Manuel Chávez Jr.
I write this essay thinking of those who commit themselves—to think, act, live—against White supremacy.1 In particular, I have in mind straight-identified men of color, who may be committed politically in different ways and at different levels, but nevertheless possess a sensibility critical of Whiteness that resists the internalization of racial self-hatred (personal and communal). I am thinking of men of color who may have become politicized through situations similar to my own. In my case, reading Chicana/o literature served as a starting point to understand anew my own sense of self and the reality in which I live. This new sense of self, informed by the histories and memories of survivors of colonization, motivates me to live consciously in ways resistant to racism. Yet, with the company of Chicana feminist theorists, I also became aware that a gender-binary grounds the “antiracism” of Chicano politics and limits publicly recognized activist and intellectual leadership primarily to straight-identified men of color.2 These men of color, in turn, institutionalize the masculinist definition of what it means to be an antiracist. As Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) now widely cited analysis of “intersectionality” reveals, a consequence of this form of antiracist politics is the failure to understand how racial oppression differentially affects women of color. This chapter interrogates Chicano investments in a masculinist form of antiracism in response to what María Lugones identifies as “the indifference that men … who have been racialized as inferior, exhibit to the systematic violences inflicted upon women of color” (HGS 188). Specifically, I examine how a modernist ethics anchors this hegemonic politics of antiracism and perpetuates the gendered logic of colonial domination.3 Given this, the politics of antiracism, often advocated by straight-identified men of color, requires a decolonial shift in our ethical approach in order to confront the violence directed at women of color.
Central to this project is what María Lugones names the “coloniality of gender,” a concept she develops through the work of both Aníbal Quijano and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Expanding Qujiano’s (2000) notion of the “coloniality of power,” Lugones articulates connections between systems of colonialism and Crenshaw’s theoretical framework for the intersectionality of oppression. In so doing, Lugones exposes that, in spite of his anticolonial stance, Quijano’s way of thinking “accepts the global, Eurocentered, capitalist understanding of what gender is about” (HGS 190). As a result, his Eurocentered assumption of sex/gender hides colonial forms of violence. He assumes all men are competing for women, ignoring both men of color who may not be erotically interested in women and men of color who are also perceived and treated as objects of sexual domination. Lugones argues that Quijano makes these assumptions because he does not consider how the construction of gender marked the division between humans and nonhumans. Within the Eurocentric perspective, Lugones explains, the gender difference between masculine and feminine traits are relevant to humans, and therefore only Europeans are clearly gendered. In this scheme, non-Europeans are “without gender.” Consequently, Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power “serve[s] to veil the ways in which nonwhite colonized women have been subjected and disempowered” (190). In effect, Quijano’s elaboration of the coloniality of power does not recognize how our contemporary conception of gender itself is a product and instrument of colonialism, with particularly violent effects for women of color. Lugones understands heteropatriarchal constructions of sex/gender as integral to the racialized apparatus of violence in the service of colonialism. She refers to this as the coloniality of gender. Her insight makes clear that men of color politicized against racism who still uphold heteropatriarchal gender/sex norms are thus complicit in the mechanisms of coloniality. If gender is a colonial construct, Lugones infers it is vital for straight-identified men of color who are committed to antiracism to call on each other to resist colonial heterosexualist and patriarchal masculinities. In this chapter, I unpack the role modern ethics plays in seducing men of color away from this charge. Specifically, I elaborate the link between the politics of antiracism and its investments in individualist conceptions of agency that erase historical relations of power upholding White supremacy.
