hello everybody Welcome to a new episode of the descenter I'm your host as always Ricardo lops and today I'm joined by Dr Dr Rebecca tuval she is associate professor and chair of philosophy at Rhodes college she works in feminist philosophy philosophy of race and the ethics of identity she has a book project titled changing Grace the ethics and metaphysics of trans-racialism which will explore the possibility and permissibility of changing one's race and we're going to talk a little bit about that today and also about feminism cultural appropriation and also if we get the time to do it animal ethics so Dr Tu well welcome to the show it's a big pleasure to everyone thank you so much for having me it's a pleasure to be here so let's start with the feminism then because I guess that over time since feminist feminism has been around there's been several waves of feminism and there's different theories surrounding feminists there are feminism there are different kinds of feminists out there but for you what does it really mean to be a feminist so for me being a feminist feminist and gender inequality and discrimination so historically feminists have fought you know four women's right to vote for women's right to own property to file for a divorce to legally accuse their husbands of rape and today's feminists fight different battles depending on where they're located so globally we have many feminists still fighting for basic rights for young girls and women like the right to an education they're fighting against forced female genital cutting against sex trafficking against child marriage and in the west uh you know feminists still also fight different battles many feminists fight against gender Norms that teach young girls and women that their main value lies in their ability to land a husband and bear children you know in the U.S right now many feminists are fighting for women's Reproductive Rights uh while abortion bans sweep Across the Nation so the the Fight Continues so let me ask you another kind of question then why do you think that apparently there are so few people who are including women that identify themselves as feminists nowadays yes feminists one is that there are still a lot of stereotypes out there about feminists so feminists are all Angry loudmouth man-haters who want to take over the world didn't you didn't you know that um so stereotypes certainly are part of the problem I also think that in in the US and in the west more broadly there are a lot of people who think feminism won you know the Sexes are equal we don't have formal barriers anymore to women's success so we don't need feminism in fact some people go so far as to argue that if you look at the data men are worse off young boys and men are now worth on so what we need to be doing is fighting more for men so philosophers like David Benetar have argued this point and others certainly are making that point too and then I I think also because the history of feminism has not always been inclusive especially of women of color and of folks across the gender Spectrum there are a lot of people who just feel feminism isn't for them and so they feel like the that's not my movement yeah there there are even people that say or claimed that feminism and other civil and social movements are already kind of obsolete but apparently and particularly with recently some of the challenges to Reproductive Rights in the U.S specifically I mean it doesn't seem to be the case right yes yes I would agree for sure and I would I would argue further that you know feminism properly defined is the movement that challenges all types of pernicious gender norms and stereotypes so you know any feminism worth its salt is not an anti-male feminism it's a feminism that's also concerned about the plight of boys and men and that seeks to combat State toxic masculinity for instance or the expectation for men to be you know aggressive and dominant not to cry I mean those are things that are not only bad for women they're bad for men too and feminists should be concerned about them and many of course are and I mean that exact same point I've heard from other feminists saying that I mean when people accuse them of not caring about men's issues some of them even say something along the lines of look but patriarchy for example we think it also affects men or most men a lot in many different ways particularly through for example forcing or gender roles on them that might have many different kinds of pernicious psychological and other kinds of effects for example precisely so you've already answered this question a little bit I guess but since feminism has gone through several different iterations over time uh what would you say it means to be a feminist today specifically and uh I mean do you think that feminism has changed a lot over time through the first second third waves and so on yes I think I think changed a lot over time I mean even just if we focus on the US you know the the type of battle that feminists are fighting has changed again from fighting more formal kinds of inequality like women cannot vote for instance to fighting more informal or you know subtle forms of discrimination like the ways that sexist bias functions it's also certainly become more inclusive so you know intersectionality has made a big difference to how feminists think of their battle so this is a term coined by the legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw to draw our attention to you know overlapping forms of discrimination and inequality um one famous case she discusses is that of General Motors in the 1970s so they were brought up on charges of discrimination against black women and General Motors and its defense said we don't discriminate against black women look at all these women we hire or we have as employees they're white women but they're women and then look at all these blacks we have as their black men but they're black so they were able to say we don't discriminate against black or women of course that doesn't address whether they discriminated against black women who fall at the intersection they're neither white women nor black men so intersectionality is supposed to teach us that there are all kinds of often worse forms of discrimination that happen at the intersection between marginalized identities big feminists have taken that very seriously such that the the fights that we're involved in are very different if you're you know a like a poor woman of color in one context versus somebody like Taylor Swift um feminism today there's ongoing battles about its proper scope and Ambit so you know increasingly there are divides among feminists um really heated divides so gender critical feminists argue that feminism should be the fight to protect biological females that's the proper proper feminism and then a lot of other feminists say no you know feminism is again a broader movement that ought to fight many forms of gender inequality and discrimination including the kinds of gender inequality and discrimination that targets minority genders like transgender people and non-binary people and not just women so that that's very much like an ongoing kind of um internal Fight Within feminism now so I would like to ask you I think two follow-up questions to that so first of all do you think that I think I've already had uh this discussion with someone on the show but do you agree that perhaps some of the issues that women face have also evolved over time and that over time we have to become aware of certain new issues like for example I mean I don't know uh what are your views personally on things like for example sex work like working in for in the porn industry or being a prostitute I mean there are different feminists have different views on that but nonetheless one could argue that for example nowadays with the existence of the internet and because um there there's evidence that Within in those kinds of occupations there are for example sex trafficking and people that are forced into them that perhaps the internet might feed some