Legal Feminism: Activism, Lawyering, and Legal Theory

7 False Consciousness

False Consciousness Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform. —Frank Zappa In previous chapters, I’ve repeatedly come back to the concept of choice. It is a fundamental tenet of legal liberalism—that the individual is the only meaningful unit of social measurement and that the individual captains her own ship, makes her own bed, and is the self-determining protagonist in a number of nonmetaphorical endeavors as well. Choice is also an intractable problem in philosophy. There is no way that our human minds could ever know for sure whether what we experience as choice actually determines any events in our own lives or elsewhere. We could be mere cogs in an eternal universal unalterable plan. Or maybe what we understand as our choices have some partial effectuality—maybe nature and nurture and physics and the gods and human dignity are all ingredients in a cosmic stew. We just can’t know for sure. I’ve also referred the reader to how the concept of choice has particular poignancy for women and other “others.” This chapter is a meditation upon the matter of individual choice, and specifically upon how feminist lawyers have dealt and not dealt with the concept. Though my discussion goes well beyond the specific term, I’ve called this chapter “false consciousness” because the term signifies—not always precisely —a continuing source of feminist infighting and paralysis. “False consciousness ” is both a philosophical term of art and a political epithet, at least these days. Along with the charge that a feminist is engaging in “essentialism,” the allegation that a feminist has accused another of “false consciousness” has long been both a conversation stopper and a thought stopper. That happened when any of us began to think beyond liberalism. If individual perception and evaluation aren’t the measure 7 120 of all things, if political success isn’t just the provision of equal individual “opportunity,” what standards should feminism provide to replace those? People who grew up in the Cold War era, perhaps particularly, were hypersensitized to threats of “thought-policing” by others claiming to have found a better political path. The idea of false consciousness bounces around in lots of contexts, and at the least seems to mean that someone is missing something important or that someone is accusing someone else of missing something important. Before getting to the heritage and meanings of the idea, let’s consider three situations where the matter of false consciousness might arise or has arisen. First, in London on the morning of November 4, 2004, the Daily Mirror ran a front-page picture of the just reelected President George W. Bush with the headline “How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?”1 Second, President Bush has appointed Gerald Reynolds as the new head of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Though an African American, Mr. Reynolds says that he has never clocked race discrimination , at least as practiced against himself: “I just assume somewhere in my life some knucklehead has looked at me and my brown self and said that they have given me less or denied me an opportunity. But the bottom line is, and my wife will attest to this, I am so insensitive that I probably didn’t notice.”2 The third example is a comment from Professor Joan Williams, who in a symposium about the work of caring for others (that most fundamental and usually uncompensated work done most often by women), stated that “the only rhetoric dominance feminism offers for understanding ‘choice’ . . . is ‘false consciousness.’ ” Williams says that an accusation of false consciousness “is infuriatingly condescending,” and asks, “[C]an you imagine a trade book that actually inspired women to think of themselves as responding to social mandates rather than making authentic choices by telling them they suffered from ‘false consciousness ’?”3 I understand that these examples are different in many ways but offer them to introduce a spectrum of talking about the misconceptions of others. “False consciousness” could refer to a wide range of responses to the assertion of an opinion, from “I disagree with you, and believe that with more information or experience you might change your mind,” to “you are a total puppet and I am both smarter than and morally superior to you.” False Consciousness | 121 The first example is straightforward. Of course, the British press has always enjoyed hyperbole, and...