Casting a Vote for Subordination Using a Slur

In this paper, I develop an account of slurs focusing on their two underappreciated features. The first underappreciated feature is what I call their “communal nature.” Slurs are communal. The meaning of a slur depends on the existence of a significant number of people who are bigoted against the target. When this condition is not satisfied, a slur loses its power to offend. This can be seen when we consider how philosophers choose examples of slurs to avoid offending people. For example, Williamson, in his essay “Reference, Inference and the Semantics of Pejoratives,” uses a slur for Germans as his main example. What makes the slur for Germans a safe example to use is the fact that there is no widespread bigotry against Germans in any Anglophone country. Had there been strong enmity between Germans and the people in the Anglophone countries, even if Williamson had chosen an outdated slur, his example would not have been such a safe choice. Slurs are words that bigots use to offend and harm the people they are bigoted against. When there are no bigots, neither are there slurs.The focus on the communal nature of slurs leads to the second underappreciated feature of slurs. A bigot does not use a slur just to express his beliefs or feelings, but to subordinate his target. To subordinate others, a bigot needs to cooperate and coordinate with other bigots. In this paper, I will propose a mechanism for how slurs work as a tool for coordinating subordination. To account for the communal and subordinating nature of slurs, I turn to speech act theory and explain what kind of illocutionary act is performed when one uses a slur.1My proposal is to understand utterances made using a slur, or slurring,2 as an act of casting a vote for ranking the target as socially inferior. On this view, a slur is a conventional tool used to cast a vote demanding the subordination of its target. The considerations that motivate this view are as follows: First, the uses of a slur are the results of consciously choosing it over its neutral counterpart. By explicitly avoiding a neutral counterpart term, one can show their support for fellow bigots and the willingness to participate in whatever activity they do. Second, the point of using a slur does not seem to be exhausted by its role of expressing the bigot's negative beliefs about the target. We can see this when we consider that the way to fight a slur is to impose strict prohibitions against its use, not by objecting to the content of the slurring utterance. This can be better explained when we understand the slur as a conventional tool for the performance of a certain type of action, rather than a word that has distinctive descriptive content different from the descriptive content of its neutral counterpart. Finally, the point of some speech acts is not just expressing the state of the mind of the speaker. The point of some speech acts is to change what is the case in society. To make an utterance using a slur seems to fall into this latter category of speech acts. What would bigots be up to if they were not engaged in the project of creating a society where their target was inferior to them? This consideration suggests that making an utterance using a slur might fall into the kind of speech act Searle calls declaration (Taxonomy 361–68). As a declaration, slurring is an attempt to change society such that the target is subordinated.Insofar as an election is understood as a process within which people collectively decide on what should be the case in society by indicating their stance for or against a proposal, slurring can be understood as a casting of a vote in the election bigots’ proposal to subordinate their target. I argue that this account can better explain why a slur cannot function as a slur without there being a significant number of bigots, and how it is used to coordinate the bigots’ effort of subordinating their target.The paper proceeds in the following order. In section 2, I briefly delineate the target of my account. Among many different pejoratives, my account attempts to investigate the slurs that target not individuals with certain features, but groups as a whole, and slurs for which there are neutral counterpart terms. In section 3, I will explain in detail what I mean by the claim that slurs have a communal and subordinating nature and why I do not think the existing accounts give a satisfactory explanation of them. In section 4, I develop and justify my own proposal that slurs are a conventional tool to perform the illocutionary act of voting for subordination. Understanding slurring as an act of voting for subordination can give us a helpful insight into how the social hierarchy comes into existence; slurring satisfies important conditions to count as an act of voting; a typical strategy of fighting slurring also supports my proposal. Finally, in section 5, I will briefly show how my proposal can explain other important characteristics of slurs just as well as any other rivaling accounts. Especially, I will outline two important explanatory challenges: the projective behavior of slurs and our conflicting intuitions about the truth-value of sentences with a slur.Before developing my view, I want to make clear what I count as a slur. First, slurs are pejorative terms that target groups, not individuals. They target different kinds of groups: racial groups, religious groups, occupational groups, groups with certain sexual orientations, and so on. This distinguishes slurs from pejoratives targeting individuals. For example, words like “asshole” are not considered a slur since there is no socially recognized group associated with it. Second, slurs are pejoratives that are paired with a neutral counterpart. This distinguishes slurs from other group-targeting pejoratives that do not have a corresponding neutral counterpart. For example, “pimp” is a pejorative for a certain group of people, but since it lacks a