Keywords

6.1 Negative Cultural Imaginings

What are the conditions for the possibility of truth? Is certainty of knowledge ever possible—especially since it is transmitted by language, which has ambiguity at its heart? In this chapter, I will use middle and late period Ricœur to focus upon how to avoid perpetuating Ricœur’s misunderstanding of the mechanics of discrimination. I will show how his unwillingness to be direct about moral values regarding race and identity is common to many of us and has allowed the so-called culture wars to influence campus life.

Ricœur loved teaching on American campuses, believing the liberal arts colleges to be the epitome of good higher education (Ricœur et al. 1998). His first invitation to USA came in 1955 from the Quaker Haverford College, Pennsylvania—the same year his first essay collection, History and Truth was published. Over fifteen years later, after resigning from Nanterre University, he began a regular commute and divided his time between the University of Chicago (1971–1991), the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium (1970–1973) and the Sorbonne (1973–1980). In America he taught many courses in English and published prolifically in French and English and other languages. It was also on American campuses that he experienced the student unrest and demands for recognition that made him uncomfortable about ‘identity politics’.

There was considerable evidence of discrimination in the USA. In 1985 when Ricœur was commuting between Chicago and Paris, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that 55% of non-black American society believed that black people do not have the willpower or the motivation to bring themselves out of poverty. Such negative prevalent social attitudes would have made him uncomfortable; and indeed, it is disconcerting that in 2018 36% of Americans still held that belief. This is a large-scale negation of the willpower of others. In the UK the problem is less severe with circa 12% holding such views (Duffy et al. 2021). Such statistics make it possible to locate the negative in our cultural imaginings about race, because part of the populist conjuror’s trick has been to hide racism in upbeat libertarian and nationalist free speech rhetoric. In the current culture war atmosphere, there is of course always a restrictive negative hiding inside an apparent right to uninhibited free speech for some but not for others. In 2022, a survey of almost three thousand British people found that ‘being a man, being white and being a Conservative or Leave voter are characteristics that make someone more likely to feel that people take offence too easily’ (Duffy et al. 2022, 4).

The foundational—albeit rarely discussed—negative that underpins these cultural imaginings is that the modern state often uses rights-based arguments to assert that it will honour the needs and rights of all, even and especially the most marginalized, while simultaneously negating this by asserting that such communities are more unworthy than they are marginalized; we see this in the government’s determination to expel the Windrush generation (Gentleman 2019). The manifest negative binary is that black people are conceived of as ‘allochthonous’, outsiders and labelled illegal immigrants, whilst white people are seen as ‘autochthonous’ and belonging without question even if they are from another country. This binary can function as a cover to distort the relationship between the citizen and the state—a distortion that allows racialised inequity to go unnoticed by many white people until our attention is drawn to it—as Ricœur did in his 2010 Being A Stranger (Ricœur 2010).

There is evidence aplenty of this in the public domain to which we should turn our own attention. For example, the Wessely Report on mental health found that black people are more likely to be subjected to community treatment orders than white people (Wesseley 2018). These treatment orders can be extended to retain individuals in mental hospital for their own or others’ safety. To compound this, mental health issues among black people are more likely to be caused by social stress such as racism, as opposed to being related to genetic predisposition (Bhui et al. 2018). Such inequalities are also evident in other areas of life. A 2022 Greenpeace and Runnymede Trust report found that black people are far more likely than white or Asian people to live near polluted land and dirty air and water (Craig 2022). Regarding women’s health care, a 2020 report by MBRRACE-UK showed that black women are more than four times as likely, and Asian women twice as likely, to die in childbirth than white women (Bunch et al. 2021). In terms of the sociopolitical experience of British Muslims, in British Muslims, Ethnicity and Health Inequalities, the authors (who include medical practitioners and community workers) show through their research that Muslim religious identity is yet another explanatory factor—along with class, ethnicity, racism and deprivation—for the many negative health outcomes that persist for them (Dogra 2023).

Even though Ricœur abandoned his twenty years of work on negation (c. 1950–1970) as he settled into his lecture calendar in Chicago, in my writings I show how, after shifting to language studies, he incorporated his use of the negative into his language analyses (Scott-Baumann 2013). Furthermore, the original corpus of negation work also remains valuable for our understanding of discrimination and the way it sits hidden and festering inside the populist rhetoric of ethno-nationalism. In the only essay he published on negation, he gives us the solution: we need to act, rather than accept at face value the form of a negative argument. We can see this happening now, when polarizing and extreme culture war arguments demand protection of the current curriculum, the victors’ voice, versus decolonisation of the curriculum. These binaries narrow our scope for taking action because they seem to preclude compromise and have an emotionally depressive effect:

Under the pressure of the negative we must re-achieve a notion of being which is act rather than form, living affirmation, the power of existing and making exist. (Ricœur 1965, 328)

6.2 Whiteness

Yet action is rare. Those like me who do not suffer such discrimination are blissfully untouched by it and fail to take a stand against it, even when made aware of it by the experts on economic, educational, health care related, political and social inequities (MacDorman et al. 2021). It is these systemic cycles of discrimination that may be more deserving of Ricœur’s epithet ‘bad infinity/ies’ (see Sects. 6.5 and 6.7) than the desires of black students on campus.

