By Grace Tesoro, Staff Writer
“One of the most challenging things to a human is knowing oneself,” Maureen Linker said in her lecture titled “Knowing Thyself: Managing the Relational Nature of Social Difference” Monday night in Faylor Hall.
Linker is a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and came to Susquehanna to lecture on the importance of recognizing social differences between groups of people. Department head of philosophy Colleen Zoller played in integral role in having Linker come to campus. Zoller said she discovered Linker through an email from University of Michigan Press regarding Linker’s newly-published book, “Intellectual Empathy: Critical Thinking for Social Justice.”
“Just reading the blurb about [the book] I could tell how much it was meeting a need I think fundamentally goes unmet in terms of helping people learn how to talk across difference and see how it is not to just be nice but to be better at thinking” Zoller said.
Linker opened the lecture by stating that the title of the presentation, “Knowing Thyself” is the same injunction that was distinguished by ancient philosopher Socrates. “Knowing oneself is a challenge that remains true today,” Linker said. “It is a challenge to know how you form the beliefs you form and how it operates your decision making.”
Linker then presented the idea of intellectual empathy, an idea that emphasizes the exercise of self-understanding through individual’s identification and understanding of the feelings and motives of people that come from different social groups.
Linker involved the audience in the lecture by asking them to raise their hands if they thought racism, sexism, religious bias and bias on sexual orientation are problems for the United States, the state of Pennsylvania, Susquehanna Valley and the Susquehanna campus. A wave of hands shot up in the air as the response.
However, when Linker asked if any member of the audience was racist, sexist or homophobic, only five or six members boldly raised their hands to admit to having biases.
“So the majority of us are not the culprits, but how do these problems exist?” Linker asked. Linker stated that these issues were systemic and have elements that get perpetuated by people who are not actively working against it. Linker discussed the idea of intersectionality, where systems of privilege, culture, power and history intersect to create complex experiences.
The aspect of intersectionality was derived by black feminists and black feminist thought. “In the 1970s, white women sought to dismantle the church because they found it to be patriarchal. However, for black women, the church had a different meaning. It was a source of liberation and solidarity,” Linker said. This example of intersectionality demonstrated how a system can be seen differently by women based on different experiences and different facets of their social identity.
“Identity is forged through experience, and knowing you have privilege makes us uncomfortable,” she said. On the subject of social privilege, Linker offered a metaphor comparing social privilege to having an E-Z Pass through life’s major roads. Linker explained, “The people with the pass are just so concerned with where they need to be, they are not even focused on the people who don’t who are stuck in a long line of traffic.” Whereas a person with less privilege has a more difficult time navigating through life’s major roads. “Privilege is the invisibility of it,” Linker said. “Privilege feels like it is normal.”
Linker presented a photo of an African-American couple showing a public display of affection and explained that even though the couple’s race could create issues for them, their sexual identity and expressing their affection in public does not, whereas if they were a gay or lesbian couple it would be different.
“We all have something we can learn from each other,” Linker said.
Linker urged the audience to recognize the differences in social identities and to understand that they are complex, and to pay attention to biases and make an effort to steer clear of them but also recognize that everyone has them.