neutral counterpart, I do not count it as a slur in this paper.Slurs are derogatory words. They are deeply offensive. What is it about them that makes their use so offensive? To answer this question, let's start with some obvious features of slurs. Slurs are words that are used by bigots. What interests do slurs serve for them? Ultimately, what makes a bigot a bigot is that he has an interest in making life harder for the people he is bigoted against. A slur might have various uses, but one thing that is certain is that it is a means for a bigot to achieve this goal. Slurs contribute to the achievement of this goal by helping bigots recognize each other and coordinate with each other. When a bigot uses a slur, he knows very well that there are other slur users out there and that by using the slur, he is joining them. These features show that slurs are the words that bigots use to create a society, together with other bigots, where their target is subordinated.I believe that what I have said so far would be acceptable to most who work on slurs. However, the existing accounts of slurs that have been proposed so far do not yield a satisfactory explanation for the two features. The goal of this section is to show this and to motivate the need for an alternative account. Although there are numerous and varied accounts of slurs, one can categorize the existing accounts from the perspective of speech act theory, by looking at what kinds of speech act each account of slurs thinks can be performed with utterances containing slurs. For a succinct overview of the existing accounts, I will illustrate them using the following hypothetical conversation between Sam, Chris, and Alex.(Here and below, to avoid mentions of slurs, I will use the following notation system to talk about slurs. “S*” is a slur for a group. “G*” is a neutral counterpart term referring to the group that “S*” targets. Asterisks are used to differentiate slurs targeting different groups. “S*” and “S**” are two different slurs that target two different groups, G* and G**.)In this conversation, Sam answered Chris's question and gave her information about the new boss's group identity. Alex, in addition to answering Chris's question, asserted that the information Sam gave was incorrect and provided different information about the new boss's group identity. However, this description of the conversation above would be an extremely distorted description of what happened in the conversation. They did not merely exchange information about the new boss. By using slurs, they did something bad to the new boss, G*, and G**, and this warrants offense.3 All accounts of slurs seek to identify what it is that they did that warrants offense in addition to exchanging information about the new boss's group identity.According to the existing accounts, what they did in addition to the exchange of information largely fell into two categories. First, the offensiveness of their speech lies at the locutionary level. What Alex, Chris, and Sam did by using the slurs was a violation of a norm governing our choice of words when we produce meaningful utterances.4 It is not that their utterances with slurs have a special illocutionary force that warrants offense. The problem is that they violated the norm that prohibits the use of slurs. That is what makes their utterances so offensive, just as using a swear word in a formal address is offensive. The kind of speech act performed using a slur does not matter.Secondly, we can understand the offensiveness as coming from a specific illocutionary act that was performed using it. What warrants offense is not just the act of choosing a prohibited word, but what one does in using the prohibited word. Accounts that take this approach can again be divided roughly into three sub-classes depending on the kind of illocutionary act they identify as the act performed by using a slur. First, using a slur is an act of conveying some false, derogatory information about the target. Though the exact mechanism with which the derogatory information is conveyed varies from account to account,5 what they are doing in the conversation in addition to exchanging the information about the new boss's group identity is to convey the false information that members of G* and G** have some negative properties.6 Second, illocutionary acts performed using a slur are acts of getting the hearer to adopt an adversary attitude toward their targets.7 Finally, utterances of sentences containing a slur could be an act of expressing negative emotions against the target.8 By uttering “she was an S*,” Sam expressed her contempt for the new boss's group identity.Formulated in terms of the speech act theory framework, these approaches are not mutually exclusive, as one can perform multiple acts with a single utterance. So the accounts above should be understood as identifying the primary source of the offensiveness of slurs. Taken as such, each account has its own merits and shortcomings. However, what they share in common is their negligence of the two key features of slurs: their communal character and their role as a tool for subordination. No accounts suggested so far capture the fact that bigots use slurs only if they know that there are other fellow bigots using them, nor do they ask what it implies that they are using slurs together with other bigots. In what follows, I will elucidate these two features of slurs in detail and explain in what sense the existing accounts cannot satisfactorily explicate them.Let us consider the communal nature first. All linguistic expressions depend on the linguistic convention, and they are communal to that extent. However, the communal nature of slurs goes beyond mere conventionality. Slurs are communal because the success of the offensive speech act performed by using a slur depends on the existence of a certain social group, that is, a large number of people who are bigoted against their targets.To see this, imagine an American