of that so I I mean through in this particular case the development of new technology new issues might arise or get exacerbated would you agree with it yes I definitely think that feminism change some of those kind of classic feminist issues I mean there are always kind of disputes about whether sex work could be feminist whether pornography or could be feminist but for the most part feminism was on the side of these things are anti-feminist they are not good for women and now things are far less clear I think there are a lot of feminists who think feminism needs first and foremost to embrace women's agency and autonomy and if that means for certain women that they want to enter into sex work and that they want to enter into pornography than power to them you know feminism ought to respect their choices and I I think you could have a consistent feminism that both upholds women's individual agential choices to do that kind of work and that simultaneously questions the larger structure of society in which that kind of sexualization of the female body is as prevalent and desired as it is I think you can you can hold those things together so and the other follow-up question I have is so you mentioned the intersectionality framework there uh when it comes to that um because I know there are feminists who would disagree with this but what are your views on including trans women specifically in the feminist movement because I know there are some feminists out there who sometimes are called turfs that is trans exclusionary radical feminists or some other equivalent term that do not think or do not agree that trans women should be part of the feminist movement so what is your position on that since you also seem to come from an intersectionality perspective do you think that intersectionality also extends to such gender identities I think I guess yes I I ought to include trans Women Within its fight for various reasons one obvious reason is that much of the battles that trans women face are not entirely different and kind from the battles that cisgender women face either so um you know stereotypes gendered expectations about what it means to be a woman those things will affect both CIS women and trans women alike but they obviously also face different battles and you know the the gender critical feminists are especially concerned about the ways in which those those um the battle for CIS women and the battle for trans women kind of bump up against each other um but I think that feminism's proper concern is for for all kinds of women um I do also want to add though that this is the point about kind of the way that the academic conversation has has gone I think it's unfortunate that gender critical feminists are kind of labeled as as turfs which I agree with them that that's effectively become a slur um and I think that we need to be able to have more productive actual conversation around these really thorny issues between gender criminal gender critical feminists and more trans-inclusive feminists um because also just as philosophers I think everybody needs to practice the the virtue of charitability and assume that people are really trying to come from the best place when they're working for justice issues um and I think all too often in these conversations that assumption is is not rough and since you come from these intersectional point of view do you think that when thinking about issues and challenges that women have to deal with nowadays I mean we should also think about for example their place of origin if they live in particular countries in particular regions of the globe I guess that women in different places would face different challenges right so I mean we have also as feminists you also have to take that into account that perhaps the challenges faced by women I don't know in the Middle East or Africa or some other places are different it could be more or less challenging I don't know than the us or the Western World in general correct yes yes yeah for speech be general terms I mean if you if you look at the kind of plight that um women are facing globally you know in many countries you know in in Africa but um you know in other continents as well um they are you know a fights that have been won in many places in in the U.S like fights for um basic education for young women against child marriage forced female genital cutting like you know compulsory veiling things like that that um and so you know it's it's certainly very important to attend to context when discussing feminism and the particular battle that feminists are involved in um yeah so I would like to get now since of course you're also an academic I would like to get now more into some issues that perhaps from the point of view of an academic uh are we also have to take into account so we're we're our epistemic exclusions what does that term mean yeah so epistemic exclusions are what happens when knowers or you know people with relevant knowledge are left out of or excluded from forms of inquiry in which they belong so epistemic you know you know from the Greek episteme meaning to know so exclusions on the basis of knowledge and there's been a really huge literature spawned mostly because of a book written by Miranda fricker on epistemic Injustice that is now concerned with all kinds of wrongs and injustices done specifically to people in their capacity is as knowers um there is certainly internal debate um about you know whether or not those kinds of injustices she describes are you know really epistemic injustices are there are they really not just moral injustices that have to do with knowledge and it gets kind of thorny and nerdy there but in any case big literature on this question and and epistemic exclusions and particular um are what happens when when people are left out in various ways from from inquiry and by being left out I mean how does that manifest exactly within Academia I mean could it be does or does that include for example a female students not participating so much in the classroom not raising their hands to participate I don't know in debates or to pose questions or to raise issues Does it include that Does it include for example being harder for women to publish in particular academic journals or to or for example even if they do so for their work to be taken as seriously as the work of men I mean is are those some of the examples of epistemic exclusion are those all examples of epistemic exclusion yeah good good I think I think a lot of those are examples of epistemic exclusions so I typically think of epistemic exclusions as you know a kind of Injustice done to somebody because they they have a bit of knowledge um to contribute or an entire research Paradigm or whatever it may be that's then ignored or dismissed or undermined various ways of being excluded um and and I guess I hesitate to think of the phenomenon of like women contributing Less in class and raising their hands less as a kind of epistemic exclusion although I might need to rethink that question um the the the the cause of that epistemic exclusion is is complicated right it could be internalized sexism it could be the internalized sense that what I have to say is not valuable and that that could be traced back to kind of sexist structure in which case maybe it would make sense to think of that as an epistemic exclusion as well um that that's that's something I haven't thought of and it's interesting um other examples of epistemic exclusions are not listening to women's input because uh she's you know overly emotional or you know she's just being hormonal let's not take seriously what she's saying um you know lots of women have faced difficulty being being believed having their testimony accepted um you know what especially when they bring forward claims of sexual assault like sex workers in particular have faced this struggle and historically you know indigenous women's knowledge has been excluded women's contributions to intellectual history have been excluded and in the scientific realm there have been a lot