, to accept the same kind of low-paying, exploitative jobs that they held under slavery. He shares his own family’s experience. My mother’s folk,” he says, “. . . sat poised on that thin edge between the farmer and the menial. The surrounding Irish had two chances, the factory and the kitchen, and most of them took the factory, with all its dirt and noise and low wage. The factory was closed to us.”¹⁶ Factory work was not an option for Black families because of racist stereotyping. White workers often perceived Blacks as lesser. They didn’t want to toil side-by-side with Black laborers, something that would suggest that they were equals. White factory owners also preferred white employees, deeming them more reliable and less prone to vices such as laziness. Because of discriminatory attitudes, ambitious Black workers had limited options.

Those who bucked the odds to pursue jobs beyond farming and domestic service—a growing number of industrial workers, entrepreneurs, doctors, teachers, railroad workers, artists—remained uniquely vulnerable to capitalist exploitation.¹⁷ Even when factory owners in the North and West began to recruit Black workers, for example, these workers failed to command the same wages as white laborers because unions refused to admit them. He recounts, “the labor movement turned their backs on those black men when the white world dinned in the ears. Negroes are servants; servants are Negroes. They shut the door of escape to factory and trade in their fellows’ faces and battened down the hatches, lest the 300,000 should be worked equal in pay and consideration with white men.”¹⁸ The backstory of this stereotype—“Negroes are servants”—is once again located in slavery. Christian slaveholders argued that Black subordination was ordained by God, citing passages in the Bible such as this one: “’Cursed be Canaan!’ cried the Hebrew priests. ‘A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’”¹⁹ “With what characteristic complacency,” Du Bois tells readers, “did the slaveholders assume that Canaanites were Negroes and their ‘brethren’ were white? Are not Negroes servants? Ergo!”²⁰

7.1.2 Insight 2: Racialized Violence

A second observation is that stereotyping invites whites to act out in violent, aggressive ways.

One avenue to violence was through dehumanizing images in popular media. Consider D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the fabulously popular, white supremacist film released in February of 1915. The film tells the history of the Civil War, depicting the Ku Klux Klan as valiant defenders of the South. In one scene, a white woman jumps to her death, saving herself from being despoiled by an animalistic Black pursuer who chases her to the top of a cliff, a role played by a white man in crude blackface. Such representations were incendiary, as Du Bois well knew. As editor of the National Association for Colored People’s (NAACP’s) monthly magazine, The Crisis, he ran an opinion piece in May of 1915 in which a Jewish rabbi declared the film “a deliberate attempt to deepen and justify within the hearts of men the more or less instinctive prejudices which it is the business of an enlightened democracy to challenge.”²¹ All year, The Crisis published lynching exposés, underscoring the impact of stereotyping on Black lives as the NAACP campaigned to censor the film.²²

Not one to put the sole blame on culture, Du Bois emphasizes the alacrity with which white individuals internalized and acted on racist stereotypes. Describing what began in 1906 as a protest for higher wages, he notes in Darkwater that white protestors in Saint Louis embodied a “great red monster of cruel oppression.”²³ Instead of perceiving Black workers as allies in the fight against industrial exploitation, they attacked them. He recounts:

The white men drove even the black union men out of their unions and when the black men, beaten by night and assaulted, flew to arms and shot back at the marauders, five thousand rioters arose and surged like a crested stormwave, from noonday until midnight; they killed and beat and murdered; they dashed out the brains of children and stripped off the clothes of women; they drove victims into the flames and hanged the helpless. . . .²⁴

Committing atrocity after atrocity, white rioters raged. Racial stereotyping fed the flames of their anger, Du Bois says. They perceived Blackness as “unpardonable crime.”²⁵

What’s wrong with stereotyping on Du Bois’s view is—in part—that it fuels such violence. The moral problem here, according to Du Bois, is not simply that pain and suffering result, making people’s lives worse, but that these harms are visited upon Black people who are perceived as stepping out of line. Functioning as a mechanism of social control, stereotyping engenders vindictiveness in whites, giving them pleasure in Black pain.²⁶ It has the awesome power of making cruel acts of racist retribution—whether for perceived social transgressions or merely existing while Black—feel less like hatred and more like, in the words of Kate Manne, “righteous[ness], like standing up for oneself or for morality.”²⁷

7.1.3 Insight 3: A Domineering White Worldview

A third observation is that stereotyping enacts a domineering white worldview in which Black people are deemed inferior and inherently servile.

Start with Darkwater’s subtitle: “Voices from within the veil.” In Du Bois’s work, “the veil” is a concept at once metaphorical and material, emerging in the opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois recalls being snubbed by a white classmate. “It dawned upon me with a certain suddenness,” he writes, “that I was different from the others . . . but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”²⁸ When he invokes the veil in Darkwater, he elaborates:

There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears. As one peers through its intricate, unfathomable pattern of ancient, old, old design, one sees blood and guilt and misunderstanding. And yet it hangs there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored and Black and White—between You and Me. Surely it a thought-thing, tenuous, intangible; yet just as surely is it true and terrible and not in our little day may you and l lift it.²⁹

“A thought-thing,” the veil is nonetheless “true and terrible.” Both artifact of culture and a real feature of human psychologies, it is the “psychosocial” foundation of group oppression, as Charles Mills once put it.³⁰

Using his own lived experiences, Du Bois examines the veil. In “The Servant in the House, he begins with this story. Once, after a lecture on racial justice, a white woman assailed him. “She came nearer and spitefully shook a finger in my face,” he recalls.³¹ For years, she had given money to Black colleges like Tuskegee. Yet she couldn’t find decent servants. Hers were defective, she explained: “They don’t try. They’re lazy. They’re unreliable. They’re impudent and leave without notice. They all want to be doctors and lawyers and” (she spat the word with venom) ‘ladies.’”³² The outburst reveals a certain way of thinking. She had in mind the stereotype of a “good” Black person: a loyal Mammy or Uncle Tom. On her view, the world should be one in which Black people happily serve white people and make their lives easier, despite paltry paychecks. Notice what Black people are “good for” from this perspective: the labor that they can perform for whites. Recalling a summer when he worked as a busboy at hotel in Minnesota, Du Bois remembers this attitude saturating the atmosphere. He describes one waiter who “sent him crazy” by “playing the clown,—crouching, grinning, assuming a broad dialect when he usually spoke good English.”³³ He says that it was “heartbreaking” to watch this man embody racist stereotypes of Black servility in order to ingratiate himself with white diners.³⁴ In that same dining room, he was once beckoned by a white man, mouth full of food, looking for his waiter. The man’s body language said it all. “Thus Caesar ordered his legionaries or Cleopatra her slaves,” Du Bois writes, “Dogs recognized the gesture . . . Then and there, I disowned menial service for me and my people.”³⁵

Du Bois doesn’t just find stereotyping of this kind morally problematic because of its consequences: the fact that it justifies withholding education from Black children, votes from Black citizens, and union membership from Black laborers. On his view, racist stereotyping is problematic in and of itself. When recalling racial dynamics at his summer job, he calls out “the unnatural assumption that worker and diner had no common humanity.”³⁶ He labels this assumption “inherently and fundamentally wrong.”³⁷ The assumption is morally wrongful, he implies, because it denies the moral equality of persons, a principle he champions. A few paragraphs later, he refers to the myth of Negro servitude embraced by Christian slaveholders as “a degradation.”³⁸ He asks, “Why in the minds of so many decent and up-seeing white folks does the whole Negro problem resolve itself into the matter of their getting a cook or maid?”³⁹

Time and again, he refers to the mentalities, beliefs, and assumptions underlying oppression and offers moral critique. White supremacist ideology, he says, “has worked itself through warp and woof of our daily thought with a thoroughness few realize.”⁴⁰ Even the most enlightened white Americans, Du Bois argues, “the sweeter souls of the dominant world,” deem whiteness “inherently and obviously better than brownness or tan.”⁴¹ “[A]bove their actual words,” when he talks to white people, “they play an obligato of tune and tone, saying: ‘My poor unwhite thing!’”⁴² “I do not laugh,” he says, “I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly: But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?”⁴³ “Then, always,” explains Du Bois, “somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is ownership of the earth forever and ever. Amen!”⁴⁴

Racist stereotyping is wrongful, from this perspective, both because it enacts this domineering worldview—intrinsically wronging those targeted—and because it sustains oppressive practices, policies, and laws with extremely harmful consequences for colonized peoples worldwide.

7.3.4 Insight 4: Internalized Racism

A fourth observation is that racist stereotyping is internalized by Black people in ways that undermine their wellbeing and freedom.

Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness” sits at the heart of this fourth observation. Introduced alongside “the veil” in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois refers to double consciousness as “a peculiar sensation . . . this sense of always looking at one’s self through the other’s eyes.” This sensation first arises when he experiences discrimination. When a new classmate snubs him, his consciousness splits, doubling into two distinct streams. He sees himself from the perspective of his white classmate. From her point of view, he embodies pejorative stereotypes. From his own perspective, he is a kid like any other—just as good, if not better, than his white classmates. These two streams of consciousness, warring with each other, constitute the phenomenon of double consciousness.

From Du Bois’s perspective, double consciousness is a blessing and a curse. In The Souls of Black Folk, he celebrates it, asserting that Black people “are gifted with second-sight in this American world.”⁴⁵ Claiming this special knowledge as his own, Du Bois announces in Darkwater that he is “singularly clairvoyant” and “can see in and through” white people: “I know their thoughts and they know that I know them.”⁴⁶ Yet to have double consciousness is to have internalized racism. Internalization may work in different ways. For some, it means accepting racialized stereotypes that deem nonwhites lesser, and which generate feelings of self-hate. Even for those who reject racist ideals, double consciousness can be a source of debilitating anxiety, self-censorship, and self-doubt. “Being a problem is a strange experience,” Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folk, “even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe.”⁴⁷ “Why,” he asks, “did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own house?”⁴⁸

In Darkwater, Du Bois digs deep. Accused of being “too sensitive” by a white friend, he describes a typical day:

I arise at seven. The milkman has neglected me. He pays little attention to colored districts. My white neighbor glares elaborately. I walk softly, lest I disturb him. The children jeer as I pass to work. The women in the street car withdraw their skirts or prefer to stand. The policeman is truculent. The elevator man hates to serve Negroes. My job is insecure because the white union wants it and does not want me. I try to lunch, but no place near will serve me.⁴⁹

“Do you mean to sit there and tell me that this is what happens to you each day?” his friend responds.⁵⁰ “No,” he says, “not every day.” “That’s the hell of it,” he explains, “Imagine spending your life looking for insults or for hiding places from them—shrinking (instinctively and despite desperate bolstering of courage) from blows that are not always but ever [present]. . . .”⁵¹ Double consciousness exemplifies the “sensitivity” of which Du Bois speaks in this passage. Experience tells him that any Black person—no matter how educated or accomplished—is marked for stereotyping. “Everything great, good, efficient, fair, and honorable,” Du Bois observes, “is ‘white’; everything mean, bad, blundering, cheating, and dishonorable is ‘yellow’; a bad taste is ‘brown’; and the devil is ‘black.’”⁵² Even though he rejects racist assumptions of inferiority, his constant awareness of them constitutes an existential burden, a weight that must be borne as he navigates everyday social life. He must walk through the world knowing that people are primed to misrecognize and distort the meaning of his actions, words, and thoughts.⁵³ The prospect of inferior treatment is constant. It shapes how he moves through the world, how he behaves. In public, he finds himself “shrinking.”

All in all, Darkwater provides an ambitious critique of stereotyping. Beyond Black people in the United States, Du Bois argues that stereotyping is a source of “oppression and humiliation and insult at the hands of the White World” for all colonized peoples globally.⁵⁴ Advancing a feminist line of critique, he contends that sexist stereotyping hurts “all womanhood” by lifting up women up as “virgins and mothers” while, at the same time, relentlessly sexualizing them, including and especially Black women.⁵⁵ Despite their variety, these objections all circle back to Du Bois’s “Credo.” “I believe,” he says, that all people are “alike in the soul and the possibility of infinite development” and “in liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroad uncursed by color.”⁵⁶ When stereotyping in thought and culture impugns people’s intrinsic moral equality or prevents its realization in society, especially with respect to exercising fundamental liberties, Du Bois emphatically condemns it.⁵⁷

7.2 Sophia Moreau on Wrongful Discrimination

I now turn to Moreau’s theory of wrongful discrimination in Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination. Moreau’s and Du Bois’s analyses are largely consistent with each other and converge in significant ways. In this section, I outline these convergences.

Start with the first element of Moreau’s theory: subordination. A group is socially subordinated if and only if, she says:

The members of that group have, across a number of social contexts, less relative social and political power and less relative de facto authority than the other group.

The members of that group have, or are ascribed, traits that attract less consideration or greater censure across a number of different social contexts than the corresponding traits of the empowered group.

These traits are the subject of stereotypes, which help to rationalize the differences in power and de facto authority, the habits of consideration and censure, and the structural accommodations.

There are structural accommodations in place in society that tacitly accommodate the needs of a superior group while overlooking the needs of at least some members of the subordinate group; and these accommodations work together with stereotypes to rationalize the differences in power and de facto authority and differences in consideration or censure.⁵⁸

Already overlap with Du Bois is manifest. Like Moreau, Du Bois is interested in group subordination. His life’s work can be understood, in part, as an attempt to analyze how and why racial inequities (in the United States and globally) have persisted since the end of slavery. In Darkwater, he writes from the perspective of an activist and cultural critic who, like Moreau, is interested in analyzing how social subordination undermines cherished moral and political values.

Subordination is connected to wrongful discrimination in two ways, on Moreau’s view. First, discrimination can wrong subordinated groups (and the individuals in them) by “causally contributing” to their relative powerlessness and lower status vis-à-vis other dominant groups. Discriminatory treatment’s consequences are the crux of the matter here. Second, discrimination can wrong subordinated groups (and the individuals in them) intrinsically. This happens, Moreau argues, when a discriminatory action, policy, or law “constitute[s] an expression of censure of the subordinate group, or an expression of lack of deference towards them, a way that marks them out as inferior.”⁵⁹

Applying this framework to stereotyping, here is an initial result. Like discrimination in general, stereotyping can sometimes be intrinsically subordinating and, thereby, wrong for that reason. Though Moreau doesn’t explicitly make this argument, her framework entails it. Think about The Birth of a Nation scene described earlier. A white man in blackface, hunched over as if a jungle creature, chasing a white woman with the intent of sexual assault.⁶⁰ The actors in this scene embodied racial stereotypes. In Moreau’s parlance, the film attributes to Black men traits that attract “greater censure” and “lack of consideration” across a range of social contexts. In contrast, white women are represented as paragons of innocence and virtue; white men are depicted as valiant defenders. It follows that racial stereotyping in the film is inherently subordinating—and for the exact same reasons that Moreau says discrimination in general can intrinsically subordinate.

A parallel observation holds for stereotyping in thought, perception, and imagination. Consider the generic images and ideas that pop into people’s heads when they think of social types. When a person views individuals through the lens of group stereotypes, they may project marks of inferiority onto individuals. In Darkwater, Du Bois shares examples from his own experience. When the man with a mouth full of food beckons him, Du Bois says that it was something about “his way, his air, his assumption” that disturbs him. Du Bois says that “even a dog” would recognize what the gesture’s meaning: obedience is being demanded of an inferior. Even so, it is not the behavior alone that Du Bois identifies as insulting. Behind the man’s discriminatory behavior, there exists a racist worldview, a way of seeing and judging Black people. Within this worldview, Black people are marked as lesser. Acts of stereotyping perform this “marking” cognitively. They attribute to individual Black people traits that attract “greater censure” and “lack of consideration” across a range of social contexts.

At least three explanations exist for stereotyping’s inherent subordinating power. The first has to do with its representational content. Dominant groups tend to be represented—both in culture and in thought—as “good” and virtuous in nature, whereas subordinated groups show up as bad, vicious, and weak. Even if an act of stereotyping is not publicly communicated, its representational content qualifies as subordinating when it depicts groups in ways that instantiate these wider social patterns. Second, thinking plays a regulative role in social interactions.⁶¹ The very act of categorization thrusts people into a normative universe in which individuals show up as beholden to norms associated with their presumptive social roles. People are thus “held” in presumptive social positions by those who stereotype them, their social relationships vis-à-vis other people prescriptively defined in advance.⁶² In this way, they can be treated as inferiors or superiors by stereotyping, even in the absence of behavioral interaction. Whether or not one knows it, a person can be being judged through a lens that puts them at risk for harm and which consigns them to social inferiority. Third, fast thinking itself can be a power move, as I noted in Chapter 2. To judge someone quickly by stereotyping can be a way of treating them as lesser, as not worth engaging with. Conversely, it can be a way of extending power to dominant groups (e.g., by automatically presuming their competence and authority). The upshot: stereotyping—like discrimination in general—can be intrinsically subordinating while also having subordinating consequences.

