Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [63]
Peggy McIntosh takes up the problem of blindness and attempts to find ways of seeing better in the hope of thereby doing better. She claims that one reason we don’t pay more attention to the discrimination around us is because most of us are taught not to see it or the ways that we have privileges that others do not share. Most of us are taught that there is equality of opportunity, but when we look closer at society, we can see problems with this belief. Some of us, like the Star-Belly Sneetches, are born into wealthy families, while others of us are so poor we don’t have enough food to eat. Do the children born into poverty have the same opportunities as the kids of the superwealthy? McIntosh doesn’t think so. Instead, she argues that it’s like we each wear an invisible knapsack containing items that help us out and that unfairly privilege us over others. For instance, she thinks that because she’s white and heterosexual, she hasn’t faced the types of discrimination faced by those who aren’t. To better help her understand discrimination and privilege, McIntosh has written lists of things she doesn’t have to worry about, simply because of her race and sexuality. As an example, McIntosh says that unlike many homosexuals and racial minorities, she “can be reasonably sure that [her new] neighbors . . . will be neutral or pleasant”4 when she relocates. Because of her privilege, she has a mobility that others lack. Like the Star-Belly Sneetches, she has both access and acceptance into places where others are shunned. But until she slowed down, paid attention, and wrote her lists, McIntosh wasn’t aware of the extent to which she was privileged and others were disadvantaged. This is the blindness that Freire points to, and it is one of the problems that the philosophy of diversity attempts to address.
Being on the receiving end of discrimination causes a number of problems; for instance, the Plain-Belly Sneetches were unable to join in with the elite of Sneetch society, and they suffered both physically and psychologically because of it. Frantz Fanon speaks as someone relegated to the status of the Other, and he details the oppression that results. In particular, he describes the anger, fear, depression, and alienation that so often accompany discrimination, and he expresses the need for what he calls disalienation, which is the process of overcoming alienation.5 Drawing upon Fanon, Sandra Bartky discusses the psychic violence done to those deemed Other, arguing that the psychologically oppressed internalize the negative stereotypes and assumptions about themselves in ways that are “dehumanizing and depersonalizing.”6 For instance, “suppose that I, the object of some stereotype, believe in it myself—for why should I not believe what everyone else believes? I may then find it difficult to achieve what existentialists call an authentic choice of self, or what some psychologists have regarded as a state of self-actualization.”7 We have all seen children who have been shamed and ridiculed to the point that they refuse to participate in activities that might lead to further abuse, regardless of their actual abilities, something we see in “The Sneetches” as the Plain-Belly children stand back and watch the Star-Belly activities that they know they can never join. The children’s own anxiety, depression, and self-blame will keep them from putting themselves into positions where they might fail. Until they overcome the “internalization of intimations of inferiority,”8 they will continue to “exercise harsh dominion over