of exclusions um so you know famously there was a British chemist named Rosalind Franklin who made pretty major contributions to the structure of DNA but those contributions went pretty much unnoticed um there was also the scientist Barbara McClintock who discovered genetic transposition or jumping genes and her work also went um mostly ignored during her lifetime although 30 years later she won the Nobel Prize for that research and in today feminists argue this is still a problem there actually was just an article in nature published last year it was entitled um women are credited Less in science than men and it claims that even to this day women's scientific contributions are excluded in in various ways so so certain so I think I think my my considered answer actually is that all of all of the examples you gave probably would qualify as epistemic exclusions so I mean these are when it comes to epistemic exclusion the examples you gave are probably illustrative of some of one issue that we talked about earlier that is when it comes to some people claiming that feminism specifically in the west nowadays is Obsolete and in Academia specifically because I mean women can go to college they can study in University they can take whatever kind of degree they want they can publish papers and books and be professors and all of that that there's no longer an issue there let's say but it can still be through those kinds of occurrences and manifestations right yes uh so even if formal inequality doesn't exist anymore let's just you know accept that that doesn't mean that informal kinds of inequality or discrimination don't persist and that's certainly much of what feminists and more kind of progressive Democratic societies try to draw our attention to a lot of the time although as you noted earlier there are now more formal um obstacles to women's flourishing than there have been um in recent years such as with the abortion fans and you know in the case of transgender people for sure in the U.S there is there are many laws now coming into existence that are also like formal obstacles for Trans people's um you know right to live and flourish so again I mean a lot of feminists today say that our Focus really should be on gender minorities um given that their battles are especially and it's acute and egregious but um you know it doesn't have to be in either or do you think that the historical exclusion of women's knowledge that you mentioned there at a certain point uh also occurred and perhaps still lockers I'm not sure within philosophy I mean since you are a philosopher yourself yeah good of philosophy um you know women's contributions have you know not always been valued and there have been efforts among you know feminists um today to kind of resuscitate some of the insights from earlier feminist philosophers like hypatia for instance and many others um so yes I think it's happened within philosophy um and you know in other domains for sure um I think that things are far improved today I mean I know that it's common to claim that you know women still face many obstacles within the the discipline to being taken seriously um but I'll admit that um I'm I'm skeptical of some of those claims um I think that things have vastly improved um for women and in philosophy but do you think that when it comes to this kind of exclusion uh it's just a matter of I'm in the Injustice itself of excluding women from participation in knowledge production or I mean even from an epistemic point of view and from the point of view of developing knowledge and for the evolution of knowledge I mean having basically half of the human population historically for the most part excluded from the production of knowledge also country or might have contributed to its in impoverishment in a way I mean is that absolutely absolutely oh uh 100 yes so so the exclusion of women's knowledge is not only bad and wrong for the sake of the women who are excluded but for the sake of the knowledge Enterprise itself definitely so and that's what feminist epistemologists and feminist philosophers of science have tried to argue that for the sake of science right we need to include women and science was worse on account of having excluded women like Rosalind Franklin and like Barbara McClintock because the research was worse right women drew our attention to um things that we've missed and that's so so our our actual achievements are are marred by the exclusion too yeah for example I remember reading at a certain point that when it comes to attributing the Nobel Prize they attributed it to Marie Curie as well but originally apparently they only wanted to attribute to to attribute it to Pierre Curie and then it will see himself that said that he wouldn't accept it if they wouldn't include his wife that that's I guess an example right I didn't know that good for him that's good I didn't know that that's interesting yeah so uh that's about epistemic exclusions but uh but when it comes to epistemic inclusions are are there also injustices in that department I guess I mean because one would think that if we are epistemically including women that would always be positive or not so yes I argued that while it's important to attend to the ways that we exclude women knowers and other knowers from inquiry we also need to attend to the ways that including those knowers might also be less than just so one example imagine that you're a researcher and she's published an article and you're ready to send it off to the journal and then you look at the bibliography and you realize oh no I don't have any minority Scholars on my bibliography and I know that this journal really values citing a diverse array of Scholars so I better find some and then so that researcher kind of scrambles and looks for some minority sounding names to throw in a couple footnotes just so that they can get them on the bibliography that's a kind of inclusion but I would say it's an unjust kind of epistemic inclusion because they haven't really seriously engaged the work of those authors they kind of just went to the them to be able to add them to their citation page and they're really being objectified or used instrumentalized in that case so I would say the wrong there is that this is a kind of instrumentalization not really compatible with treating those Scholars as fully equal inquirers so that would be a kind of inclusion that actually is unjust and then there are other sorts of epistemic inclusions that actually serve to exclude more than they include so another kind of common trend is for people to go to like the member of um one my uh one member of a minority like a racial minority let's say or a woman or a you know a trans individual and then allow them to speak for the whole right it should be spokespeople for their entire group like well and um what you're doing then if you were to say well I I spoke to my you know my black friend and that person said that you know all black people think the following or they wouldn't put it quite like that but that's effectively the the move is to pretend like you are speaking for um or including the perspectives of a large group of people um just because you solicited the input of one member of that group so that's another way in which an epistemic inclusion can actually mask what's really an exclusion in so for example when people are on Media or alternative media even sometimes on the internet uh find someone that is part of a particular minority group that espouses particular views that usually promote uh policies for example that go against the interests of the majority of people that are part of that group that would probably constitute an example of epistemic inclusion that is not good right I mean and that could work both ways right I mean I I would imagine that even just because you include someone where who is very good intentioned and to promote what she thinks are the interests of the majority of people of their group I mean even if it has overall a positive effect he shouldn't perhaps assume that what that