Now consider the second element of Moreau’s theory: “deliberative freedoms.” This concept refers to, “the freedom to deliberate about one’s life, and to decide what to do in light of these deliberations, without having to treat certain personal traits (or other people’s assumptions about them) as costs, and without having to live one’s life without these traits always before one’s eyes.”⁶³ To have deliberative freedom means that your social identity does not make you “a problem” in the eyes of others or yourself, as Du Bois once put it. It means having the power to shape your life in accordance with your interests and values. When people lack deliberative freedom, Moreau argues, they don’t just miss out on opportunities “like buying a car or joining a club.” A person’s very existence and way of being the world is at stake. “What they [people unable to exercise deliberative freedoms] lack,” she says, “is the space to become the people whom they want to be.”⁶⁴ One way in which discrimination can wrong people, according to Moreau, is by persistently thrusting group membership into one’s consciousness, thus framing one’s identity as a burden in social interactions and limiting the kind of choices that one can make in one’s everyday life.

One of her key examples is Craig v. Masterpiece Cakeshop, a U.S. court case in which a baker refused to create a cake for a gay couple because he believed homosexuality was a sin. Moreau argues that this refusal marked gay people as “inherently unworthy of marriage” and thus constituted “expression of censure,” rendering the baker’s decision an instance of inherently subordinating discriminatory treatment. Yet, on her view, this was not the primary reason that the plaintiffs “felt they had experienced wrongful discrimination.”⁶⁵ [W]hat Craig and Mullins were insisting,” she argues, “was that they should not have to have their sexual orientation, and other people’s assumptions about what it means, constantly before their eyes; nor should they have to bear the costs of other people’s assumptions about it or about what it renders them fit or unfit for.”⁶⁶ Thus, Moreau proposes to analyze this case as one in which discrimination wrongs people, not just by subordinating them, but also by undermining deliberative freedoms.

This objection generalizes to public acts of stereotyping. When stereotyping is expressed in speech, it has the same power to stop people in their tracks as discriminatory policies and actions. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon recalls walking down the street, minding his own business, when a white child points at him: “Look a Negro! . . . Mama, I’m scared!” The utterance paralyzes Fanon, sending him into a spiral of anxiety. His head fills with racist images: grinning servants, cannibalistic natives. In that moment, he describes to readers experiencing a profound lack of freedom brought on by what Du Bois would call “double consciousness.” He is held captive by racist presumptions, his original train of thought stopped, his day ground to a halt. In Invisible Man, the sight of a children’s piggybank taking the form of a grinning Negro—an artifact discovered in the room of the house where he is boarding—causes the novel’s narrator to meltdown (Chapters 1 and 2). These examples illustrate exactly what Moreau means when she says deliberative unfreedom entails having your social identity put in front of your eyes at every moment, in ways that make it hard—if not impossible—to be who you are.

Even when acts of stereotyping are not publicly expressed for all to hear, they may exert control over those targeted. Du Bois reports experiencing anxiety owing to white people’s domineering worldview. When he’s out in the world, he knows it’s possible that white people will act on stereotypic presumptions, predictions, and beliefs. What weighs him down is the ever-present possibility of people acting on their prejudices.⁶⁷ He knows what the what world thinks about “darkies” like himself. In Dusk of Dawn, he writes:

I knew . . . that white people were just the same as I: their physical possibilities, their mental processes were no different than mine; even the different in skin color was vastly overemphasized and intrinsically trivial. And yet this fact of racial distinction based on color was the greatest thing in my life and absolutely determined it, because this surrounding group . . . determined that I was to be a thing apart.⁶⁸

His life, he says, is “absolutely determined” by racial distinction. This is a claim much like Moreau’s is about freedom. The “veil” curtails his freedom. In the Darkwater essay, “Of Beauty and Death,” he waxes poetic about the American landscape’s majesty. “Why,” he says, “do not those who are scarred by the world’s battle and hurt by its hardness travel to these places and drown themselves in the utter joy of life?”⁶⁹ He asks a room of Southern Black people. From personal experience, he knows why they don’t leave the South. Traveling while Black in the United States is inherently risky. “It’s difficult to get lunch and clean water,” he explains, “. . . As for toilet rooms,—don’t! If you have to change cars [on a train], be wary of the junctions which are usually without accommodation and filled with quarrelsome white persons who hate “a darky dressed up.”⁷⁰ Whites have a freedom of movement that Black people in the United States simply don’t. Every time one contemplates public transportation, one must consider the risks.

One might be skeptical that silent acts of stereotyping limit anyone’s freedom. How could an act of stereotyping impact a person’s decision making, limiting their freedom if they don’t know that they have been or would be stereotyped? Wouldn’t they be none the wiser? Here it helps to shift perspectives. Think about the situation from the perspective of the person who stereotypes. Even if they don’t communicate their thoughts in speech or behavior, they are perceiving the stereotyped person as occupying a certain social role. Already “the opportunity space” for social interaction has been defined, binding the stereotyped person to prescriptive expectations associated with this perceived social role. Without anything being said, a certain kind of social choreography is demanded. If this choreography does not play out as the more dominant party expects—if the person expected to occupy a more submissive social role rejects it, public shaming and acts of policing may follow. Punitive responses may range from verbal and non-verbal expressions of disapproval—eye rolling, snarling—to horrific acts of violence. Knowing that white people who stereotype have a disposition to police racial norms, Du Bois recognizes that the very act of stereotyping, even if it is not yet expressed in behavior or speech, puts Black people at risk. These risks shape his deliberation, making his social identity something that he must always consider when moving through white space. Accordingly, it’s not just discriminatory behaviors, policies, or laws that can undermine deliberative freedoms; stereotyping has the power to do this too. It has this power by shaping the space of social interaction in ways that aren’t always explicitly revealed to targets of stereotyping, but which they learn to expect, as underscored by philosopher Kristie Dotson’s work on conversational silencing.⁷¹

The third element of Moreau’s theory is access to basic goods. A good is ‘basic’ for someone, she writes, if and only if:

Access to this good is necessary in order for this person to be a full and equal participant in her society.

Access to this good is necessary in order for this person to be seen by others and by herself as a full and equal participant in her society.⁷²

Examples of basic goods including access to drinking water and housing. She argues that there is no set list of basic goods required for all people and that determining whether (and why) something qualifies as such requires attention to context. On her view, what’s wrong with discrimination—at least sometimes—is that it leaves some people “without access to basic goods, goods they need to have access to if they are to be, and to be seen as, full and equal members of their society.”⁷³

This objection generalizes to stereotyping. To see why, return to Darkwater. According to Du Bois, access to education is what Moreau calls a basic good. He repeatedly identifies it as necessary for Black folks to be seen and treated as equals in American society. “Surely the overwhelming evidence is today that men are slaves and unequal.” “But,” he writes, “is it not education that is the creator of this freedom and equality?”⁷⁴ In conjunction with this view, Du Bois argues that stereotyping blocks this path to equality and freedom. Celebrating the work of British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge Taylor, he contends that this man’s genius would never have been blossomed in the United States. Why not? Because of prejudicial stereotyping, which impact the educational opportunities of Black children. “To many millions of people,” he writes, “this man [Coleridge Taylor] was all wrong. First, he ought never to have been born, for he was the mulatto son of a white woman. Second, he never should have been educated as a musician,—he should have been trained for his “place” in the world and to make him satisfied wherewith. . . .”⁷⁵ Here again is the stereotype: “Negroes are servants and servants are Negroes.” Much of the American public believed that Black people didn’t need to be educated—and whatever education they did receive ought to be vocational—because their social role was to do whites’ “dirty” work: farming, laundering, and cleaning houses. He also notes that the public held a concurrent belief that Black people “cannot be educated” because they are ignorant by nature.⁷⁶ The fact that he talks so much about stereotyping in this passage is evidence that he takes it seriously as a causal contributor to the violation of Black rights and denial of opportunities. He argues that the reasoning of millions of Americans is infected by racist prejudice, setting them against Black education.

7.3 Du Bois: Two Challenges

Though Du Bois’s analysis of wrongful stereotyping converges with Moreau’s theory of what’s wrong with discrimination in significant ways, he also challenges some of her key claims.

A challenge to legalistic methodology. In developing her theory, Moreau defends two methodological premises: first, any theory of wrongful discrimination must consider the lived experiences of those subject to discrimination and, second, antidiscrimination law constitutes “a necessary starting point” for thinking about the wrongs of discrimination.⁷⁷ Advancing the second premise, she writes, “Our ideas of discrimination seem to owe so much to our legal frameworks that any theory of discrimination that does not start from the rough contours of some of the basic ideas about discrimination given to us by the law risks not being a theory of discrimination as we understand it, and so risks irrelevance to our public discourse and moral lives.”⁷⁸ Combining these premises, she analyzes lived experiences of people targeted for discrimination through case law from the United States and Canada.

Here is what Du Bois’s analysis shows. Lived experience, on its own, constitutes a sufficient epistemic basis for theorizing. When he was writing the essays in Darkwater, the U.S. Supreme Court still ruled that the U.S. Constitution permitted Jim Crow laws. Despite the U.S. Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment, Black people could not exercise their right to vote. The Civil Rights Act was decades away from being passed. Nonetheless, Du Bois opens Darkwater just as Moreau opens Faces of Inequality: with a clarion call for equality and freedom. Much like Moreau, he analyzes what’s wrong with stereotyping and discrimination, how it undermines freedom and equality, but he doesn’t go through case law. When arguing for universal voting rights in Darkwater, he enjoins readers: “Remember the foundation of the argument,—that in the last analysis only the sufferer knows his own sufferings.”⁷⁹ To develop an accurate theory of how people are wronged when they are judged by group membership, he argues, theorists must listen to those impacted, lest their theories distort the truth. He vindicates lived experience as the crucial epistemic foundation for theorizing.

This is one of the most important lessons to be learned by putting these theorists in conversation, in my view. In Faces of Inequality, you won’t find Du Bois’s ideas being discussed. Nor will you find other heavyweights in the Black radical tradition: Frantz Fanon, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Frederick Douglass. Privileging case law excludes their voices, ripping a theory of wrongful discrimination from its social foundations. Correcting this problem entails looking more deeply into history, across a variety of disciplines and modes of discourse.

A challenge to the theory’s scope. Du Bois also pulls Moreau’s theory in a more radical direction. Here it helps to remember the scholars with whom Moreau takes herself to be in conversation. Some of her interlocutors argue that the state has a duty treat its citizens as equals. Others contend that individuals can have a duty to treat each other as equals, but only when they step into a very limited range of formal institutional roles—at work or when someone is elected as a public official, for example. They deny that this duty extends to people’s everyday lives and so-called personal decisions. Against their envisioned protestations, she argues, “we can accept that people ought to have considerable freedom to make personal decisions as they see fit, without interference from the state and without pressure from other people, quite consistently with recognizing that each of us nevertheless has a moral duty to treat people as equals, and that we exhibit some kind of moral failing when we do not treat others as equals.”⁸⁰ On her view, the fact that people have equal moral worth entails that we must act in ways that recognize each other’s equality. Du Bois work forces an even more ambitious extension of this view. Moreau never applies her theory to stereotyping in thought and culture. Nor does she seem open to doing that. Yet one of the big takeaways of her book, from her perspective, is that antidiscrimination is an unassailable duty of interpersonal morality. If that’s right (and I think it is), antidiscrimination is an ideal that applies to our cognitive and emotional lives. We can fail to treat persons as equals, and limit their freedom, by how we think about them, perceive them, and the kind of predictions we make, and even how we imagine them “in private.” Du Bois’s analysis clearly shows this. Thus, it reveals Moreau’s theory to be even more expansive and powerful than she herself recognizes.

7.4 Radical Pluralism on the Horizon

Here is biggest result of this chapter. New objections must be added to our account of what’s wrong with stereotyping. Equality-focused objections are special because they highlight the wider social processes that perpetuate group inequality and oppression in which acts of stereotyping play a role, including practices of economic exploitation, social segregation, and group-based violence. Freedom-focused objections are also unique. They invoke a fundamental right to chart our own lifepaths, to use our capabilities and develop our potentials in ways that create a life worth living, collectively. Only with these more expansive social and liberatory lenses can acts of stereotyping finally be placed into in a fuller moral context.

¹ W. E. B. Du Bois, “Credo,” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Garden City, NY: Dover, 1999), 1.

² ibid, 1–2.

³ See, e.g., Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From the South (Natrona Heights, PA: General Press, 2023); Wells, The Light of Truth. Like Du Bois, Both Wells and Cooper use the term prejudice but not stereotypes or stereotyping.

⁴ Du Bois, “The Hands of Ethiopia,” in Darkwater, 41.

⁵ ibid. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in Philip S. Foner (ed), Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1890-1919 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 73–85, at 80.

⁶ ibid.

⁷ ibid.

⁸ Racial capitalism refers to the historical expansion of capitalism as an economic system through European colonialism beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and continuing to the present day. For further discussion, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Third Edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Press, 2020). Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Liam Kofi Bright, “A Response to Michael Walzer,” Dissent (August 7, 2020). https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-response-to-michael-walzer [Accessed on January 1, 2024].

⁹ Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater, 24.

¹⁰ For discussion of the Black Marxist tradition and Du Bois’s place in it, see Robinson, Black Marxism.

¹¹ Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater, 27. For his account of the twists and turns of Black exploitation after the Civil War, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, First Edition (New York: The Free Press 1998).

¹² Cited in Mabel O. Wilson, “The Cartography of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Color Line,” in Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (eds), W. E. B. Du Bois Data Portraits Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 37–50 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018), 38.

¹³ Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, “Introduction,” in Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (eds), W. E. B. Du Bois Data Portraits Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018), 7–22, at 16.

¹⁴ Julian Rothenstein (ed), Black Lives 1900: W. E. B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition (London: Redstone Press, 2019).

¹⁵ Du Bois, “The Servant in the House,” in Darkwater, 66.

¹⁶ ibid, 63.

¹⁷ Battle-Baptiste and Rusert, W. E. B. Du Bois Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018). See Plate 45 “Occupations in which 10,000 or more American Negroes are Engaged.”

¹⁸ Du Bois, “The Servant in the House,” in Darkwater, 66.

¹⁹ ibid, 65.

²⁰ ibid, 65. Du Bois’s emphasis.

²¹ Cited in W. E. B. Du Bois (ed), “Tom Dixon’s Clansman,” The Crisis 10, no. 1 (April 1915), 19. https://archive.org/details/crisis910dubo/page/18/mode/2up?view=theater [Accessed January 1, 2024].

²² For example, see W. E. B. Du Bois (ed), The Crisis 9, no. 4 (February 1915), 196–8. https://archive.org/details/crisis910dubo/page/18/mode/2up?view=theater [Accessed January 1, 2024].

²³ Du Bois, “The Shadow of the Years,” in Darkwater, 12.

²⁴ Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” in Darkwater, 54.

²⁵ ibid.

²⁶ Ella Myers, The Gratifications of Whiteness: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Enduring Rewards of Anti-Blackness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 52–3.

²⁷ Manne, Down Girl, 20.

²⁸ Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 2.

²⁹ Du Bois, “Of Beauty and Death,” in Darkwater, 143.

³⁰ Mills, The Racial Contract.

³¹ Du Bois, “The Servant in the House,” in Darkwater, 63.

³² ibid, 63.

³³ ibid, 65.

³⁴ ibid.

³⁵ ibid.

³⁶ ibid.

³⁷ ibid.

³⁸ ibid.

³⁹ ibid, 67.

⁴⁰ Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folks,” in Darkwater, 25.

⁴¹ ibid, 18.

⁴² ibid.

⁴³ ibid.

⁴⁴ ibid.

⁴⁵ Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 2.

⁴⁶ Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater, 17.

⁴⁷ Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 1.

⁴⁸ ibid.

⁴⁹ Du Bois, “Of Beauty and Death,” in Darkwater, 130–1.

⁵⁰ ibid, 131.

⁵¹ ibid.

⁵² Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater, 25.

⁵³ Alisa Bierra, “Missing in Action: Violence, Power, and Discerning Agency,” Hypatia 29, no. 1 (2014), 129–45.

⁵⁴ Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folks,” in Darkwater, 28.

⁵⁵ Du Bois, “The Damnation of Women,” in Darkwater, 96; see also Du Bois, “Of the Ruling of Men,” in Darkwater, 86.

⁵⁶ Du Bois, “Credo,” in Darkwater, 1–2.

⁵⁷ A scholarly question arises about whether this argument generalizes beyond Darkwater. My sense is that it has purchase throughout Du Bois’s work. Though Du Bois’s political views shift as he becomes a skeptic of American democracy, his deeper moral values (and, specifically, his commitment to the moral equality of persons) remain relatively stable. Likewise, even as he becomes more pessimistic about the possibility of changing American culture and realizing social equality, he maintains his critique of stereotyping as a mechanism of group oppression. For discussion, see Charles Mills, “W. E. B. Du Bois: Radical Political Liberal”; Basevich, The Lost and Found: W. E. B. Du Bois (Black Lives).

⁵⁸ Du Bois, “The Second Coming,” in Darkwater, 62.

⁵⁹ Du Bois, “The Servant in the House,” in Darkwater, 65.

⁶⁰ Tommy Curry, The Man Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017); Livingstone Smith, On Inhumanity.

⁶¹ McGeer, “Mind-Making Practices.”

⁶² For more arguments in this spirit, see Aness Webster, “Proof Paradoxes, Agency, and Stereotyping,” Philosophical Issues 31, no. 1 (2021), 355–73. Quill Kukla and Mark Lance, “Telling Gender: The Pragmatic and Ethics of Gender Ascriptions,” Ergo 42, no. 9 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.2911.

