01 Jun On rights vs. responsibility

I posted a wonderful piece on Non-Natives in Headdress, by âpihtawikosisân, on Facebook a few days ago. It’s based on a much-longer piece available on the author’s blog. For the most part, the response to my posting was very positive – a few comments about posting before festivals that they will be at, a comment on their own difficulty with seeing friends in headdress at parties, etc. And then i received several posts by a single poster, that are worth quoting in some bits and pieces, who was perhaps, struggling to understand:

…Certainly, the party kid on that gogo dancer box wearing skimpy cloths and a Native American head dress is no more claiming they earned it then the exotic dancer who shows up in a Marine Corps dress blue uniform or a nun’s habit to entertain at a bachelor party. Why is one acceptable and the other is not? Both instances involve an individual appropriating current or past symbology that is significant and possibly sacred to the originally intended recipient into a costume for personal use. Part of me wonders why it is acceptable for someone to dress up as a Viking warlord, or an ancient Greek legendary hero, or a Samurai, an English knight, Saracen warrior or President of the US and then go get drunk at a friends house party while making a fool of themselves. But doing the same while wearing a costume as a Native American chief is taboo. Each of these costumes appropriate cultural symbology which was/is highly significant to certain individuals. Why is Native American culture, particularly the head dress uniquely qualified for restricted use when these other cultural symbols are not?

…I believe that it is very important to remember the distinction between wearing something and claiming that the historical significance of that symbol is a true representation of who you are as a person and doing one does not by nature imply the other. I believe it is wrong for me to tell anyone what they can wear, can not wear or must wear in order to satisfy my own cultural beliefs. I hold this to be true no matter how much I may dislike their particular choices. I have to agree with the U.S. Supreme Court in that military medals are a freedom of speech issue. For what I know today I apply the same thinking to the head dress. While we may dislike what a person has to say (or has to wear) unless that person is causing harm to me through their actions then I must allow them their form of speech…We can not tell someone they are restricted from wearing something because of cultural significance (such as the head dress) any more than we can force someone to wear something because of cultural significance (such as the star of David). I believe there are far more appropriate ways to spread racial and cultural equality and acceptance then by the creation of barriers like this. Is the idea that only a native american can wear a certain article of clothing really all that different from only a caucasian can drink from certain water fountains?…Are there not more appropriate ways for us to teach cultural and racial respect and appreciation than to create restrictions that suggest you can not participate unless you belong to a select group? Bringing it back to the head dress; I am having a hard time with the idea that the head dress and other Native American symbology is restricted in ways that we do not restrict other culturally significant symbols.

It goes on for quite a while. In fact, in four separate pieces that are long diatribes like this short piece that i’ve inserted here. I toyed with responding to each and every one of his complaints, and then thought better of it. I thought about being rude and making a comment about “of course a white male blah, blah, blah.” I don’t find that a productive way to respond. I thought about simply ignoring it all. And then i took a deep breath and posted one of my favourite quotes by Tariq Ramadan:

Nobody is saying that we don’t have the right to offend. The question is: is it wise, and is it the way forward for us in our societies? It is wise when we are in a pluralistic society to say ‘I have the right to do it, but I have the civic sense of responsibility not to do it.’ It’s not censorship that we want. You know, the difference between censorship and respect is that censorship is the removal of a right, while respect is asking you to use that right in a reasonable way.

This quote is from a discussion of which Tariq Ramadan was a part after the protests against the cartoons of Mohamed posted in a Danish newspaper. While some were arguing about a “clash of civilizations,” Ramadan was trying to point out that gross polarizations between inalienable freedom of speech and inviolable sacredness were, in fact, shutting down the possibilities of real conversation – to both speak and to listen. Judith Butler, Talal Asad, and Saba Mahmood published a book, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech in 2009, based on a set of lectures in 2007 on the Danish cartoons, which i have found helpful in digging through these thoughts. In the introduction, Wendy  Brown begins by unpacking the historical impetus of critique and its push toward a sense of itself as secular through Enlightenment presumptions about “the true, the objective, the real, the rational, and even the scientific…with the shedding of religious authority or ‘prejudice’…critique not only links religion to historical conditions of unfreedom but also reads religion as indirectly harboring the wishes and aspirations of humanity against its suffering in the present. Religion is both “the expression of…suffering and a protest against it” (11 & 12).

