Perpetrator

From Hobson's Choice

In identity politics, the perpetrator occupies a narrative role as the malignant actor. The role of perpetrator is to commit evil deeds and receive benefits of which he is manifestly unworthy.

Context

Generically, humans are constantly doing things that have unanticipated consequences; for example, men are often surprised to learn that some women regard their social behavior as oppressive, since it is part of a vast pattern of gradual marginalization or coercion. While the man regards himself as courtly and chivalrous—and is complimented by other women for this—he may find himself accused of perpetuating a system of noblesse oblige toward "the weaker sex," which contributes to the shutting out of women from positions of authority. Another case is when a speaker is accused of racism, when in fact she doesn't believe she's talking about race; this arises in debates on crime or affirmative action. Another case is the damaging effect of contemporary middle class lifestyles on the environment, especially in the form of climate change: present-day climate change is known to be causing widespread desertification and forest dessication, which affects chiefly people in Third World countries near the equator.

While these are all legitimate criticisms of certain behaviors, an additional step is to allege that certain categories of people are inherently perpetrators unless they struggle to modify their own behavior. In other words, feminist critiques of men sometimes insist that masculinity is a political role with political responsibilities: when men persist in roles that are oppressive to women, they are actively guilty.^[1] While a man may believe he is merely undertaking his social responsibilities and availing himself of normative social pleasures, these critiques would maintain he is actually derelict in his responsibility to know how his industrial and social role is oppressing women. He is obligated morally to be aware that he is in an unjust power relationship, and to abdicate that power or take a leading role in attacking oppressive social relations.

Similarly, racism is sometimes construed as a necessarily asymmetrical power relationship: Blacks cannot be racist towards Whites because Blacks lack the power to oppress Whites; even on an individual level, while a Black supervisor could conceivably persecute a White underling (because of racial animosity), this would merely be pettiness and personal meanness: the White underling has recourse to sympathetic White administrators or higher-ranking managers, or can easily file a lawsuit. In extreme cases, such discrimination is a prosecutable offense under the law. In contrast, a Black employee in the same predicament could possibly file a lawsuit as well, but would have a much harder time winning and would likely have to do so repeatedly, since racist White supervisors are much more common problems for any randomly selected Black person, than vice versa. This would, of course, lead to the impression that the Black employee was a trouble maker, and reduce the probability of landing a high-ranking job.^[2]

In these and other examples, collateral ideologies have arisen that equate membership in the privileged group with responsibility for unjust social relations. This responsibility is taken a step further, to equate the unjust social relation with civil violence with active criminality. The analogy may be made to a criminal conspiracy, in which a member of the conspiracy, when caught by the police, defends himself by arguing that his role in the conspiracy was minor and the conspiracy would have functioned successfully without him; or by claiming that refusal to participate in the conspiracy would have deprived him of some important advantage. It would be unlikely that such a defense would have any exculpatory benefit.

Criticisms of the Concept

Naturally, those alleged to be "perpetrators" by virtue of their identity (men, Whites, Usonians, et al.) will object that they are unjustly attacked. While power may be concentrated in the hands of people who are, by and large, White, male, Usonian, or [nominally] Christian, it does not logically follow that all Whites, all men, all Usonians, or all Christians (or even all White male Christian Usonians) are sufficiently powerful to bear culpability for the things lain at their door. Members of these groups have enormous internal divisions, and often act as a result of fierce competition with each other; hence, men frequently require supportive and self-denying wives in order to win top spots in the industrial system. While one might win moral satisfaction by sacrificing that spot in order to accommodate an emancipated spouse, such principled self-denial is rare and (usually) fruitless. Progressive social change is rarely brought about by sheer willpower on the part of the privileged class.

Turning from the predictable objection of wounded moral reputation, there remains the more compelling argument that, as a part of an ideology, "perpetrators" are problematic. Basically, the idea implies that social injustice is actually the result of bad people whose conscience needs to be pricked. Hence, the radical feminist (for example) is stuck defending her ideology using liberal narratives. Liberalism (as a principle of social reform) argues that there are universal human rights, and social orders are reformed by applying those rights consistently. Radical feminism differs from liberal feminism precisely in so far as it denies the usefulness of those rights: the idea of sexual relations arising from free mutual contract, for example, is exactly the sort of thing the radical feminist would find objectionable.^[3] Radical feminism's confrontation with society is overwhelmingly directed at revealing "universal rights" as universal male rights, rights that have little value to anyone but those already enjoying male privilege. Hence, the classification of individuals into "guilty" or "innocent" incorporates an appeal to a universalist conception of justice, and doing the same thing to entire categories of people is not much better.

Another problem is that there are many conflicting notions of who is a perpetrator and why. Articles written by radical feminists frequently insist on the need to reject perpetrator status for White women, since they were merely acting as subalterns to White men.^[4] Catherine A. MacKinnon wrote extensively on the conflict between class solidarity and [radical] feminism; she rejected the idea that class oppression had any role in feminism, since it existed wholly as a byproduct of patriarchy.^[5] Obviously, a vulgar Marxist would argue that bourgeois professors MacKinnon and Rich were class "perpetrators," while Rich and MacKinnon would attack Karl Marx as a white man (and member of the perpetrator gender); they would doubtless scoff at the idea of "class struggle." Frantz Fanon, while allowing a distinguished exception for Marx and some other Whites, would slam Rich and MacKinnon, not merely as bourgeois Whites, but as opportunistic beneficiaries of the Trans-European Project. And Sayyid Qutb would lambaste Marx, MacKinnon & Rich, and Fannon as perpetrators of Western cultural pollution.

Notes

1. ↑ Whenever possible, we need to keep in mind that there is no one consensus on what feminism is or believes. Some feminists, for example, believe that the onus for reform of gender relations lies not on individual men, but on political and legal institutions.
2. ↑ This interpretation of racism is approximately the same as the one used by this site, although with some important caveats.
3. ↑ "Free mutual contract" does not necessarily imply an exchange of money; it could consist of other benefits. The problem is, however, that if men have intangible social benefits that they can exchange for sex, and those benefits are necessary for women to meet their urgent needs, then it could reasonably be said that women have limited powers to withhold consent for sex.
4. ↑ An example is Adrienne Rich's essay, "'Disloyal to Civilization': Feminism, Racism, and Gynephobia" (in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 Norton, 1978). Rich (a White Southerner) wrote:

   If Black and White feminists are going to speak of female accountability, I believe the word racism must be... ripped out of the ...defensive consciousness in which it so often grows, and transplanted so that it can yield new insights for our lives and our movement. An analysis that places the guilt for active domination, physical and institutional violence... on white women not only compounds false consciousness; it allows us all to deny or neglect the charged connection among black and white women from the historical conditions of slavery on...

   Bell Hooks cites this passage in "Racism and Feminism: the Issue of Accountability" (Les Back & John Solomos, Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader Routledge, 2000, p.376) to point out the perhaps understandable, but nonetheless self-serving result: a categorical and absolute rejection of any responsibility for racism on the part of Rich and other White women; with the result being still more guilt heaped on White men. Rich claims the right to self-exculpation in the name of a more vehement repudiation of patriarchy.
5. ↑ Catharine A. MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, method and the state: an Agenda for Theory" , Signs, Vol. 7, No. 3. (Spring, 1982), pp. 515-544.