⁶³ Moreau, Faces of Inequality, 84.

⁶⁴ ibid, 87.

⁶⁵ ibid, 83.

⁶⁶ ibid, 83.

⁶⁷ Du Bois, “Of Beauty and Death,” in Darkwater, 130–1.

⁶⁸ W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 69.

⁶⁹ Du Bois, “Of Beauty and Death,” in Darkwater, 134.

⁷⁰ ibid, 135.

⁷¹ Thanks to Karen Tao for reminding me that Dotson’s work fits beautifully in this context. Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence”; see also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988), 271–316.

⁷² Moreau, Faces of Inequality, 125–6.

⁷³ ibid, 129.

⁷⁴ Du Bois, “The Immortal Child,” in Darkwater, 121.

⁷⁵ ibid, 119.

⁷⁶ ibid, 119.

⁷⁷ Moreau, Faces of Inequality, 28.

⁷⁸ ibid, 14.

⁷⁹ Du Bois, “Of Ruling Men,” in Darkwater, 83.

⁸⁰ Moreau, Faces of Inequality, 220.

8 Radical Pluralism

A New Theory of Wrongful Stereotyping

When and why is it morally wrong to stereotype? Over the last seven chapters, I’ve analyzed this question. One discovery has been that not all stereotyping is morally wrongful. Not only is there nothing wrong with stereotyping in certain cases, but sometimes it may be the best thing to do. A comprehensive theory of what’s morally wrong with stereotyping has, nonetheless, remained elusive. The basic problem is stereotyping’s complexity. Complexity frustrates the most obvious strategies for developing a successful theory. A unified theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping—often believed to be the philosophical gold standard—is highly unlikely. No single ethical objection has emerged as “the” wrong of stereotyping. A modestly pluralistic theory, which would have posited two or three wrongs of stereotyping, also has gaps. Investigating cases, I’ve discovered not two or three ethical objections, but a plethora of overlapping, interconnected complaints. If a unified explanation of wrongful stereotyping is impossible, and modest pluralism doesn’t work either, what options for theorizing wrongful stereotyping—and thus solving this book’s central puzzle?

8.1 Stereotyping’s Complexity

To bring the problem into focus, let me revisit—by way of summary—the multifaceted nature of stereotyping’s complexity.

Since Chapter 1, I’ve documented the many forms taken by stereotyping in culture and thought. The term’s history has been especially important here. In the eighteenth century, new technology allowed printers to cast metal plates that represented whole pages of media, freeing them from costly, laborious typesetting. These metal plates were called stereotypes. This term is also applied to the ink representations left by these plates: images and ideas repeated without change. Stereotyping—the verb—referred to the activity of using stereotype plates to produce books, newspapers, pamphlets, and posters. While misinformation and prejudice were spread by this technology, it also had positive social impacts, enabling the amplification of marginalized voices and, with them, the messages of burgeoning social movements, including the antislavery and women’s rights movements. In 1922, American journalist Walter Lippman—a former student of Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James—argued that humans, just like printing presses, stereotype. Girls are like this. Boys are like that. Europeans look this way. Africans look that way. Of special interest to Lippman was the relationship between print media and human psychology. Images and ideas in the world, cast in metal and used in printing presses, were intimately connected to individual cognition and imagination, to the things people tended to both think and say about one another, to how they perceived the world and the people in it. These ways of thinking, moreover, were crystallized in social practices and norms, reflective of the political moment.

All of this is to say that, for over a century, the term stereotyping has referred to powerful elements of mind and world. Three-dimensional, material objects can stereotype. Words and images may stereotype. Humans can stereotype in our heads: automatically or on purpose, consciously or unconsciously, in ways that both conform to and contradict our explicit beliefs. So too artificial intelligence can stereotype. Group representations implicated in acts of stereotyping can be warm and fuzzy in evaluative feel, negative and nasty, or affectively neutral. Only at a very high level of description is the phenomenon of stereotyping unified in any sense. To stereotype an individual, I’ve suggested, is to judge that person by group membership. To stereotype a group is to characterize it as a collective entity.

Given the complexity of stereotyping as a psychosocial, linguistic, computational, and cultural phenomenon, its normative complexity should come as no surprise. Stereotyped judgments run the gamut from flagrantly irrational to well evidenced. One can be stereotyped based on true, justified beliefs about groups or flagrant falsehoods. Stereotyping is likewise a morally mixed bag. Though morally horrifying cases often jump to mind, there are examples of morally permissible stereotyping. A panicked parent runs into an emergency room and pulls aside the first person whom they see in a white coat, assuming that this person is a doctor. A nurse presumes that a gay male patient who shows up in her emergency room with shingles in 1985 is likely to have AIDS and tells him as much. I’ve also raised the possibility that stereotyping could sometimes be morally good, an expression of respect for how individuals present themselves publicly (e.g., as a man, woman, or nonbinary person). Because this book aims to advance a theory of morally wrongful stereotyping, I have been especially interested in examples that involve wronging others.

Wrongful stereotyping’s normative complexity has been a recurring theme. In Darkwater, W. E. B. Du Bois recounts a white man who recoils in disgust upon seeing Black people drive by in an expensive car.¹ To adequately explain why stereotyping is wrong, one must acknowledge the man’s demeaning racial beliefs. Yet not all acts of wrongful stereotyping fit this mold. In Chapter 5, the centerpiece example of wrongful stereotyping was one in which a well-intentioned medical practitioner diagnosed a female patient based on epidemiology statistics. This was wrongful stereotyping—no demeaning representations required. The judgment caused serious harms (e.g., robbing the patient of the chance to receive timely treatment) and exemplified a larger pattern of females with HIV and AIDS being rendered invisible in medical spaces. Not only is normative complexity manifest across cases, but it also exists within individual cases of stereotyping. To adequately explain what’s wrong with stereotyping in the example described by Du Bois, one can’t simply focus on its demeaning representation of Black people. To offer such a truncated explanation would be to ignore the plethora of other ways in which this judgment is disrespectful as well as the harms it causes, the ignorance it expresses, the ways in which the judgment fosters social inequality, and more.

Because of stereotyping’s normative complexity, it is challenging to provide a successful philosophical theory of when and why it is morally wrong to stereotype. Every existing analogue theory in the discrimination literature entails that what’s wrong with stereotyping could be boiled down either to a single ethical objection or to a small disjunction of objections, such as that wrongful stereotyping is either disrespectful or harmful. One might argue that theorizing requires simplifications and that this is simply the price of doing business. But I am skeptical. “Sometimes,” writes Sally Haslanger, “a selection of truths that does not do justice to the phenomenon for the purposes of the inquiry is as bad as a falsehood.”² What would it take, one might wonder, to capture “the whole truth” of wrongful stereotyping?

8.2 Modeling Normative Complexity

To better model stereotyping’s normative complexity, one option is to introduce a massively disjunctive theory.

Crafting such a theory is easy. Take the modest pluralisms stated in Chapters 6 and 7 and combine them. The resulting theory would articulate the following list of potentially wrong-making properties:

Being a judgment that fails to treat someone as an individual and, thereby, disrespects them.

Being a false or misleading judgment.

Being a judgment that publicly expresses a demeaning message to the effect that some groups are morally less than or not fully human.

Being a judgment that disrespects those targeted in ways that go beyond (a)–(c).

Being a judgment that exists because of moral vices in the person who makes it such arrogance.

Being a judgment that makes people worse off (i.e., by causing comparative harm).

Being a judgment that is categorically harmful.

Being a judgment that fails to treat persons as equals by representing them as intrinsically lesser because of membership in a historically subordinated group.

Being a judgment that reflects or entrenches subordination and thus group-based exploitation, political domination, violence, etcetera.

Being a judgment that limits or undermines freedoms.

Such a list can—and should—be kept open-ended. A case of stereotyping would be prima facie morally wrongful if it has one or more properties on the list. The more wrong-making properties present, the stronger the case there would be for classifying an instance of stereotyping as all-things-considered wrongful. All-things-considered judgments require a careful weighing of reasons in favor of and against stereotyping. To say something is prima facie wrongful, by contrast, is just to point out that those targeted for stereotyping have at least one legitimate ethical complaint, a complaint which may or may not be outweighed by other moral considerations.

When I’ve contemplated massively disjunctive theories in the past, my first impulse has been refusal. Massively disjunctive theories seem less like theories and more like ad hoc, enumerative lists. This or that or that or that or that. Philosophers in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition—like myself—are trained to clean up messes, clarify concepts, find ethical principles that make sense of and organize sticky realities. Entertaining a massively disjunctive theory requires, if not suspending those impulses, at least leaning into the world’s messiness, exploring what might be gained from theorizing the world as it is and prioritizing the variegated insights of lived experience.

Here I suspect that ethicists might benefit from a new frame. Explanatory projects in ethics—and perhaps normative ethics in general—involve investigating moral reality in ways that carve out specific kinds of things and delineates their “natures.” That’s why it’s so easy to frame a project like mine in terms of “the wrong” of stereotyping. It’s the analogue of essence. Thinking about ethical theorizing in this way suggests that ethicists are engaged in the activity of “kinding,” as philosopher of science Catherine Kendig puts it.³ In this way, we’re not unlike scientists who study the natural world. While scientists are interested in natural kinds, ethicists concern themselves—at least in part—with normative kinds.

Seen in this light, what a massively disjunctive theory asks us to contemplate is the reality that normative kinds are “messy,” a concept introduced by philosopher of science Joyce Havstad. Neat kinds are ones that lend themselves to a unified analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Gold is often cited as a paradigm example. It is scientifically defined by two properties, observes Havstad: “that of having a nuclear charge and a number of proteins both equal to 79.”⁴ Messy kinds exhibit complexity. They aren’t amenable to a unified analysis. “Once upon a time,” Havstad writes, “both biological and chemical kinds seemed like neat and tidy natural kinds. . . . But now it is common knowledge in philosophy of science that biological kinds are messy.”⁵ The natural world is replete with messiness, as Havstad sees it; indeed, most of the things studied by chemists, minerologists, and biologists are messy. If biological kinds lack neat essences, and many chemical kinds are messy and nonunified, why must ethicists continue to practice philosophy as if what we’re looking for (at best) are normative essences, the necessary and sufficient conditions that make things morally wrongful when they are? Neatness may be the exception in the ethical realm, not the rule. Just like it is in the natural world. Ethicists at least ought to be open to exploring theories—even massively disjunctive ones—that model normative complexity.

Because of its ability to model messiness, a massively disjunctive theory has extraordinary explanatory power. Return to an example of stereotyping from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (Chapters 1 and 2). When a white partygoer targets Ellison’s narrator for judgment based on race, the narrator has been disrespected in multiple ways. He’s not been treated as an individual, a complaint explored in Chapter 4. Likewise, the white partygoer does not simply advance a stereotyped prediction about the narrator’s singing prowess. He issues a command: “Sing us a spiritual, brother!”⁶ This command is rooted in demeaning ideologies of Black servility. Jack, the narrator’s boss, angrily intervenes and labels the white partygoer’s outburst “a prejudice.” This suggests a vice-based objection: the partygoer’s act of stereotyping expresses arrogance.⁷ Group wrongs also push into view. Because the judgment insults Black people as a group by assigning them a subordinate position vis-à-vis white people, any group member has grounds for complaint. The narrator’s wellbeing also takes a personal hit. After being called out, he feels physically ill. As bouncers drag the white partygoer out of the room, his mind races. To break the tension, he plays the fool for the white crowd. Soon after, the narrator has a mental breakdown. When one considers the incident from the white partygoer’s perspective, there’s little weighing on the moral scale. He thinks it would be fun if Ellison’s narrator would sing. He clearly takes a great deal of pleasure in enacting racialized tropes. No pressing moral reason for him to stereotype exists.

By analyzing the fuller moral dimensions of the case, its unique normative profile begins to emerge. What one discovers are not one or two objections to stereotyping but a whole cluster of interconnected ethical objections, including vice-based objections, individual and group wrongs related to disrespect and freedoms, cumulative harms related to health and wellbeing, a failure to treat persons as equals, and potentially other wrongs. A massively disjunctive theory is designed to recognize the myriad ways in which stereotyping can be wrong and yields tailormade analyses. That’s its superpower. The theory is the equivalent of a Swiss-Army knife, a device composed of useful tools that can be extended and retracted as necessary to analyze the ethical particulars of individual cases.⁸

8.3 Wrongful Stereotyping as a Cluster Kind

A massively disjunctive theory is not our only option. I now sketch a different—and, I think, better—way to model normative complexity. The theory that I’ll articulate will have to be further elaborated, but it has an incredible amount of promise as an account of what’s wrong with stereotyping.

As an opening salvo, swing back to Havstad’s reflections on biological species. “Once thought to be paradigmatic instances of natural kinds,” she writes, “they are not generally considered to be natural kinds anymore.”⁹ What she means, roughly, is that theorists no longer believe that biological species are defined by an essence shared by all and only members of that kind.¹⁰ For decades, philosophers of science have asked: “if biological species aren’t natural kinds in the classic sense, what are they?” An incredible energy has surged around this question. Havstad surveys a range of answers:

Perhaps biological kinds are cluster kinds (for example Boyd [1991], [1999]) or historical kinds (for example, Millikan [1999]); may be they’re kinds with historical essences (for example, Griffiths [1999]) or dispositional ones (for example, Ellis [2001]); perhaps they’re sociable kinds (for example, Chakravartty [2007]) or just promiscuous, pluralist ones (for example, Dupré [1993], [2001]).¹¹

Though the theories in this list are different (and I’m not going to take time to investigate all of them individually), they express a common desire to model complexity—and, hence, the world’s messiness. Perhaps normative kinds, and moral reality writ large, are not complex in the exact same ways as biological or mineral kinds, but that’s no roadblock to exploration. In what ways might the theories above, created to model the natural world’s complexity, help us to better understand the ethics of stereotyping?

“Cluster theory” is a good test case. Cluster theories embody a shared way of thinking about kinds, which Zina Ward characterizes with the following three claims.

Similarity: individuals of a kind share many properties in common.

Antiessentialism: many or most kinds do not possess an essence and cannot be characterized in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

Separation: the co-occurring properties that characterize kinds are clustered in that there are gaps between kinds in “property space.”¹²

Let me explain each of these commitments with an eye toward helping readers assess whether they might be sympathetic to a cluster theory and to articulate its predictions vis-à-vis wrongful stereotyping as a normative kind.

“Similarity” is the most straightforward. To be a cluster theorist, one must endorse the claim that kinds (typically) share many properties in common. Here, then, is cluster theory’s first prediction: if wrongful stereotyping is a typical kind, individual cases of it will share many properties in common. Cluster theory’s second element, “antiessentialism,” says that essences might exist, but they are not the norm.¹³ Here we find prediction number two, namely, that there is no essence of wrongful stereotyping in the classic sense: no property or set of properties that all cases have in common. “Separation,” advances a positive thesis—purportedly distinctive to cluster theory—about how to articulate kinds. A kind’s special nature, according to cluster theorists, is characterized in terms of co-occurring properties that hang together (i.e., “cluster”) in “property space.” Imagine a blank page. Now visualize properties being mapped onto the page represented by labeled dots: “having a beak,” “having wings,” “having the capacity to fly,” “having the capacity to chirp,” “eating insects for food,” etcetera. The kind “bird” is associated with this property cluster. When one examines property space, some properties (e.g., “being warm-blooded”) will be associated with different biological species. However, each species has, by hypothesis, a distinctive constellation of properties associated with it. Here we find cluster theory’s final prediction: wrongful stereotyping’s property cluster will be uniquely positioned in “property space,” reflecting the fact that it is normatively distinctive.

One kneejerk reaction to the invocation of cluster theory is that it’s too naturalistic, too rooted in the biological sciences, to be useful for analyzing a phenomenon like wrongful stereotyping. The theory’s historical lineage proves otherwise, however. Before philosophers of biology took it up, ordinary language philosophers championed cluster theory. Wittgenstein is often identified as its modern-day progenitor.¹⁴ Paradigm cases “define” kinds, on Wittgenstein’s view. When an object has many or most of the properties in the cluster associated with a paradigm, it qualifies as a member of that kind. However, members of a kind can also have properties very different from paradigms. A chair made of cheese. Exercise balls that serve as chairs. One might think of some chairs as distant cousins of the paradigmatic chair, but no less a chair. In the last thirty years, philosophers working in social metaphysics have used cluster theory to explore wide-ranging social phenomena, including social categories such as woman and archetypes of masculinity.¹⁵ The fact that wrongful stereotyping is a psychosocial, linguistic, computational, and cultural phenomenon therefore doesn’t automatically disqualify it as a candidate for cluster analysis.

In “What is Masculinity?” Matthew Andler provides a checklist for testing whether something qualifies as a specific variety of cluster kind.

Kind Condition: there exists a kind, K.

Clustering Condition: Properties P, P₁ . . . Pn tend to co-occur in members of K (i.e., Properties P, P₁ . . . Pn. cluster in K).