At least some of our inaction must be attributed to the fact that many white people enjoy more privileges than many black people do and thus need not change the status quo. This has led to scholarship and media noise about ‘whiteness’ as a phenomenon that must be challenged because it inhibits improvement for minorities. There are different ways of using the term whiteness: as a racial descriptor; as a way of analysing discrimination that takes place; as a value judgment because being white is therefore oppressive; whiteness as some sort of inherited privilege that is denied people of colour and whiteness as a bias blind spot (Malik 2023, 250–254).

There are many arguments raised to dismiss whiteness. For example, some can argue with conviction that skin colour is not the only discriminatory factor because class is also a major determinant of success or failure. Yet, ceding that class and poverty are also factors does not belie racism being the driver (Malik 2023). We could also dismiss whiteness by citing evidence of black communities in the deep south of the US wanting to be as tough on crime (and thus on black criminals) as white racists; indeed, one might even argue that black communities are racist (Jr. Forman 2017). That would however be disingenuous since it seems reasonable to believe that black people who want black criminals punished simply want crime controlled, and are not racially motivated. The criminal justice system uses the same specious argument, dismissing race as a possible contributory factor in criminal sentencing; however, their claim is debunked by statistics showing black people are targeted more by law enforcement and receive harsher sentences because incarceration is used as social control (Alexander 2012). What is required however, is the recognition that racism can contribute to poverty which can make crime a likelier outcome; the solution is thus large-scale social improvements to ameliorate the factors that lead to those outcomes (Alexander 2012).

6.3 Jim Crow

In order to understand the environment of the University of Chicago, I will briefly summarise some of the history of antiblack discrimination and violence in America. In the early twentieth century six million African American people were part of the Great Migration from the south to north of America to flee Jim Crow laws that discriminated against black people in all areas of civil life from 1877 to 1964. Chicago needed workers and attracted half a million of those migrants. Yet racism was rife there too: with the Ku Klux Klan well established and housing segregation enforced by estate agents (‘realtors’) and violent mobs, 1919 witnessed the extreme events of the Red Summer riots. Martin Luther King moved there in 1966 but was unable to make progress. In 1970, the American Nazi Party established itself in Marquette Park to fight integrationist attempts. Even in the twenty-first century, Chicago remains one of the most segregated cities in USA and young black people are still denied access to parts of the city with better employment prospects.

Amidst this Chicago culture, during the 1980s and 90s Ricœur developed a renewed interest in law and analysed the work of American scholar John Rawls, whose book Theory of Justice became a key text on the idea of societal equality that an egalitarian legal system could actualise. Rawls proposed a mythical, symbolic way of being fair by remaining ignorant of the state of affairs of those requesting justice: he thus proposed group decision-making from behind a veil of ignorance which would universalize fair behaviour in sharing social and economic goods fairly and avoiding selfishness: ‘imagine if everyone were to act like me?’. However, the distributive justice that ensues from this procedure cannot, Ricœur reflects, resolve discrimination since it fails to create deeper moralities for resolving societal injustices (Ricœur 2000, 2007). In fact, the procedural basis for a moral code created by veiled group decision-making offers less than Kant’s test of moral universalism; for Kant had already added community concerns and cosmopolitan issues to the person’s load, the ever-widening concentric circles of right action from one person to many. Kant’s moral imperative thereby demanded more than Rawls as he also enjoined each of us to treat people as ends in themselves, not as means to an end, and that it is possible to act as both subject and object (Ricœur 2007, 237). Rawls’ focus upon fair exchange of social and economic goods has materialist features that neglect the need for deeper moralities. Ricoeur foresaw this in his early work on negation in which he shows the risks inherent in a model of conduct that relies upon having/not having. This can lead to delusions about debt/not having as a way to free oneself from responsibility to others. In fact, we are indebted to others in so many ways and these debts can be addressed by a both/and model, not an either/or dichotomy.

