The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.3 (2003) 216-223

It takes no great insight to recognize a deep conflict in contemporary America between our political ideals and the actuality of our lived experience. On the one hand, we have a public rhetoric and a philosophical heritage that celebrates pluralism and that promotes diversity. On the other hand, we lead lives shaped by the pervasive and unrelenting influence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious intolerance. Nearly everyone is familiar with the tragedies of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, with the unceasing attempts to dismantle affirmative action, with the widening gap between male and female earnings, and with current threats to reproductive freedom. (This list is certainly not exhaustive.) On a level closer to home, I live in a city that displays the ten commandments in the county courthouse, I have a seventh grade son whose buddies think nothing of using the term "gay" as an epithet, I watch the parade of fourteen-year-old girls on Jenny Jones who declare their ambition to be strippers and their greatest achievement to be "playing" older men into buying them cell phones and lunches at McDonald's, and I listen to a friend praise a Black first baseman—"terrific athlete, great girl, wonderful parents—the total package"—and in the next breath refer to a father on an opposing team as a "big buck."

Like everyone else with whom I share a professional affiliation, I do, of course, realize that we have made significant gains in our struggle to grant all Americans full social enfranchisement and I do consider the fact that most of us at least acknowledge the reality of oppression to provide some cause for hope. My frustration is with the pace of this progress—a frustration exacerbated by the memory of being told by my mother's friends well over twenty years ago that my generation would reap immediate and large-scale benefits from the feminist revolution of the 1970s. (In bleaker moments, I fret that the promise of full self-determination will be realized, at the earliest, only by my great-grandchildren.)

Accordingly, my concern is to take some tentative steps toward understanding why the conflict between our political aspirations and our habitual modes of interaction appears so intractable, why this divide seems so difficult to bridge. And while there are many factors responsible for the maintenance of social injustice—not the least of which are economic—my approach is shaped by the conviction that any adequate diagnosis must begin by recognizing how deeply the presumption of white male superiority is embedded in the American psyche. In short, I will argue that we need a richer conception of subjectivity than that currently operative in our public discourse if we are to understand why our actual behavior falls so short of our democratic ideals.

In so doing, I am following the lead of the feminist philosopher Diana Meyers. In her 1994 book, Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy, she argues that the neo-Kantian reduction of moral agency to mere logical consistency is powerless to address the phenomenon of double-consciousness, the social assignment and self-ascription of problematic status to those deemed "different." It is so powerless, she insists, because it cannot recognize the central role of culturally transmitted imagery in shaping our perception of socially excluded groups. On her diagnosis, "prejudice is not merely a result of individual cognitive malfunction, but is culturally encoded and transmitted through figurations of socially excluded groups, including emblematic characters in stories and myths as well as pictorial imagery" (Meyers 1994, 11). In order to reframe our perception and thus dislodge such prejudice, Meyers celebrates the power of "dissident speech" (108) and argues that we must supplant "figurations that crystallize and perpetuate negative stereotypes of socially excluded groups with emancipatory figurations" (12). In brief, Meyers urges us to "augment our repertory of moral skills" (9) with such "imagery...