Homeostatic Condition: Properties P, P₁ . . . Pn cluster in K because of homeostasis; that is, properties P, P₁ . . . Pn tend to co-occur in K because:

for any of those properties (P, P₁ . . . Pn) the instantiation of the property (e.g., P) in a member of K creates conditions in which other properties (e.g., P₁ . . . Pn) tend also to occur in members of K and/or

there are underlying mechanism(s) which create conditions in which P, P₁ . . . Pn tend to co-occur in members of K.¹⁶

Homeostatic cluster theory is the classic version of cluster theory introduced by Richard Boyd to model biological species as kinds.¹⁷ Since it’s the most famous version of cluster theory, it is a good place to start.

The Kind Condition presents itself first. A posited kind exists, Andler argues, when it “can be used in explanation and induction” and, hence, has epistemic value.¹⁸ Scientists working in biology treat biological kinds as epistemically useful. Social scientists treat social kinds as having utility. Ethicists are no different, positing “wrongful conduct” as an overarching normative kind, differing from “permissible conduct” and “superogatory conduct.” Explanatory projects in applied ethics—of which this book is an example—target different varieties of conduct and try to figure out what makes them normatively special: lying, stereotyping, discrimination, etcetera. Because ethical practice entails treating these categories as epistemically—as well as practically—useful, the Kind Condition is satisfied.

The Clustering Condition is next. Some readers might want to pump the brakes here. In typical cluster analyses, co-occurring properties are visually observable: birds often chirp and many have the capacity to fly. With wrongful stereotyping, there’s a salient difference. Properties in the cluster are normative in nature and, thus, aren’t visually confirmable in the same way.¹⁹ Though this may give readers pause, it shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. Anyone open to a unified or modestly pluralistic theory of wrongful stereotyping has already taken on board the idea that acts of stereotyping can possess certain normative properties (e.g., being disrespectful, being harmful) that make them wrong.²⁰ If these properties can make acts wrong, they are capable of co-occurring.

Lived experience supports the Clustering Condition. Think about Chapter 4, which was focused on the objection that stereotyping fails to treat persons as individuals. Return to the photo of Barbara Gittings at an early gay rights protest. She’s holding a sign: “Homosexuals should be judged as individuals.” Looking at the photo, you’ll see other people in the frame, each holding their own protest signs. A chorus of voices, each pressing different ethical objections. In Bridge, it’s similar. Though I have focused on contributors’ thoughts vis-à-vis the disrespect and harms of stereotyping, their essays simultaneously press freedom- and equality-focused critiques. One finds this same diversity of objections shouted into bullhorns and emblazoned on protest signs in the fight for Civil Rights, in decolonial movements, in AIDS activism, and a range of other social movements. Activists, says cluster theory, are latching onto the same constellation of wrong-making properties.

Only the Homeostatic Condition remains. Return to the massively disjunctive theory sketched earlier. It says that wrongful stereotyping is characterized by (at least) the following list of properties:

Being a judgment that fails to treat someone as an individual and, thereby, disrespects them.

Being a false or misleading judgment.

Being a judgment that publicly expresses a demeaning message to the effect that some groups are morally less than or not fully human.

Being a judgment that disrespects those targeted in ways that go beyond (a)–(c).

Being a judgment that exists because of moral vices in the person who makes it such arrogance.

Being a judgment that makes people worse off (i.e., by causing comparative harm).

Being a judgment that is categorically harmful.

Being a judgment that fails to treat persons as equals by representing them as intrinsically lesser because of membership in a historically subordinated group.

Being a judgment that reflects or entrenches subordination and thus group-based exploitation, political domination, violence, etcetera.

Being a judgment that limits or undermines freedoms.

If wrongful stereotyping is a cluster kind, wrongs in the list co-occur with regularity and thus “travel together.” The homeostasis condition articulates two reasons for co-occurrence: (i) properties in the cluster stand in probabilistic or causal relationships with one another, (ii) there exist “underlying mechanisms” that tend to create conditions which create and sustain these properties.

The appeal to homeostasis underscores cluster theory’s difference from a massively disjunctive theory of wrongful stereotyping. Unlike a massively disjunctive theory, cluster theory demands that we pay attention to the relationships between different normative properties within the cluster (a)–(j) with an eye toward scrutinizing possible causal and probabilistic connections, as well as to the social environments in which acts of wrongful stereotyping occur to determine how these environments give rise to and support the relevant wrong-making properties. These emphases generate the two demands outlined by Andler. Either a theorist must be able to show that properties in the cluster associated with a kind encourage the existence of others (condition (i)) or, alternatively, one must show that environmental mechanisms causally support the existence of clustered properties (condition ii).

Wrongful stereotyping satisfies condition (i). Having one property in the list (a)–(j) makes the existence of others more likely. Consider an act of stereotyping that expresses the personal arrogance of person who stereotypes. Arrogance will tend to shape a person’s habits of thinking (and specific thoughts about groups) while foreclosing others. Behavioral impacts are likely. Humans are notoriously bad at keeping our thoughts on the inside. For this reason, the intrinsic wrongs associated with stereotyping—when these are judgments “in a person’s head”—raise the probability of other moral wrongs, even though they do not necessarily entail them. Think a demeaning thought about someone because you have stereotyped them as lesser, and you are more likely to behave disrespectfully. Behave disrespectfully toward that person, and you are likely to hurt them, contribute to their oppression in significant ways, as well as entrench prejudice in your own heart and mind, raising the probability that you’ll make stereotyped judgments in the future. Here one finds what Ian Hacking famously calls “looping effects.”²¹ Culture, individual thoughts and feelings, behaviors, policies and law are mutually reinforcing. Looping effects are, in part, what give rise to predictable sets of wrongs when wrongful stereotyping occurs.

Condition (ii) is trickier. Social environments certainly do sustain ways of thinking, modes of perception, and so on. Think about Du Bois’s Darkwater. In essay after essay, he argues that anti-Black stereotyping constitutes “a hateful badge of slavery” and that racist labor practices and educational policies in the United States sustain its existence.²² Yet, in his lifetime, Du Bois saw new institutional scaffolding going up as slavery fell. In Black Reconstruction, he explores the historically evolving mechanisms of Black subordination in the United States.²³ What he documents is a changing social landscape over time, not homeostasis. On Andler’s view, this result doesn’t prove that wrongful stereotyping isn’t a homeostatic cluster kind. It’s not necessary that both conditions (i) and (ii) are fulfilled. Only one is required. If so, wrongful stereotyping would satisfy all the conditions needed to qualify as a homeostatic cluster kind. The Kind Condition, the Clustering Condition, and the Homeostatic Condition have all been met.

On the other hand, this result is liable to inspire skepticism. In the literature on cluster kinds, theorists heatedly debate whether “homeostasis” is the right framework for thinking about property clusters. In Boyd’s original formulation, homeostasis could be caused by a common ancestor, living in the same ecological niche/habitat, or shared developmental dispositions.²⁴ Whatever the cause, it is supposed to be unified: that is, the exact same mechanism or set of mechanisms must tend to underwrite property clustering in all cases. Presumably this is why Boyd and others writing about cluster theory have sometimes framed the theory as reconceptualizing—hence rescuing—the idea that kinds have essences.²⁵ Beneath the world’s messiness, there is still presumed unity. Surveying cases of wrongful stereotyping, one might make an analogous argument. Nearly all my examples in this book are connected to environmental structures—norms, institutions, and laws—associated with what bell hooks has called the “imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy.”²⁶ Though individual cases of wrongful stereotyping don’t share a single property or set of properties, perhaps they have this same underlying cause.

This argument has an obvious historical problem. Wrongful stereotyping existed before the rise of global capitalism and its accompanying white supremacist, heteronormative ideology. Misogynist stereotyping of women is on full display in Ancient Greek texts, in the musings of Medieval Japanese courtesans, and more.²⁷ Despite the seeming ever-presence of misogynist stereotyping of women, there’s no unified, “homeostatic” cause across history. The heterogeneity of environmental mechanisms reveals itself in other ways too. Global differences are a case in point. Social scaffolding for racist stereotyping in the United States looks differently than it does in other places, especially nations where formerly colonized people of color are the majority and hold power.²⁸ Not even all wrongful stereotyping at the same time and place has identical environmental supports. In 2023, the Utah state legislature passed a bathroom bill, requiring public school students to use the bathroom corresponding with the biological sex stated on their birth certificate.²⁹ In the parlance of cluster theory, this is an environmental support for antitrans discrimination (of which stereotyping is a form). Now consider another kind of wrongful stereotyping: classist stereotyping. Classist stereotyping is perpetuated by discussions around proposed changes to Medicaid policy, as legislators argue for work requirements that aim to prevent “lazy” people from receiving state-sponsored healthcare.³⁰ Both transphobic and classist stereotyping fit the overall normative profile of wrongful stereotyping; however, despite that, there’s no identical, unified underlying cause or set of causes for both.

Though these results suggest that one probably shouldn’t classify wrongful stereotyping as a homeostatic cluster kind, it doesn’t speak against conceptualizing it as a cluster kind more broadly. Almost everything else about cluster theory fits beautifully. Some readers may want to delve deeper into other kinds of cluster theory. But I am less interested in slotting my theory into an existing box than in revealing cluster theory’s superlative potential as a theory of wrongful stereotyping. Here is what we’re left with:

Radical pluralism—wrongful stereotyping is characterized by an open-ended list of normative properties (a)–(j), which have probabilistic and causal relationships with each other and are supported by structural elements of the social environment.

I began this chapter with a question. If a unified explanation of wrongful stereotyping is impossible, and modest pluralism doesn’t work either, what options remain? A novel philosophical answer is now on the table. The best theory of wrongful stereotyping could be a cluster theory. Radical pluralism is the name I’ve given that theory. Some readers might wonder why the theory’s pluralism qualifies as radical. I’ll answer that question in Section 8.5; however, first I want to sell this theory a little more.

8.4 Desiderata for a Successful Theory

Earlier I introduced two desiderata for a successful theory (Introduction and Chapter 3). Here they are again:

The identification condition: the best theory of wrongful stereotyping must reliably identify cases of wrongful stereotyping.

The explanatory condition: the best theory of wrongful stereotyping must adequately explain why stereotyping wrong, when it is.

Does radical pluralism satisfy these desiderata?

Start with the identification condition. Though using property clusters for the purposes of identification may sound abstruse, it is not. Many people will have experience using cluster theories in their everyday lives. I know that I do. When I was eighteen, instead of going straight to university, I went to the Gemological Institute of America (GIA). Though I come from a long line of dairy farmers on my father’s side, my parents opened a jewelry store when I was a toddler. Fresh out of high school, I figured that I would go into the jewelry industry someday and enrolled in the GIA’s graduate gemology program. Our classroom was filled with microscopes, ultraviolet lights, refractometers, scales, and other testing instruments. Over my course of study, I successfully identified thousands of specimens. All gemologists-in-training used a diagnostic manual for this purpose. Next to each kind of gemstone, there was a neatly printed list of properties: the typical “look” of the material when polished and seen under a microscope, refractive index (a numerical measure of the light-bending ability of a material), a gemstone’s fluorescence or lack thereof, specific gravity, and so on. Identifying gemstones required using this list for diagnostic purposes, gathering additional evidence as necessary. I was—in effect—using property clusters to distinguish diamonds from cubic zirconia, rubies from sapphires, emeralds from green glass.

Though my experience is idiosyncratic, it is also relatable. Becoming an expert in many domains requires cultivating reliable judgments based on property clusters. Amateur birders and mycologists—indeed, naturalists of all kinds—buy identification manuals that use property clusters to guide classification “in the wild.” Diagnoses in medicine and psychiatry are similar. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) used by psychiatrists to diagnose psychiatric conditions is a handbook that taxonomizes psychiatric “disorders” based on distinctive clusters of properties.³¹ Diagnosing patients entails finding the best fit between their individualized experiences and typical ways in which psychiatric conditions manifest.

Return to the identification condition: a successful theory must reliably identify cases of wrongful stereotyping. Unlike a unified theory, radical pluralism doesn’t articulate a simple diagnostic rule for identifying all wrongful stereotyping. Nor can its criteria be boiled down to an elegant disjunction consisting of two or three properties. Instead, radical pluralism mimics cluster theories used for diagnostic purposes in medicine, gemology, psychiatry, and biology. If property clusters provide diagnostic standards in these other domains and are used to train experts for the purposes of identifying unknown “specimens,” they have the potential to work well in the ethical domain too.

To see how classificatory judgments work in practice, return to the Invisible Man example. It is a paradigmatic case of wrongful stereotyping, exemplifying properties in the list (a)–(j) and is therefore a benchmark against which other cases are to be judged.³² Consider, as an initial test case, Gloria Anzaldúa’s condemnation of white schoolteachers who presume that “all Chicanos are stupid and dirty.”³³ Just as in the Invisible Man example, stereotyping is racist, reflecting the psychological legacy of European colonialism. Both acts of stereotyping sustain and seek to justify group subordination. Both represent groups in intrinsically demeaning ways and express moral vice. Both cause harm. The same can be said of many examples discussed in this book. From the acts of stereotyping described in Invisible Man; to the everyday racism, sexism, and homophobia experienced by contributors to This Bridge Called My Back; to the activists fighting for the rights of those living with HIV and AIDS in the early years of the epidemic; to Du Bois’s critiques of racist and sexist stereotyping in Darkwater. Despite the vast intersectional and contextual differences in these cases, they share striking normative similarities. Even though no single ethical objection applies across the board in a way that would make a unified theory viable, there are normative resonances—strong family resemblances—across cases. For that reason, these cases are recognizably wrongful, and a cluster theory classifies them as such.

One might worry that radical pluralism will generate intractable disagreements. Yet disagreements about borderline cases, as well as cases where we lack full information are inevitable even with the best theory. Using the DSM, psychiatrists can disagree about whether someone has obsessive compulsive disorder or a condition of quite different type. I’ve watched gemologists disagree about whether a particular “mystery” gemstone is a red corundum or ruby, lab created or natural. Birders may disagree about whether a specimen observed in the wild is a finch of this or that type. Likewise, using a cluster theory, two philosophers might argue about whether a particular case of stereotyping qualifies as all-things-considered wrongful or not. When arguing, parties who disagree can consult the cluster (a)–(j) to pinpoint why they are disagreeing and better understand the other person’s point of view. Sometimes these disagreements will be tractable, other times not.

The second desideratum—the explanatory condition—is its own matter. It says that a successful theory must adequately explain what’s wrong with stereotyping. Though competing theories discussed in this book may all identify a certain case of stereotyping as wrongful; they advance different explanations of why.

Not every explanation is equally good. Unified theories are premised on “an essence” shared by all cases of wrongful stereotyping. Modestly pluralistic theories do better in this sense. When presented with a case like Ellison’s, they explain why stereotyping is wrong by citing multiple wrong-making properties. The disrespect or harm theory—explored in Chapter 6—is case in point. Why did the white partygoer engage in wrongful stereotyping when he presumed that Ellison’s narrator could sing spirituals? Because, the theory says, stereotyping is wrong when it is either disrespectful or harmful and, in this case, it’s both! Though this explanation is more nuanced than one focusing on disrespect or harm alone, it is still too reductive. This was an upshot of Chapter 7. Pivoting to the claims that stereotyping fails to treat persons as equals and curtails freedoms, I abandoned a strictly respect- and harm-focused lens. What I discovered were rich explanations of what’s wrong with stereotyping that emphasized the wider sociological contexts in which acts of stereotyping take place.

All this suggests that a cluster theory has impressive explanatory power. Rather than dumbing-down or artificially simplifying wrongful stereotyping, it embraces normative complexities and seeks to illuminate them. When explaining why a particular case of stereotyping is wrong (if it is), the theory combines distinct explanations of what’s wrong with stereotyping—such as those highlighted in Chapters 4–7—into a synergistic, integrated explanation that exceeds its constituent parts. Just like a massively disjunctive theory, it faithfully mirrors the real-life complexity of wrongful stereotyping and is attentive to particulars. Furthermore, radical pluralism allows us to recognize that these wrongs are probabilistically and causally interconnected and, crucially, are dependent on social environments.³⁴

Here’s something else to notice. Murder, deception, extortion, harassment. The world teems with wrongful treatment. Theorists of stereotyping must be ready to explain how wrongful stereotyping involves a distinctive kind of falling short. Radical pluralism can help. By comparing property clusters associated with different forms of wrongful treatment, the theory reveals a distinctive story about how stereotyping wrongs people. What’s wrong with stereotyping has to do with treatment that targets people based on presumed group membership. Wrong-making properties will include ones that readers have been thinking about all along. Chapters 4–7 gain new significance in this light. Little by little, I have been documenting a distinctive cluster of properties—failing to treat persons as individuals, being caused by prejudice, causing harm, being disrespectful, and failing to treat persons as equals—that together characterize wrongful stereotyping qua normative kind.

8.5 How Radical is Radical Pluralism?

Radical pluralism strikes me as a fitting name for the theory. This section outlines three kinds of pluralism fostered by the theory and, in so doing, both clarifies its content and provides working hypotheses about how it may be developed in the future.