who is extremely bigoted against the British people. She learns the slur for the British from a dictionary and starts using it to refer to them, intending her speech to be as offensive and scandalous as speech with other well-known slurs. However, contrary to her expectations, her speech act is hardly offensive, unlike a slur for African Americans. What explains the difference in the offensiveness is that, whereas there are many who are bigoted against African Americans, there is only a meager number of people who are bigoted against the British. Imagine this same American moved to Ireland. Her speech would be quite offensive, since antipathy against the British people is still strong in Ireland. Using the slur, she would be able to perform an offensive and scandalous speech act there. This shows that whatever speech act one performs using a slur, its success as an offensive speech act depends on the fact that there must be a significant number of fellow bigots in the society.The communal nature of a slur manifests itself not just in the way its offensiveness covaries with the bigotry against its target in a society. It also manifests itself in the way it is created. Someone who is extremely bigoted against a certain group of people might create a word to use as a slur for them. Further, somehow, everyone in her linguistic community knows the story about this new word. Yet this is not sufficient to make her use of the word offensive. So long as there is only one person who is bigoted against the group, her use of the word would strike people as eccentric rather than offensive. Only when there are sufficient people who share her bigotry and adopt her word can the word be used as a slur. Whatever she wants to do with the word, she cannot do it alone.These considerations show that for a bigot to use a slur successfully, that is, to perform whatever offensive speech act that is normally performed with a slur, there needs to be a group of fellow bigots using the slur. How could the existing accounts explain this fact? Among the two kinds of accounts classified above, the accounts that identify the offensive speech act performed with a slur as an illocutionary act are hard-pressed to explain this fact.Suppose slurs are offensive because they are used to convey some false and derogatory information about the target. In principle, then, one can always create a slur because one can create a word that encodes some false and derogatory information about some group. To those who are familiar with the word, the use of the word would be offensive, but its offensiveness would not depend on the existence of people who are bigoted against the same group. The same can be said about other kinds of speech acts that the existing account has identified with the slur. Anyone can create a new word to give an offensive order or to express one's negative emotional state. To perform the intended offensive speech act successfully, one needs to make sure that one's interlocutors become familiar with your lexicon. However, there need not be a large number of fellow bigots using the word. You can convey some information, give an order, or express your emotional state by making your intention known to your interlocutor.The account according to which the offensiveness of slurs comes from the fact that they are prohibited words better captures the communal aspect. If a slur is a prohibited word, a natural explanation for its prohibition is that there are many people who use the word in an offensive way. Otherwise, there would be no point in prohibiting it. However, this account does not explain why slurs are prohibited in the first place. There must be something offensive in what bigots do with the word, such that the targets need to prohibit it. Unless what bigots do with slurs is clarified, the prohibited word account cannot offer a satisfactory examination of slurs.Slurs are words that bigots use when they want their targets to be subordinated. This is not to say that individual bigots form the intention to subordinate the target whenever they use a slur. The psychological state of an individual user of a slur might differ from situation to situation. Someone might use a slur when he is annoyed by the presence of a member of a racial group he hates. He might use a slur at different times when he thinks that his bigoted beliefs about a racial group have been vindicated by the act of a member of the group. Regardless of the intention behind each token use of a slur, that slur contributes to the subordination of the targeted group. This is the reason why we treat slurs differently than swearing words in general.The key question is how a slur contributes to the subordination of its target. All the existing accounts of slurs can explain the relationship between the uses of slurs and subordination as a causal relationship. For example, if a slur has derogatory content about its target as part of its meaning, its use can convey that content to the audience, change the beliefs of the audience, and as a result, change how the audience treats the target group. According to this understanding, using a slur is not itself an act of subordinating the target. A bigot does something else, and the subordination of the target might or might not follow, depending on how downstream causal effects unfold. When I argue that slurs have a subordinating nature, what I mean is not merely that they can causally contribute to the subordination of their target; I also mean that the use of slurs is itself an act of subordination. Regardless of the intention behind the use of a slur, its use always constitutes an act of subordination. The following fact supports this understanding.There is a distinctive way in which we resist the use of slurs, which is to outrightly ban their use. This would not be the case if slurs were just causally responsible for subordination. When we hear someone using a slur, the only effective way of resisting it is to stop the