I begin with how the Chicano Movement is an antiracist project entangled within the coloniality of gender. As Adalijza Sosa-Riddell points out, through their ignorance of “the condition of double oppression under which Chicanas suffer, [Chicanos] are not only perpetuating the stereotypes and the conditions that those stereotypes support, but they are also guilty of intensifying those conditions and their negative results” (1974, 163). Cherríe Moraga argues that it is not simple neglect of gender oppression by Chicanos, but that Chicanos take advantage of heterosexualism:
Living under Capitalist Patriarchy, what is true for “the man” in terms of misogyny is, to a great extent, true for the Chicano. He, too, like any other man, wants to be able to determine how, when, and with whom his women—mother, wife, and daughter—are sexual. … The control of women begins through the institution of heterosexuality. (2000, 102)
In their focused opposition to White supremacy, Chicano cismen who are complicit with heterosexuality tend to reinforce the coloniality of gender by the indifference they exhibit toward the well-being of Chicanas and nonheterosexual members of the Chicana/o community. As a result, Chicano politics manifests itself as what Elizabeth Martínez calls “Chingón politics” (1998, 172). This form of politics promotes a male-centered hierarchical leadership that “encourages the association of machismo with domination” (175). Chingón politics stifles dialogue and marginalizes women. So instead of informing a movement toward liberation for all, it serves to perpetuate oppression. Moraga laments: “Any movement built on the fear and loathing of anyone is a failed movement. The Chicano movement is no different” (130). Lugones’s notion of coloniality of gender helps illuminate the self-delusions necessary to ignore the contradictions and hypocrisy of a movement committed to end White supremacist violence against communities of color that, in its enactment of this commitment, reinforces the oppression of the women and nonheterosexual members within these very communities.
If we, politicized antiracist straight-identified men of color, want to maintain political integrity in our struggles for liberation, we must examine our attachments to the coloniality of gender. An important aspect in this antiracist politics is our ethical stance. The antiracism of Chingón politics is located within modern ethics, which offers politicized straight-identified men of color a positive moral standing denied to them by White supremacy. Modern ethics presumes a universal framework based on a masculinist model (Hoagland 1988).4 By posing moral actors as self-sufficient, reasonable, and independent, modern ethics offers a strongly individualist stance for fighting racial oppression. However, for straight-identified men of color committed to antiracism, subscribing to modern ethics is a form of self-colonization that serves to reproduce the coloniality of gender. The colonizing logic of modern ethics lives in its masquerade as a universal model that normalizes reality framed by White masculinity. Accordingly, men of color who embrace a modern ethical attitude in their political commitments against racism must remain blind to historical relations of power that produce White male supremacist social reality. The internalization of the assumption that colonial oppression does not impact non-White agency necessarily involves the adoption of a masculinist disposition to assume individualist agency as priority over coalitional work against racism. Men of color seduced by the masculinist construction of individual moral agency offered by modern ethics invest in the very Eurocentric logics that justify their own community’s subordination under White supremacy. The coloniality of gender thus unveils what I am calling “the coloniality of ethics.” At stake for politicized straight-identified men of color in adopting a decolonial ethics is the way to create solidarity within and across communities of color that builds toward social and institutional transformation.
Although understanding the coloniality of ethics is a necessary step in resisting complicity with the coloniality of gender in one’s antiracist commitments, the next step is to chart avenues toward liberation that encompass all members of (post)colonized communities. Lugones offers us a map to reveal both the coloniality of ethics and the “ethics of decoloniality.” I cautiously use the term ethics in relation to Lugones’s work given the modern/colonial philosophical conceptions of this field of study. Modern ethics, whether expressed via ethical theories such as deontological theory, utilitarianism, neo-sentimentalism, or social contract theory, does not address how the legacy of colonialism operates in contemporary society, let alone how it shapes its own history as a field of philosophical investigation.5 Nevertheless, I use it because it creates bridges to the work of other thinkers who recognize that antiracist struggles demand a transformation of personal and communal values. To be clear, Lugones herself does not use the language of ethics to conceptualize resistance. However, her emphasis on praxical thinking brings into focus how the creation and sustainment of intersubjective relations is a necessary node of political resistance. Praxical thinking is attentive to the complexities of oppression that are hidden by the logic of domination. It is this emphasis on conscious, flesh and blood interactions with others in the context of oppression that I wish to call forth by using the term ethics. Drawing on Lugones’s theories and her idea of praxis, I wish to retain and expand on the conception of ethics in elaborating a decolonial ethics.
