Recognition, Dignity and Worth

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now, Harvard professor Michèle Lamont, who has a new book that adds to a fascinating body of work about human dignity. The new book is called Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World. The book includes concepts like how people use morality to validate exclusion, how members of stigmatized groups respond to rejection, even a concept of inclusion she describes as a Trojan Horse, as used by stand up comedians. We'll explain.

It all builds on previous books with titles such as Dignity of Working Men, a multiracial examination of class and culture among non-college educated men, that book came out 20 years ago, but it's so relevant to the politics of today, the culture wars, the UAW strike, work permits for migrants and more, and a previous book called How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. We'll get to that too. Michèle Lamont is a professor of sociology, African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman professor of European Studies at Harvard. Interesting combination, African American and European Studies, and she joins us now. Thanks for coming on, Professor Lamont. Welcome to WNYC.

Michèle Lamont: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really appreciative.

Brian Lehrer: The title of the book, again, is Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World. I want to ask you what you mean by recognition in the context of this book?

Michèle Lamont: Well, when we think about recognition, one might think of [unintelligible 00:01:57] that looks like this. I recognize that this is the apple on the table, or I recognize that this is Johnny on the street, but in the context of my book, it's really about recognizing the value of others, and the qualities that make them full members of our society, and included in our concept of us.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Reading your book, I was thinking about how this is a perennial issue of thousands of years of racial hierarchies and patriarchy and other systems of power concentration in human history, but it seems to me that in the last few years, maybe as a response to the combination of Trump's exclusionary politics, followed by the murder of George Floyd, and also the recognition of so-called essential workers and who they are demographically during the depths of the pandemic, there has been a real burst of activism around specifically recognition that maybe it's getting somewhere. I wonder how you see these recent years in the context of what you've studied for decades now.

Michèle Lamont: The book is inspired in part by the Trump years because I felt quite desperate. I felt like many of others. I was looking for hope, so I became interested in the role of narratives, the story we tell about the future and inspiring new visions. Of course, with Black Lives Matter, Me Too, et cetera, I could see recognition claims everywhere around us, but also on the right, MAGA is very much about groups that feel they've been displaced turning to nationalism in part to affirm their centrality to American society.

One of the goals of the book is really to point to the similarities of quest that animate people involved at both end of the political spectrum. They all want dignity, they want to be treated as people, and the book tries to highlight this parallel, and heighten the importance of recognizing the centrality of dignity to everyone's well-being, and to our society as a whole. Having a society where you have a whole lot of homeless people who are left to die on the street has a very negative impact on everyone's quality of life, so it's also tied to that.

Brian Lehrer: That relates to the subtitle of the book, How Recognition Works―and How It Can Heal a Divided World. When you talk about the recognition being sought in the Me Too movement, Black Lives Matter movement, but also in the MAGA movement, many people might critique the politics of recognition as divisive in and of itself. We become about our group identities rather than a universal humanity that I know you're also interested in as a moral concept. Is recognition by group a double-edged sword?

Michèle Lamont: Brian, you really put a finger in one of the main tension about recognition, and that's why the French government has not recognized the constant explosion of racism that are at the center of their society, really wanting to highlight universalism. I think one of the way out of this is to acknowledge that there's just a lot of things that bring all of us together, and we're all the same as human beings. That involves the need for dignity, and the fact that we need a plurality of criteria by which we appreciate and evaluate others.

The book is written against the background of growing decades of growing inequality with the working class feeling more and more like losers while the college-educated professionals are presented as heroes. The virtues that go with this neoliberal growing inequality moment is a focus on competitiveness and socioeconomic success and self-reliance as criteria through which we evaluate the value of people. The book presents an alternative by advocating for embracing a plurality of criteria by which we view others as worthy such as care workers and essential workers who help everyone in many ways.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we welcome calls, texts, and tweets for Michèle Lamont, but no sneezes. Only she's allowed to sneeze. Did you just sneeze?

Michèle Lamont: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Calls, texts, and tweets for Michèle Lamont on her book Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World. Does anyone have a story about or a question about how recognition has mattered to you in the context of inequality, as she was just framing it, or how it matters to or separate from economic equality or anything related for Michèle Lamont? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text or tweet @BrianLehrer.

I see you said you wrote the book partly because you saw some very good academic work on how Trumpism threatens democracy, but you wanted to add a sociologist perspective on how it was affecting culture and representation. I wonder if you could talk about the difference or how they fit together.