person says and thinks is representative of what every single person of that group also thinks and feels and yes yes definitely and and members of those minority groups or marginalized groups are often very frustrated when they witness being spoken for in that way because you know these are uh if we're talking about race and gender and religion I mean we're talking about massive groups of people there's a ton of internal diversity within those groups and in fact it's part of the logic of discrimination to mask that diversity to try to treat those groups as if they are uniform in some way as if all the people are the same in some way so there's a sense in which the speaking for kind of rehashes the very discriminatory logic that we're trying to fight against so I think it's it's always imperative to draw attention to the the internal diversity among people within these groups there's there is disagreement of course and um you know there there's much to be learned from um from you know talking to as many you know groups individuals as possible within groups in order to get a sense of that diversity and also because I would imagine that another way this kind of thing would be pernicious is it doesn't matter really what kind of position a particular person would be expressing it could be for I don't know even from a minority group someone who is right-wing or left-wing or whatever it doesn't matter but I I mean if people are exposed to one single person or a handful of people who all of them say that they believe in they have this or these or that sort of political beliefs for example then people watch them might think oh okay so this is a reasonable X person a reasonable I don't know trends person a reasonable black person something like that or and the the rest of them if some if someone among them says something different they are unreasonable why right right right so yeah exactly that narrative can serve to like further marginalize people within the group who don't share that share the narrative you know ascribed to the group as a whole even though that in itself is is a misguided thing to do because we're talking about huge groups of people I mean it might be one thing if it was a small enough group but we're talking about like millions of people in some of these cases yeah also because I guess that in this case what people consider reasonable or unreasonable I mean it's just basically someone who says something they agree with right side exactly exactly and then they'll hold that person up be like see this is what everybody in that group thinks like no that's just what you want to be able to say and it is a frustrating experience I mean I've I've witnessed this you know as a woman people will kind of say well you know women um you know believe this or you know just this kind of really General sweeping claim like that and um it's it's always just you know kind of jarring because he was like well wait a minute I don't I don't think that am I not part of this group um so uh changing topics uh I would also like to ask you about cultural appropriation and I guess you're of course we will get into some of the the common Notions that people have of cultural appropriation but before we get into that and uh how your position differs perhaps from some of those more common views tell us then what the sculptural appropriation mean for you so on my view at cultural appropriation takes place when a cultural Outsider you know borrows a style or practice that was developed by or you know popularized within another culture often a minority culture so that could be a hairstyle that could be a clothing style that could be a musical style that could be a food recipe tons of examples in the media all the time about cultural appropriation you know whether it be Kim Kardashian getting accused of cultural appropriation for wearing like Fulani braids which is a protective hairstyle among the Fulani people of West Africa or Iggy Azalea an Australian white rapper getting accused of culturally appropriating from black hip-hop musicians or there were a few years a couple years ago there was a white high school student in the U.S who went viral for wearing a traditional Chinese dress or to pow um to prom so tons and tons of examples um I think the term cultural appropriation is used in everyday parlance to have a a negative connotation like cultural appropriation is by definition wrong in the philosophical literature it's employed more neutrally so cultural appropriation kind of just describes any Act of exchange from you know a cult from one cultural member kind of to another um so that can get a bit confusing because I think that there's a distinction there between how the terms are used I I argue that we should employ the neutral understanding cultural appropriation and then when it goes wrong I call that cultural misappropriation oh okay so that's a very important distinction there because I mean I guess that um usually people outside of the academic Circle let's say when they hear the term cultural appropriate appropriation nowadays by being exposed to some I guess extreme examples on the media and stuff like that they think oh that's just silly ridiculous stuff that people on the left have invented or something like that because it's ridiculous why can't I eat food that is that comes from that culture or wear clothes that comes from that culture over there I mean I'm not offending anyone directly and that's not my intention so I I mean I guess that what I'm trying to say is that the sort of understanding kept the general public as of cultural appropriation I mean people makes people very dismissive of the concept itself right yes I think I think has like undergone this inflation now wherein you know most any instance of cultural exchange is assumed to be immoral in some way um and it's called cultural appropriation and thought to be wrong for that reason um and yet at the same time I think that everyday people kind of recognize that there are differences between different kinds of cultural appropriation or exchange and it's important to attend to those differences when making moral evaluation so in this case I mean what really distinguishes uh I guess I could I could use the term mirror positive cultural appropriation from a cultural misappropriation so what are the criteria here and does it have do you focus here when you evaluate things do you focus on the person who appropriates the appropriator or the the appropriation itself yeah good question so most approaches to cultural appropriation focus on the appropriation itself when in order to locate the wrong so you know there are what I divide into two main approaches in the literature and philosophy at least there are kind of toleration-based approaches and power-based approaches so toleration-based approaches say it's not really about what the individual appropriators doing whether it's wrong depends on how widely tolerated the practice is among members of the cultural group being appropriated from so if it is the case that say the Fulani people of West Africa do not support you know Kim Kardashian wearing Fulani braids because it's a protective hairstyle then it would be wrong for that reason it's not tolerated by the people um power-based approaches emphasize whether or not the appropriation you know manifests or exacerbates you know problematic power dynamics so you know does Iggy Azalea playing her music um enable her to get ahead get famous get rich while black hip-hop musicians struggle against you know racism or other kinds of forces that preclude them from getting the same advantages that's what makes her appropriation wrong in that instance so those are both cases that those are both approaches that focus on the appropriation I argue that we should focus more on the individuals themselves the appropriators than anything else when it comes to determining whether or not the culture Act of cultural appropriation is wrong so I defend an agent-based approach to cultural appropriation and I think you know when everyday people are