Ladelle McWhorter

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Normalization and the Welfare StateLadelle McWhorterIn Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, I argued that as race was absorbed into biology in the nineteenth century, it was recast from a morphological typology to a function of physiological and evolutionary development (McWhorter 2009b). Racial difference became a sign of developmental difference. Racial groups represented stages of human evolution, and raced individuals were to be disciplined and managed in accordance with developmental norms.Twentieth-century race was therefore a category and tool of normalization; to be raced was to be located at a particular point along a developmental curve. Some races were thought to be more or less arrested in their development, while others were merely retarded, and theorists disagreed at times about which were which. But they all agreed that the most highly developed race was the Nordic or the Anglo-Saxon. Anglo-Saxons were the norm for modern human beings— anatomically, physiologically, intellectually, and morally. There were other white races whose status was debated (Mediterraneans and Ashkenazi Jews, for example), and there were disputes over the evolutionary status of Chinese, Hindus, and Mexicans. But most theorists agreed that at the very bottom of the developmental scale we should place Celts, Negroes, and American Indians. These peoples were savages, primitives. They should be trained to the extent possible to contribute to the society that had already superseded them, but their proper destiny was to pass away into extinction as humanity advanced.These evolutionary stragglers, along with the evolutionary throwbacks that appeared sometimes among whites, were considered dangerous for two main reasons. First, a great many of them were expensive. They were shiftless, often incompetent, and frequently lawless. Because of them, it was necessary to [End Page 39] maintain police forces, prisons, poorhouses, and asylums. They were a drain on the economic advance of society, which affected its educational and technological advance and ultimately its evolutionary advance as well. Second, because they had primitive sexual urges unrestrained by reason as well as heritable defects and diseases, they threatened the bloodlines of more advanced human beings. In short, they posed a risk for the ongoing evolutionary advancement of the entire Human Race. To protect the Race, it was necessary to contain these primitives, savages, and throwbacks and to reduce their numbers through careful management of their sexuality. This, I argued in the book, was racism’s cutting edge in the early twentieth century.Since publishing the book, I have done some work on the changes in practices of racism in the wake of the Biological Synthesis—that is, the unification of biology and genetics that occurred in the 1930s through the efforts of renowned scientists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr (McWhorter 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). As I discussed in that work, by 1950, evolutionary biology was less a study of species development than it was a study of the effects of evolutionary forces acting on and within populations. Correlatively, racial practices shifted toward management of statistically delineated populations or ethnic groups. Theorists and policymakers recognized that not all members of a given population have the same genes, meaning that old-style racism (which assumed, for example, that all Negroes were stupid) was false; some Negroes might be quite brilliant, in fact. It was not The Negro who was stupid but the population of Negroes in the aggregate that was measurably stupider than the population of Anglo-Saxons. Accordingly, normalization now occurred at the level of the population. Disciplinary practices designed for cultivating the capacities of groups of individuals were altered or replaced to focus on groups as groups, as aggregates. The point was to shift the statistical norm of the population rather than to alter the bodies or behavior of each and every individual. I have argued elsewhere (McWhorter 2009a, 5) that this merger of disciplinary normalization and population management constitutes the full flowering of what Foucault calls biopower (Foucault 1978, 140).When Lisa Guenther invited me to speak at the plenary on “Re-thinking Whiteness” that took place at the fifth annual meeting of philoSOPHIA at Vanderbilt University, she explained that although many presenters offer polished papers, it has been a...

Queer defies categorization and resists preset developmental trajectories. Practices of queering identities emerged near the end of the twentieth century as ways of resisting normalizing networks of power/knowledge. But how effective are queer practices at resisting networks of power/knowledge (including disciplines) that are not primarily normalizing in their functioning? This essay raises that question in light of expanding neoliberal discourses and institutions which, in some quarters at least, themselves undermine normalized identities in favor of a proliferation of personal styles susceptible to governance through market forces. Special attention is given to Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics in this analysis

