Women, men and queer protest discriminations and racism

Women identify and protest discriminations and racism

Linda Martín Alcoff aims at revealing creative self-identity and making socially visible what social violence and identity anxieties try to repress; the burdensome labor of accepting oneself, “to know thyself, to be to thine own self true”, makes visible shame and structures of power (Martín Alcoff, Linda. 2006. Visible Identities. Race, Gender, and the Self. 8. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press). Yes, “shame and guilt are affective companions of a negative appraisal of one’s own self” (Aichhorn, Wolfgang, and Helmut Kronberger. 2012. “The Nature of Emotions. A Psychological Perspective.” In Yearbook 2011. Emotions from Ben Sira to Paul, edited by Renate Egger-Wenzel and Jeremy Corley, 515–25. 523. Berlin: De Gruyter). Yet, the feeling of guilt because of a presumed violation of rules and norms transforms to self-esteem and self-worth, when these rules and norms are identified as unjust social power structures that result from a women oppressing male ideology. Martín Alcoff reflects on her life experiences. Personal experiences and history have informed her feminism (Martín Alcoff, Linda. 2006, ix). “The double day, the ordinary stress and guilt of the working mother, the sexual harassment that is a constant aspect of the working environment” belong to this life history as “having been born to parents of different races and ethnicities and having grown up in the U.S. South during the era of civil rights” (ibid.). She describes herself as a Latina and as a white Anglo-American academic middle class woman, she suffers from “the experience of having mixed or ambiguous identity” and takes advantage of her experience for learning “about the fluid and at times arbitrary nature of social identity designations” (ibid.).

For the last twenty years, identity was an omnipresent concept. I must get clear about the meaning of the concept and my use of it. The question of identity is linked to shame and power. Shame can be understood as the resulting feeling of a person-environment and environment-person relationship that oppresses the person’s social choices and her right to reciprocal relationships, and at the same time legitimizes this discrimination as normal. Neglecting the acceptance of the person as person, refusing to provide love and understanding, the lack of positive feedback and recognition produces feelings of humiliation, anger and hate (Aichhorn and Kronberger 2012, 523). All basic emotions and feelings are developed in infancy and childhood. “A child develops a sense of self-worth through mirroring from its mother. The child is loved for the sake of his or her own self and is validated in his or her spontaneous aliveness” (ibid.). The psychological understanding of the person-environment and environment-person relationship is linked with the understanding of the social and political structures of the environment, because of the claim that the persons have the chance to change the social structures and unjust polities with the help of policies that lead to a just rule of Human Rights law. The social domestic order is produced in much the same way as the international order is produced that is by the realization of social choices by women, men and queer. It is important to be clear on the point that shame and power is a problem for all, for women, men and queer. My shame as male partner who pretends to love my female partner but in reality, I was not sharing the housework burden in a fair way, results from the recognition of the discrepancy between the real and the ideal self. The shame of my partner not to comply with her ideal self of keeping the house in perfect order causes submission that powers my discrimination. Only the feed-back that she feels bad and her claim that we realize the housework in solidarity helps me to recognize my discriminating patterns of behavior and help restore the integrity and dignity of my partner and me.

The question of identity is linked to shame and power, but how do we describe identity? I am suggesting the predicate term for the expression identity that is I try to define the expression. Therefore, I suggest for the expression identity the predicate “self-assessment of how successfully I claim the social realization of my dignity as a singular individual that is part of one or more particular groups”. A group is two or more persons, women, men or queer who are interacting with each other. I know that group formation and formation of group identities like “black women”, “white women”, religious groups, political parties, states and nations but also groups of animals like of chimpanzees, a pack of wolves, a herd of antelopes, and the swarms of birds, etc., belong to the many processes of the world’s history that empirical sciences study. I am thinking not so much about zoo-semiotics that is animal communication, but rather of anthropo-semiotics that is human groups speaking languages (Cobley, Paul, and Litza Jansz. 2010. Introducing Semiotics. A Graphic Guide. 120. London: Icon Books Ltd.). Concerning speech-acts of women, men and queer, I use the term social semiotics according to M. A. K. Halliday who assesses the fact that the social context of the speaker and hearer appear within the utterance rather than existing externally in a system (ibid. 165).

It is not so much of a social choice that I am a man, woman or queer, but accepting that I am a man, woman or queer or not accepting is a social choice. It is a social choice to accept that I am a white European. Identity is understood as a meaningful characterization of self; ascriptions that are imposed on people from the outside are an alienating and hurting brand (ibid. 43).