Michèle Lamont: Fit together, you mean [unintelligible 00:07:25] democracy with recognition. Is that what you have in mind?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Michèle Lamont: Yes, I think they're very connected. In this moment of political polarization of our society, a lot of what's happening is a dismissal the claims for dignity of groups that are different from us. If you think about, for instance, the reaction of many working class men toward non-binary Gen Zs who are pushing for the recognition of pronouns, the use of non-binary pronouns or the bathrooms, those are really sensitive points, I think, that are driving the Democratic Party crazy because it's very hard to bring under same umbrella both the very progressive young people who might be really very supportive of trans right and the working class who might perceive them as snowflakes who are focusing on types of recognition that seem artificial or superficial or not needed to them given the kind of life that they have.

I think at the center of American politics is really looking at these different conceptions of what matters. The work of political scientist is extremely important, but they don't get to these things. I'm really looking at other aspects of our process of polarization that are ignored by other discipline, and I would say partly by some psychologists who are focusing on tribalism, and what we are allegedly wired to do or not do, and instead of having a vision of human nature that really drives the polarization between groups, I've spent my life studying how boundaries can be bridged and weakened.

I really focus on the identity of groups and how they can be transformed, and perceptions of groups and how the frames through which we perceive them can be changed. I give the example of people who are HIV positive who were deeply stigmatized when the AIDS crisis started in the 1980s and who are now viewed as not dangerous anymore. I describe how this change has happened or the change of same-sex marriage that is now widely accepted. We could go on and on to say the stigmatization of groups can be reduced, has been reduced and much more can be done in this direction.

Brian Lehrer: I mentioned in the intro the term Trojan Horse as you apply it to standup comedy. Can you talk about that as a strategy for inclusion, which is, I think, how you see it?

Michèle Lamont: One of the most fun part of the project is that with graduate students, we interviewed 75 Hollywood creative showrunners, as well as standup comic. In these two groups, many, many people are committed to using their work to create a more inclusive vision of what our society should be. For instance, the creator of the show, Transparent, Joey Soloway. Much of what they talked about is that they're using their creative work to provide a less stereotypical, more multidimensional, more humane, more dignified view of the groups that their show portrays.

There are many examples of this. Among the standup comics, they are sometimes accused of using humor to just get claps, it's called clapter. The strategy they use in response to this is that they engage in what we call the Trojan strategy. Some of them actually use those words, which is basically that their primary goal is, of course, to make their audience laugh. While doing this, while they tell stories, they also bring in some stories about inequality and dignity and injustice that really feeds their work.

That's omnipresent in the world of humor today. Very few of the people we interviewed, only four white men, I think, said I'm against politics, but at the same time, they tell jokes that can be extremely sexist, and they don't realize that patriarchy is politics as well. We document in the book eight different strategies that are used to do this kind of inclusion work that is central to the work of a great many cultural producers that we interviewed for the book.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here's Anne in Yonkers. You're on WNYC with Harvard Sociology Professor Michèle Lamont, author of Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World. Hi, Anne.

Anne: Thank you so much for taking my call. I'm delighted to see that this topic is being brought forward. I work directly with survivors of human trafficking, and for anyone who's not knowledgeable in this area, that means that the survivors are predominantly survivors of sex trafficking. Because of the stigma and associated shame in this area, this is a totally hidden population that is completely reticent at best to reveal that this is their history. I'm wondering if the author has seen a timeline of stigmatization that then results in acceptance because I feel like each thing has its own life cycle. I just wanted to pose the question and see if there are any other illuminating ideas that come around this.

Brian Lehrer: Do you understand the question, Professor Lamont?

Michèle Lamont: Yes, absolutely. Many groups that feel stigmatized today and have the courage of talking about it, are group whose own identity was totally erased in previous decades. I was recently talking with one of my students who's trans, who said that when they were growing up 20 years ago, there was no language even available for them to talk about this.

When it comes to asylum seekers and refugees, I have actually a graduate student who wrote a paper on this very topic, where she's analyzing people who are in charge of making decisions about asylum seekers, which is not exactly the same as you are talking about. The question of how they talk about their experience is absolutely crucial to whether or not they're going to get the status. Often among the staff that makes a decision, there are a number of people who are using moral criteria to really support the individual for moral reason because they feel a lot of sympathy.

At some level, there's criticism of the process saying there's now a well-established scenario about getting it, which requires that you describe how you have been victim of real violence. There's a lot of tension in terms of reaction to the fact that this identity is now being discussed much more publicly than it was until very recently.