person from using it. However, if subordination is just a causal effect of a slurring speech act, we should be able to do many more things to prevent the use of a slur from having subordination as its causal effect. For example, if a slur is a word that has derogatory implications about its target as its literal meaning, one could explicitly reject to endorse the proposition expressed with the slur, by saying something like “No, he is not an S* because he is charming, athletic, and smart.” However, this would be an absurd response to an utterance of a slur.Compare this with the case of the use of derogatory words that target people with certain (imaginary) characteristics. We can resist this use by arguing that the relevant characteristics do not exist at all or are not instantiated by the targets. For example, against the use of the S-word against a woman, we can say something like: “No, women are not promiscuous or unchaste. These are old-fashioned concepts that do not apply to anything.” This response is possible because the literal content of the S-word is causally responsible for the connection between its use and the subordination of women. That this kind of resistance to a slur is impossible shows that there is no literal content in slurs that is responsible for the subordination of their target.When we understand the use of slurs as constituting a distinctive kind of speech act whose illocutionary point is to subordinate its target, we don't have to look for the medium that is causally responsible for the connection between the use of a slur and subordination, and we can understand why the only effective way of resisting slurs is to ban their use outright. The key task is, then, to explain how an act of using certain words could be an act of subordination. Before developing my own account, I will make the notion of subordination clear. Once we have a clear understanding of what subordination consists of, we will be able to understand how an act of using certain words can be an act of subordination as well.Rae Langton develops an account of pornography in which pornography is understood as an illocutionary act of subordinating women. According to Langton, a speech act is an illocutionary act of subordination when it does one of the following things: unfairly ranking the target as having inferior worth, legitimizing discriminatory behaviors against the target, or unjustly depriving its target of some important rights or powers (304). “Blacks are not permitted to vote” uttered by a South African legislator during apartheid is an example of a subordinating speech act that deprives black people of political rights. Pornography might be a subordinating speech act if, by representing women as sexual objects, it ranks women as socially inferior to men or legitimizes treating women as such.Although Langton's purpose is not to develop an extensive account of subordinating speech acts, her account of subordinating speech acts and their application to pornographic speech acts is illuminating. First, she explores the possibility of attributing an illocutionary force to a speech act that looks drastically different from paradigmatic cases of speech acts with the illocutionary force in question. In her view, pornography is very different from such paradigmatic cases of speech acts of assigning rankings to people: it is not made with the explicit rules for who can assign rankings to whom under which conditions (Langton, “Speech Acts” 310). However, as Langton's work shows, this does not necessarily mean that pornography cannot be an act of ranking women as inferior. We can reasonably assume that the hierarchy between people and the authority to determine the relative ranks between people can exist outside highly organized social institutions (Langton, “Speech Acts” 312). In principle, an illocutionary act can appear to be completely different from paradigm cases of the same kind.Second, Langton offers a general strategy with which one can justify an ascription of an illocutionary force to a speech act regardless of its seeming difference from paradigm cases. According to Langton, one can justify an ascription of an illocutionary force to a speech act by asking three questions: First, whether the speech in question has satisfied some important felicity conditions to have the illocutionary force in question. Felicity conditions are conditions that an attempt to perform a speech act must meet for it to be successful. A common felicity condition for declarations is authority. For example, we cannot call a speech act of declaring a move in a game as a foul if the speaker does not meet important conditions for it that include being the appointed umpire of the game (see Austin 12–24); second, whether the hearer takes the speech to have the illocutionary force in question; third, whether the perlocutionary effect of the speech can be best explained by supposing that the speech has the illocutionary force. Using this strategy, she gives three reasons to consider pornography as a subordinating illocutionary act: First, pornographers, even if they are not held in high esteem in society, are authoritative for the men who “want to know which moves in the sexual game are legitimate” (Langton, “Speech Acts” 312). Second, many women take pornography to be subordinating; that is, many women take pornography to have the illocutionary force of subordination. Finally, that pornography has subordinating illocutionary force might be one reason why it has the perlocutionary effect of making men more likely to see women as sexual objects. These reasons are all fallible, yet they support the ascription of the subordinating illocutionary force to pornography.We can apply the same strategy to speech acts made with a slur. They do not seem to be an act of subordination. A person can make an order, an assertion, or a question using a slur, and how can they be all understood as acts of subordinating their target? We can apply Langton's