evaluating cases of cultural appropriation they often are attending to the agent they're trying to evaluate whether that person is engaged in a respectful um use of another culture's product so that High School student I mentioned earlier you know a lot of people on social media were saying well it doesn't seem like she was wearing that dress in a disrespectful manner um she obviously really loved the dress and thought it was beautiful and there were some people and you know members of um or Chinese people as well who defended her right to wear that dress and and I argue that that that is the right Focus we should we should look to the individual and evaluate whether or not they are exhibiting some form of disregard whether that be disrespect or indifference or ignorance in their use of the cultural product um so we can definitely think of examples in which that it's clear that the appropriator is failing to be adequately respectful so an appropriator who wears a Native American headdress for instance um is being disrespectful because Native American headdresses are specifically worn by selected honorable people uh within Native American cultures they earned that right it's really difficult to imagine an outsider wearing a Native American headdress than in a manner that would be consistent with respecting you know the members of the relevant Native American tribe for instance um and you know I think what what's helpful about my Approach is that it draws our attention to the attitudes behaviors and beliefs of individuals and I think that's good because cultural appropriation is everywhere you can't avoid cultural appropriating in a Multicultural Society we exchange our cultural products all of the time I mean we're constantly involved in borrowing from other cultures and I think that is a good thing it is a good thing for thriving Multicultural Society and we don't want to be so quick to police people's abilities to exchange across cultures yes I mean since I talked with lots of anthropologists on the show I don't know what you would think about this but perhaps there are two different ways through which anthropology would help here so one of them would be as you have just mentioned I mean a culture is not a monolith and there are no a strict barriers between different cultures I mean there's cultural extra exchange and transmission uh all the time between different cultures across different cultures I mean that's just inevitable and no one can do anything about that and I it's even a positive thing because it enriches all cultures that participate in it I guess that's 1.10 the other point I mean for example you mentioned their uh objects used by indigenous people and I would imagine that perhaps one of the ways when it comes to cultural misappropriation one of the ways that or one of the things that people should take into account is that there are certain things that are part for example of specific rituals that occur in particular cultures like for example head dressers or any other kinds of objects or even for example tattoos that people have to perform the ritual in a particular way according to particular rules uh observed by particular people and I mean if someone was to use whatever kind of object associated with that or just do a tribal tattoo on their harm or on their arm or something like that I mean in that particular case perhaps they should take into account that that might be actually offensive to people who are part of that particular culture because uh I I mean you if you want that you really have to go through the normal ritual or cultural process whatever through which those things get expressed right yes and and the the wrong maker in that case is not so much the causing of offense but the reason for the offense and I make that distinction because there's you know other accounts of cultural appropriation that say we ought not to culturally appropriate you know if it causes offense and I think that view is misguided for a couple reasons one you could be doing something wrong culturally misappropriative and nobody's offended um so that's one problem another is that um you don't want to you know hinge your the wrongness of cultural appropriation on other members offense because you know again they might not all be offended they might um you know how do we start kind of adjudicating how many people's offense does it take um you know and and I think that can start to get messy so it's like the reason for the offense um is well this is a this is a culturally protected practice it symbolizes the following like this is this is the reason why it is it is wrong right so uh changing topics now uh you're working on a book about the ethics of identity we're of course not getting into the content of the book itself here but from the work you've been doing what is the ethics of identity what sorts of questions does it deal with so the ethics of identity broadly concerns you know moral and immoral ways to hold an identity I mean another major part of the ethics of identity concerns defining what identity even is that's a huge part of the conversation too but the sorts of questions it deals with that I'm especially interested in are questions like um when is it always wrong to lie about your racial background um when do we owe people the truth about say our birth sex or our parents race sorts of things um to what degree should people's self identities be beholden to social norms and expectations about those identities okay so uh and let's focus on one kind of identity here today so from your point of view from the point of view you come from how do you understand race with this race mean good question so there are there are three main positions in the the philosophical race debate debate those are racial anti-realism biological racial realism social racial realism and I can tell you a bit a bit about each of those so in my own book and my work on the topic of transracialism in particular I explore whether and how trans-racialism is possible on different conceptions of race so I kind of don't um you know endorse a particular understanding of race I just defend transracial identity and the possibility of transracialism based on varying conceptions of race back to your question um I can just lay out the debate a little a little bit between those views yeah basically within the philosophy of race what are the different positions out there are three main positions in five race racial anti-realism biological racial realism and social racial realism so racial anti-realists argue that race properly defined refers to subspecies like biologically meaningful divisions within the human species and so defined so properly understood races don't exist there are no such thing as human subspecies right there is biological diversity within the human species but it's not of the kind that it would need to be for there to be something like races or subspecies and therefore races aren't real hence the anti-realism right the racial anti-realism racial anti-realists though do think that there are what they call racialized groups groups of people erroneously believed to be members of races okay so that's that's one position and then the the social racial realists and the biological racial realists agree that races do exist um and they do refer so they're not anti-realist in that sense they just disagree about the nature of race so biological racial realists think yeah races exist and they are biological in nature now they don't think that those are like biologically deep um kinds of uh that they don't think it's a biologically deep um difference between the races it's biologically superficial but it's still biological in nature the social racial realists think no it's social in nature the the what the races fundamentally are are categories defined by humans throughout culture throughout history in line with different purposes um and and yet it is social so for instance the social racial realist will say look you know when it was convenient for expanding the slave trade the one drop