8.5.1 Pluralism: The First Sense

Begin with this definition of pluralism: a theory of wrongful stereotyping is pluralistic when its criterion for wrongfulness is not unified. A unified theory would state that stereotyping is wrong—when it is—in virtue of a single property or set of properties that all wrongful cases share. Notice that unity is not the same thing as monism. Monist theories locate the wrongness of a phenomenon in “one disvalue,” as Sophia Moreau puts it.³⁵ A theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping could be unified but nonmonistic if it says that a conjunction of two normative properties (e.g., harm and disrespect) are always present when wrongful stereotyping occurs or, alternatively, if its unified criterion for wrongfulness appeals to multiple normative properties (such as undeserved harm, which appeals to both desert and harm).³⁶ Radical pluralism qualifies as pluralistic not just because it rejects monism but also because it entails that individual cases of wrongful stereotyping can be wrong for different reasons.

Not all pluralisms are radical. Modestly pluralistic theories are nonunified; yet their deviation from the ideal of unity is minimal. They whittle down what’s wrong with stereotyping to small, manageable number of ethical problems: two or, perhaps, three wrongs. By contrast, the theory for which I’m arguing articulates at least ten distinctive wrongs of stereotyping, and it is open-ended, meaning that the theory has room to accommodate even more. It manifests a splashier, more radical pluralism for two reasons: (1) the sheer number of wrong-making properties it invokes is greater, and (2) its open-endedness means that the theory is amenable to a truly unruly number of wrongs.

A cluster theory of the kind I’m describing articulates one of many forms that radical pluralism might take and is part of a family of philosophical theories that rightfully fall under that label. One might attempt to rank these theories in order of their “messiness”: the messier, the more radical. If one were to engage in that task, a massively disjunctive theory would likely qualify as maximally radical. My argument suggests that a slightly less messy—and thus less radical—theory would better satisfy the desiderata for a successful theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping. Nonetheless, a cluster theory is still radical vis-à-vis the dominant philosophical options in the discussion space.

8.5.2 Pluralism: The Second Sense

I now move on to the second way in which the theory for which I’m arguing is pluralistic. To bring it into view, consider this visualization in Figure 8.1.

Figure 8.1 Kinds of Wrongful Stereotyping, Partial Sketch. Drawing by Jacob Rivkin.

Here is what this diagram is trying to say. Radical pluralism doesn’t just hold that individual cases of stereotyping can be wrong in different ways and for different reasons. It is also compatible with there being multiple types of wrongful stereotyping, each with their own distinctive normative profiles.

To understand why this is so, consider a more quotidian kind of thing: chairs. According to cluster theory, objects are classifiable as members of a kind based on their proximity to paradigm cases. When I look at my kitchen table, I see paradigmatic chairs around it. They have four legs, a stable back to lean on; are sized to fit an adult human, constructed from durable material, and used for sitting. Something can count as a chair but have properties quite different than the chairs around my kitchen table: camping chairs that are easily portable, exercise ball chairs made from less durable materials, roly-poly desk chairs with wheels. These aren’t one-off exceptions. They are identifiable nonparadigmatic types of chairs that one can search for and buy. Thus, if we are creating a taxonomy of chairs, we’ll want to include nonparadigmatic types of chairs in our schema: camping chairs, exercise ball chairs, roly-poly desk chairs, and so on. Each type is characterized by its own cluster of typical properties. At the same time, these types are subordinate to the paradigm; they only count as kinds of chairs because of their relationship to it.

What goes for chairs holds for all kinds of things. Cluster theory’s machinery, when applied to pretty much anything, tends to generate types and subtypes. Thus, radical pluralism leads to pluralism of a second variety: it invites theorists to delineate nonparadigmatic kinds of wrongful stereotyping.

This second sense of pluralism helps to clarify the book’s overall argument. Slowly but surely, I’ve been documenting normative properties associated with paradigmatically wrongful stereotyping. Paradigmatic wrongful stereotyping is exemplified by oppressive stereotyping: a kind of stereotyping that greases the wheels of group-based domination, exploitation, violence, land grabs, and more. This kind of stereotyping constitutes a benchmark. Just like with my kitchen table chairs, it sets the terms for kind membership. Whereas oppressive stereotyping is associated with the cluster of wrongs (a)–(j), I have not yet delineated what other kinds of wrongful stereotyping there might be. It’s a working hypothesis of mine that there are likely to be other kinds of wrongful stereotyping, each with their own normative profiles in so-called property space.

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin seems to agree. Invited to dinner with Nation of Islam leadership, he reports a constant refrain: “White people are devils.” “In the eeriest way possible,” he writes, “I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman.”³⁷ He reports providing counterexamples (white people who are kind and racially progressive), only for them to be dismissed. “All my evidence,” writes Baldwin, “would be thrown out of court as irrelevant to the main body of the case, for I could only cite exceptions.”³⁸ Though he is fully aware that these acts of stereotyping bolster Black self-worth and provide inoculation against the harms of white supremacy, Baldwin argues that they are nonetheless morally wrongful. “The glorification of one race over another,” he writes, “and the consequent debasement of another—or others—have always been and always will be a recipe for murder.”³⁹ He tells readers: “It is so simple a fact, and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others is debasing himself.”⁴⁰ Neither Baldwin, nor I, would want to say that it’s always wrong to stereotype dominant groups.⁴¹ The moral of his anecdote is simply that negative stereotyping of dominant groups can sometimes be wrongful.

In the diagram above, I use the category resistant to oppression but wrongful to describe the wider category of cases in which Baldwin’s example fits. Resistant-but-wrongful stereotyping, by hypothesis, typically targets socially privileged groups: Karens, investment bankers, tech bros, and the rich who party on yachts off the shores of Ibiza. In Baldwin’s example, the target is white people. The rationale for this category is as follows. Though it can be wrong to stereotype privileged groups, doing so will never have certain normative properties on the list (a)–(j) and will rarely have other properties. For example, stereotyping oppressors will never have property (h): being a judgment that fails to treat persons as equals by representing them as intrinsically lesser because of membership in historically subordinated group. Oppressors are not social subordinates. The same goes for property (i): being a judgment that reflects and entrenches social conditions of subordination. While resistant stereotyping is a reaction to subordination, it has important ameliorative effects. It is a middle finger to dominant groups, a refusal to accord them social deference. Likewise, it will be rare that resistant stereotyping has property (f): making its targets comparatively worse off. Resistant stereotyping will rarely have this property because the people who do it tend to lack social power. Pejorative stereotyping therefore doesn’t tend to end up disadvantaging dominant groups in a way that makes their lives worse overall. Furthermore, this category of wrongful stereotyping has significant moral benefits: it boosts the wellbeing of the worst off. What we’re seeing, in real time, is a unique normative profile emerging. According to cluster theory, this is just what one should expect. Nonparadigmatic forms of wrongful stereotyping have their own distinctive property clusters.

The imperative of taxonomy doesn’t stop here. A third potential kind of wrongful stereotyping has nothing to do with oppression and, hence, with historically marginalized groups. Philosopher of science Kathleen Creel has recently written about algorithmic stereotyping that targets “people with the first name Donald” (and other artificial “name” groups) for negative judgment in ways that end up creating disadvantage on job markets.⁴² It’s possible that novel forms of wrongful stereotyping will—and have already—come into existence with the development of artificial intelligence technologies. Other potential examples involve groups like “night owls,” people who prefer to stay up late at night and sleep in the daytime. Stereotyped as lazy and unproductive, night owls face social stigma.⁴³ Rather than pigeonholing all wrongful stereotyping into a single box, radical pluralism invites theorists to sit with examples such as these and analyze whether they fall under wider types, types which bear a family resemblance to paradigmatically wrongful stereotyping, however distant.

8.5.3 Pluralism: The Third Sense

Earlier I represented “the puzzle of stereotyping” with a simple Euler diagram (see Figure 4.1 in Chapter 4). If wrongful stereotyping is a cluster kind, this visualization ought to be supplemented, or perhaps even replaced, with an image that conveys the true complexity of the phenomena under investigation. A more apt visualization of normative space would be a tree diagram akin to those used by biologists to map the evolutionary development of species. Such a visualization conveys that there are many species of wrongful stereotyping, species that have histories and thus may come in and out of existence and which can be organized into even more fine-grained subspecies. However, even this is not yet the full picture. Radical pluralism is compatible with not one but multiple taxonomies of wrongful stereotyping; hence, it invites what philosopher of science John Dupré has called “taxonomic pluralism.”⁴⁴

Pluralism in this third sense entails a rejection of what philosophers of science call “the hierarchy thesis.” P. D. Magnus puts it like this, “A tradition going back to Aristotle insists that each individual belongs to just one maximally specific kind. There is another more generic kind that includes everything of the specific kind as well as others. That kind is included entirely in an even more generic kind. Natural kinds are nested in another like stacking dolls. Call this the hierarchy assumption.”⁴⁵ Applied to wrongful stereotyping, the hierarchy thesis/assumption would entail that there is one and only one legitimate way to taxonomize wrongful stereotyping. Traditionally, the hierarchy thesis has underwritten practices of biological taxonomy, with scientists competing to construct the best, most complete taxonomy that “carves nature at its joints.” Because the impulse to create unified theories is strong, even if philosophers embrace radical pluralism, they may be tempted to presume unification in a taxonomic guise.

Philosophers of science have—for decades—provided compelling arguments against the hierarchy thesis.⁴⁶ Though explaining these arguments in depth would take me too far afield, I would like to convey their flavor. Joyce Havstad’s research is again helpful here. In “Complexity Begets Crosscutting, Dooms Hierarchy (Another Paper on Natural Kinds),” Havstad argues that scientific kinds are complex and, for that reason, give rise to divergent classification systems. She offers as a prime example “the nuclear receptor superfamily,” a set of proteins that live inside the nucleus of cells bound to DNA, which serve to “change broad patterns of transcriptional activities.”⁴⁷ “There is strong scientific consensus about what the nuclear receptors are (i.e., how to characterize them), as well as how many there are (how to individuate them),” Havstad reports, yet scientific researchers diverge in how they model relationships of receptors with each other (“what we might call sub-kinds”).⁴⁸ Much of her argument consists in diving into each model’s nitty gritty details and the human interests it serves. Each model provides a unique classification system giving rise to distinctive inferential affordances, which turn out to be useful for particular scientific and therapeutic purposes. Havstad puts her example into context by appealing to Muhammed Ali Khalidi concept of “crosscutting” taxonomies. In an article published twenty years prior, Khalidi argued that the invocation of multiple, nonoverlapping classificatory schemas is standard scientific practice. Crosscutting taxonomies slice up the world in ways that are differently useful, helping humans to achieve a plethora of valuable goals. “Poison” is one of his many examples. In toxicology, he observes, “poisons may be classified in terms of the target organ they affect, the chemical mechanism they exploit, their poisoning potential, their route of absorption into the body, and so on.⁴⁹ Toxicologists, like the scientific and medical researchers described by Havstad, are happy to draw on and use diverse classificatory systems. Each system is epistemically and practically useful for distinct purposes. “If classification is always relative to certain interests,” Khalidi argues, “we should expect some taxonomies to reorganize some of the same entities in different ways without displacing existing ones.”⁵⁰

Far flung from wrongful stereotyping as these examples might be, they make a certain point about radical pluralism. Complex kinds, as Havstad notes, generate crosscutting taxonomies. Because stereotyping is a complex normative kind, it too invites crosscutting taxonomies. One question for theorists interested in developing radical pluralism and evaluating its explanatory potential is what these taxonomies might look like and the interests they serve. In psychiatry, taxonomy has a therapeutic purpose. In gemology, it is guided by market considerations. For theorists of stereotyping, I hypothesize that the aim of normative taxonomy is almost always to call out and challenge injustice.

One way to taxonomize normative space of wrongful stereotyping, given these ameliorative aims, is in terms of intersectionality. Think—once more—about the Invisible Man example. This is a paradigmatic case of wrongful stereotyping. But it’s also an instance of oppressive stereotyping. Even more specifically, it illustrates a specific kind of oppressive stereotyping, namely, racist stereotyping. Racist stereotyping comes in different flavors. Anti-Black stereotyping is only one variety. Moreover, anti-Black stereotyping manifests in distinctly gendered forms. In This Bridge Called My Back, authors of the Combahee River Collective Statement call out anti-Black racist stereotypes that apply to Black women specifically: the jezebel, the mammy, the matriarch, and so on.⁵¹ Their analysis suggests a taxonomical picture, according to which gendered anti-Black acts of stereotyping can be furthered organized by the controlling image or idea being used in judgment. Each of these stereotypes is associated with historically specific forms of oppression, each with the potential to disrespect, harm, and subordinate Black women in distinct ways.⁵² Ellison’s novel further bolsters this view. When the novel illustrates anti-Black stereotyping targeting men, it describes distinct harms associated with different stereotypes. Compare the traumatic party scene discussed earlier with another in which police officers execute a Black man on the street for resisting arrest, presumably because he is viewed as a threat.⁵³

Figure 8.2 Wrongful Oppressive Stereotyping Organized into Categories by Intersectional Principles, Partial Sketch. Drawing by Jacob Rivkin.

A taxonomy organized around intersectionality captures valuable knowledge amassed over the last two hundred years by historically marginalized groups working in liberation movements (Figure 8.2). When the women of Combahee explain why they focus on interlocking oppressions that impact Black women specifically, they recount experiences of being sidelined in the Black Power and feminist movements. Told they needed to work for the liberation of Black people and women writ large, their specific needs were sidelined. “No other ostensibly progressive movement,” they explain, “has ever considered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression.”⁵⁴ Taxonomizing oppressive wrongful stereotyping using intersectional principles is a preventive against similar erasures. Confronting viewers with the distinctive constellation of harms and wrongs done to intersectional groups, it becomes a tool for educational purposes (because the information it reveals is illuminating), but also for political purposes.

A second way to taxonomize the normative space associated with oppressive, wrongful stereotyping focuses on “sites of injustice.” Categories here could include epistemic injustice, affective injustice,⁵⁵ aesthetic injustice,⁵⁶ ontic injustice,⁵⁷ and discursive injustice.⁵⁸ For the purposes of exposition, I’ll focus on one category: epistemic injustice. “Epistemic” is a descriptor that refers to knowledge and belief. In her book Epistemic Injustice, philosopher Miranda Fricker introduces the term testimonial injustice to refer to a specific kind of epistemically unjust stereotyping, which has to do with evaluation of a person’s testimony.⁵⁹ A person suffers testimonial injustice, on Fricker’s view, if they are judged to be less credible or trustworthy than is justified and, furthermore, this credibility deficit can be traced back to morally bad prejudices in the heart and mind of the person who stereotypes. Using Fricker’s analysis as a springboard, theorists have distinguished other varieties of epistemically unjust stereotyping, for example, involving memory (a category that Katherine Puddifoot labels “mnemonic injustice”⁶⁰) and attention (which Leonie Smith and Alfred Archer have called “attentional injustice”⁶¹). Types of testimonial injustice associated with distinct institutionalized contexts have also been pulled apart in the literature: medical testimonial injustice,⁶² educational testimonial injustice,⁶³ and criminal testimonial injustice.⁶⁴ Though this is only a small slice of the taxonomical picture, I hope that is sufficiently illustrative of this taxonomy’s logic and how it might be filled out (Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3 Wrongful Oppressive Stereotyping Organized into Categories by Sites of Injustice, Partial Sketch. Drawing by Jacob Rivkin.

To fully vindicate the second taxonomy, theorists would have to answer tantalizing philosophical questions about the normative distinctiveness of its categories. This painstaking work is already underway. According to Fricker, testimonial injustice has a distinctive normative profile: it intrinsically wrongs people in their capacity as knowers and is associated with a constellation of specific extrinsic harms and wrongs.⁶⁵ In Criminal Testimonial Injustice, Jennifer Lackey argues that criminal testimonial injustice, qua subtype of testimonial injustice, has a distinctive set of wrong-making properties due to the carceral contexts in which it takes place.⁶⁶ Though theorists working in this philosophical and empirical space don’t tend to frame what they are doing in terms of “kinding” and don’t attempt to give a general theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping, they are nonetheless contributing to the project of articulating radical pluralism as I see it.

Taxonomical pluralism creates explosive explanatory power. Imagine a patient—a Black woman—who experiences medical distress after giving birth. The patient has a life-threatening condition for which she normally takes medication but hasn’t taken the prescription since her pregnancy began. When she reports this to her medical team, they tell her to calm down. She’s fine, as they see it—just a little emotional after giving birth. In fact, the patient is experiencing a pulmonary embolism, something that comes to light after she repeatedly insists on being examined. Is this wrongful stereotyping? If it is, radical pluralism invites a follow up question. Of what type is it? Using the first taxonomy, one might argue it is misogynoir stereotyping, a kind of racist stereotyping that targets Black women. Using the second taxonomy, one could argue that stereotyping manifests as medical testimonial injustice, a kind of epistemically unjust stereotyping involving credibility deficits in medical contexts. These designations are differently informative and differently useful. A taxonomy organized around intersectional principles asks us to contemplate the ways in which Black women are particularly vulnerable to harmful stereotyping. Indeed, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites implicit racial bias as one of the reasons that Black women in the United States are three times as likely as white women to die in childbirth and have the highest rates of maternal death across all intersectional groups studied.⁶⁷ On the other hand, a taxonomy focused “sites” of injustice highlights the impacts of stereotyping across intersectional groups. When a real-life version of the imagined scenario played out with tennis star Serena Williams, women of all races and ethnicities echoed Williams’s experience on social media.⁶⁸ What began to emerge was a pattern of women’s testimony, across many intersectional groups, being deemed less than credible by medical staff. Though each taxonomy highlights a different dimension of the example, both are equally crucial in the fight against oppression and, moreover, in explaining why stereotyping in this example is wrong.

