Indulging Our Fiction Persistently

The conditions on the slave ships--in which thousands died crossing the seas--the treatment slaves often received, and, in a special way, slavery based on skin color, cannot just be passed over. For complex reasons still debated by historians, Englishmen, continental Europeans, and Americans indulged in the fiction that the black [hu]man was not a person and could therefore be treated as a thing. This fiction covered their hypocrisy. Actually they harked back to Aristotle's definition of a slave as a living tool. . . .

--Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live, page 114, 1976

Record numbers of blacks and Hispanics are earning diplomas, but the disparity between their salaries and those for Anglos in the workplace is bigger than it has been in almost a decade, according to census data [in the USA] released Monday. "The lesson of most economic downturns is minorities are the last hired, first fired," said Roderick Harrison of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

--Hope Yen, "Census: Racial disparities in higher-paying jobs persist," Fort Worth Star-Telegram, page 1, Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Aristotle & Baron-Cohen & Summers & Sommers: On Difference

A good friend of mine (an academic, a literary scholar, a rhetorician, not a feminist) wrote me last Friday (to share with me Christina Hoff Sommers’s op-ed piece “Academic Inquisitors”). He said:

I wanted to share with you a very interesting, if divisive and perplexing, article from today's Wall Street Journal. The article makes me wonder, don't feminist scholars want to show that women have a different perspective and epistemology? Or does that thesis depend on whether one finds herself (or himself) in the humanities or in science?

Others of you more qualified than I and more personally vested in the rhetoric here should have good answers to these questions. Please feel free to comment! But because my friend asks me, and because I can’t sit quiet when I think (with the mother of my children) about our first-born (our son) in the academy and our other children (our daughters) not far behind, here’s what I say:

Yes, women and men are different and have valuable differences. You and I are different (whoever we are). Gender makes different; race makes different; class makes different; place makes different; disability makes different.

No, finding myself in the humanities or in science does not erase the difference of one human body from another. Or the difference of one human brain from the next (whether autistic, if that’s the “far end of the male norm -- the ‘extreme male brain,’ all systematizing and no empathizing” or “wired to be . . . better empathizers” if that’s the other extreme in the female norm, as per scientist Simon Baron-Cohen, as per journalist Sommers.)

So, I ask:

Aren’t all men and women created equal (if we are different in body and brain and perspective and epistemology and rhetoric)?

And is Aristotle a humanitarian or a scientist when he declares that

Greeks are different from (and therefore superior to) Barbarians;

natural born masters are different from (and therefore superior to) natural born slaves;

males are different from (and therefore superior to) females, who are merely

males botched in the biology of conception by the mother’s mal-functioning;

and males are different from (and therefore superior to) females, because males have more teeth and males have heads full of sperm and have backbones that de-seminate the powerful fluid from the brain to the testicles, the natural receptacles for in-semination (if the females serving as mothers would just get the procreation process right)?