rule of black racial membership said all you needed is one African ancestor to be black and you know so somebody who had a one drop of black blood on this view would be black and that's a social phenomenon that's not saying anything meaningful about you know what one African ancestor actually makes you a you know as as far as your biology is concerned and the same thing was true like with the Nuremberg Laws and Nazi Germany like here are the rules for you know for being classified as Jewish and uh social racial realists will say well you know you are black and are Jewish in those contexts according to those rules um but those are social socially determined so I I mean several different things about that first of all it's interesting to notice that both the um anti-realists and uh biological race realists uh based their arguments uh I mean their arguments come from a biological basis right but they come to different conclusions because the anti-realists are also basing their arguments on biology to say so from a biological standpoint there's no really any good basis for us to talk about human races or to distinguish or categorize people into different races but the biological realists are basically saying the opposite even though and this is my second observation at a certain point you said there that the biological realists do not think that perhaps the differences get too deep that they are mostly superficial but what does that mean exactly I mean does that mean that for example they only considered some anatomical differences like skin color for example because I'm asking you that because when I think about bio biological realism applied to race I also tend to associate it with people that talk about for example IQ differences and other psychological differences and sometimes make claims about the different kinds of culture being intrinsically associated with different races like for example sometimes we hear people making claims about uh African-American people in the U.S not living more in in poverty than whites because they have a particular kind of culture that they say is intrinsic to their race so I I mean does do the philosophers who come from a biological realist perspective Associated to race also make those kinds of arguments or are they just focusing more on on more superficial stuff let's say yeah that's a great question so they're certainly focused on very different arguments so two of the most prominent biological racial realists in philosophy are actually African-Americans so queshan Spencer and Michael Hardiman um and you know they they both argue that your genetic sampling programs just do you reveal that there are you know ways that we can um distinguish the people into races like biologically speaking Michael Hardiman calls his concept of race minimalist race to denote the fact that the biological differences there are minimal so you know he says that look um the races do exist and are divided because they capture kind of um patterns of physical features like nose shape and hair type and skin color that are biological right um and yet they're biologically superficial right and so they're kind of minimal he says he says that they're not a big biological deal and yet they're still biological and he thinks again that the genetic sampling programs kind of like prove that these are real but again biologically minimal um grouping so they would in no way justify you know some of the more radical uh conclusions about you know race and IQ for instance or other other examples that you gave but yeah I know that the the there are certainly a lot of different ways of being a biological racial realist um and I think a lot of people assume that the only way to be one is to be kind of on that more extreme end but that's certainly not not the case at all and like again you know question Spencer and Michael hardman's work among others shows that yeah I asked you that question just because I I wanted to understand if these positions associated with for example IQ and other psychological traits and culture is something that we see among certain kinds of for example social scientists or just among them or if you also get that with some philosophers of race there are definitely some philosophers of race also who have a kind of more hard line in biological racial realism um who think that there are like biologically significant divisions between the races even significant enough that they could um provide a uh that they could explain um differences between the races you know at the level of IQ and other other sorts of of things like that yeah there there are some philosophers who think that too okay so uh one more question associated with what you said earlier so about the social realists so they are social realists so they attribute some sort of reality to the concept of race but in that case it's real as a social construct correct yes precisely construct we as people kind of determine it's the the reality that doesn't mean that it's any less real in fact we are very powerful and yet social constructionists or social racial realists I'll use those terms interchangeably think races are social categories in that they don't carve nature at its joints so to speak right humans are the ones who come up with the rules for these categorizations yeah there are some people who have a sort of Blended view um between social realism and biological realism yeah I mean I just wanted to ask you that quick question because I don't want to get into the broader metaphysical discussion about what's real and what it's not it falls outside of the scope of this interview of course but it's still interesting to just observe that when it comes to that kind of discussion there are people who argue that social constructs are not real things but there are other people who argue the opposite and say that I mean whatever kind of social construct we operate under is also a real thing right yes yes to conflate like the social constructionist and the anti because the social constructionists thinks these constructions are very much real and have real effects and you know often devastating effects on people and so they are very much still realists so uh getting into the issue of trans-racialism and if someone can change their race just to introduce the topic I would like to understand so out of these three positions where do you come from to tackle this issue so I I argue that you know trans-racialism is quite possible on a variety of views in the race literature so I don't like myself endorse a particular account of race I mostly want to show that transracialism is possible first off on the most popular conception of race the social racial realist View and you know a lot of people most of the people in fact who say trans-racial trans-racialism is not possible identify as social social racial realists or social constructionists so one of my main goals is to show it's possible on social racial realism properly understood I also argue it's possible on The anti-realist View because it's just that we would have to frame what transracial individuals are doing a bit differently I would say for the anti-realists transracial people are moving from one racialized group to another rather than from One race to another the biological racial realist will deny the possibility of transracialism and yet even biological racial realists like Michael Hardiman for instance acknowledge that the biological race concept can't do all the work we need it to do we also need a social race concept because he grants that there are racial categories out there that don't really map neatly onto the minimalist race concept he comes up with so um and even for biological racial realists they kind of see that like the dominant race concept is race car concept and so I my point is really to say transracialism is possible across a lot more race Concepts than people would otherwise imagine so if someone can change their you use the term racial category instead of race correct oh okay okay let's go with redstone so if someone can change