Abstract
The negative health effects of stress are well documented in medical and psychological research, but these effects are underexplored in political philosophy. This essay evaluates these effects in relation to the explanatory and normative value of the concept that I call “being at home.” The phenomenological description of the state of being at home is the sense of feeling safe and at ease in your context, and therefore able to relax. Although it characterizes a particular state of being for an individual person, its conditions are relational. I show how the normative value of being at home can guide nonideal action-guiding recommendations to respond to racism in light of the claim that one of the negative effects of racism is a steady stream of disruptions to a person’s sense of ease in the world. Racism and microaggressions create stress, which then causes further negative health effects to the minority body. Consequently, the physical harms perpetrated by racist and sexist societies on the members of oppressed identities can be as great as the effects of actions standardly understood as violence. Demonstrating that a nonideal theoretical approach to bioethics is well suited to evaluating the philosophical ramifications of the bodily damage incurred by microaggressions, I recommend selective and episodic separatism from the perpetrators of microaggressions as a health-protective response to the realities of living in an unjust world.
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Notes
- 1.
Hostility, here, is hostility to Keara’s flourishing or hostility to her assertion of equal status, or some combination of the two. The connection between flourishing and its relationship to the social standing of an equal is a question for future inquiry.
- 2.
For a definition of microaggressions, see Sect. 10.2.
- 3.
- 4.
See Brogaard (2013) for a list of examples of micro-inequities, some of which are microaggressions.
- 5.
For discussion of this issue, see Allison Wolf’s contribution to this volume, “Dying in detention: Where are the bioethicists.”
- 6.
Here, I make no claims about whether the medical provider has an explicit propositional belief with racist content. Instead, her practical agency has been informed by narratives and norms with content including customary forms of discrimination. In the absence of what Jose Medina calls “meta-lucidity”, it is likely that agents’ actions will perpetuate these cultural norms: “Meta-lucid subjects are those who are aware of the effects of oppression in our cognitive structures and of the limitations in the epistemic practices (of seeing, talking, hearing, reasoning, etc.) grounded in relations of oppression: for example, the invisibilization of certain phenomena, experiences, problems, and even entire subjectivities” (2013, 192).
- 7.
- 8.
There is a vast literature about the epistemic and ethical implications of implicit bias. For a survey, see Brownstein (2017).
- 9.
For a similar strategy that focuses on the effects of the targeted class rather than the motivations of the perpetrators of harm, see Kate Manne’s (2018) account of misogyny.
- 10.
This connection has been proven, at least in the case of noise as a stressor. “As Glass and Singer (1972) demonstrated clearly in the case of noise, an unpredictable stressor entails greater adaptational costs upon the individual experiencing it in terms of behavioural aftereffects than predictable or controllable stressors” (from Dion et al. 1992, 518).
- 11.
In Hahm, Ozonoff, Gaumond, and Sue’s (2010) study of the effects of discrimination on Asian-Americans, they found that “a high level of discrimination was associated with negative mental and physical health outcomes for both women and men”, but those women had worse outcomes in response to a lower threshold of perceived discrimination than men did. The connection between stress and depression has also been supported by studies of immigrant communities (Aroian and Norris, 2000).
- 12.
For a study on the effects of social stressors on women’s bodies that evaluates gender-based discrimination outside the U.S., in India, see Baker et al. (2018).
- 13.
For a systematic normative review of the contested methodology employed by ideal and nonideal theorists, see my student Laura Brown’s dissertation (in progress), “Mediated ideal theory.”
- 14.
Amartya Sen criticizes an overemphasis in political philosophy on the definition of perfectly just social arrangements, which is an approach he calls “transcendental institutionalism” (2009, 7–8).
- 15.
In her essay about “world-traveling”, Lugones (1987) defends the view that she has different selves in different contexts in relationships. She explains that she is, in fact, a playful person with her friends and family. In other contexts, though, such as in the professional world of philosophy, she is not at all playful. Preserving one’s health, though, is not always the prevailing aim. As Lugones’s discussion of being a pioneering woman of color in the traditionally white and male field of philosophy demonstrates, sometimes individuals forego their own health to create a better world or to pursue other personal goals.
- 16.
- 17.
On the phenomenon that women of color have to guard against the specter of paranoia in relation to real and imagined microaggressions, see Fatima (2017).
- 18.
For further explanation of Teju Cole’s term “white savior industrial complex”, see Aronson (2017).
- 19.
See The National Urban League’s “State of Black America 2018 black-white equality index” report, which shows that African-Americans’ overall health, measured to include life expectancy, access to care, and a range of common diseases, is 79.3% that of white Americans (7).
- 20.
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Acknowledgments
Although the views here are entirely my own, and not necessarily endorsed by any of my interlocutors, my thinking about this topic has benefitted from conversations with a community of women of color faculty at the University of Iowa, the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory’s conferences, and the 2019-2020 Imagining Latinidades Sawyer Seminar working group. I thank Elizabeth Victor and Richard Fumerton for their valuable comments on a written version of this paper and Elizabeth Zupancic for research assistance.
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Bhandary, A. (2021). “Being at Home”, White Racism, and Minority Health. In: Victor, E., Guidry-Grimes, L.K. (eds) Applying Nonideal Theory to Bioethics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 139. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72503-7_10
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