Charles Scott has always encouraged his students to take up the questions they find most troubling, difficult, and even possibly unanswerable. For him, philosophy is about movements of thinking themselves rather than arrival at reasonable conclu­sions. In tribute to Scott as a teacher, this paper takes up a troubling and perhaps unanswerable question: How might we teach our students today so as to prepare them for life in a world of ecological instability beyond what any member of our species has ever experienced? It looks at the question of ethics in the midst of pollution, peak oil, and climate change.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Chloë TaylorLadelle McWhorterAs Chloë Taylor notes, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America puts forth a genealogy of race and racism. It also contains fragments of genealogies of intelligence, disability, family values, and a few other concepts and practices that were hugely influential in the twentieth century and have been since. In addition, it presents a certain conception and experience of abnormality and of sexuality in relation to all of the above. But the book does not present a theory of racism or of sexual oppression or of both together. There are important differences between theorizing and the practice of genealogy, at least in the way that I understand the two, and that difference makes a difference in the book’s structure and aims.When I began my graduate education in the early 1980s, feminists were producing compelling critiques of regimes of knowledge and techniques of knowledge production that claimed legitimacy through detachment, dispassionate observation, and objectivity.1 Theory was a not infrequent target of those feminist critiques. Theory (from the Greek theoria, as Heidegger reminds us) is about seeing (not, for example, touching or feeling), and theorizing is typically about representing with accuracy and thoroughness what non-theorists see only incompletely, if at all. Theory, therefore, seeks to correct distortions as it captures reality under concepts.2 Theory also aims to be unitary and exclusive. And theories compete with each other; no matter how many theories there are, only one can possibly be true.By contrast, genealogy is not detached or dispassionate; on the contrary, one takes up genealogy precisely because one feels a need to change something—including something in or about oneself. One takes up genealogy, Michel Foucault maintains, in order to “free thought from what it silently [End Page 216] thinks,” to “enable it to think differently,”3 to get free of oneself as one has been constituted in a certain milieu. Genealogy is concerned with accuracy of representation, therefore, to the extent that detail, facts, and logical plausibility make a narrative more compelling, more moving, more potent—to that extent, and no further; it does not employ scholarly observation and insight to get at “the truth.” A good genealogy constructs a new way of seeing and experiencing that may well disturb a given regime of truth and may make possible the generation of new truths or perhaps new habits of thought and action, but it does not purport to be final or exclusive. It problematizes habitual practices and ways of seeing and, thus, it opens toward indefinite possibilities. My book is genealogical; it promotes no theories. I emphasize this, because I want to insist on the book’s hospitability to the extension of its analyses beyond its covers and to its own (self-)overcoming.Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America presents some genealogies, then, but it is not only a collection of genealogies. It is explicitly framed by a set of contemporary political and ethical contingencies, some of which it identifies as problems, and it considers what to do in response to them. Its genealogies are undertaken and constructed in the context of grappling with those questions, a featured one of which is this: Can we find enough common ground to make common cause between antiracism and anti-heterosexism activists?In the course of tracing a genealogy of twentieth-century racism, I found quite a bit of common ground between racial minorities and nonhetero-sexual people in the United States. So, in addition to my genealogies, I offered some (admittedly perhaps heavy-handed) advice to antiracism and anti-heterosexism activists, namely: Not only is there ground for common cause, but you ignore this ground at your peril, because there is not a lot of other ground for you to stand on; if you do not acknowledge this common history and the strong connections among the forces that oppress your group and those that oppress these other groups, you will have to deny much of your own history and obscure many of the sources of your own oppression. I did not issue the same advice to disability activists or environmentalists, although they might do well to consider it too. I singled...

Does the black struggle for civil rights make common cause with the movement to foster queer community, protest anti-queer violence or discrimination, and demand respect for the rights and sensibilities of queer people? Confronting this emotionally charged question, Ladelle McWhorter reveals how a carefully structured campaign against abnormality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries encouraged white Americans to purge society of so-called biological contaminants, people who were poor, disabled, black, or queer. Building on a legacy of savage hate crimes—such as the killings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd—McWhorter shows that racism, sexual oppression, and discrimination against the disabled, the feeble, and the poor are all aspects of the same societal distemper, and that when the civil rights of one group are challenged, so are the rights of all

This paper considers the following question: how can those whose thought is informed by poststructuralist values, arguments, and training legitimately teach the history of philosophy? In answering this question, three pedagogical approaches to courses in the history of philosophy are considered and criticized: the representational, the phenomenological, and the conversational. Although these three approaches are seemingly exhaustive, each is problematic because the question they attempt to answer rests on the false assumption that there is one, universally right way to teach philosophy and many wrong ways. In rejecting this assumption, the author considers a new, more concrete, and contextualized question concerning teaching philosophy from a postmodern perspective.

Most feminist theorists over the last forty years have held that a basic tenet of feminism is that women as a group are oppressed. The concept of oppression has never had a very broad meaning in liberal discourse, however, and with the rise of neo-liberalism since 1980 it has even less currency in public debate. This article argues that, while we may still believe women are oppressed, for pragmatic purposes Michel Foucault’s concept of practices of freedom is a more effective way to characterize feminist theory and politics

In his 1979 lecture series now translated as The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault suggests that there is an important relationship between neoliberalism and the cluster of phenomena he had previously named “biopower.” The relationship between these two apparently very different forms of governmentality is not obvious, however, and Foucault does not explicate it. The question has become a pressing one for feminists because it underlies a set of issues surrounding the emerging field of “reprogenetics.” Feminists have been highly critical of invasive reproductive technologies for decades, viewing them as demeaning to and dangerous for women's bodies and as staunchly traditional in their reinforcement of gender roles and of maternity as female desire and destiny. Reprogeneticists accuse feminists of hypocrisy in seeking to curtail the widest technically possible range of “procreative choice.” This essay traces some ways in which reprogenetics may be interpreted as a biopolitical formation as well as a neoliberal formation and suggests how the two seemingly antithetical types of phenomena might actually be overlapping and mutually reinforcing—perhaps opening the way for a more effective feminist critique