6.4 The Denied Negative Debt at the Heart of Authoritarian Populism

Ricœur’s twenty-year long project on negation convinced him that we should beware of defining ourselves, as we often do, by lack, longing and loss rather than by what we actually have (Ricœur 1966, 23). This is the malaise at the heart of extreme populism: at its centre, I argue, is a potent form of lack—a nothingness, because such populism deliberately incites us to desire that which is unattainable, and which we probably at some level know to be unreal. For example: Can we really do without the European Union? Can we really have free speech? Can we change our gender identity fully? Are binaries real?

For Ricœur, it is necessary to accept that binary thinking is real in that it is an integral and irresistible component of much human thought; Derrida also shows that we often attach more moral heft to one of a pair, so that one is viewed positively and the other is negated (Derrida 1976, 2001). But, in contrast to populism’s trick of insisting that irresolvable oppositional tension is the key to success, Ricœur demanded that we identify some sort of synergy even between opposed belief systems, since if there is no apparent overlap, such contrasts and comparisons would be unproductive.

Ricœur’s lecture notes on negation span the 1950s to 1970s and demonstrate the disturbance to balanced thought that can be created by false negatives that, in turn, develop debt and debt denial. In his 1971 lecture script Kant and negation, Ricœur used several ways of explaining Kant on the topic (thanks to Goncalo Marcelo for translation). Of them, given the dominance of economic factors in our twenty-first century lives, I choose his economic example which shows the two ways in which the idea and concept of ‘nothing’ has been conceptualized in western thought from Aristotle onwards. The first is real: the cancellation of a concept by its contradictory concept, e.g. financial credit leading to and being contradicted by active debt i.e. money being lost (I had money, but now that I have lost it, it is not there any longer). This is real opposition: something is posited, it exists and is then absent. The second way is through a distorted version of logic that is unreal. Logical contradiction produces a different kind of ‘nothing’. In Ricoeur’s notes on Kant we see this with the example of debit/money owed: when I fail to honour a debit note, I refuse to acknowledge that I owe money. In this second version of the negative, the consequence of one act (e.g. leaving the EU) leads to the contradiction of another reality (e.g. being in debt to the EU), and finally to cancellation of it and denial (I do not owe anything to the EU or to anybody; rather, I am owed) (Ricœur archives 1971, page 8452).

It is clear that it is this second type of negation (logical contradiction) that the populist rhetoric of the right (and left—see below) tends to follow. This is because the phenomena upon which the right-wing propagandas are focused (e.g. take back control, take back sovereignty, block off migration routes) are unsound because their use of language conceals unrealistic and contradictory states of debt. The impulse to leave the EU entails denying that we have a debt to the EU and asserting that we are not dependent upon them for trade, culture, history and security (our debit note). Although this debt is unequivocal, denying the debit note—and even trying to turn it into a quasi-credit note whereby the EU apparently owes the UK a great deal—has proven to be highly effective in rhetoric. Its success owes much to the assertions of lost sovereignty and the perceived need to support ‘British values’: they become so huge and ill-defined that they cannot become manageable concepts. The rhetoric is also deceptive in that the strong satisfyingly adversarial conflict it embodies does indeed promise a clear outcome: one ‘side’ will win the argument and the other will lose.

Left-wing populism also falls into negative logical contradiction when, for example, it takes a position based on the negative premise that leaders are by definition corrupt. The consequence of that is to free the worker or student of any obligation to the bosses, which is to deny any dependence on them; rather, we the ‘people’ believe we are morally in credit because we have the moral advantage as the downtrodden and we are owed power. This postulates a cancellation (our debit note is considered to be actually cancelled, rendered negative simply because we deny it). We can feel powerful because we have decided that we don’t owe anyone anything. Paradoxically this powerful feeling is born out of the lack, longing and loss at the heart of extreme populism: it overcomes the doubts of those who may see multiple sides to situations, by implying that if they fail to support clarity then they are the drifters, the wobblers and the ‘don’t knows’; this accusation of weakness cannot be easily challenged. Thus, a high level of rigidity has become a marker of similarity between left and right extreme populism; and the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ may have even become disorientating and less useful as markers of political positions and more significant as manifestations of extremities of thought.

At this point I propose we use one of Ricœur’s several working definitions of dialectic to dismantle these populist binaries. He saw, as Adorno of the Frankfurt school did, that Hegel’s dialectic absorbed the negative and thus denied us the importance of accepting negative aspects of our lives; nor I think, would he endorse Badiou’s 2013 commitment to dialectic that is a positive commitment to communism (rather than a critique of it). Ricœur hoped, instead, for an iterative balance that gives weight to both the positive and the negative—and this is important as it will help us look at these apparently polarising strategies and make something positive of their outrageousness. Accordingly, both the examples of the right’s idea of the EU’s problems and the left’s idea of corrupt leadership can be understood as rooted in reasonable concerns:

Here by dialectic I mean, on the one hand, the acknowledgement of the initial disproportionality between our two terms and, on the other hand, the search for practical mediations between them – mediations, let us quickly say, that are always fragile and provisory. (Ricœur 1995, 315)

This method requires the detection, and balancing of binaries and is useful for deconstructing, taming and replacing with pluralisms those populist discourses which otherwise insist upon one certainty and drive wedges between groups. It is also imperative that we engage with the ideas we reject in order to better understand ourselves, since they will inevitably contain elements of our own thinking; indeed, Ricœur posits that understanding of self can only be achieved through understanding another person (Ricœur 1992). Teju Cole, in his essay Black Body, gives us a potent example of a Ricœurian approach: balancing binaries and being confident and positive, as opposed to measuring oneself by lack, longing and loss; he does so by rejecting the sense of exclusion from western culture imparted by his hero, the great black writer James Baldwin, eloquently asserting: ‘Bach, so profoundly human, is my heritage. I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt painting’ (Cole 2014).

6.5 ‘Bad Infinity’ and the Unhappy Consciousness

The Course of Recognition (2004) is amongst Ricœur’s last works, so his ideas therein can be understood as reasonably final. In it, he explored further this issue of recognising difference in others, such that they feel content to be recognized; yet, Laitinen commented in surprise in 2011:

There is really no discussion of the sense of recognizing one’s identity, of who one is in particular (and not merely the fact that, like others, one is a capable, responsible agent). This is surprising, given Ricœur’s famous earlier analyses of ipse-identity and narrative identity, which no doubt are related to recognition of oneself. (Laitinen 2011, 38)

I agree with Laitinen. Indeed, I believe ‘recognition of oneself’ is also closely related to the way a country understands its own collective identity. In Britain, state pressure is increasingly being used to differentiate people according to skin colour, while simultaneously denying that any such differentiation is taking place: for example, Ukrainian refugees are welcomed; Syrian and African refugees are not. Many plausible yet unsound sophistical reasons are given for this, such as that Ukrainians enter our country legally while people of colour do not. These legal/illegal options are fully controlled by government, and such an approach can influence individual citizens’ attitudes. Laitinen follows this line with his summary of what full recognition might look like:

the full course of recognition might be something like the following: i) recognition-identification of something as ‘a something’ at all, or as this particular thing….; ii) recognition-adhesion in accepting a proposition as true; iii) recognition-adhesion in accepting a norm as valid; iv) recognition-attestation of oneself as a capable agent, …an irreplaceable person; v) recognition of others in the sense of esteem, respect or approbation or love. And perhaps one should add the following: vi) recognition of collective agents, institutions, organizations, groups. (Laitinen 2011, 47 with elisions)

Given his work on numerous social justice issues and his excellent writing in Being a Stranger on the better or worse chances in life bestowed by being born into certain circumstances (Ricœur 2010), it is remarkable to note this omission of societal factors. Ricoeur abandoned his early work on negation which could have shown him that there are individuals and groups whose history of lack, longing and loss is inscribed so deeply that it can only be rebalanced with measures that destabilize his dialectical model. Is this perhaps a specifically French blind-spot of secular republicanism, where the society of equals cannot recognize its own particularities? The first French republic did not abolish slavery and subsequently, under Napoleon, the French empire maintained and increased its reliance upon slaves (Reiss 2013). Ricœur, in a section entitled Multiculturalism and the ‘politics of recognition’, warns of the highly polemical character of ‘a notion such as multiculturalism’, and also names ‘battles on other fronts, whether those of feminist movements or of racial and cultural minorities’ (Ricœur 2005, 212–218). He analyses this as a problem of collective identity that is rooted in history dating back centuries and he worries that he cannot retain his ‘descriptive’ stance when exploring such issues (whilst in fact only spending a few pages on it). In an alarmed tone he seeks to define what is to him the non-normative nature of the politics of identity:

Does not the claim for affective, juridical and social recognition, through its militant, conflictual style, end up as an indefinite demand, a kind of ‘bad infinity’? (Ricœur 2005, 218)

He believed this bad infinity leads to ‘an insatiable quest’, ‘a new form of the ‘unhappy consciousness’, as either ‘an incurable sense of victimization or the indefatigable postulation of unattainable ideals’ (Ricœur 2005, 218). Here, he drew on Hegel’s model in which the ‘unhappy consciousness' is the third stage of self-consciousness after stoicism and skepticism; Hegel described it as trapped: that which ‘…knows that it is the dual consciousness of itself, as self-liberating, unchangeable, and self-identical, and as bewildering and self-perverting, and it is the awareness of this self-contradictory nature itself’ (Hegel 1977, 206). Ricœur presented the ‘unhappy consciousness' as the regrettable product of unreasonable demands for more recognition on the part of some peoples and some communities, thereby putting a certain level of responsibility—even blame—for this upon those who struggle in vain against lack of recognition. It is remarkable to note the growth of many forms of identity politics and attendant vulnerabilities: for example, the term ‘trigger warning’ was first used for soldiers traumatised on the battlefield in the Vietnam war, and now it is used to describe the misuse of words—as if they are weapons that wound. Such amplification of trauma requires careful attention. Yet the issue of racism is most urgently in need of attention, and we need to challenge Ricœur and move on ahead.