After an intellectual, physical, psychic, social, economic and spiritual struggle of decades, Martín Alcoff abandons the enterprise to seek comfort and identity in one particular group. She is not either Anglo or Latina; she accepts fighting for her self-worth, integrity and dignity and the equal dignity of women, men and queer of this world independently of a particular group identity through sharing existential and precious living experiences in more than one social group (Martín Alcoff 2006, 284).

Problems arise by neglecting particular groups the social realization of dignity by deterministic ascriptions in combination with a discriminating polity (ibid. 15). The political reaction of discriminated groups to create homogenous consciousness for group identity, to organize protest and equality ensuring polities is important, but groups are always heterogeneous and tend to discriminate legitimate interests for equal dignity of discriminated sub-groups (ibid.). There is “the racism in the white-dominated wing of the women’s movement, the sexism in the male-dominated wing of the black liberation movement, and heterosexism that was virulent everywhere” (ibid.). Balkanization is not the real danger but a pretext for the political and economic disempowerment of minority communities (ibid. 18). Conceptualizing justice and the rule of Human Rights law across cultural differences is the real need and challenge (ibid. 19). The social struggle for dignity, recognition of oppressed minorities, women or queer, and redistribution concerning labor, wages, welfare rights, etc., does not lead to social transformation by claiming an unselfconscious universalism, but by realizing the right of full participation of all and by keeping in mind that “maintaining unity requires a careful attending to differences” (ibid. 26–27). Internalizations of self-hatred and inferiority cannot be solved through redistribution but only by the recognition and social realization of the status as a full partner in social interaction as a ruling value in society (ibid. 32–33). The social realization of dignity with the help of speech-acts, that is with the mutual interaction of a speaker and a listener, is claimed by and agreed to by feminist philosophers, including Martín Alcoff (ibid. 60).

Martín Alcoff’s parents had the power, the legitimate authority, to give her a name and name her. Accepting her name may be based on the narcissist desire to be seen, as psychoanalysts claim (ibid. 74). I would say that I accepted my name and being named with a name, because I took narcissist profit from being named and I got cared for and was loved for the sake of my own and therefore accepted that name as my name. I do not like the determinist ascription of the psychoanalysts that I accepted my name because of my desire to be seen, because I have the feeling that the matter is more complex and interactive. I call my cats by their names, and they look at me and indicate that they understood their names. My cats then will not start talking to me or with me. My parents empowered me to use language to express myself. Eventually, I was capable of consenting or protesting to their power and alienation was not the result of their power to name or dominate me. I felt alienated when I did not get understanding, when my father was unable to communicate his feelings and to interact with the expressions of my feelings. Social naming is not necessarily per se “a form of primary alienation whose source is power” as Butler claims with Althusser as well as Freud and Foucault (ibid. 75).

Butler’s claim that “interpellation never identifies that which existed before but calls into existence a subject who becomes subject only through its response to the call” (ibid.) oversees the social condition of that “which existed before” as possibility condition for hearing and understanding the interpellation. The baby comes to understand because the parents already interacted and taught the baby some rules of language games. The parents usually communicate on the expectation of a reciprocal and mutual interaction with their baby; they empower their baby to use language and do not reserve the power of naming to themselves. “A child develops a sense of self-worth through mirroring from its mother”, interiority is a social category because it is expressed in language, and mirroring is not a posteriori to naming. Speech-acts are not necessarily social realizations of dignity. I may start a speech-act by presenting me with my name and yes, I present myself as a speaker. The language game of presenting each other to each other includes the rule of reciprocity. The partner of my speech-act will present herself or himself too with her or his name. The rules of the language games are social rules, are part of the social structure and the social institution of language and the speakers use this social structure. There is no doubt that interpellation is used for purposes that do not protect the integrity and dignity of other persons. There are uses of the expression interpellation that aim at subordinating women, men and queer by telling them who they are, but the process of questioning for government ministers in parliaments is also called an interpellation. Martín Alcoff is not a language philosopher, but she accuses as alienating determination “if I am culturally, ethnically, sexually identifiable that this is a process akin to Kafka’s nightmarish torture machines in the penal colony” (ibid. 81). There is no necessity for describing the interactions of parents, community and society, and the discourse episteme as a one-sided subordination and oppressing domination in the sense of Martín Alcoff (ibid.).