their race and you you say you come mostly from a social realist perspective if you understand it correctly what does that mean exactly I mean what does it mean for someone to change their race good question view of race so you know let's let's take a particular uh example maybe so lots of people think that there aren't transracial people first off that you know that these people don't exist and that's not true there are trans-racial identified people there are more out there than than folks tend to assume um one transracial identified person recently published a book actually called white girl within uh their name is Ronnie Gladden and they were born a black male and identify as a white woman and have even taken like certain steps to try to align their racial self-presentation with their racial identity so like lightening their skin or attempting to and and you know various other efforts to align their presentation with their racial identity so I think we could say that Gladden is transracial in that you know as a kid Gladden was a black man right according to the racial rules and uh we could we could say and I'll clarify um the caveat in a moment that today you know Gladden um is a white woman um according to the rules of racialization um of our given Society now I say there's a caveat because for the social realist an individual can't just change Race by themselves right it's a social phenomenon that requires that that the racial membership criteria are such that it's possible to have to be a member of a race despite lacking the relevant ancestry so for the social realist there would need to be a change in our everyday approach to race that says you can be a member of a racial group you know even if you don't have the ancestry maybe if you meet other criteria like self-identification criteria or things like that so the question of what it means to change race is really complicated depending on the particular view of race that you have right if you're a social realist you think that the social rules we're going to have to accommodate or change in order to make it possible and if you are somebody who thinks race is more about an individual property and then you don't need the social uptake in order for race change to be possible so I I mean just to see if I got if I got clear some of what you said to be able to change one's race can the person do it by herself or does it have to be recognized by Society more generally think on a social constructionist view of race a person cannot dressed by them by them okay because whether or not a person is a member of a certain race really does depend on whether they meet the social criteria deemed necessary to be a member of that race and if ancestry remains a Criterion for racial membership in our society as it currently does then it won't be possible to change race on a social realized realist View um and so you know it's analogous in certain ways to to gender in that um there has been a push to de-emphasize biological sex as a Criterion for gender Ed membership right or gender identity and you know transracial individuals you know hope for a time when race is also more accommodating toward people who lack the relevant ancestry so we've been talking about if it's possible or not for someone to change their race but another different kind of question is should it be possible for someone to change their own race I mean what do you think are some of the more relevant ethical questions associated with this yes good really important question so I do think it should be possible for certain people to change their race I think it should be possible for transracial identified people to change their race um if doing so will alleviate the kind of racial dysphoria they experience and will enable them to flourish more as members of the identity group with which they uh to which they feel they belong um I will say that that doesn't mean that there are no ethical limits on transracial identity right so I think that there are more or less ethical ways of holding a transracial identity I don't think that it's permissible to like feed really harmful racist stereotypes for instance in the holding of one's transracial identity and to say that it should be possible to change phrase doesn't mean that we treat all transracial people the exact same way as CIS racial people either right so it wouldn't follow for instance that a transracial black person should be entitled to like the exact same benefits and entitlements as a CIS racial black persons such as for instance like scholarships that are intended specifically to address centuries of inequality based on having a certain kind of ancestry right so ancestry is important for certain affirmative action purposes and in those cases it would not be appropriate to just treat transracial people the same way and you know it's really important that we get the ethics right because there are lots of ways that that these uh that these kinds of identities could be abused or insincerely held of course um for the sake of trying to gain certain advantages and yet there are people who sincerely hold these identities and we need to um you think about what I what our ethical obligations to those individuals are and what their obligations are to themselves too like what does it mean to hold an identity authentically and what does it mean to have to kind of pretend that one does not hold that identity and I mean if a disease really a social process and if uh other people Society in general has to also recognize the race racial identity of a particular person that changed their race uh I mean when it comes to changing one's race what would that entail exactly I I mean would it entail for example just participating in some sort of uh cultural manifestations that are usually associated with the race one wants to change to would it would it also necessarily imply changing one's physical appearance according to what these socially understood as being a person of a particular race or falling under a particular racial category are those questions that you also think about and we you think we should address in these issues yeah those are really important and good questions I think what race change will involve will vary depending on you know the individual transracial person so some trans-racial people do seek to like change their self-presentation to like align more with the race they identify with others don't feel the need or desire to do that and they feel more like just familiarizing themselves and kind of becoming more um at one with like the the relevant culture associated with the racial group that they occupy is maybe more more important to them um so it it really will vary and I wouldn't put any like moral restrictions on like how One ought to be to kind of hold a transracial identity and I'll add to that like there are a lot of different ways of being transracial so if we think of trans racial identity broadly as just holding a racial identity that kind of uh holding a racial identity thinking oneself of oneself as a member of a race different from your presumed race then you know there are actually a lot more ways of being transracial than we might suspect so you know they're they're the obvious case of being like transracial in the sense of identifying As One race identifying or moving from the member being a member of One race to another but then there are other kinds of examples too so I would say that you know the mixed race artist Adrian Piper in 2012 released this a book and the statement that said henceforth my racial designation will be neither black nor white but 6.25 Gray and I would say that that's a kind of transracial identity it's transracial in what Rogers Brewbaker has called the trans of Beyond so Brubaker divides different ways of being trans into three categories like the trans of um migration that's moving from like One race or gender to another the transit between that's kind of like existing somewhere between you know the um conventional racial or gender categories and then there's a trans