This third form of pluralism is incredibly useful. Radical pluralism invites classificatory schemas that can be stitched and unstitched, revealing different patterns in normative space. Its explanatory power grows exponentially as a result. Crosscutting taxonomies provide a fuller picture of how and why stereotyping wrongs those targeted, a picture far more informative and useful than that provided by a single taxonomy. This feature of radical pluralism creates space for intersectional solidarity while also recognizing the specific ways in which specific groups can be harmed by stereotyping. I’ve sketched two such taxonomies, but more are waiting in the wings.⁶⁹

8.6 Singing the Praises of Radical Pluralism

In closing, I would like to celebrate three features of a radical pluralism, which further recommend it.

Its first notable feature is the way in which the theory turns ethics into a collaborative venture. Philosopher of science Melinda Fagan characterizes collaborative explanation as a joint activity, requiring synthesis.⁷⁰ Suppose I’m a neuroscientist. You ask, “Why did that person raise his hand?” I might say, “because neurons were firing in their brain.” A psychologist would offer an explanation appealing to reasons. The person raised their hand to call a cab, to shield their face from the sun, etcetera. Neuroscientific and psychological explanations might be framed as competitors. If they were competitors, these disciplines would have to battle it out in a test of superiority. A more collaborative approach would be to sit down and figure out how to integrate these explanations into a more coherent whole with greater explanatory and practical power than its parts.⁷¹

Radical pluralism is collaborative in two notable ways. First, the theory embraces ethical objections associated with “the big three” ethical theories in Western philosophy: virtue ethics, consequentialism, and Kantian ethics. Instead of pitting these ethical frameworks against each other, it recognizes that each framework captures something true and important, without which one cannot tell the full story of what’s morally wrong with stereotyping. Its openness means that the theory is amenable to yet other objections ensconced in different ethical frameworks, including non-Western ones. Additionally, radical pluralism embraces and collaboratively builds on explanations across scientific disciplines. Sociologists tend to focus on big-picture social processes, centering group dynamics. A sociological frame highlights group wrongs, as well as the unjust extrinsic consequences of stereotyping such as the role it plays in promoting group exploitation and violence. In contrast, psychological explanations tend to explain why individuals stereotype by citing their personal beliefs, perceptions, desires, and mental habits. Respect-focused objections lean hard on psychological frameworks. They require us to appeal to perpetrator’s thoughts and emotions. One could argue that one of these frameworks is more valid than the other. But radical pluralism doesn’t do this. It synthesizes explanations across disciplinary frameworks.⁷² It also underscores that researchers across different disciplines are working together to explain wrongful stereotyping, despite having vastly different methodology and research foci.

Writing this book has also been a collaborative enterprise for a different, related reason. From my position in the social landscape, I can only see so much. The same goes for others who are differently situated. Since no one person can be expected to have the full story of what’s wrong with stereotyping, and because those systematically targeted for wrongful stereotyping are in the best position to know how they have been wronged, it is imperative to include a multitude of perspectives. That is why I have centered different historical case studies in Chapter 4–7 related to different intersectional groups. I see this book as a chance to learn from, and collaborate across, difference. José Medina uses the term kaleidoscopic to describe a forever-openness to new perspectives, and this term applies equally well to the philosophical methodology that gives rise to radical pluralism, as well as to its account of what’s wrong with stereotyping.

A second desirable feature of radical pluralism is the way in which it handles controversial cases. I’m thinking especially here of resistant-but-wrongful stereotyping. Often when Baldwin was called to do public interviews about the Civil Rights Movement, he was asked for his take on the polarizing Nation of Islam stereotype described earlier. Was it wrong to stereotype white people as devils? Similar questions could be asked of other examples in this book. In Darkwater, Du Bois says that he pities white people. “There surges in me a vast pity,” he says, “—a pity for a people imprisoned and enthralled, hampered and made miserable for such a cause [i.e., of white supremacy], for such a phantasy.”⁷³ Notice the characterization of white people as ignorant racists. Bridge contributors state that they no longer trust white feminists because they have been burned so many times.⁷⁴ One reports a white classmate’s resentful outburst: “I feel that Third World women hate me and that they are being racist, I’m being stereotyped. I’ve never been part of the ruling class.”⁷⁵

What resources does radical pluralism have to analyze these cases? Family resemblance, for starters. The Invisible Man case provides a way forward, revealing a new resource for negotiating controversy. When I mapped wrongs associated with that case, I noted something important: there’s nothing morally weighty on the other side of the scale (i.e., which stands in favor of the white partygoer’s stereotyping). Radical pluralists are free to argue that this property is one of the reasons that the act of stereotyping described by Ellison qualifies as paradigmatically wrongful to begin with. What makes the act of stereotyping wrongful, according to the radical pluralist, is not just that stereotyping is associated with a cluster of wrongs, but also these wrongs are not outweighed or counterbalanced by other considerations. In controversial cases, the issue is precisely countervailing factors. They exist. But are they of sufficient moral weight to render resistant stereotyping permissible? In some cases, yes; in others, no. It can be hard to know.

Ethicists might be inclined to frame the issue here in terms of “defensive harm.”⁷⁶ “On a commonly held view,” explains Renée Bolinger, “it is permissible to harm someone in self-defense when and because doing so is necessary to avoid unjustly suffering a similar or worse harm. . . . ”⁷⁷ The question of permissibility within this framework hinges on whether stereotyping is truly necessary to avoid suffering, and, furthermore, how pressing the danger at hand is. Baldwin’s analysis drives this point home. When reflecting on his impulse to stereotype white police officers and New York doormen paid to keep riffraff out of buildings, Baldwin admits that the people whom he stereotypes have grounds for complaint. “I am guilty of some injustice here,” he tells readers.⁷⁸ However, he acknowledges that stereotyping is a form of self-defense, a way for the less powerful fight back against oppressors and protect themselves from similar and, typically, much worse harms and wrongs. Failing to stereotype can put one’s safety—one’s very life—in jeopardy. “I cannot risk assuming,” Baldwin’s writes, “that the humanity of these people is more important to them than their uniforms.”⁷⁹ In Baldwin’s view, other factors matter as well. While he stereotypes out of pragmatism, his Nation of Islam dinner companions stereotype white people as categorically, intrinsically, irredeemably evil. Their stereotyping is thus morally vicious in a way that his is not.

Surprisingly perhaps, radical pluralism manifests an underlying ethical logic that resonates with a core idea of contractualist ethics (i.e., that wrongfulness consists in treating people in ways that they could reasonably reject). Because people can reasonably reject (i.e., “ethically veto”) being stereotyped for a range of reasons, the best theory of wrongful stereotyping must be pluralistic, and, because people object to being stereotyped for a plethora of diverse reasons, pluralism must be radical. Furthermore, when controversial cases arise, radical pluralists are free to analyze whether stereotyping is all-things-considered wrongful using tools inspired by contractualism. Wronging someone and treating them in a way that is all-things-considered wrongful are not equivalents, as both the radical pluralist and the contractualist realize.⁸⁰

The third feature of radical pluralism that I’d like to highlight is the way in which it embodies democratic values. Only those targeted for unjust treatment, Du Bois argues, are in an epistemic position to know what is best for them, and democracy entitles them to have voice and, therefore, a vote.⁸¹ Radical pluralism thus emerges from the same epistemic claim that justifies universal suffrage, expressing not just a collaborative impulse but a democratic one. Like democratic politics, radical pluralism creates space for contestation. When determining when and why an act of stereotyping is wrongful (if it is in fact wrongful), one must always ask what objections there are to stereotyping and who has them. How does stereotyping hurt those targeted by it? Why do they find it problematic? At the same time, one must be on the lookout for challengers. Would anyone claim that stereotyping has strong moral considerations in its favor? What are its moral benefits, if any? This approach rejects a reductive approach to normative analysis, which tries to distill the wrongs of stereotyping to a neat and tidy package. It also promotes a decentralized, earthy vision of theorizing. Understanding what’s wrong with stereotyping is not something that can be done from an ivory tower, using artificial thought experiments. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation, requiring the input of scientific experts, social theorists, technologists, as well as everyday experts and activists.

My argument for radical pluralism—developed over the course of this book—also underscores how much true equality requires. The activists, writers, and theorists featured in my analysis were all participants in American democracy. They fought for political rights and against economic exploitation, for social equality and against group-based violence, for health care access, and against injustices of all kinds. Yet read the pages of Bridge, for example, and you’ll see essay after essay where contributors scrutinize their own habits of thoughts and own up to internalized racism and homophobia. Even their most intimate thoughts are not immune from critique. “My attempts at eliminate my racism have to start at the base level of those mind-sets that inhabit my relationships with people,” writes Barbera Cameron.⁸² “None of us in this book,” adds Cherríe Moraga, “can challenge others to confront questions that we ourselves have not confronted. How do we deal with the ways in which this diseased society has infused our very blood systems? How do we take personal responsibility for our own racist actions and assumptions?”⁸³ Notice what lies behind these questions. Liberation requires all of us to confront the ways in which we contribute to oppression on a personal level while at the same time working for impactful structural change.

The ending of this book is, therefore, also a beginning. At the outset, I opened with the puzzle of stereotyping. How do does one differentiate cases in which there is nothing wrong with stereotyping from those that are unjust? Radical pluralism answers this question, articulating a view of wrongful stereotyping as a living, breathing psychosocial and cultural phenomenon, something with myriad forms and potential to evolve over time. It is a theory that, as I’ve argued, has excellent explanatory and practical potential, satisfying the desiderata for a successful theory of what’s wrong with stereotyping far better than its unified and modestly pluralistic competitors. Paradigm cases and property clusters are the theory’s key tools. Only radical pluralism fully amplifies the moral knowledge that has emerged from collective, democratic discussion in the context of liberation movements. We are all participants in this continuing discussion. You and me. Contestation lies at the heart of the puzzle of stereotyping. To delve into this puzzle is to contemplate not just how stereotyping shapes our reality, but how we can collectively create a more just future.

¹ Du Bois, Darkwater, 19.

² Sally Haslanger, “Theorizing with a Purpose: The Many Kinds of Sex,” in Catherine Kendig (ed), Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016), 131.

³ Catherine Kendig, “Homologizing as Kinding,” in Kendig (ed), Natural Kinds, 106–25.

⁴ Joyce Havstad, “Messy Chemical Kinds,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69, no. 3 (2018), 719–43, at 720. I thank Havstad for recommending this framing.

⁵ ibid, 719.

⁶ Ellison, Invisible Man, 311–12.

⁷ For discussion of arrogant perception, see Lugones, Pilgrimages = Peregrinajes, 77–100.

⁸ I thank Melinda Fagan for this metaphor.

⁹ Havstad, “Messy Chemical Kinds,” 720.

¹⁰ For overview of other claims associated with natural kinds and how they have been challenged, see Alexander Bird and Emma Tobin, “Natural Kinds,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2024 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2024/entries/natural-kinds.

¹¹ Havstad, “Messy Chemical Kinds,” 720.

¹² Ward, “William Whewell, Cluster Theorist of Kinds.”

¹³ See also Carlos Santana, “Mineral Misbehavior: Why Minerologists Don’t Deal in Natural Kinds,” Foundations of Chemistry 21, no. 3 (2019), 333–43.

¹⁴ Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

¹⁵ Ron Mallon, The Construction of Human Kinds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 156.

¹⁶ Matthew Andler, “What is Masculinity?” Synthese 202, no. 3 (2023), 1–16, at 3.

¹⁷ See Boyd, “Realism, Anti-foundationalism, and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds”; Richard Boyd, “Homeostasis, Species, and Higher Taxa.”

¹⁸ Andler, “What is Masculinity?” 3.

¹⁹ On the idea that we can sometimes perceive moral properties, see Preston Werner, “Moral Perception and the Contents of Experience,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 13, no. 3 (2016), 294–317; John Drummond and Mark Timmons, “Moral Phenomenology,” in Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/moral-phenomenology/.

²⁰ For an articulation of this assumption, see Lippert-Rasmussen, Born Free and Equal, 156.

²¹ For discussion of looping effects, see Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effect of Human Kinds,” in Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premark (eds), Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 351–94.

²² Du Bois, Darkwater, 66.

²³ Du Bois, Black Reconstruction.

²⁴ Robert Wilson, Matthew Barker, and Ingo Brigandt, “When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural Kinds,” Philosophical Topics 35, no. 1/2 (2007), 189–215, at 202–3.

²⁵ E.g., Boyd, “Homeostasis, Species, and Higher Taxa,” 142. Here is Boyd: “I conclude that individual species have (homeostatic property cluster (essences), so that a form of ‘essentialism’ is true for species, albeit a form of essentialism quite different from that anticipated by Mayr and others who have discussed essentialism in biology.” See, also, Wilson, Barker, and Brigandt, “When Traditional Essentialism Fails.”

²⁶ hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin To Center.

²⁷ For examples of sexism in texts from these eras, see Aeschylus, The Complete Aeschylus, Volume 1: The Oresteia, translated by Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney (New York: Penguin, 2007).

²⁸ For discussion, see Adam Omar Hosein, Discrimination, Inclusion, and Remaking the Social World, unpublished manuscript.

²⁹ Amy Beth Hanson, “Utah Joins 10 Other States in Regulating Bathroom Access for Transgender People,” Associated Press News Website, January 30, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/utah-transgender-bathroom-access-746d51175ad770623e6f403b426fdc8c [Accessed June 26, 2024].

³⁰ U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “FACT SHEET: Medicaid Work Requirements Would Jeopardize Health Coverage and Access to Care for 21 Million Americans,” U.S. Department of Health and Services Website (April 21, 2023). https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/national-work-requirements-fact-sheet.pdf [Accessed July 4, 2024].

³¹ For discussion, see Jonathan Y. Tsou, “Natural Kinds, Psychiatric Classification, and the History of the DSM,” History of Psychiatry 27, no. 4 (2016), 406–24.

³² Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022). Daston would say that I’m appealing to the idea of a “rule as model,” a more complex, paradigm-focused take on what a rule is.

³³ Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues,” 163.

³⁴ For analysis of social environments and epistemic injustices, see Ezgi Sertler, “The Institution of Gender-Based Asylum and Epistemic Injustice: A Structural Limit,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4, no. 3 (2018), 1–24; Elena Ruiz, Nora Berenstain, and Nerli Paredes-Ruvalcaba, “Reproductive Violence and Settler Statecraft,” in Sanuallah Khan and Elliott Schwebach (eds), Global Histories of Trauma: Globalization, Displacement, and Psychiatry (New York: Routledge, 2023), 150–73.

³⁵ Moreau, Faces of Inequality, 23.

³⁶ Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen makes this point about his own “desert-priortarian welfarist” theory of wrongful discrimination. See Lippert-Rasmussen, “Moreau on Discrimination.”

³⁷ Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 73.

³⁸ ibid, 72.

³⁹ ibid, 82.

⁴⁰ ibid, 83.

⁴¹ ibid, 68.

⁴² Kathleen Creel, “Algorithmic Monoculture and the Ethics of Systemic Exclusion,” unpublished manuscript; Kathleen Creel and Deborah Hellman, “The Algorithmic Leviathan: Arbitrariness, Fairness, and Opportunity in Algorithmic Decision Making Systems,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52, no. 1 (2002), 26–43.

⁴³ Maciej Stolarski and Joanna Gorgol, “Blame in on the “Night Owls”: Perceived Discrimination Partly Mediates the Effects of Morning-Eveningness on Positive and Negative Affect,” Journal of Sleep Research (2023). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.14097.

⁴⁴ John Dupré, “On the Impossibility of a Monistic Account of Species,” in Robert A. Wilson (ed), Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 14.

⁴⁵ P. D. Magnus, Scientific Enquiry and Natural Kinds: From Planets to Mallards (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillian, 2012), 37.

⁴⁶ See Muhammed Ali Khalidi, “Natural Kinds and Crosscutting Categories,” Journal of Philosophy 95, no. 1 (1998), 33–50; Dupré, “On the Impossibility of a Monistic Account of Species.”

⁴⁷ Havstad, “Complexity Beget Crosscutting,” 7674.

⁴⁸ ibid, 7679.

⁴⁹ Khalidi, “Natural Kinds and Crosscutting Categories,” 49–50.

⁵⁰ ibid, 42.

⁵¹ Combahee, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 212.

⁵² E.g., as suggested by Alcoff, Visible Identities, 247–63.

⁵³ Ellison, Invisible Man, 433–6.

⁵⁴ Combahee, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 212.

⁵⁵ Amia Srinivasan, “The Aptness of Anger,” Journal of Political Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2018), 123–44.

⁵⁶ Bence Nanay, “Everyday Aesthetic Injustice,” in Dominic McIver Lopes, Samantha Matherne, Mohan Matthen, and Bence Nanay (eds), The Geography of Taste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 157–86.

⁵⁷ Jenkins, Ontology and Oppression.

⁵⁸ Quill Kukla, “Performative Force, Convention, and Discursive Injustice,” Hypatia 29, no. 2 (2014), 440–57.

⁵⁹ Fricker, Epistemic Injustice.