When reflecting on his decades of teaching in the USA, Ricœur offered this explanation of why American universities ‘have never succeeded in integrating blacks in significant numbers’:

A large number of them [blacks] live in lone-parent families and are raised by single mothers; onto the economic disaster is grafted a cultural one. …. Blacks who have succeeded rarely involve themselves in educational activities on behalf of their own people; in this way the black community is massively abandoned to its own lot. (Ricœur et al. 1998, 47)

Using discriminatory terms such as ‘their own people’, Ricoeur’s explanation lays the blame for the low educational attainment of black students on the black communities themselves.

This sounds like Oscar Lewis’s ‘culture of poverty’ argument, i.e. that the values of the poor perpetuate their poverty (Lewis 1964). Lewis’s argument has recently been reinterpreted as an argument that such values are not the ‘responsibility’ of the poor, rather they are a stigma created and imposed by the powerful upon the poor—a more Marxist interpretation. Yet the more recent interpretation of Lewis does not seem to fit Ricoeur’s thinking here: he did not discuss causal and correlational relationships between racism or discrimination in society and on campus, or the possibility of institutional racism, and his arguments contain difficult tensions. On the one hand, he ceded that ‘affirmative action’ (i.e. the preference of a candidate representing a less privileged group over the application of a candidate representing the more privileged group) can be enacted ‘by reason of the wrong done in the past—and, it is true, also in the present’; yet he also warned that affirmative action will ‘explicitly contradict the principle of equal opportunity’ by ‘violating the principle of the present equality of individuals before the law’ (Ricœur et al. 1998, 54–58). He was very clear that ‘the paradox is indeed that the praise of difference ends up reinforcing the internal identities of the groups themselves’ (Ricœur et al. 1998, 55–56) and that it would thus be better to allow the current legal, social, educational and cultural systems to take control of redressing inequalities.

Similarly, whilst he admitted that all are not treated equally in the law as shown in several essays in Paul Ricœur and the Task of Political Philosophy (Johnson and Stiver 2012), he nevertheless counsels strongly against the ‘ideology of difference’ especially when combined explosively with ‘corrective justice’ because ‘the classical philosophy of individual rights is less and less apt for the demands that are supported by entire communities claiming an indivisible collective identity’ (Ricœur et al. 1998, 56).

This analysis is shocking, given the high, systemic and systematic levels of discrimination meted out to black communities in Chicago during the decades of Ricœur’s visits. The University of Chicago did not stand out particularly in the 1960s as a hotbed of American student revolt, yet the Black Power movement was energised by widespread and historically entrenched racial injustices, school segregation and housing segregation across the city. Mayor Daley’s brutal policing policies only ended with his death while still in office in 1976; however, even after Daley’s tenure, the university continued to implement clearance policies on black communities (Cohen and Taylor 2000, 183–215; Bradley 2021; Carlton 2020; Rolland-Diamond 2019).

The assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee (April 1968) was marked by demonstrations and riots in Chicago and showed the depths of despair of black communities. When he left Nanterre behind him, Ricœur was in effect exchanging one unstable campus situation for an even more volatile one in Chicago. As a visiting scholar without long-term institutional responsibilities, he will have been protected from its worst excesses, and he may possibly have been influenced by narratives from city authorities and lobby groups that depicted black communities as criminal. As Danielle Allen comments in her 2004 book Talking to Strangers, which she wrote while at the University of Chicago: ‘Many in the university community believed the myths’ of criminality adhering to black communities around the university from the 1940s onwards (Allen 2004, 177).

In the 1960s radical white students and those of Spanish-American heritage worked with black students to pressurise University of Chicago authorities into increasing numbers of black students and staff and altering the curriculum, with some success. But perhaps the most remarkable characteristic inherent in Black Power protest in Chicago was the students’ conviction that these actions were not only about university issues, but were essential in improving living conditions for black and other communities beyond the campus. This motivation could also be attributed to the French students in 1968, because they worked effectively with French unions and workers to achieve improvements in labour conditions. However, the French movement was shallower, not deeply rooted in the need and the desire to rectify endemic social and political injustices such as those experienced across Chicago.