Anne: Thank you. One last part of the question is if you could comment on governmental policy and how it perpetuates stigmatization. There is a direct connection in this country, but I'm sure it's a global problem.

Michèle Lamont: Yes, of course. The whole debate about immigration and undocumented immigrants in the US which will only continue given the crisis we have with climate change. The number of people who are moving north from the south is all about the vilification of migrants. We certainly have seen this with some students. I wrote a paper which did a detailed analysis of the 73 electoral speeches that Trump gave in 2016.

The vilification of immigrants to defend workers in a context where the workers felt displaced because of globalization was really the most central theme to all his speeches. There is true public figures such as Trump [unintelligible 00:16:03] diffusion of the norm that condemning immigrants and viewing them as immoral becomes very widespread in society. We know that with the movement against Asian hate that has exploded in the last two, three years, there's been really growing awareness as well of the importance of fighting these stereotypes.

Brian Lehrer: Anne, thank you for your call and we'll continue with Professor Lamont in a minute. Among other things, we'll get into her critique of individualism and how we view our own individual accomplishments through a lens that may contribute to the exclusion of marginalized groups. She'll explain. Stay with us. More of your phone calls as well, 212-433-WNYC, calls and texts welcome, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Stay with us.

[music - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Harvard Sociology Professor, Michèle Lamont, author now of Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World. I think it's fair to say you tend to be critical of middle-class and upper-middle-class ideas of worth, neoliberal ideas, as you use the word neoliberal tied to material and professional success by individuals, if I'm reading it right. I think it's what many people perceive as actual merit in a meritocracy. What degrees you earn, what professional accomplishments you've had, things like those, but that you don't think it's always true merit. Am I getting at something real for you here?

Michèle Lamont: Absolutely. One of the problem with the notion of meritocracy is that it really emphasizes individual efforts, and I am totally in favor of that, except for the fact that it also makes up extraction of the many privileges and resources that people at the top of the social ladder have when they are pursuing success. If you have parents who are college-educated, if you live in a neighborhood that has some of the best school, of course, you're much more likely to end up with a high-paying job.

That's very much part of neoliberalism, which really emphasizes individual competitiveness and individual self-reliance. Well, self-reliance is possible if you have the means to be self-reliant. That's why I really call for a much broader understanding of who's worthy, which would include care workers, which would include people who are providing collective goods for the community. In this period, in the life of Americans, where the class segregation has grown enormously over the last decades, it's very difficult for many college-educated professionals who live in exclusively professional towns to understand the challenges that people in the bottom half of the social ladder experience.

To think that meritocracy is really reflexive of people's abilities and hard work and morality. It's tied to the notion of morality as well. The book argues that we need to acknowledge the importance of those resources in creating very different outcome and in supporting more pluralistic view of who matters and to extend more solidarity toward those who don't have the chance of being born with very strong [unintelligible 00:19:48] supporting them in their ambitions.

Brian Lehrer: Do you see this relating, in any way you would want to comment on, to the current debate over the Supreme Court's Affirmative Action ruling and the whole idea of selective colleges and the criteria they use to include and exclude? I realize I'm asking a Harvard professor this, but go ahead.

Michèle Lamont: Of course. No, I think that the position that the Supreme Court took in this ruling is really to see evaluating people based on their identity as being really counter to the American spirit. They cite very selectively from different aspects of the constitution and justifying their judgment. We know that, in fact, individuals enter this whole college process with different tools. The tools that we use to admit such as the SAT, greatly favors middle-class kids whose parents can hire tutors or hire consultant who will guide them to the whole college application process.

I think the judges have opened the back door by saying, yes, but you can use essays. Well, yes, these essays will give us a sense of what is the life experience of the students, but even knowing how to make a case for oneself based on prior suffering, if you will, is a very acquired skill and a cultivated skill. It's not necessarily a leveler the way that the broader policy that has been eliminated is.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote a book 15 years ago called How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. I wonder if relating to that and relating to what you just said, you have a thought about a news story this week. I wonder if you've even seen it yet, about US News and World Report changing the way it does college rankings. Here's a version from Patch, the news site Patch on the US News announcement.

"The company said it significantly altered the way it ranks colleges placing a greater emphasis on social mobility and outcomes for graduates. More than half of a college's rank now looks at how well it enrolls and graduates students from all backgrounds without overburdening them with debt and leaving them with postgraduate success. Additionally, the company no longer looks at five factors, class size, faculty with terminal degrees, alumni giving, high school class standing, and the share of graduates who borrow federal loans."

