Rhetoric, Respect, and Institutional Racism

A few months ago, I was talking with a lot of rhetoric scholars trying to identify the qualities of good rhetoric, and it was suggested that one of the important characteristics is respect—that people need to respect each other. I was completely incoherent in my response.

Arguing that respect should not be considered a criterion for good rhetoric sounds like attacking Santa Claus, baby bunnies, or apple pie. One thing I couldn’t make clear is that I wasn’t saying the respect is bad, but that it’s setting an actively harmful criterion, for four reasons:

1. It’s setting the bar too high—if the parties respect each other, we’re probably in good territory anyway. We need to figure out how to have productive arguments when the people involved don’t respect one another. If respect is required for productive argumentation, then we’re saying that instances of conflict without respect have to go to violence. So, by setting the bar too high, this criterion truncates the possibilities of argumentation.
2. It makes the common mistake of thinking that our problem is the consequence of bad feelings for others—it’s like the civility argument. Respect is an affect; it’s a posture. We tend to judge it by whether we feel comfortable with the tone someone is using. Therefore, as long as someone is using a tone we find comfortable, we’ll infer respect. That tendency to infer respect by what feelings of ours are (or are not) being triggered (comfort/discomfort) means that we are more likely to get prickly and defensive about how someone is disagreeing with in-group members than out-group members. It’s inevitably a non-reciprocal standard—it is never applied equally across interlocutors.
3. And, hence, and this is the point I couldn’t get across, respect as a standard will always get entangled in hierarchies of power and authority. We don’t ask that parents treat children with the same respect as children are supposed to treat parents; we have different standards of respect for how students treat teachers than vice versa. Respect is always going to benefit people who have cultural, political, or legal authority more.
4. There’s another way it isn’t an equal burden on all parties, and this also is a consequence of “respect” being something we infer through affect and tone—like the notion of “civility,” it puts a higher burden on rhetors arguing for major social change or who are the victims of institutional oppression and violence. There was no way for abolitionists to make a “respectful” condemnation of slavery, because it was always taken as an attack on slavers (some of whom were euphemistically called “slaveowners” or “slaveholders”).

You see this issue with accusations of institutionalized racism—the people who benefit from the current system feel themselves attacked by such condemnations, and they inevitably express that they feel disrespected. And they do feel disrespected. So, if we’re going to say that respect is a requirement of productive rhetoric, then powerful people feeling disrespected ends the argument. In that world, how can someone raise the issue of institutional racism?

They can’t. Or, they can, but their argument will be dismissed as disrespecting people who deserve respect. And then we’re on the identity stasis, arguing about the goodness of the people who felt criticized. Political rhetoric spends way too much time on the feelings of the powerful.

And notice that this, again, doesn’t apply equally across all parties. Slaveholders, surprisingly enough, could use a language and posture of respect for their attitudes toward slaves; racists always use a language of respect for their feelings toward other races. It’s not uncommon for them to claim to respect the other group more than that group respects themselves—that they are the ones who really understand that group, and who can see what that group really needs. If you assess respect by tone and the feelings it triggers in the judge, then extraordinarily disrespectful discourse can slide through by looking calm and rational; patronizing dismissal doesn’t set off disrespect alarms in other in-group members.

We don’t know one another’s hearts, but more powerful people think they do (asymmetric insight is worse for people with power). So, what I wish I’d said is, “Making ‘respect’ one of the criteria for productive rhetoric guarantees that we won’t be able to have the hard arguments—because we’ll end up with the more powerful people focused more on how they feel disrespected than on whether we need substantial change.”