The Chicago students provide us with a template for encouraging students as citizens to see that they have an invaluable role to play in improving society. Their Chicago model of activism led to violence and deaths and yet, without advocating such desperate measures, we can take inspiration from the expansive democratic vision of students agitating for campus improvements whilst simultaneously looking outwards beyond the campus in order to guide, support and lead civil communities towards pressuring the government with specific demands for societal improvements, especially for black communities (Rolland-Diamond 2019, 364). Here Allen finds political friendship enacted, i.e. trust and shared resolve and goals even when cultural differences, for example, may be perceived as significant barriers to long-term relationships. As Allen expresses it:

Political friendship does not solidify the boundaries of the community but encourages the cultivation of habits within the community that make cosmopolitanism itself possible as a cultural orientation (Allen 2004, 221, fn. 18)

Yet fifty years after the events of the 1960s and 70s which she describes, Danielle Allen notes with concern that the university had a private security company to provide armed response where necessary, and that this has since been expanded as a law-keeping element in neighbourhoods beyond the university (Allen 2004, 180–181). She accepts that policing the university area may have some short-term utility, but the long-term outcome has been the control and suppression of black groups since at least the 1950s; using the concept of utopia much as Ricœur explained it (see Sect. 4.6), she states: ‘In my utopia universities would have no police’ (Allen 2004, 180–181).

Because his discussion of bad infinity in The Course of Recognition appears in a section on Multiculturalism and the ‘politics of recognition’, we can confidently accept that his thinking here includes ethnic differences (Ricœur 2005, 212–216). Indeed, some years earlier, Ricœur had already listed ‘sex, sexual orientation, ethnic group, social class etc.’ as contentious issues on US campuses which involved, in his view, exaggerated demands for recognition (Ricœur et al. 1998, 56). He used the term ‘bad infinity’ in 1998 too, in his acceptance speech for the Kluge Prize in Washington DC, asking also how sufficient recognition could ever be received if ‘the demand for recognition expressed in this struggle is insatiable’ (Ricœur 2016, 3:295).

In his attempt to use dialectical balance that takes equally from each side of a binary with a seesaw motion and ends up, even temporarily, balanced, Ricœur’s writing on this topic fails to take account of the sheer imbalance of power between former slave and master that cannot be contained within a Hegelian model of dialectical equilibrium. Rather, as Fanon explains in the final chapter of his 1952 Black Skin, White Masks (‘The Black Man and Recognition’), for reciprocated mutual recognition between black people and white people to be possible, change on a phenomenal scale is required:

I am not only here-now, locked in thinghood. I desire somewhere else and something else. I demand that an account be taken of my contradictory activity insofar as that I pursue something other than life, insofar as that I am fighting for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognition (Fanon 1952, 2008, 193)

Demands for recognition can be deflected by arguing that the ideology of difference can manifest itself in extreme forms that seem counterproductive, such as demands that only black academics can teach about black authors. However, an example like this can become a strawman argument, an exaggerated version of an argument designed to make it seem ridiculous, and thus easier to knock over than a real person would be. Here the strawman highlights an example of identity politics in such a way that it seems as if all identity politics takes such a stance. This is not so; many would argue the urgent need to increase numbers of black academics so that they can teach about black authors and avoid perpetuating the domination of white norms for defining black identity, while not excluding white academics. The strawman must be identified and dismissed in order to address and reduce racism. Ricoeur did not propose a strawman, but he refused to accept that the norms used to discriminate against people of colour are different from the norms used to discriminate in favour of white people. He asked for ‘equivalence without identity’ (Ricœur 2007: 31, 114), and for a universalizable humanity in which we observe ‘a just distance’ (Ricœur 2005: 263). However, universalism cannot house the normative approaches he takes in his analysis of people of colour in America because they are racialized norms and thus different from those he applies to white populations. Thus we see how, in adopting Honneth’s development of a theory of recognition using normative content (Honneth 1996), Ricœur excludes the possibility of looking at racism. Fanon was writing at the time of Ricoeur’s Algerian decolonisation efforts, yet Fanon described the individual and collective burden of colonialism in ways that Ricoeur did not recognise forty years later in Chicago. Despite Jackson Reese Faust’s argument that Ricœur and Fanon both sought ‘mutual recognition untainted by racism or coloniality—a “new skin” for humanity’, and can strengthen each other (Faust 2022), there is a radical and ineradicable discrepancy in their respective understanding of inequalities. As Honderich commented: ‘You who are reading this essay are, in all likelihood, a beneficiary of the system of inequality’ (Honderich 2014, 19); indeed, the magnitude of discrimination is demonstrably one of the major issues of our time and thus has normative status (Goodier 2023). Fanon understood that magnitude.