I am convinced that in today’s world of globalized information the individual man, woman and queer must take himself and herself the word to give expression to the sense and dignity and freedom of his or her life. At the global level, I am an accomplice sustaining the social structures of subordination and oppression. I wrote in September of 2007:

I take part in the slave trade of our globalized world and buy cloth that come from the sweatshops in India or Asia. I have my money in a bank system that works and secures my little wealth because it can make profit with the millions of millions of Euros and dollars that are stolen from the peoples of Africa by a tyrant like Mobuto. In the year 2007, Switzerland will still not return the money deposited in banks by the dictator Mobuto Sese Seko, who was ousted from power in 1997. There are one million children in Great Britain according to the BBC that will not be lifted out of deprivation by the end of the decade and will still live in poverty. But there is the money in Great Britain to participate in the war against Iraq. The health of indigenous people worldwide is much worse than that of other communities, even the poorest communities in the countries where they live. Infant mortality among the Nanti ethnicity in Peru, the Xavante in Brazil, the Kuttiya Kandhs of India and the Pygmy peoples of Uganda is much worse than in the poor communities that host these minorities (Stephens, Carolyn, John Porter, Clive Nettleton and Ruth Willis. 2006. “Disappearing, displaced, and undervalued: a call to action for Indigenous health worldwide.” Lancet 367: 2019–28. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)68892-2). One in seven children dies before the age of five in the least developed countries, in West and Central Africa one in five dies before the age of five. It takes me some minutes to settle and really listen to the message of studies like this. I am getting sad. There are children growing up in poverty in my country. I am conscious that I am sitting at the desk in my university office without having to worry about anything. My social security is safe, my job is safe, my payment is good, and my social and economic status is secure. From my small personal European experience, I am grateful for the Western advocacy of economic and social rights. This political strategy was strong, consistent, and essential to creating the post-war international order, which was intended to consolidate and strengthen Western welfare states. I realize that this Western welfare state in the 1980s was getting into trouble. I realize that Bretton Woods practically broke down due to the politics of global neoliberalism. I did not study economics, trade or world financial transactions; my knowledge on economic affairs is blank and rude. I am mostly concerned with the rule of Human Rights law in the Roman Catholic Church.

When I come to read authors like Jean Ziegler, I get concerned and worried again and I feel guilty. I do not doubt that his description of the actual global market laissez-faire exploitation order corresponds to the facts and that his accusations are reasonable. He writes that the International Monetary Fund, The World Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department agreed in 1989 in the name of reform to help the indebted countries on their way to develop to force them to open up to the market fundamentalism of the large multinational corporations. Their wealthy owners in First World economies work for the profit of the rich and the deconstruction of social, economic and educational infrastructures in the poor countries that cannot protect their basic interests and needs. Three hundred to five hundred corporations seem to steer World Trade with the instrument of the World Trade Organization to the end of maximum profit. I do not ignore the problems of corruption and nepotism of families, clans, ethnicities and ethnic conflict. Legitimizing stateless global governance with the end to maximize the profit of the rich and to be able to overlook and neglect the basic needs of the poorest is to take part in the deprivation of the dignity and liberty of life for millions. Jean Ziegler estimates that in 2001, over thirty million people in Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala, and South Korea, in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Santa Domingo and China are suffering under slave like working conditions in the sweat shops. I am taking profit of these sufferings and enjoy low prices for the clothing I buy in Austria. An estimated twelve million people in Russia, China, India, Peru and Zambia are affected by the severe pollution caused by chemical, metal and mining industries. 140 thousand people are at risk from lead poisoning in Tianyng in China. Globalized information makes it possible to get easy access to what is going on in this world. I am saying this to document that I know about the misery that 20% of the world’s population uses 80% of the world’s resources. In his 2003 report as UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler assesses that “Women are disproportionately affected by hunger, food insecurity and poverty, largely as a result of gender inequality and their lack of social, economic and political power. In many countries, girls are twice as likely to die from malnutrition and preventable childhood diseases as boys are, and almost twice as many women suffer from malnutrition as men. Unfortunately, however, there are still no global statistics on malnutrition or undernourishment rates disaggregated for men and women (Ziegler, Jean. 2003. The right to food. United Nations. A/58/330. 7. http://www.righttofood.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/A58330.pdf).

