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In 2008, Joseph Biden called Barack Obama ‘an African-American who is articulate, bright and clean and a nice-looking guy’ (NPR 2007). Articulateness was often attributed to four-star African American military general and Secretary of State Colin Powell. In the present day, former democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, an openly gay married man, has often been complimented in the press on how ‘traditional’ he is said to be (Smith 2019). Trans actress Laverne Cox is overly described as ‘gorgeous’ by well-meaning fans (Allen 2017). Though articulate, clean, traditional, and gorgeous are intended as compliments, arguably they would not be applied in similar situations to people belonging to different, more dominant social categories—that is, if Barack Obama were not Black, if Pete Buttigieg were not gay, and if Laverne Cox were not trans. Such biased evaluative descriptions—roughly, well-intended descriptions whose apparently positive surface meanings are inflected with implicit bias or benevolent discrimination—are the focus of this essay.
My primary goals of the discussion are to characterize the phenomenon and to make headway in diagnosing the linguistic force and moral significance of such descriptions. My secondary goal is to draw attention to a heretofore overlooked topic in feminist philosophy of language: well-intentioned discriminatory speech. Feminist philosophy of language has a long tradition of analyzing straightforwardly negative speech, like slurs and epithets. Feminist speech act theory has been extensively utilized in exploring the illocutionary force and moral status of pornography. But philosophers of language and feminist philosophers have not turned their attention to the pervasive phenomenon of well-intentioned speech inflected with sexism and other discriminatory attitudes. Here I aim to lead the way.
1. Demarcating the Phenomenon
Biased evaluative descriptions are a species of a broader genus of linguistic phenomena infused with implicit bias. There are questions whose occurrences betray bias, such as when journalists ask women athletes about their personal lives. There are biased linguistic omissions, as when a letter of reference discusses a woman's personality while omitting her accomplishments. There are biased appraisals, as when women are verbally scrutinized for signs of competence more than men. And there are likely many more similar sorts of biased evaluative phenomena. Though my focus on biased evaluative descriptions is relatively narrow, some of my remarks apply...