⁶⁰ Marina Trakas and Katherine Puddifoot, “Fear Generalization and Mnemonic Injustice,” Episteme (2024), 1–27.

⁶¹ Leonie Smith and Alfred Archer, “Epistemic Injustice and the Attention Economy,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (2020), 777–95. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-020-10123-x; Catharine St. Croix, “The Epistemology of Attention,” in Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy, and Mattias Steup (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, Third Edition (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, forthcoming).

⁶² Havi Carel and Ian James Kidd, “Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare: A Philosophical Analysis,” Medicine, Health Care, and Philosophy 17 (2014), 529–40. Kristin Magrethe Heggen and Henrik Berg, “Epistemic Injustice in the Age of Evidence-Based Practice: The Case of Fibromyalgia,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8, no. 4 (2021), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00918-3; Giorgia Pozzi, “Testimonial Injustice in Medical Machine Learning,” Journal of Medical Ethics 49, no. 8 (2023), 536–40.

⁶³ Gerry Dunne, “Epistemic Injustice in Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 55, no. 3 (2023), 285–9.

⁶⁴ Jennifer Lackey, Criminal Testimonial Injustice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

⁶⁵ Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 43–59.

⁶⁶ Lackey, Criminal Testimonial Injustice.

⁶⁷ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Working Together to Reduce Black Maternal Mortality,” CDC Health Equity Website, April 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/features/maternal-mortality/index.html [Accessed June 25, 2024].

⁶⁸ Tweets are cited in P. R. Lockhart, “What Serena Williams’s Scary Birthstory Says About the Medical Treatment of Black Women,” Vox, January 11, 2018. https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/1/11/16879984/serena-williams-childbirth-scare-black-women.

⁶⁹ Traditional schemas in discrimination theory focus on modes of reasoning. Statistical discrimination is often posited to be a morally distinctive kind of discrimination. Bigoted, hateful stereotyping, statistical stereotyping, and implicitly-biased stereotyping could thus be categories in a quite different taxonomy.

⁷⁰ Fagan, “Collaborative Explanation.”

⁷¹ ibid, 21.

⁷² Helen Longino, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 15. Longino writes: “My pluralist analysis seeks to identify what kind of knowledge each approach [to aggression and sexuality] can offer. Unlike many other philosophers who have written about these areas of research, I am not attempting to evaluate the approach or to argue for the superiority of one over the other. We can learn more by trying to get a handle on the complexity of the research landscape than by engaging in partisanship.”

⁷³ Du Bois, Darkwater, 19.

⁷⁴ Yamada, “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism,” 68; Davenport, “The Pathology of Racism,” 83; Moschkovich, “—But I Know You, American Woman,” 75; Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Prieta,” in Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back, 206.

⁷⁵ Woo, “Letter to Ma,” 142.

⁷⁶ Thanks to Renée Bolinger for helping me to see this connection!

⁷⁷ Renée Bolinger, “The Moral Grounds of Reasonably Mistaken Self-Defense,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103, no. 1 (2020), 140–56, at 140.

⁷⁸ Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 68.

⁷⁹ ibid.

⁸⁰ For additional discussion, see Moreau, Faces of Inequality, 12. “My main concern in this book is the ways in which we wrong other people, when we discriminate against them. In many, if not most of these cases, we thereby at wrongly. That is, wronging people by discriminating against them is most often wrong, all things considered. But I want to leave for the possibility that in some cases, even though we wrong other people by discriminating against them, there are other pressing or urgent needs that justify us in the continuing the discriminatory practice that wrongs people.”

⁸¹ Du Bois, Darkwater, 87.

⁸² Cameron, “Gee You Don’t Seem Like an Indian,” 44.

⁸³ Moraga, “And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You,” 58.

Acknowledgments

My work over the last decade has been made possible by so many individuals and intertwined communities.

In the Bay Area, I started thinking about stereotyping with the help of my PhD advisors: R. Jay Wallace, Véronique Munoz-Darde, Mike Martin, and Victoria Plaut. I owe my Berkeley friends a debt of gratitude for their insights: Katrina Winzeler, Anna Bailey, Mike Rieppel, Lindsay Crawford, Bill Campbell, Benjamin Boudreaux, Eve Eckman, Ethan Nowak, Su-Lin Lewis, Paige Johnson, Nandini Pandey, Athena Kirk, Annie McClanahan, Ted Martin, Joseph Bjelde, Kimberly Conley, Greer Alley, Dale Alley, Margie Gelb and Mark Aronson—and, as always, Jing and Scott Jacobs. To the writers in my life during this era, I love you: Steph Soileau, Harriet Clark, Laura McKee, Courtney Dillon, and Jim Gavin. Thank you to The Townsend Center for the Humanities at Berkeley, which provided me with my first academic fellowship related to this project. Lang Antiques was the source of a supplemental paycheck, a space away from academia, and place where I found companionship. I’m looking at you Suzanne Martinez, Mark Zimmelman, Maria Ibarra-Rivera, Barbara Voltaire, Alison Floyd, and Angela Grigsby.

Near the end of my PhD, I moved to Los Angeles to be with my partner and favorite writer, Joshua Rivkin. Thanks to the UCLA philosophy department (and A. J. Julius, in particular) for permitting me to be a visiting graduate student in Spring 2012 and to Gerald Maa, Brandon Som, Jackie Simon, Natashia Deon, and Kristina Gehrman for their friendship. When Josh was awarded a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship in Provincetown in Fall 2012, we moved to Cape Cod for eight months, where I worked on my dissertation, walked on the beach every day, and brought a small human into this world. A vibrant community of visual artists and writers kept us warm throughout the winter: Lisa Iglesias and Paul Gerlitz (+ Bowie), Janelle Iglesias, Esteban DelValle, Aja Gabel, Katie Bellas, Alison O’Daniel, Heather Hart, Hannah Walsh, Liz Bradfield, Jill McDonough, and Bailey Bob Bailey. I thank the American Association for University Women for supporting my research through a dissertation fellowship that year. After Provincetown, we moved to Rome for Josh’s Fulbright Fellowship, and I finished writing my dissertation in Italy. During that time, we became fast friends with Leslie Ewell, Peter Streckfus-Green, and Heather Streckfus-Green—and discovered what it was like to have stable, affordable childcare.

Since Fall 2014, I’ve worked at the University of Utah. Colleagues there have helped me to come into my own as a philosopher and provided invaluable feedback on this project: Carlos Santana, Joyce Havstad, Steve Downes, Natalia Washington, Dustin Stokes, Cindy Stark, Melinda Fagan, Leslie Francis, Peggy Battin, Marcel Paret, Karen Tao, Ella Myers (who gave me fabulous input on the Du Bois chapter), Annie Fukushima, Paisley Rekdal, David Roh, Hollis Robbins, and the luminous Kathryn Stockton—thank you! Throughout this time, the Sterling M. McMurrin Presidential Endowed Chair in Philosophy facilitated my research in myriad ways, including funding a book workshop to revise the penultimate version of this manuscript. During the Fall 2015, I spent the semester visiting Humboldt University in Berlin. Mari Mikkola, Bas Beffers, Antje Bjelde, and Joseph Bjelde, thank you for our German adventure; and thank you to the University of Utah for funding for the trip through a Faculty Fellowship. The National Humanities Center (NHC) moved us to Durham, North Carolina, for the academic year of 2016–17, where I wrote drafts of the first four chapters of this book and was the Philip L. Quinn Fellow. Dore Bowen and Ásta, Kate Marshall and Ian Newman made our days at the NHC shine. During the 2019–2020 school year, I believed that this project was almost done. I thank the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) for six-month fellowships that pushed my work forward! Right before COVID hit, we moved to Scotland to take up the ACLS fellowship in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Thanks to Ellie Mason and Eric Freund as well as Ben and Darran Tilghman for the time we spent together. During COVID, Sue Putman and John Steele kept us afloat by providing a bucolic place to stay when we had to flee Scotland and couldn’t return home to Salt Lake City. Jessie Mandel and Marcel Paret, Kerry and Leslie Simon, Karen Tao and Zac Imel became our bubble family.

The work in this book has been presented to so many audiences that I could not possibly list them all. I have so much gratitude to the people who have engaged with and contributed to my work. I want to give special recognition to Susanna Siegel and Nico Silins for organizing an amazing five-week, cross-disciplinary NEH summer workshop at Cornell in 2016. It was a transformative intellectual experience. Big love to participants, especially: Lauren Ashwell, Glenn Bracey, Michael Brownstein, Becko Copenhaver, Keota Fields, Clifton Granby, Nathifa Greene, Gabbrielle Johnson, Fiona MacPherson, Kate Manne, Jessie Munton, Jenni Mueller, Eve Rabinoff, Jason Stanley, Katie Tullman, and Jonna Vance. Athena Kirk and Andrew Moisey fed me in Ithaca and graciously hosted me. I also offer my gratitude to the feminist philosophers, discrimination theorists, and other coconspirators in social and political philosophy who have sustained me: Ásta, Mari Mikkola, Saray Ayala-Lopez, Jules Holroyd, Adam Hosein, Janine Jones, Rima Basu, Larry Blum, Cheshire Calhoun, Kathleen Creel, Esa Diaz-Leon, Anne Eaton, Ben Eidelson, Katie Gasdaglis, Sally Haslanger, Louise Antony, Debbie Hellman, Daniel Kelly, Serene Khader, Meena Krishnamurthy, Becca Mason, Sophia Moreau, Bence Nanay, Jenny Saul, Gina Schouten, Alexis Shotwell, Susanne Sreedhar, Kenneth Silver, Jean Thomas, Sabine Tsuruda, and Aness Webster. Special thanks to Samia Hesnia, Reneé Bolinger, Linus Huang, and Ting-An Lin who read and commented on the manuscript in its entirety and provided invaluable feedback. Diarmid Rook Brashear helped me with the bibliography and notes for Chapters 5 through 7. T. Petra Emmer did a beautiful job with the index. Jacob Rivkin, my brother-in-law, hand crafted the figures. Alex Madva has been my longest-running collaborator and provided incredibly detailed comments on the arguments in this book (thanks, Alex!). Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen has been a most patient editor.

My family deserves the biggest thanks, especially my siblings (Drew + Jen, Ali, Bri, Jonathan, and Lance). I am a first-gen college student from rural Pennsylvania, and it was not preordained that I would even go to college. Of course, because my father strongly discouraged it, I was very keen to lean into the academic experience. When I dropped out after my first year, I knew that I would come back. Harriet Horowitz and Alice Fritz, I miss you. Neither of you is alive to see this book, but I know that you would be exceedingly proud! This book is dedicated to my parents, Amy and Brian Beeghly, and to Josh and Esme Rivkin. I love you.

In closing, I acknowledge the vibrant activists and communities that I write in solidarity with. Much of this book engages queer history and experience in the United States. This research has deepened my connection to my queer ancestors. I offer my gratitude and stand in awe of earlier generations who lived with such joy, and created so much beauty, in this imperfect world. Thank you in particular to the Burnett Foundation Aotearoa (formerly New Zealand AIDS Foundation) for permission to use a vintage AIDS awareness poster from 1990s, to Susan Fleischmann who took the photo that opens Chapter 6, to Sarah Schulman for permission to reproduce part of her interview with Terry McGovern for the AIDS Oral History Project, and to all contributors to This Bridge Called My Back, from whom I have learned—and continue to learn—so much. For another reason, this project has been incredibly personal. In my twenties and early thirties, I was mothered by two gay coworkers in their fifties who told me stories of San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, supported me through existential crisis, and regularly fed me. Dennis Graham died of AIDS-related complications in 2006. Richard Frey died in 2014, having survived the epidemic and the passing of his long-time partner from AIDS-related complications. But for their loving kindness, I might not have made it through. This project brought me closer to them and opened up new, generative relationships for which I will be forever grateful.

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Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

Figures are indicated by an italic f following the page number

absurdity, problem of 92–99

access, to basic goods 179–80

ACT UP 114, 133–34

activism 1–2, 10n.23, 13–18, 22–23, 124–27, 130–31, 174–75, 193–94, 199–200, 217–18, see also ACT UP

agency 64–65, 67, 100–1, 103–4, 106–8, see also autonomy

AIDS 15–16, 110f, 111–18, 123, 124–35

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power see ACT UP

algorithm 3–4, 6–7, 8, 23, 24–25, 42–43, 65–66, 185, 206

Andler, Matthew 19, 192–97

Anger 43–44, 139–41, 151

white 167–69, 170

antiessentialism see cluster theory

Anzaldúa, Gloria 12–13, 16, 70–72, 74–75, 136f, 137, 139–40, 146, 158–59, 199–200

Appiah, Anthony Kwame 118–19

Aristotle see virtue ethics

Ásta 50n.19, 129n.62

autonomy 101, see also agency

Baldwin, James 22, 204–6, 215, 216

behavior

discriminatory see discriminatory treatment

disrespectful 145–46, 147–48, see also disrespect

exclusionary 140n.12

impacted by cognition 195, see also cognition

as influenced by stereotyping 34–35, 56–57

policing of 121–22

prejudicial 131

as stereotyping 32–33, 62

beliefs see cognitive states

Berndt Rasmussen, Katharina 150–52, 153–54

bias 6, 16–17n.45, 30, 47n.6, 58–59, 120–22, 155, see also prejudice

implicit 11–12, 30, 64n.57, 98n.18, 105n.25, 212–13, 213n.69, see also responsibility, control based

big data 3–4, see also algorithm

Birth of a Nation 167–68, 175

Black imaginary see racial imaginary

Black Skin, White Masks see Fanon, Frantz

blackface 167–68, 175

blame 22n.54

Blum, Lawrence 37–38, 40, 86, 101, 105

Boyd, Richard 19, 190, 193, 196, see also cluster theory

Braithwaite, Valerie 86–87, 88

Brennan, William 33–35

Briggs Initiative 58–59, see also gay rights; homophobia

Brownstein, Michael 30, 119n.32

Callen, Michael 111–12, 113–14, 116n.24, 130n.64, 133–34

Cameron, Barbara 71, 136f, 138n.1, 139–42, 140n.12, 143, 147–48, 150, 151, 155, 217–18, see also This Bridge Called My Back

capitalism 165n.8, 165, 196–97, see also exploitation, economic

CDC see United States Centers for Disease Control

classism 71, 196–97, see also Du Bois, W.E.B

cluster theory 19, 20–21, 190–98, 199–200, 201, 203, 204, 205–6

clustering condition 192, 193–94, 195–96

cognition 28–29, 61, 63–64, 129, 130, 139–40, see also prejudice, as cognitive phenomenon

affected by stereotypes 6, 34–35, 36, 38–39, 42, 49

discriminatory 9, see also cognitive discrimination

and disrespect 143–44

embodied see embodied mind argument

normative 61

regulative 57–59, 61

cognitive acts 47–48, 47n.6, 55, 59, 63–64

cognitive discrimination 46–47, 50–51, 60–61, 63–67

cognitive lucidity 76–77, see also lived experience; multiperspectival

cognitive process, stereotyping as see tereotyping, as cognitive process

cognitive resources, ethically compromised 98–99

cognitive states 48, 63, 65, 130

cognitive structures 28–29, 30, 42, 139–40

collaboration 23, 213–15, see also radical pluralism

Collins, Patricia Hill 6–7, 24–25, 44, 45, 80–81, 120–21

colonialism 68–69, 165, 173, 199–200, see also capitalism; Du Bois, W.E.B.; Fanon, Frantz; slavery

Combahee River Collective 12–13, 71, 115–16, 137–38, 208–10, see also This Bridge Called My Back

complexity 18–19, 134, 184, 187–90, 201, 207–8, 214n.72, see also messiness

consequentialism 13n.39, 16–17, 20, 142, 214

contractualist ethics 216

Craig v. Masterpiece Cakeshop 177

Creel, Kathleen 206

Crenshaw, Kimberlé 41n.36, 81

cultural techne 6–7, 24–25, 44, 45, 80–81, 120–21

Daly, Mary see Lorde, Audre

Darkwater 22–23, 163, 164–65, 166–67, 168–71, 172–73, 174–76, 178–79, 180, 181, 186, 199–200, 215, see also Du Bois, W.E.B

DeCoster, Jamie 29–30

deep self theory 64–65

deliberative freedom 18, 72–74, 176–79, see also Moreau, Sophia

desiderata 21, 79, 93, 95, 154–55, 198–201

Dewey's Lunch Counter 85, 86–92, 93, 95–96, 97–98

diachronic openness 94

diachronic stubbornness 94–95, 129

discrimination

algorithmic see algorithm

cognitive see cognitive discrimination

definitions of 50–62

as differential treatment 51–61

as drawing distinctions 50–51

employment see discrimination law theory

harm/disrespect theory of see disrespect; wrongful stereotyping, theory of, by disrespect or harm

harms of see harm; wrongful stereotyping, theory of, by disrespect or harm

political 46–52

psychological 46–47, see also prejudice, as psychological state

statistical 15, 122–32, see also algorithm

discrimination law theory 33, 73–74, 123, 181, see also Moreau, Sophia

discrimination theory 15, 16–17, 18, 51–52, 65, 66, 73, 83, 105, 122–24, 137, 142–54, 159n.57, 174–80, 186, 213n.69

discriminatory treatment 51–61, 146, 175–76

behavioral view 52

regulative view 52, 58–61

disenfranchisement see oppression

disjunctive theory 187–90, 194, 203

disrespect 132–33, 134–35, 141–43, 189–90, 195

and beliefs 143–45, 147–48

and communication 145–46, 147–48

expressivist views of 145–48

and knowledge 146–47

mental-state views of 143–44

process-oriented views of 144–45

domination 12–13, 44, 120, 204, see also oppression; power

Dotson, Kristie 12n.34, 74, 179

double consciousness 69, 171–73, 177–78

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1–2, 17–18, 20–21, 22–23, 69, 162f, 163, 164–73, 175–79, 186, 195–96, 217, see also Darkwater