How to bring about change? It is my conviction that social responsibility and individual freedom must join in conversions to solidarity to stop the actual attack of global acting market fundamentalism on the institutions of the welfare state and the empowerment of the marginalized economies to join the global market as players. Ivan T. Berend the professor writing on the economic orders and developments in Europe from the nineteenth to the challenges of the twenty-first century confirms this description of the actual market situation of global economics (Berend. Ivan T. 2006. An economic History of Twentieth Century Europe. Economic regimes from Laissez-Faire to Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511800627.007). His insights show that this global laissez-faire of money liberalism is the rebirth of the economic system that dominated the European economies in the nineteenth century. The twentieth century knew many sorts of national economic systems that were characterized by interventionist state policies. Centrally controlled capitalist-socialist economies presented a mix of laissez-faire for private enterprise and Keynesian interventionist economic policies. Social security, health and social rights of the workers were guaranteed in this welfare state. The eighteenth century brought England the individual liberties. The nineteenth century continued the fight with civil liberties to develop political liberties. Civil and political liberties were the conditions to develop markets and a capitalist economy. To get the many inequalities corrected that are produced by a free market economy, we must rely on individual and political liberty. This is my conviction. The success of the free market in the late twentieth century was due to the gigantic technologic, communications and service-economy revolution of the 1970s and 80s. In 1974, the first Personal Computer entered the market. Social and economic rights were institutionalized in the twentieth century and belong to the international Human Rights. Yet social citizenship for every man and women on this earth remains a dream to become realized. The European Union’s history in the second part of the twentieth century was a success of social peace and economic success. In the twenty-first century, we need a profound reform of our welfare institutions and a radical transformation of the global world order writes Berend (ibid. 263–326). I only can agree. Democracy must face the equilibrium of economic growth, social justice and ecologic sustainability, must balance the gaps between extremely high and low incomes and bear in mind that democracy has to take a look at possibilities for everybody and not only for small elites. The United States of America and the European Union and Japan will see China and probably some other Asian nations as the principal architects of this new order.

I want to do something to help to change this misery for a life in dignity. Many men and women of good will are laboring and collaborating to bring about that change. They were successful in the twentieth century; democracies managed to assert individual rights and create prosperity in Central Europe, in 1991 the Soviet Union was buried and the states under her control went free. What kind of possibilities does freedom have, if the institutions which empower the dignity of men and women do hardly exist and function ineffectively? Majority voting and the rights of minorities are a key element of individual, social and political freedom. Other factors are free media, free elections, free speech, multiple political parties, protection of minorities, equal rights, rule of good law, responsive public services, a free enterprise environment, access to education to mention some basic conditions of democracy. Where in Europe, Latin America and Asia are the democratic nations that are powerful, willed and able to support and defend progress towards a more liberal, human and just world?

Equal rights for women in the Roman Catholic Church are impossible to realize now. Why? There are still too many enemies of the rule of Human Rights law holding power and authority in the Roman Catholic Church’s hierarchy. To convince Roman Catholics to accept the rule of Human Rights law in our Church, I must show that Human Rights law is a central message of the faith in the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. A few years ago, I thought it was evident in the Catholic Theological Faculties of Europe that professors and students want to bring about the rule of Human Rights law into the Church. Today the contrary is evident. The majority of Catholics in Europe at the beginning of the third millennium do not demand the rule of Human Rights law within the Church. Since I am convinced that the rule of Human Rights law is a basic message and claim for the governance of the Catholic communities and the life of each woman, man and queer in the Roman Catholic Church, I must prove that the rule of Human Rights law is a claim of the message of Jesus Christ.

The sentences about my faith, my convictions and values are speech acts that claim validity. The validity condition of the claim of the link of Human Rights with the message of Jesus Christ must be met. My claim that the rule of Human Rights law corresponds to the teachings of Jesus Christ must be validated with the texts of the Holy Scriptures of Christian faith but also with the theological tradition of the Catholic Church.

The foundation of liberty with the help of customary laws and historical liberties we find in the European medieval tradition. From there, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1485-1566) developed - inspired with the rationalist stimulus of Saint Thomas’ conception of natural law -, the claim of freedom and equal rights for all independently of race, religion, wealth or power (Pérez Luño, Antonio-Enrique. 1990. “Estudio preliminar al Tratado de Regia Potestate.” In Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Obras Completas Vol 12. De Regia Potestate, edited by Antonio Larios Ramos and, Antonio García del Moral y Garrido, i–xxxix. Madrid: Alianza Editorial). Already Aquinas was convinced that Go’d’s right of the order of grace does not take away with human right that is of the order of natural reason. This conviction of the Aquinas guided a few Europeans in the fifteenth century in their struggle for freedom and liberty of the Indians. The principle is clear. God’s grace is not at disposition to determine the suppression of the Indians at the prey of enslaving laws that corrupt kings promulgate, and popes tolerate. Religious beliefs and convictions helped to develop what we call today Human Rights that is the conviction and belief in the dignity and freedom of all women, men and queer. Pérez Luño reconstructs Las Casas’ fundamental claim that the right of freedom and liberty must be respected by the Christian religion according to its fundamental beliefs and convictions (ibid. 1–39): For the sake of the souls neither man nor woman is allowed to enslave another man or woman, because salvation in theology is a predicate which is reserved to Go’d, salvation belongs to the order of godly grace. Las Casas was the first to assert and claim liberty for all human beings. He affirms the principle that a man or a woman who is born free cannot legitimately lose this freedom during his or her lifetime; a human person is always free. Las Casas presents a theological argumentation to defend his claim. Liberty for Las Casas comprises liberty of conscience and the right to property. Las Casas followed the understanding of the Bible of his times that is he took the Gospel quite literally. He observes that Jesus did not compel anybody to believe, nor did he take away property rights from the unbelievers to reward the believers. With understanding and love, Las Casas wanted to convince everybody to be ready to collaborate with reason and caritas to reach an individual and social order of solidarity. I do not share Las Casas’ hypotheses that natural reason pushed men and women to live in societies nor do I share the naturalist confidence in the necessity that human nature will build a society of solidarity. Las Casas is an important Catholic theologian because he was reflecting on liberty and the Christian faith as being inseparable. Following Las Casas there were individual Christian women, men and queer contributing in the historic development that leads in the 20th century to the proclamation of the UDHR.