That sounds like a lot of big changes to the US news rankings for whoever cares about those rankings in the first place, but as an expert on recognition and a Harvard professor, does that sound like meaningful change to you?

Michèle Lamont: Oh, absolutely. The changes were created because there were growing number of institutions who first had cheated in trying to raise their rank by basically trying to improve the very dimension that were measured, that were included in the former measurement, and in general, all these tool to quantify rankings and prestige have been widely dismissed in academia. They're widely used, but they're also widely criticized because it's too easy for organizations to cheat and it also reduce really a lot of the [unintelligible 00:23:31] Some of the best organizations, the best colleges in the US like Reed College in Portland, Oregon, which really gives an excellent education to undergrads has done very badly precisely because it was not doing well on some of the dimensions that you just described. It's important, but I'm not sure that it will save the system given that it's been in crisis, and many universities now are not asking students, for instance, to take SATs. There's a real revolution and a lot of thinking about how meritocracy will function in higher education.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe there should just be some big national lottery system that forces integration of people with various kinds of differences into the same universities.

Michèle Lamont: Yes. Some people advocate that, and also some people advocate that for peer review. They say we should have a basic bar, and once people are above this bar have a random system, would guarantee much less conservatism in which research projects receive funding from governmental organization or philanthropy. There's a lot of discussion about how merit is constructed. My book, How Professors Think, originally was going to be titled Cream Rising, because many people who are involved in the process believe that cream rises naturally at the same time as they confess, often appreciating most the work and the projects that are most looking like the work that they do that themselves. It's hard to think about evaluation in a blank slate and it's not how it works.

Brian Lehrer: Andy in New Paltz, you're on WNYC with Michèle Lamont. Hi, Andy.

Andy: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. Hi, Professor.

Michèle Lamont: Hi.

Andy: Can you hear me?

Michèle Lamont: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: We got you, Andy, go ahead. What you got?

Andy: Great. I was thinking about some old classics courses that I took when I was in college, and there's this great scene from Homer's Odyssey where Odysseus comes home from his travels and nobody recognized him at his house. His household has been overtaken by tutors who are really thieves or marauders. The story of the last part of the poem is him restoring order to his household. The first positive step that happens in that direction is he's recognized by his dog who hasn't seen him in a very long time. Then he's gradually recognized by the rest of his family, and as a result of that, peace is restored to his household. I thought that was an interesting vignette in the context of the discussion.

Brian Lehrer: What's the moral of the story? Andy, as you see it, what's the moral of the story?

Andy: I think it's that those who appear other, upon closer scrutiny are closer to you than you may think. That by recognizing that, you can restore order and peace to the world around you.

Brian Lehrer: Andy, thank you very much. Professor. Oh, go ahead, Andy. You want to finish that thought? Go ahead.

Andy: Yes, I was just going to say on the flip side of that, maybe those who seem most familiar to you are potentially a greater threat than the other.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe the innocence of the dog who is not perverted in its perceptions by human biases.

Andy: That's an excellent one. I hadn't thought of that.

Brian Lehrer: Andy, thank you. Professor, anything on-- who expected The Odyssey to come up in this conversation, but go ahead.

Michèle Lamont: I think it's such an excellent comment and it reminds me of interviews that I conducted in the early '90s with North African immigrants in France who were illiterate and very much from rural, peasant background. In the context of the interview for the book, The Dignity of Working Men, I asked them what makes them similar or different from French people.

A lot of the answers had to do with what we all have in common, and they were based on evidence that they can witness in the course of their everyday lives. They would say, "We all spend nine months in our mother's womb. We all have 10 fingers. We all have to go to get bread in the morning at the baker. We're all the children of God, or we are all equally insignificant in the cosmos."

That really inspired me to have a section of the book on this notion of ordinary universalism. In this book also, interviewed a lot of white workers who kept saying, "You have to treat people as people." This is something that remains extremely central, this anti-elitism that Trump is building on in his rhetoric. I think it's one of the dimension that the Democratic Party really needs to put front and center as we prepare for the 2024 election and really figure out ways to leave behind the vision that it's increasingly the party of college-educated people because this is totally alien to the vision of a worthy person that many working-class people have, which is a vision of people who are not phony, who are not hierarchical, who embrace people, who are [unintelligible 00:29:12] You relate to other human beings as people. I think this is extremely important, whether we're a dog or not. [laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Andy, thank you for starting that stretch of the conversation. It's funny because this is about where I wanted to end with you and I didn't expect a phone call about Odysseus to get us there. I was going to bring up your older book, Dignity of Working Men, in which, as you say, you explored differences between the US and France. Also, immigrants and native-born and white and Black people on men's relationship to their self-worth when making a working-class income.