We need to recognize that resistance to oppression requires a transformation of the ethical perceptions of ourselves and of one another that undoes the coloniality of gender. Lugones underscores this need in her understanding of decolonization as a process of liberation from colonial cognitive mechanisms: “How do we practice with each other engaging in dialogue at the colonial difference? How do we know when we are doing it?” (TDF 755). She offers a way to think of the practice of liberation as open-ended and created by one’s way of life with, and among, survivors of colonization. Decolonial ethics elaborates a way of life that confronts, resists, and yet is separate from coloniality at the fleshy level of daily embodied relations and interactions. It is not based on universalizing ways of thinking, nor is it normative or prescriptive; instead, it is critically heuristic, characterized by three connected cognitive practices. First, decolonial ethics entails making sense of and thinking from, what Lugones calls, the “anti-structure” (SAS 60). The anti-structure is the living social space not comprehended by the coloniality of power. Second, thinking within the anti-structure requires a streetwalker’s/callejera’s sensibility of the palpable frictions between hegemonic and nondominant senses of social reality and of one’s self (TSC 222). A decolonial ethics finds its hermeneutic footing in this streetwalking awareness that exists in tension with dominant normative structures. Third, a decolonial ethics does not pivot on the individual(ist) self and the illusion of individualist modern agency. Rather, it gives attention to “active subjectivity,” a type of subjectivity that emerges through and from nondominant socialities that enable collective action against institutionalized oppression (TSC 211). Taken together, these elements serve to propel a decolonial ethics.
Men of color may glimpse in mainstream ethics the possibility of adopting a clear moral standing that promises a solid conceptual foundation in an immoral racist world. In so doing, modern ethics emphasizes a moral autonomy that makes it possible to imagine oneself as a moral hero struggling against irrational social evils. Because of its assumption of solitary self-discipline, modern ethics makes it difficult to conceptualize and to create social transformation that does not depend on abstract individualism. In the context of coloniality, however, the colonized cannot wield individual action with any effective and enduring consequence in the struggle against oppression. Decolonial ethics responds to this limit in modern ethics by addressing the structural dimensions of oppression that expose personhood itself as a racial and gendered fiction. In this regard, decolonial ethics makes clear the need to forge solidarity and foregrounds the embodied social interactions that constitute the point where supportive connections are built. Building solidarity with nonheterosexual people and women of color, rather than inhabiting the abstraction of modern moral autonomy, offers an opening for antiracist men of color to resist internalized oppression and cultivate a new way toward self-love (personal and communal) delinked from the logic of domination.
Ethical projects against racism take many forms. Some argue racism is a betrayal of ethics, and thus antiracist work requires the fair adherence to moral principles (Zack 2011). Other antiracist theorists criticize dominant forms of ethics by arguing that these frameworks already contain racialized presuppositions that maintain and naturalize social inequalities (Mills 1998). Interrogating the ethical motivations and perceptions of the politics of antiracism, especially where carried out by politicized straight-identified men of color, can serve to foreground, confront, and offer ways to resist the indifference of men of color toward the violence directed at women of color.