I return to my reception of Alcoff’s feminist philosophy in 2019: Martín Alcoff writes in English. She has learned the rules, grammar and use of language games in that language. I have learned English to a degree that I read and understand her book and write my thoughts in English. I am not communicating with Martín Alcoff, I am not speaking with her. She published her book, a possibility condition for women, men and queer all over the world to get to know her thoughts. The readers have in common that they know what Martín Alcoff’s has written. In recent years, academic cultures in the West have started to use gendered language. I interpret the fact that the use of gendered language until recently was not a desired and required norm of speaking behavior, as an indicator of the male dominance and control of women by the subordinating and discriminating use of language. The use of language is an instrument of suppression just as it is possible to use language as an instrument for the social realization of the dignity of the women, men and queer with whom I am communicating.

Investigating the concept of woman as the central concept of feminist theory is of primary significance because this investigation transforms contemporary culture and social practice “from a woman’s point of view” (Martín Alcoff 2006,133). It is an enormous cultural effort for women to work on “a concept of woman” because “it is crowded with the overdetermination of male supremacy, invoking in every formulation the limit, contrasting Other, or mediated self-reflection of a culture built on the control of females” (ibid.). Two decades later, this affirmation of Martín Alcoff is still valid. There were and there are feminist thinkers who claim, “that feminists have the exclusive right to describe and evaluate woman” (ibid. 134). Cultural feminists have rejected the definition of woman by men; they have not reflected that they “merely valorized genuinely positive attributes developed under oppression” (ibid. 139). Cultural feminists simply replaced the misogynist male discourse by reevaluating the male ascribed passivity as peacefulness, the ascribed sentimentality as proclivity to nurture, the ascribed subjectiveness as advanced self-awareness, and so forth (ibid. 134). A second major response to male control over defining woman rejected “the possibility of defining woman as such at all” and claims politics of gender or sexual difference “where gender loses its position of significance” (ibid.). We cannot discuss the question of sex and gender without considering race. Radical feminists of color consistently rejected the cultural feminists’ efforts to develop a female counterculture (ibid. 138). Cultural feminism developed and flourished best among white women and duplicated a strategy of discrimination (ibid.). A thorough critique of power refuses “the construction of the subject by a discourse that weaves knowledge and power into a coercive structure” (ibid. 139). A coercive structure is a discourse that does not allow the listener to answer, it is a determinist discourse that tells the other what he or she is. In the case of cultural feminism, this coercive discourse tells the woman what she is and the woman has no social choice but to subordinate to this interpellation. Feminist theory asks the individual woman to speak, listens to the sentences of the woman and discusses the claims by realizing the social dignity of the speakers. In my understanding, the social realization of dignity in speech-acts presupposes that the speakers understand their language games and engage in the mutual recognition of the rule that there are no privileged sentences.

The social realization of dignity by speech-acts is based on the belief and conviction that women, men and queer possess equal dignity, freedom and rights. The participants of a speech-act express their positions. Am I talking about an illusion? Aren’t the positions of the speakers mediated through their cultural discursive contexts and isn’t the product of this person-environment and environment-person relationship dominated again by male determinations that discriminate women? Does the individual woman, man and queer have the social choice of mutually interacting, and committing to each other and in a reciprocal flow? I am convinced of the hope that women effectively find the context of speech-acts as a position and “location for the construction of meaning, a place from where meaning can be discoverer (the meaning of being female)” (ibid. 148). The concept of women as positionality invites me to theorize about speech-acts of women, men and queer where “women use their positional perspective as a place from which values are interpreted and constructed” (ibid.). Speech-acts position women, men and queer in a locus where they question their determined sets of values from their own position as speakers and listeners.