formulas to answer this question. First, does speech made with a slur satisfy the felicity conditions to have the illocutionary force of subordinating its target? Second, do the hearers take the speech to have the illocutionary force of subordination? Third, is the perlocutionary effect of speech made with a slur best explained by supposing that it has the illocutionary force of subordination? I suggest that the answers to these three questions are all positive.Let me start with the third question. Is there a perlocutionary effect of speech with a slur that can be better explained by understanding it as an act of ranking the target as inferior? The phenomenon that supports my proposal is the very existence and persistence of the social hierarchy between groups within a society. As Searle points out, what is distinctive about social reality is that it is created and maintained by our linguistic activity.9 When successful, what is said in a declaration becomes the case. “Blacks are not permitted to vote” uttered by a South African legislator during apartheid makes it the case that blacks are not permitted to vote. On the contrary, “Blacks are prone to violence” uttered by the same legislator cannot make it the case that blacks are prone to violence, regardless of how many people accept what has been asserted. The relative rank of a social group within a social hierarchy is also what is determined by declarations. When a declaration about the rank of a group within a social hierarchy is successful, it becomes part of the social reality that the group takes up that position in the social hierarchy. The relative rank of groups in a society can be determined in various ways, for example, by a King's order. However, the ranks of each group can persist as long as the people in the society continue to collectively represent them as having these ranks. The group has the lower social rank only if the majority in a society collectively represents that group as having a lower social rank than they have. However, there is no natural base in response to which people form the belief that different groups have different ranks that they have. The hierarchy of a given society is based on its people representing the society as having that social hierarchy. Since there is no natural base for that representation, the representation needs to be reproduced again and again. That is, the fact that there is an unjust social hierarchy in our society that is determined by one's race, gender, sexuality, and so on, indicates that the performances of declarations in which those who are subordinated are represented as inferior are made repeatedly. Furthermore, since social hierarchy cannot be created and maintained without the collaboration of the majority of society, such declarations need to be made by the majority of the members of the society.Slurs have the characteristics that make them an apt tool for such subordinating declarations for at least three reasons. First, slurs are paired with their neutral counterparts. Therefore, a slur can function as a linguistic tag that is attached to its target as a marker for an inferior social position. Second, the uses of a slur are the result of an intentional choice over its neutral counterpart. For this reason, a slur is an efficient tool for indicating one's position. Since the knowledge of the meaning of a slur includes the knowledge about the kind of people who use the slur, a conscious choice to use a slur indicates that one has a similar position to that of the slur users. Furthermore, since slurs can be used anytime when there is a need to refer to the target group, one can indicate one's position anytime without interrupting the flow of the conversation. Finally, one can indicate one's position using a slur without being fully explicit about what it is that one is committed to. As pointed out by many who work on slurs,10 it is notoriously difficult to specify what descriptive content a slur has. However, if a slur is a tool for indicating one's support for the existing social hierarchy, it is no wonder that there seems to be no fixed descriptive content with a slur. One indicates one's position by using the same word as bigots do. At the same time, one can secure plausible deniability by not making one's position explicit. Therefore, when there is a slur, more people can participate in subordinating speech acts without worrying about backlash. For these reasons, slurs are suited to the collective maintenance of the social hierarchy. A large number of people can indicate their position voluntarily and safely, thereby participating in a declaration that ranks the targets as inferior.These features of slurs suggest that slurs are a conventional tool for a collective declaration that creates and maintains an unjust social hierarchy. Slurs are used by individuals at different times and in different places, so using a slur is a collective declaration, but not in the sense that people perform the declaration by consciously organizing themselves for the declaration. Rather, it is a collective declaration in the sense that people can do things together by indicating their commitment to a common goal. The declaration in question is similar to making a decision informally at a meeting. People can indicate their support for a proposal by performing a speech act that indicates their acceptance of the proposal. A simple movement like a nod or applause would be enough for them to perform a declaration together. Slurs play the same role when insofar as we understand society as a place where what should be normatively the case is constantly being contested by the members of the society. Those who use a slur indicate their approval of the proposal that the target of the slur should be ranked as lower than themselves. In this sense, using a slur in a speech act is similar to casting a vote in an informal decision-making process. By using a slur, an individual casts a vote and participates in