6.6 Racism and Critical Race Theory (CRT)

Discriminatory practices can only be tackled if everyone involved in society believes that all people really are entitled to be treated as equals, and are taught this at school and university and by family. Efforts to decolonize the curriculum by using narratives from history’s losers as well as winners are attempts to redress the imbalance in our cultural understanding of race. Yet, Kemi Badenoch, in her role as Minister for Equalities in 2020, argued against decolonizing the curriculum:

the recent fad to decolonize maths, decolonize engineering, decolonize the sciences that we have seen across our universities, to make race the defining principle of what is studied is not just misguided but actively opposed to the fundamental purpose of education’. (‘Black History Month’ 2020; UK Parliament 2020, sec. 5.31.35–5.41.20)

In stark contrast, Kehinde Andrews argues in The New Age of Empire that racism and colonialism still rule the world (Andrews 2021): racism is not a new fake problem created by the woke; rather, it is still the defining feature of the longstanding status quo—and decolonization efforts seek to attenuate it. Although doubtless aware of the realities of racism herself, Badenoch seeks to discredit those who would reform the system to support global majority citizens and students. She relies on strawman arguments, repetition and hyperbole, i.e. the rhetorical skills that Gorgias and Callicles tell Socrates that they depend upon to convince lawmakers (see Sect. 3.7); indeed, her speech about Black History Month was delivered in the chamber of the House of Commons, which enabled her to make full use of the influence and power of her political status. Her hyperbolic description of critical race theory (CRT) as ‘an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression’ (UK Parliament 2020, sec. 5.35.00–5.36.37) was praised by the editor of libertarian journal Spiked, who pronounced that Badenoch understands that ‘the culture war is very real and needs to be fought’ (Slater 2022).

Libertarians demand free speech and an end to what they call identity politics and the excesses of rights-based liberalism. However, like Charles Taylor, known as a social liberal (see Sect. 6.7), one of their main failings is their refusal to consider the reality for those who belong to a global majority of many different skin tones in which, generally, the lighter the skin tone, the more respect, more power and therefore more confidence and agency a person will be able to command than their darker-skinned counterparts, as shown in Phoenix and Craddock’s research on colourism, Black Men’s Experiences of Colourism in the UK (Phoenix and Craddock 2022). Teju Cole also eloquently explains the predicament:

There are glances all over Europe and in India and anywhere I go outside Africa. The test is how long the glances last, whether they become stares, with what intent they occur, whether they contain any degree of hostility or mockery, and to what extent connections, money or mode of dress shield me in these situations. To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially (Cole 2016, 6)

6.7 Racism: Can Ricœur Help?

Writing about the regrettable possibility of ‘bad infinities’, by which he means what he perceives to be the ever more insistent demands for recognition (Ricœur et al. 1998; Ricœur 2005), Ricœur failed us in two issues that concern racism.

First, although he admitted that equality under the law is necessary but may not be sufficient, he nevertheless found worrying, the exceptionalism demanded by some groups that represent a minority on campus.

Second, Ricœur was respectful of Charles Taylor’s arguments in The Politics of Recognition (Taylor 1994) despite its implications. Taylor’s anger about Canadian policies regarding the imposed separation of Francophone and Anglophone groups is instructive on language policies. By focusing on the way in which groups are identified by their cultures, Taylor was able to deliberate upon Eurocentric and Western values and relative judgmental discrimination against other cultures. However, of greater import is that Taylor’s analysis functions as a displacement activity that ignores much more serious racial societal ills, such as long-term Canadian domination of the First Nation (the original inhabitants of Canada), as discussed by Glen Coulthard in Red Skin, White Masks (Coulthard 2014). Ricœur accepted Taylor’s argument, believing it to be an effective critique of the argument that ‘it is universal identity that appears as discriminatory, a form of particularism disguising itself as a universal principle’ (Ricœur 2005, 215). Taylor inverted the situation so that those who are discriminated against with negative differential treatment, are actually depicted as those asking for unfair privileges:

the politics of difference often redefines non-discrimination as requiring that we make these distinctions the basis of differential treatment (Taylor 1994, 39)

Ricœur did allow, adopting Taylor’s dismissive term of ‘politics of recognition’, that this will lead to societies being judged in future by how they treat their minorities, but this is not good enough. The truth of racism is so much more fundamental, elemental and gut-wrenching than Ricœur or Taylor allowed:

But the black body comes prejudged and as a result it is placed in needless jeopardy. To be black is to bear the brunt of selective enforcement of the law, and to inhabit a psychic unsteadiness in which there is no guarantee of personal safety. You are a black body first, before you are a kid walking down the streets or a Harvard professor who has misplaced his keys (Cole 2016, 13–14)