Does the analysis of speech-acts allow to reconstruct the very concrete and historical social situation in which “one is made a woman”? Martín Alcoff is right claiming the importance of very concrete and historical social situations in which “one is made a woman” (ibid. 151). Knowing who I became and how I became the one I discovered that I am, allows asking who I really want to be, how I really want to live, and to whom I want to relate. Is discourse a way of discovering, challenging and changing regulative norms about my sex, gender, desires, sexuality, and many other behaviors? Why are so many of my academic Catholic colleagues silently submitting to the power of the Catholic hierarchy and consent being doomed to desiring our own domination as Judith Butler (ibid. 158) would analyze?

Biologically insignificant physical attributes such as skin color, the shape of the nose, or eyes, or hair type for racism are actually very significant as signs of fundamental differences in human capacity (ibid. 164). The anthropological recognition that “what is vital for reproduction is a child’s access to a somewhat stable group of caring adults” (ibid. 173) suggests that sexism’s talk about defining biological differences that legitimize the male-female dimorphism is biological determinism. “The capacity to sustain an infant entirely on the production of one’s own body, to give birth, to nurse, are much more significant attributes” than skin color, hair type, and so on (ibid. 164). Socially realizing the dignity of speakers and listeners in speech-acts by using language, makes women, men and queer use the grammars of their language but also the body structures of their brain, neurons, muscles, tongues, lips, vocal cords and much more. I strongly share Martín Alcoff’s egalitarian look at the bodies (174–75). Human bodies share the capacity of speaking and why not empower this capacity for the social realization of the equal dignity, liberty and rights of all women, men and queer? Derrida’s dream of a multiplicity of “sexually marked voices” seems possible (ibid. 176). Is it possible to realize this dream by speech-acts where “the question of the limits of possibility of each (sexed) body is recognized” as Elizabeth Grosz suggests (ibid.)? I hope so. It is true that I hope for realizing myself dignity in speech-acts. For the moment, I am preparing for these realizations.

An important exercise in this preparation for mutual speech-acts of speaking and listening consists in the practice of listening. Men are capable of listening, but they are not willed to listen in a reciprocal way. Men are not ready to listen to women as thoroughly as they listen to themselves, and therefore speech-acts that are effective social realizations of the dignity of women, men and queer are not happening. Concerning for example the literary practice in contemporary North American women’s writing, men not only do not listen, but they also even accuse women who exchange speech or writing of oversharing, that is of revealing too much personal information. Rachel Sykes argues, “that women are more likely to be accused of oversharing than man not matter what the content of their self-disclosures” (Sykes 2017, 151). It is not only feminism’s linguistic role “whether oversharing confines women to disempowering modes of communication”, to a “talk that was in itself a silence” (ibid. 152), the social realization of dignity by speech-acts of women, men and queer concerns all critique of language by women, men and queer. Discrimination of gender intersects with discrimination of race within the same gender. Black women autobiographers are not fitting the continuing prioritization of literature about straight white women experiences (ibid.). Experimental women’s writing is excluded from mainstream publication (ibid. 163). The Internet and social media help women writers “to bypass traditionally male-dominated routes to publication” (ibid. 164). Literary journalists parallel giving personal information to “the enjoyment” of sharing one’s feelings in therapy (ibid. 156).

Internet-based communication platforms satisfy the desire to share, explore, and expand on what people believe. Male media theorists criticize the exhibitionist side of sharing too much, “be it sexual, bodily, or mundane, that falls outside societal and” patriarchal norms (ibid. 157). Oversharing is a gendered term, “commentators, journalist, and reviewers accuse women of oversharing more often than men” (ibid. 158). Female self-knowledge and the public sharing of that knowledge are characterized as “in some way shameful” (ibid.). Traditional female realms such as children, food, cooking, the body, etc. are judged as “trivial and inconsequential” (ibid.). There is a double standard, because male writers giving similar accounts of the inner life of their protagonists, their body and sexual activity are celebrated by the male literary critiques as being culturally significant (ibid. 162). Depicting the personal, sexual, and intellectual lives of white, heterosexual North Americans challenges patriarchy’s power, forcing women to embody within patriarchy’s oppressing structures and constitutes effective feminist liberation (ibid. 169). Despite all social constraints, female writers write themselves into existence, and reclaim an “active, public I” (ibid.). Male journalists, academics, writers and theorists are not capable of recognizing the public claims of women to their equal dignity, freedom and rights. The cultural elite of 3% of the population in Western liberal democracies is not prepared to realize the social dignity of women, men and queer in speech-acts. To be clear. The problem is not that women, men and queer of all social strata in rich countries like Austria (Leher, Stephan P. 1995. Dialog im Krankenhaus. 243 Interviews mit Ärzten und Pflegepersonal. Wien: Springer) or countries like Colombia (Leher, Stephan P., and Denz, Hermann. 2005. Health in Bogotá. Health as a Human Right. Bogotá: Digiprint Editors and Leher, Stephan P. 2018. 112-162. Dignity and Human Rights. Language Philosophy and Social Realizations. New York: Routledge) do not speak of their life experience if they are asked and listened to. The problem is that so many men of this world are still telling women when to speak, where and what to speak and for how long. Men take interest in oppressing the liberating discourse of men, women and queer instead of listening and empowering others to listen.