Dupré, John 190, 206–7

dynamics, power 24–25, 108, see also lived experience; oppression

Eidelson, Benjamin 14–15, 100–1, 103–5, 106–8, 144, 153–54

Ellison, Ralph 24–25, 35–36, 43–44, 48, 49, 189, 199–201, 208–9, 215

embodied mind argument 55–57

epistemic shortcut argument 53–55

ethics

Kantian see Kantian philosophy

virtue see virtue philosophy

Executive Order 9066 52, 58, 90–91, see also Japanese internment

existentialism 68–70, see also Fanon, Frantz

explanatory projects 2–3n.10, 4, 4n.14, 7–8, 70, 71–73

nature of 3–4, 82, 193

point of 2–3, 22–23, 70, 72, 188

exploitation, economic 17, 76–77, 165–67, 170–71, 183

Faces of Inequality see Moreau, Sophia

Fanon, Frantz 53–55, 66–67, 68–70, 74–75, 80, 81–82, 177–78

feminism 71, 137–39

intersectional 12n.34, 81, 137–42, 173, see also positionality

feminist

philosophers 11–13, 107–8

spaces 139–40

white 139–40, 141–42, 143, 146–47

women of color 12–13, 62, 70–72, 137–38, 139–42, see also This Bridge Called My Back

fetishism 44, 68–69, see also tokenization

Fire Next Time, The see Baldwin, James

Fiske, Susan 28–29, 30

Fodor, Jerry 27–28, 42

frameworks 7, 148–54, 160, 214

ethical 16–17, 20, 142, 196, 214, 216

legal see Moreau, Sophia

psychological 45, 214

scientific 18–19

social 45, 61, 120, 175, 214

freedom, deliberative see deliberative freedom

Fricker, Miranda 46n.4, 63–64n.55, 74, 118–19n.30, 119n.32, 152–53n.48, 210–12

Garcia, J.L.A. 122–23, 128–29, 131

gay rights 84f, 85–86, 87–89, 97–99, see also AIDS; Briggs Initiative; queer

gender binaries see transgender

gender stereotyping 2, 156–57

generalization 24–25, 85–89, 96–99, see also fetishism

generics 5n.16, 25–26, 87–88

vs. generalizations 25

gerrymandering 129–32

Gessen, M. 156–57

Gittings, Barbara 84f, 85–86, 97–98, 106, 193–94

Griffith, D. W. see Birth of a Nation

harm

comparative and noncomparative views of 148–54

hybrid view of 154

orthodox view of 151–52

relational 151–53

Haslanger, Sally 6–7, 120–21, 186

Haslip, Katrina 117–18, 126, 133

hatred 139–40, 151, 169

internalized 17, 22–23, 49, 112, 120–21, 151, 168, 171–73, 217–18

Havstad, Joyce 18–19, 188–89, 190–91, 207–8

Hellman, Deborah 9–10, 16–17n.45, 50, 142n.21, 145–46, 159n.57

Hemphill, Essex 114–16, 118

hierarchies

assumption see hierarchy thesis

social 45, 49, 121–22, see also power

theories of see hierarchy thesis

hierarchy thesis 207–8, see also taxonomies, crosscutting

Holroyd, Jules 31, 47n.7

homeostasis 192–93, 194–97

homeostatic condition see homeostasis

homophile movement 14, see also gay rights

homophobia 104n.22, 104–5n.24, 111–18, 123–24, 128, 132, 137–38, 151, see also AIDS; gay rights; hatred, internalized; queer

homosexual see queer

hooks, bell 12–13, 76–77, 196

ignorance 103, 112, 186, see also reasonable availability

individual, moral right to be treated as an 14–15, 30, 86–92, 99–101, 108

inferiority 1–2, 46–47, 149–51, 155, 158–59, 166, 169–71, 175–76, see also oppression

injustice 6–7, 65–66, 67, 69–70, 74, 201n.34, 208–13

testimonial 46n.4, 63–64n.55, 210–13, 211f, see also Fricker, Miranda

intersectionalism 71–72, 115–18, 206–13, see also feminism; multiperspectival

Invisible Man see Ellison, Ralph

Janus Society 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 106, see also gay rights

Japanese internment 90–91, see also Executive Order 9066

Jezebel stereotype 81, 208–9, 209f

Jim Crow laws 20–21, 58, 149–50, 181, see also racism

Jones, Cleve 124–26

judgment see cognition; discrimination

classificatory 199–200

Jussim, Lee 2–3, 14, 34n.24

kaleidoscopic see multiperspectival

Kantian philosophy 13n.39, 16–17, 20, 63–64, 94, 107–8, 142, 214

Karens 108, 205–6

Khader, Serene 2–3n.10, 12n.34

Khalidi, Muhammed Ali 207–8

kind condition 192, 193, 195–96, see also cluster theory

kinding 188, 211–12

kinds 19, 21, 190, 191–92, 196

cluster see cluster theory

complex 207–8, see also hierarchy thesis

natural 188–89, 190, 207–8

normative 18–19, 188–89, 190–91, see also messiness, as concept

social 25, 27, 28, 42, 50–51, 190, 191–92, 193

knowledge

perspectival see multiperspectival; standpoint theory

and power 76, see also reasonable availability

Korsgaard, Christine 60–61

Ku Klux Klan 167–68, see also racialized violence

Lackey, Jennifer 211–12

lesbian 58, 71, 116n.20, 138, 152–53, see also gay rights; queer

Leslie, Sara-Jane 26

LGBTQIA+ see queer

Lippert–Rasmussen, Kasper 14–15, 41n.36, 46–47, 75, 99–100, 106–8, 124, 148–49n.39, 150–51

lived experience 12–13, 75, 133–34, 150, 187–88, 193–94, see also multiperspectival

epistemic value of 75–82, 146–48, 150, 152–53, 154, 181

looping 195

Lorde, Audre 49–50, 71, 72, 140

Lugones, María 12–13, 76–77, 196

lynching see racialized violence

machine learning see algorithms

MacKinnon, Catharine 74

Madva, Alex 30, 119n.32

Manne, Kate 121–22, 169

Mapplethorpe, Robert 114–15

McGovern, Terry 126

McGreer, Victoria 61

Medina, José 12–13, 71–72, 77, 214–15

memory 6, 29, 34n.24, 210–11

messiness, as concept 18–19, 188–89, 203

microaggressions 59n.40, 137–38

Mills, Charles 78–79, 120, 169, 173–74n.57

misogynoir 209f, 212–13, see also intersectionalism; sexism

misogyny 33–35, 196–97, see also sexism

modest pluralism 16–17, 18, 19, 83, 142, 163–64, 184, 187, 193, 198, 200–1, 202

monism 202

Moraga, Cherríe 70–72, 74–75, 136f, 137, 151, 217–18, see also This Bridge Called My Back

morally permissible stereotyping 2–3, 156

Moreau, Sophia 18, 72–76, 163, 174–80, 181–82, 202, 216–17n.80

Morena, Naomi Littlebear 140–41, see also This Bridge Called My Back

Moschkovich, Judith 146–47, see also This Bridge Called My Back

multiperspectival 71–72, 74–75, 80–82, 139, 214–15, see also lived experience; standpoint theory

Munton, Jessie 129–30

Murdoch, Iris 15n.42, 66–67, 105n.25, 107–8

NAACP see National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

narratives 61, 120n.39, see also cognition

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 22–23, 167–68, see also Du Bois, W.E.B

nonparadigmatic pluralism 203–6, see also pluralism

oppression 12–13, 12n.34, 17, 76–78, 120–21, 169–71, 173, see also domination

psychosocial foundation of 169–71, see also standpoint theory

othering 68–69

perceptions, of victims 75–76, see also lived experience; oppression

perfection see Murdoch, Iris

phenomenology 56

Piper, Adrian 46–47

pluralism 16, 112–13, 124, 132–35, 202–6, see also modest pluralism

taxonomical 22, 206–13

positionality 12–13, see also multiperspectival

power 12–13, 12n.34, 76, 108, 146, 205–6, see also hierarchies, social

power over see domination

practical identity 60–61

prejudice, as cognitive phenomenon 118–19, 118–19n.30, see also cognition

as essentializing beliefs 118–19

as ideological tool 118–19, 120–21

nonmoralized views of 118–19

paternalistic 118–19

as psychological state 118–21

and sexism 127–32

social contextual theory of 121–22

as structural 129–31

taxonomy of 118–22

processing

associative 29–30

rule-based 29

property

clusters 198–99, see also cluster theory; judgments, classificatory

normative 202, 204

space 19, 191–92, 204

wrong-making 19–21, 187, 193–95, 200–1, 202, 211–12

Puddifoot, Katherine 46–47, 210–11

queer 55n.31, 114–16, 123, 137–38, 151, see also AIDS; gay rights; homophobia; lesbian; transgender

racial capitalism see exploitation, economic

racial imaginary 12n.34, 120

racialized violence 17, 167–69, see also anger

racism 114–18, 120, 137–55, 196–97

internalized 171–73, see also hatred, internalized; stereotypes, racist

radical pluralism 16–17, 20–22, 66, 198–201, 202–13

collaborative 213–18

rage see anger

rationality 6, 24–25, 42, see also stereotyping, as cognitive process

reasonable availability 14–15, 99–101, 102–5, 106–8

regulative mind argument 57–61, see also cognition, regulative; discriminatory treatment, regulative view of

relevance 14–15, 99–101, 102–4, 105, 106–8

Reminder Day see gay rights

responsibility, control–based 64–65, 66–67

salience 41

Schauer, Frederick 96, 118–19n.30, 127–28

science

and AI see machine learning

biological 18–19, 81–82, 188–89, 190–92, 193, 206–8

and collaboration 213–14

philosophy of 12–13, 56, 190–91, see also standpoint theory

servility see stereotypes, racist

sexism 71–72, 115, 117–18, 121–22, 125–27, 130–31, 137–38, 173, see also hatred, internalized; misogyny; stereotypes, sexist

sexism and medicine see discrimination, statistical

Shakur, Assata 36–37

slavery 165–67, 170, 195–96, see also colonialism; racism

Smith, Barbara 115–16, 136f, 156–57, see also Combahee River Collective; This Bridge Called My Back

Smith, Beverly 136f, 138n.1, see also This Bridge Called My Back

Smith, Eliot 27–28n.9, 29

social psychology 31–32, 39

Souls of Black Folk see Du Bois, W.E.B.

spuriousness 127–31

standpoint theory 12–13, 22–23, 75–82

status quo, supported by stereotypes 6–7, 61, see also stereotype, as control

stereotype

activation and application of 31–32, 36, 46–47

as caricature 36, 47–48

as control 6–7, 24–25, 44–45, 49, 139–40, 148, 168–69, 178–79, 208–9

definitions of 25–31

epistemic utility of 38–39, 53–54

evaluatively charged 49–51, 54

as fetish 44

framings of see frameworks

as network of associations 29–31

as prediction 50–51

in printing see stereotyping, history of the term

in psychology 27–37, 43

racist 115, 163, 166–67, 169–71, see also racism

as schema 6, 28–29, 30

sexist 173, 199–200, see also sexism

synonyms for 4

stereotyping

algorithmic see algorithm

by artificial intelligence see algorithm

as beliefs 30, 47–48, 63–65

benefits of 156, see also morally permissible stereotyping

as cognitive discrimination 50–51, 58–59

as cognitive process 49, 129–32, 139–40, 145, 175–76, 180

as communication 35, 36, 43–44

constitutive frame of 46–47, 62

definitions of 4–9, 24–25, 31–37, 41–42, 43, 47–48, 185

as discrimination 50–62

disrespect through 148, see also disrespect

as distinctive sensory experience 48–49, 56–57

embodied 55–57, 69, 71

as epistemic discrimination 46–47, 50–51, 53–55

four–part view of 31–37

freedom–focused objections to 163–64, 183

history of the term 38–39, 164–65, 184–85

linguistic analyses of 5–6, 7–8, 25–27, 185–86, see also generics

morally neutral view of 37–41, 42

morally permissible see morally permissible stereotyping

nonhuman 42–43, see also algorithm

nonmoralized and moralized 7–10, 35–36, 37–38, 39–41, 62–65

normative complexity of 21–22, 134–35, 184–86, 187–98

as oppression see oppression

as part of culture 43–45, 139–40

in perception 48–49, 55–57, 129–32

as presumptive classification 48–52

primary influence view of 33–35

psychological framing of 31–37, 45, 47–48, 214

as shortcut see epistemic shortcut argument

and social inequality 22–23

as social types 48, 49, 91, 175–76, see also tokenization

statistical 124–35, see also discrimination, statistical

wrongful see wrongful stereotyping

as wrongful discrimination 62–65

stigma 20, 44, 68–69, 92, 103, 111–12, 117, 123–24, 133–34, 152–54, 206, see also harm

Stockton, Kathryn 1–2, 27, 30

Stroud, Sarah 2–3n.10

subordination 72–73, 74, 123–24, 127, 174–77, 179–80, see also oppression

Sweetman, Joseph 31, 47n.7

taxonomies 21–22, 204–6, 208–13, see also cluster theory; prejudice, taxonomy of; science, biological

crosscutting 207–13, see also hierarchy thesis

Taylor, Paul 44, 66–67

Taylor, Shelley 28–29

theory

of discrimination see discrimination theory

disjunctive see disjunctive theory

of hierarchy see hierarchy thesis

of prejudice see prejudice

of unified see unified theory

This Bridge Called My Back 22–23, 70–71, 136f, 137–54, 160–61, 193–94, 199–200, 208–9, 215, 217–18

tokenization 91–92, 93–96, 106–7, see also fetishism

Torres, Émiles 2n.8

transgender 71, 138n.1, 156–57, see also queer

unified theory 21–22, 66, 72–73, 83, 86, 90, 101, 124, 132–33, 142n.21, 184, 188–89, 193, 196–98, 199–201, 202, 207, 218, see also homeostasis

United States Centers for Disease Control 117, 128, 130–32, 212–13, see also discrimination, statistical

utilitarianism 151–52

virtue ethics 13n.39, 20, 63–64, 214

Ward, Zina 19, 191–92

White, Ryan 113–14, see also AIDS

white dominance 169–71, see also white supremacy

white imaginary see racial imaginary

white supremacy 140, 143–44, 152–53n.48, 167–69, 171, 196–97, 204–5, 215, see also oppression; white dominance

witnessing 74–75, 82, see also lived experience

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 62n.50, 192, see also cluster theory

Woo, Merle see also This Bridge Called My Back 146–47

world traveling see multiperspectival

wrongful discrimination 72–75

wrongful stereotyping

algorithmic see algorithm

as cluster kind 20–198, 206–7, see also cluster theory

and freedom 17–18, 19, 71, 151–53, 160–61, 173, 177–78, 179, 180, 181–83, 187, 189–90, 200–1, see also deliberative freedom; Du Bois, W.E.B.

nonparadigmatic 204–6

paradigmatic 204, see also oppression

resistant to oppression but wrongful 203, 203f, 205–6, 215

socially regulative see discriminatory treatment, regulative view of

theory of, by disrespect or harm 16–17, 137, 142–43, 148, 150–61, see also disrespect; harm

theory of, by failure-to-individualize 101–5, 123–24, 145

theory of, by judging individuals by group membership 96–99, 106

theory of, by tokenizing 93–96, 106

wrong–making properties of see properties, wrong–making

Yamada, Mitsuye 71, 139–40, see also This Bridge Called My Back

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Figure I.1 The Puzzle of Stereotyping. Drawing by Jacob Rivkin.

4 Failing to Treat Persons as Individuals

Photo 4.1 Barbara Gittings in Picket Line (1966 or 1967). Photographed by…

Figure 4.1 The Puzzle of Stereotyping. Drawing by Jacob Rivkin.

5 Prejudice and the Problem of Statistical Stereotyping

Photo 5.1 AIDS Awareness Poster, New Zealand AIDS Foundation, 1990s. Permission from…

6 Disrespect and Harm

Photo 6.1 This Bridge Called My Back Reading, Arlington Street Church,…

Photo 6.2 The duck-rabbit illusion. Unknown creator. Image appears courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

7 Freedom and Failing to Treat Persons as Equals

Photo 7.1 “Occupations of Negroes and Whites in Georgie” Infographic Created by…

8 Radical Pluralism: A New Theory of Wrongful Stereotyping

Figure 8.1 Kinds of Wrongful Stereotyping, Partial Sketch. Drawing by Jacob Rivkin.

Figure 8.2 Wrongful Oppressive Stereotyping Organized into Categories by Intersectional Principles, Partial…

Figure 8.3 Wrongful Oppressive Stereotyping Organized into Categories by Sites of Injustice,…