I imagine that neither Taylor nor Ricœur would disagree with this statement, and yet to support Cole requires more than agreeing with him. This common personal failure is incisively elaborated on by George Orwell in his discourse on a different manifestation of discrimination, i.e. anti-Semitism:

what vitiates nearly all that is written about anti-Semitism is the assumption in the writer’s mind that he himself is immune to it. ‘Since I know that antisemitism is irrational’, he argues ‘it follows that I do not share it’. He thus fails to start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable evidence – that is in his own mind (Orwell 2018, 44)

Similarly, people often deny that they are racist. As Honderich explains it:

The agents of inequality are pretty well out of sight or, if they are in sight, they are ourselves, they are many and impersonal and they are distant from their work. (Honderich 2014, 37)

Yet if we return to Ricœur’s interpretation of Kant and the negative, to assert that ‘I am not racist’ is to negate a debit, and to owe a debt to truth. Deny it and supposedly cancel it as a white person may, this is a refusal to accept that centuries of colonial, neo-colonial dominance and slavery by white majority nations have systemically and systematically reduced and are still reducing the life chances of the black and global majority populations in myriad ways. None of that is directly my fault but I need to acknowledge it and I can do something about it. Ricœur abhorred the facts of colonialism, yet did not see that the unhappy consciousness leads to repeated demands for dignity and recognition, and may be the necessary first step towards righting such systemic wrongs. If I deny all this I can only increase the negative by owing such a debt. Because I deny this debt it can never become a positive move that acknowledges transferred responsibility. By denying this debt I refuse to remedy the lack, longing and loss of centuries of injustice; one example of the latter in modern times is the bureaucratisation of state and civil surveillance of Muslim populations by the Prevent counterterror policy—a scourge Afua Hirsch explains well in BRIT(ish) (Hirsch 2018).

6.8 Communities of Inquiry Sample: Are Universities Perpetuating Institutional Racism?

The government, the university sector and the media represent three current approaches to the issue of discrimination and difference on campus in 2023, which show how much the university sector has changed since 1968. As a way of exploring the approach of Communities of Inquiry, discuss these approaches. A group of 12–20 individuals can form three small groups, and each subgroup is to justify one of the positions set out below. Use procedural ethics to think clearly and stay calm.

The government:

On 27 June 2022 Michelle Donelan (UK Minister for Universities) advised the British HE sector to stop developing work on a ‘race equality charter’ because these ‘diversity schemes’ are expensive and they also threaten free speech:

Given the importance of creating an HE environment in which free speech and academic freedom can flourish, I would like to ask you to reflect carefully as to whether your continued membership of such schemes is conducive to establishing such an environment. (Donelan 2022)

Donelan’s intervention requests that universities think carefully about supporting diversity, inferring that there is no need to do so and that attempts to support diversity would damage free speech. This confused letter is difficult to fathom but seems supportive of the libertarian use of free speech, i.e. advocating free debate even if it is discriminatory. This implies that work designed to support high achievement of students who are different from the white, middle-class norm, is undesirable. Difference apparently does not exist. Racism supposedly does not happen. Privilege is clearly not a factor in success.

The university sector:

In response, Universities UK (UUK, the body responsible for supporting the university sector) asked for evidence to substantiate her claim. They asserted that they would not agree to follow her advice and proposed to continue supporting the sector in developing the race equality charter, asserting:

We do not believe that free speech and voluntary external assurance frameworks are at odds with each other – rather they can help to address power imbalances and ensure a more diverse range of voices are empowered to speak up. (Adams 2022)

The ‘antiwoke’ media voices:

Alternatively, this dispute may be about rectifying an imbalance of what used to be known as’political correctness’. It is possible that Donelan is responding to general alarm about the purported chilling of free speech in order to avoid upsetting minority interests on campus. This includes complaints (mostly from outside the university sector) about the muzzling of free expression though excessive use of trigger warnings, safe spaces and suppression of the importance of empire through decolonisation of the curriculum. The alarm can be summed up by the Telegraph article of May 2022 in which Sir John Hayes, who chairs the Common-Sense Group of MPs in the UK parliament, is quoted on the subject of this same racial equality charter:

Be in no doubt, this is not merely brainless woke nonsense, it is a sinister attempt to indoctrinate students and to turn places of light and learning into places dominated by darkness. (Malnick 2022)

Donelan, the university sector and the media all say they seek to create positive and inclusive environments which promote and protect free speech and academic freedom. Donelan asserts this in the conclusion to her letter, and it is endorsed by the UUK in their response. It may, however, be necessary to consider the role of government and social media: are they complicating the debate in contradictory and disruptive ways? What do you think?