Although Martín Alcoff argues that “future meanings of racial identity itself are open-ended” (Martín Alcoff 2006, 195), she investigates and documents what she witnessed all her life: The social reality of mainstream North America’s racism. Learned practices and habits of visual discrimination and visible marks on the body sustain racial consciousness as a social practice of domination (ibid. 196). The women, men and queer of the dominant group distribute “intersubjective trust, the extension of epistemic credence, and empathy” to racialized visible determinations of the bodies of women, men and queer (ibid. 197). These racialized perceptions are the results of upbringing, heritage and identity, that is of social status and social class of those in power. Usually, they are not conscious of their discriminative behavior, but they are very effective at sustaining their power (ibid. 204). Martín Alcoff gives testimony to the fact that white North Americans fear losing their identity when recognizing they have to give away the benefits of their white supremacy (ibid. 206). She is very critical of the efforts of initiating whites recognizing and reflecting their racist interactions and transforming their mind set and behavior (ibid. 212). Martín Alcoff’s lived experiences of racism, her professional studies and her personal political antiracist activism informed her skepticism on transforming social relations, political strategies and actual policies of discrimination (ibid. 290). The social realization of dignity, the recognition of an irreducible difference and at the same time the recognition of “the Other’s own point of departure, the Other’s own space of autonomous judgement, and thus the possibility for a truly reciprocal recognition of full subjectivity” are if not impossible still far from contemporary experience (ibid. 218). The social realization of dignity by speech-acts of women, men and queer seems far away.

Already in 1998, Martín Alcoff identified the political strategies that twenty years later helped the U.S. Administration of President Donald Trump in reorganizing white supremacy: “revival of nativism, the vilification of illegal immigrants, … a state-sponsored homophobia, citizenship, patriotism, family values, Christian practice, or other features that most whites can believe they share” (ibid. 221). In 2017, four in ten Americans identify as white and Christian (evangelical Protestants and Catholics), compared to eight in ten in 1976. Members of non-Christian faiths remain a relatively small percentage of all Americans, two percent of all Americans identify as Jewish, and Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam each are represented by one percent of the U.S (O’Loughlin 2017). According to these numbers, white supremacy is not challenged by non-Christian religions, especially not by Islam. Whites also lose their psychic and social status in Europe, and millions follow autocrats like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and propel far right politicians into the governments of Poland, Austria and Italy. Being white or nationalist is being against immigrants and rejecting foreigners. In the U.S., where some Anglo-Americans believe that they are the true Americans, the native Indian experience painful exclusion from the white group. Apparently, exclusion allows to give to people a very strong identification with a group that is the group of Anglo-American whites. In-group identity is important to these women, men and queer to a degree that they accept economic disadvantages for the sake of upholding group identity and feelings of in-group supremacy over other groups. Politicians who nurture in-group identity of nationalism or nativism can be sure of the support of the in-group members, even if their economic situation is poor and degrading ever more. White supremacy and nationalist ideology is being “used by the wealthy and powered to fool the white poor” (ibid. 213). The price of in-group profit in self-esteem, self-worth and feeling safe, the price of political loyalty to the oppressing rich and wealthy is blindness for one’s own economic interests, suffering of poverty, crippling psychological development, further loss of access to education, formation and health care and fewer and fewer opportunities for change.

Martín Alcoff not only makes visible to me racism in the United States of America. She tells from lived experience of a completely different situation concerning questions of race in South America and the Caribbean. The Spanish colonizers of the Americas “intermarried with indigenous people at a higher rate than the English colonizers of the North” (ibid. 266). “Massive coercion as well as some voluntary unions” of slaves from Africa contributed to the same effect, “the population of Hispanics today is a mix of Spanish, indigenous, and/or African heritages” (ibid.).