And while i am not purporting that the question of headdress as costume / style is the same or equivocal to Mohamed as cartoon, i am saying that at root is an issue, i think, of rights over responsibility. Or at least individual rights over a responsibility to the collective, particularly in relation to the Sacred. Talal Asad pushes the question further, “How does the idea of cultivating elite sensibilities (quality) implied by “civilization” fit with the idea of mass equality (quantity) implied by “democracy”?…The charge of blasphemy is said to be an archaic religious constraint, and free speech a principle essential to modern freedom…there are legal conditions that define what may be communicated freely, and how, in liberal democratic societies, and that consequently the flow of public speech has a particular shape by which its “freedom” is determined” (26-28).

But these are, still and always, shaped by those with power. What i have been struck by, repeatedly as of late, is the end of conscious thought, of moral grappling that comes with the declaration of rights, or of a particular right, in the face of disconcensus. In the claiming of these rights, there is a legal codification of relations that precludes a further examination, precludes a deeper exploration of what it means to have and to exercise those rights within the context, not of individualism, but as a member of society – of something much larger than the individual. And in this, too, there is a presupposition that everyone ought to hold the same sets of values – those values of western liberal democracy that foregrounds legally situated relations over morally developed ones.

It’s here, then that the question of integration pushes itself to the fore. I hadn’t realized how very stuck in notions of integration policy makers were until i attended the Conference on Combining Freedom and Diversity at Oxford University a few weeks ago. I made it through one panel session. I was floored by the constant refrain of “We have to help the immigrants integrate,” and “We know that it is poor immigrant neighborhoods that become hotbeads for radicalization.” I was bowled over by the overt racism that was being trotted out as a form of tolerance. But as Wendy Brown points out in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the age of identity and empire, “freedom and equality, rather than tolerance, became the watchwords of justice projects on behalf of the excluded, subordinated, or marginalized…tolerance surged back into use in the late twentieth century as multiculturalism became a central problematic of liberal democratic citizenship; as Third World immigration threatened and ethnicized identities of Europe, North America, and Australia; as indigenous people pursued claims of reparation, belonging and entitlement; as ethnically coded civil conflict became a critical site of international disorder; and as Islamic religious identity intensified and expanded into a transnational political force” (1-2). In this instance Freedom (undefined for the entirity of the panel), Diversity (boiled down to multiculturalism with a foreclosed discussion of a definition by the opening speaker), and Integration (in their minds, a seeming form of tolerance) all coalesced into a project of “fixing” the immigrants to become more British, to get them to (a) live with other British people (and not “self-segregate” – i cannot make this stuff up), (b) not radicalize (and apparently, by extension, become violent), and (c) fix the “headdress problem” (this one was met with a tad more tolerant – as in one school allows them so long as they are in the school uniform colors).

Tolerance, Wendy Brown tells us, must no longer be seen as a transcendent form of universalism, but as another form of governmentality, as the organization of the conduct of conduct. And while she argues that this is the conduct of conduct outside of the legal frames, i would push back, just a little, to point out that in the case of something like the wearing of Native American headdress as costume that there is, in fact, a shoving of “tolerance” — e.g., tolerance for non-Natives’ inability to move their relationships out of the legally sanctioned relationship, and tolerance for non-Natives’ desire to wear feathers — onto non-anglo-european-american people’s – whether they are Native American or other indigenous peoples, Islamic, people of color of all “races” and ethnicities, etc. as a function of these legal relations. Or, to say it more clearly, there is, in the imperative for culturally insensitive behaviour of the majority to be tolerated by the non-majorities, a leaning on liberal legalism.

As Alain Badiou reminds us, “No light is shed on any concrete situation by the notion of the ‘recognition of the other’. Every modern collective configuration involves people from everywhere, who have their different ways of eating and speaking, who wear different sorts of headgear, follow different religions, have complex and varied relations to sexuality, prefer authority or disorder, and such is the way of the world…It is only through a genuine perversion, for which we will pay a terrible historical price, that we have sought to elaborate an ‘ethics’ on the basis of cultural relativism. For this is to pretend that a merely contingent state of things can found a law. The only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural – or more precisely, the only ethics is of processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world…A philosophy sets out to construct a space of thought in which the different subjective types, expressed by the singular truths of its time, coexist. But this coexistence is not a unification — that is why it is impossible to speak of one Ethics” (27-28). And, i argue, of one way “right” way of relating to one another…