I'm curious if you can relate that even more than you just did to the massive partisan divide we see in this country now going into the 2024 election cycle between how working-class white men lean so Republican, and working-class Black men, say, making similar incomes lean so Democratic Party. Is it just that racial identity, Trump's class identity so much in US politics, or have you given that thought?

Michèle Lamont: Oh, absolutely. In this book, The Dignity of Working Men, I document the fact that a lot of the white workers I interviewed in the US embrace what I call the discipline self, which is basically the neoliberal self we talked about earlier, self-reliance, hard work, keeping your kids out of trouble [unintelligible 00:30:45] is crucial because they hate sponges. They work hard, they pay their bills, they try to stay to ensure the survival of their family, and that's how they think of themselves. I think a lot of the values that the Republican Party promotes, they identify with.

On the other hand, what I found more prevalent among African American is this notion of the caring self. They criticize white for being domineering and for not connecting to human, human to human. It's not they also embrace the discipline self, but to it they add another dimension, which is the caring self, that they also mobilize to draw racial boundaries against white, just like white workers use this focus on self-reliance to stereotype many Black people as lacking self-reliance, so therefore excluding them on moral basis. Of course, the solidarity toward the poor [unintelligible 00:31:39] show is much greater among African Americans than among whites, so this notion of individualism is much more central to white identity.

These people are all working-class. They draw class boundaries very differently. The white workers are much more likely to self-identify with people above them in the social structure as compared to Blacks, and they're also more likely to think of themselves as losers because they believe that those who are above them are there because they're smarter, because they work harder, blah, blah, blah, whereas Black workers know that there's racism and there's a lot of things that pull them down and prevents them from being at the top. These are very important.

Brian Lehrer: Is a class-based politics possible in this country, given that?

Michèle Lamont: Oh, absolutely. Well, yes, but we discuss far more the racial segregation in space, in neighborhoods, and workplace than we talk about the class segregation, and the class segregation, as I mentioned earlier, has grown enormously. Very few upper middle class people are now in regular contact with working class and the poor, and therefore they don't understand their life at all. The fact that our schools are being funded by local taxes means enormous inequality across the school system, and enormous concentration of college-educated people in very specific neighborhoods.

I really feel like we need a massive collective conversation around this, and what are the implication for solidarity in American society. That's starting to happen. For instance, in Massachusetts where I live, we now have a law that was passed by our Republican governor, Baker, to have a more affordable housing built in the proximity of the public transportation system. Mayor Michelle Wu, who is the first Asian woman of color to be mayor of Boston, is also pushing for more affordable housing. There's really a growing awareness. I think the growing consciousness or awareness about inequality that came with Me Too and Black Lives Matter is, I think, really moving us toward greater solidarity toward the poor.

We see this in this explosion of unionization that we are witnessing right now in the country. A lot of the young people who are involved in these unions, whether we're talking about Starbucks or even Amazon, are making claims for dignity. Like the fact that at Amazon, the workers were really talking a lot about bathroom breaks. You think about the strike among Hollywood creatives, is also, I think, largely about recognition because they resist the fact that AI is really going to make their work increasingly alienated from them.

The workers are not scared to say, "Well, if the companies are piling out the profit while diminishing our income, this is absolutely unacceptable." They're ready to mobilize in a way that I think has really been fed in part by the commitment of Gen Zs and millennial to greater equality. I think that comes from their-- That's another part of the book, which is really these interviews we've conducted with the 80 Gen Zs, they've witnessed that they're not going to buy a house. For them, the American dream is a total illusion, and they're not going to get into what some of them call the craze about consumption. They don't think that's going to do anything for them.

They're also very concerned about climate change. Instead of living for accumulation and getting richer and getting the suburban house, they want to live to have a better society today. That's largely defined by living in a more inclusive community with people to whom they can connect as people. I think we really need to focus on these aspects and the role of Gen Zs in the current strikes and the unionization to understand why this moment is so important and with a much more mobilization than we've had for workers in many decades. A lot of this comes from the service sector, which has not been traditionally the sector where workers mobilized. They are very [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Deep research, deep thinking from Michèle Lamont, professor of sociology, African American Studies, and the Robert I. Goldman professor of European Studies at Harvard. Her new book is called Seeing Others: How Recognition Works—and How It Can Heal a Divided World. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. I really appreciated this.

Michèle Lamont: Thank you for having me.

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