Latinos and Asian Americans were often brought to the U.S. as cheap labor and then denied political and civil rights (ibid. 247). “Both groups often come from countries of origin that have been the site of imperialist wars, invasions, and civil wars instigated by the Cold War, some of which involved the United States’ imperialist aggressions, as in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Korea, the Dominican Republic, and most recently Colombia” (ibid.). There are court decisions where Asians were considered white, Mexicans in Texas were classified as white or simply as other (that is other than white or black), “Latinos were overtly denied certain civil rights; when they were classified as white, the de facto denial of their civil rights could not be appealed” (ibd. 251). This legal history makes clear, “that race is a construction that is variable enough to be stretched opportunistically as the need arises in order to maintain and expand discrimination” (ibid.).

In 2017, about 20% of all Americans identify as Catholic. The U.S. Catholic church is increasingly less white, a majority of 52% of Catholics under thirty are Hispanic. Hispanic Catholics have larger families with younger children than their white counterparts. According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 10 percent of 284 active bishops in the US are Hispanic and among the six cardinals leading U.S. archdioceses, all are white and all but one lives in the Northeast or Midwest. There is a big educational gap between white and Hispanic Catholics. With 63%, white Catholics have attained some of the highest levels of education among religious groups in the United States. Hispanic Catholics present with just 28% of having some college education the lowest number for a religious group in the U.S (O’Loughlin, Michael J. 2017. “The U.S. Catholic experience is increasingly Hispanic and Southwestern.” America. The Jesuit Review. September 6). There are actually eight black Catholic bishops in the U.S.[i] It is clear, the structures of the Catholic Church in the U.S. participate in the racial discrimination of Hispanics and African Americans by all Whites in the U.S.

When Martín Alcoff lived with her sister as a child in Panama “my older sister and I were prized for our light skin” (Martín Alcoff 2006, 266). When in the 1950s they moved with their white Anglo-Irish mother to central Florida where “a biracial system and the one-drop rule still reigned … our mixed-race status meant that we had a complex relationship to white identity” (ibid.). “My sister, who was darker and spoke only Spanish at first, … still suffered discrimination at school and second-class status at home” (ibid.). In 1995 Martín Alcoff still testifies that “today, the many dark-skinned Latinos who have moved to southern Florida are ostracized not only by white Anglos but by African Americans as well for their use of Spanish” (ibid. 300). What about in 2019? Would the Catholic community in central Florida receive the two sisters today with open hearts and without discrimination? I do not know because I do not know about their religious identity. I do not know if Martín Alcoff and her sister are Catholics. As an Austrian Catholic, I suppose that the daughters of a father from Panama and a mother of Anglo-Irish background are Catholic. After having witnessed over three hundred pages of Martín Alcoff’s protest against external ascriptions of identities, I should have learned the lesson to be careful with stereotypes concerning culture and religion. There is a simple way of knowing if Martín Alcoff considers herself a Catholic that is by asking her.

What about racism in the Catholic Church? In March 2019, of the 119 cardinals who have the right to vote in a future Conclave, fifty are European, and twenty-six of these are Italian. Together with the thirteen white cardinals from North America and one white Australian cardinal, white men still possess the majority in an upcoming Conclave.[ii] The efforts for the internationalization of the Roman Curia had started with the Second Vatican Council. Fifty years later progress was made, but white men still hold the majority of cardinals. The European Catholics who make up about 15% of the world’s Catholics in 2019, are represented with 40% of the 119 cardinals that would vote in a Conclave (““How many Roman Catholics are there in the world?” 2013. BBC News. March 14). One can call this fact an imbalance, and a discrimination of 85% of the world’s Catholics. To my knowledge, nobody calls this discrimination a racial discrimination. The fact that this discrimination is not publicly called a racial discrimination does not imply that there is no racial discrimination associated with this fact. On the contrary. The fact that there is public silence on this discrimination is a secure indicator that structures of oppression are at work.

Martín Alcoff fights against discriminating social power structures that oppress gender and race and demonstrates that gender equality and the struggle to end racism are linked to each other. There is another fight among huge identity groups to oppress and dominate each other, that is the fight among religious confessions. The Christians, Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox Christians claim a Christian supremacy over other religions. To fight discrimination of religions and realize the social equality of all religions I claim the equal dignity of all religions. There is no privileged religion; all religions are equal in dignity, freedom and rights. I understand this claim from my Christian faith, it corresponds deeply to my faith in Jesus Christ and his message and deeds, his life, death and resurrection. All religions contribute to the realization of the spiritual aspect of our existence.

[i] “The Black Bishops of the United States,” The National Black Catholic Congress, https://www.nbccongress.org/the-united-states-black-bishops.html (accessed April 28, 2019).

[ii] “Distribution of living Cardinals according to the Pontificate in which they were created,” The Holy See, http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/documentation/cardinali---statistiche/distribuzione-per-papa.html (accessed March 7, 2019).