Wendy Salkin

In this paper, I seek to describe the ‘other’ harms and forms of wrongdoing that an affective stereotype with specific racial and gender content, has. I will focus on the “Angry Black Woman” stereotype (or ABW stereotype), and I will reveal its intrinsic and direct extrinsic harms. I’ll then argue that it is a stereotype threat prime whose harm as an ‘affective injustice’ can cause agents to underperform on real-life affective, social, and political tasks. I also think prescriptively with Black feminist Audre Lorde about stereotype threat and how to respond to it. In doing so, I hope to contribute to the conversation that began with Larry Blum by expanding the harms that stereotypes inflict, particularly affective stereotypes of marginalized groups.

I compare two different arguments for the importance of bringing new voices into science: arguments for increasing the representation of women, and arguments for the inclusion of the public, or for “citizen science”. I suggest that in each case, diversifying science can improve the quality of scientific results in three distinct ways: epistemically, ethically, and politically. In the first two respects, the mechanisms are essentially the same. In the third respect, the mechanisms are importantly different. Though this might appear to suggest a broad similarity between the cases, I show that the analysis reveals an important respect in which efforts to include the public are more complex. With citizen science programs, unlike with efforts to bring more women into science, the three types of improvement are often in conflict with one another: improvements along one dimension may come at a cost on another dimension, suggesting difficult trade-offs may need to be made.

Social norms forbidding rape jokes, blackface, and flag-burning exemplify a peculiar form of etiquette, which I call political etiquette. Just as compliance with ordinary etiquette expresses respect for the other individuals involved in a social encounter, compliance with political etiquette expresses respect for social groups. In this paper, I propose that we understand political etiquette as a system of conventions whereby we indicate our commitment to treating vulnerable social groups in accordance with their rightful status. Because we have a standing obligation to assure all members of our community that their rightful social status will be respected, we have a powerful moral reason to conform with all existing political etiquette norms whose target social groups lack such assurance, even when compliance with these norms is not antecedently morally valuable. Alongside our moral reasons to comply with some existing political etiquette norms, we also have moral reasons to fortify good political etiquette norms and to reform or erode bad ones.