of Beyond just like challenging the categories themselves entirely um and I think you can be transracial and transgender in fact in these these different ways um because you know there are a lot of different ways of not holding the racial uh identity that um is associated with your presumed race um so there are there's quite a bit of variety within the category um okay so we have then trans racialism um because if if we treat race as a social construct and the social category and gender also as a social construct in the social category uh I mean do you think that there are ways by which we could think of uh changing race as being a comparable or analogous to changing gender yes yes I think that changing race and changing gender are analogous in certain ways that can be Illuminating and that can help reveal inconsistencies in our thinking um again saying that their analogous is not the same as saying that they're identical they're still very different kind of phenomena but there are relevant analogies certainly and I think for for most folks skeptical of transracialism they in fact defend the claim that gender is a social construct and that race is a social construct and so it's it's surprising in a way to deny the analogy there um usually they'll note that they're different kinds of social constructs so you know one objection uh that comes from crossetta Hayes says well the way that gender has been constructed is to locate all the was to locate gender on the level of the individual body whereas race as it's constructed doesn't locate race on the level of the individual body it kind of implicates others and implicates you know ancestry and all kinds of features that we just don't have control of um and I would argue that to over emphasize like the particular features that the social construct has upheld risks actually getting us into the territory of the biological realist because the point about the social real the point about social realism is that we can change the criteria uh we ultimately are the deciders of those criteria um and so to say well you know transgender but not trans race because of ancestry is really to Veer into the terrain of the biological realist and away from the social realist View okay so I would like to get into one last topic then uh you've also done some work on animal ethics uh and nowadays of course when it comes to using uh different animals in scientific research there are ethical guidelines and I mean people have to follow different protocols Etc and people worry much more nowadays than they did before about animal welfare in general I think it would be fair to say but in one of your papers you argue not again not against particular uses of animals in animal in scientific research or medical research but against the use of knowledge that comes from animal experimentation so could you explain that uh yes so like lots of animal Ephesus argue that it's wrong to experiment on animals and they'll have different arguments to get to that conclusion some that emphasize animals as rights holders whose you know rights to not be killed and tortured are not upheld during animal experimentation so it's wrong for that reason others argue that animal experimentation just causes enormous amounts of suffering and death to animals that is not justified by the kinds of results that animal experimentation yields so results that are just too often of dubious relevance to humans so I argued that not only is animal experimentation wrong um on what either view that you take in animal ethics but that furthermore using the results from animal experiments so I pull from debates over the use of data gained during the Holocaust because Nazis did a bunch of medical and scientific experiments on victims during the Holocaust some of which has potentially useful results and in fact the Environmental Protection Agency years ago considered using results from Nazi experiments that tested the effects of phos Gene gas on I think about 50 um prisoners in preparation for like a possible phosgene attack um against Germany and the Environmental Protection Agency recognized that those results might be useful because we want to know the effects of fast Gene gas on people but we can't run those experiments and ultimately they decided not to um use those results and yet there are lots of debates about whether or not some of that data could be ethically used um and I think those debates are different because in the case of the Nazi data there's no risk that using the data now will somehow encourage people to perform like non-consensual fatal experiments on humans and that's not true in the case of animals animals so in the case of animal experimentation you can't use the results and simultaneously condemn the practice of animal fermentation because the express purpose of animal experimentation is to gain those results um so there's there's no way of like using the results in a manner that like condemns or distances oneself from from the practice and in that way it's it's different from the use of the of the Nazi data um and you know there there are other arguments in that vicinity um that argue while the Nazi data should never be used because it's disrespectful and I think that those are good arguments but I think the best argument really is this point about how the use of the results just sustains the practice and that that that's not the case and the the use of Nazi data but it very much is the case in the in the use of animal experimentations results but with that in mind uh I mean do you think that if you're correct the end goal here should be to I at least progressively eliminate animal experimentation altogether yes experimentation that have um you know become increasingly popular and I think that you know we ought to um we ought to shift towards like the use of Technology um and other means of um gaining information from um animal experimentation um so yes I think animal experimentation should be eliminated as a practice I think that um you know all too often the results are of dubious relevance and uh and in fact we have aired in using the results from animal experimentation um so famously you know um thalidomide was tested on rats before it was um brought to humans and the results in mother rats were different from the results in pregnant humans and um famously like thalidomide babies were you know born with um all sorts of deformities um because in part the results from the animal experimentation were not reliable because and humans are different there are also all kinds of alternatives to animal experimentation and if we put our resources and focus into those they would become even better um than they already are so you know human tissue and vitro testing human stem cell research micro dosing technology I mean there's all kinds of Alternatives out there that we could just employ more and not engage in this torture of of animals as we do okay so uh would you like just before we go would you like to tell people where they can find you when you work on the internet oh yes sure people can find me at my website it's rebecca2bell.com and yeah feel free to reach out to me also at my my email um rhodes.edu and thanks so much for having me no it's been my pleasure and I really do hope to have you again on the show whenever your upcoming book is out so thank you thank you so much Ricardo hi guys thank you for watching the interview until the end please do not forget to share the video subscribe to the channel and also leave a like and if you like what I'm doing please consider supporting the show on patreon or PayPal you can find the links in the description box of the interview the issue is brought to you by enlights Learning and Development done differently check their website at nlights.com I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters perega Larson Jerry Mueller and Frederick Sunda bernardum Castle Matthew wittingbird Arno wolf Tim Hollister John Connors Philip first Connolly Robert windegar ruin as you 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