As Charles Mills underscores, many discussions regarding racism usually dismiss ethics as secondary to, or derivative of, the politics and economics of racial classification (1998). While Chicana/o thought similarly lacks attention to moral philosophy specifically, Chicana/o thinkers have, however, highlighted the importance of intersubjective relations in the process of social transformation (Soldatenko 2009).6 For the Chicano philosopher Patrick Carey-Herrera, the Chicano Movement shows that “Chicanos have discovered for themselves the meaningfulness of the question, ‘What is the basis for morally right and morally wrong action?’ ” (1983, 154).7 According to him, Chicanismo, as the philosophy of the movement, suggests an “ethically superior way of living” that has been obscured by Anglo American society (153). In opposition to the values of the dominant culture, a “Chicano Ethic” is grounded in “a metaphysical bond [that] exists among Chicanos in the sense of an inherent condition of brotherhood or family” (150).8 “Carnalismo,” Carey-Herrera explains, “creates a framework of ethical imperatives upon which both theoretical and actual constructs can be tried and tested” (151). The moral life for Mexican Americans would entail the “voluntary submission to the ethical demands inherent to this expanded understanding of Carnalismo” (153). According to Carey-Herrera, the Chicano Ethic does not suggest cultural relativism; rather, “[i]t causes the Chicano to ascend to a higher level of inquiry … that of universal principles” (154). Carnalismo leads to a value system rooted in the universal principles of “Equality and Dignity” (156). It reveals a universal demand: “The respect and dignity referred to in this case are the humanistic universal imperative, the equality of man” (155). In other words, Carnalismo demands that advocates of the Chicano Movement perceive and act toward each other as persons (rather than as subpersons as in the view of White racism); however, it does not restrict personhood to Mexican Americans only. In the project of Chicanismo, Carey-Herrera perceives an alternative, but universal, moral philosophy that expands personhood to non-Whites, and thus offers a guide to transform the values of the Mexican American community and, eventually, those of the larger society.
Antiracist ethical projects, such as the one articulated by Carey-Herrera, are nonetheless unwittingly anchored in the moral structure of modernity. As a result, they undermine their own anti-oppressive aims. The contradiction of the Chicano Movement was clear to many Chicana feminists. Alma M. García notes: “Many Chicanas, active within every sector of the movement, raised their voices in a collective feminist challenge to the sexism and male domination that they were experiencing within the movimiento … these Chicanas began to see and experience some of the contradictions of Chicanismo, specifically as it applied to women” (1997). While “macho attitudes” are explicit expressions of sexism and male domination, Chabram-Dernersesian notes how these oppressive views are embedded within the discourse itself: “Chicano identity is written with linguistic qualifiers—o/os—which subsume the Chicana into a universal ethnic subject that speaks with the masculine instead of the feminine and embodies itself in a Chicano male” (1992, 82). She explains that the effect of the centering of the male Chicano subject is that “the silenced Other, Chicanas/hembras, are thus removed from full-scale participation in the Chicano movement as fully embodied, fully empowered U.S. Mexican female subjects” (83). Chicanas who wished to be treated according to principles of equality and dignity within the Chicano Movement “had to embody themselves as males, adopt traditional family relations, and dwell only on their racial and/or ethnic oppression” (83).9 In other words, Carnalismo implies machismo. Lugones offers further clarity of how the logic of an antiracist ethics can be rooted within modernity.
In his critique of modernity, Quijano argues it is historically and conceptually inseparable from coloniality (2000).10 The coloniality of power describes the global system of power based on racial stratification. In this system, Quijano points out that “… only European culture is rational, it can contain ‘subjects’—the rest are not rational, they cannot be or harbor ‘subjects’ ” (2007, 173). And, where White Europeans are assumed to be modern subjects, Quijano observes that, “certain races are condemned as inferior for not being rational subjects” (2000, 555). In modernity/coloniality, the world system of power established domination over social existence by “Whites” over “Indians,” “Negroes,” and “Orientals.” Although Quijano does not directly address ethics in his discussion of modernity/coloniality, it is clear that ethical concerns were never meant to apply to non-Europeans, as explicitly admitted by modern ethical theorists themselves.11 Given the modern/colonial paradigm, the only relation that exists between Europeans and non-Europeans is one of domination.12
Mills offers a way to understand the effect of coloniality on ethics through his explanation of what he calls Herrenvolk morality. Mills describes Herrenvolk ethics as “the moral code appropriate to the racially privileged population within a social order simultaneously committed to liberal egalitarianism and racial hierarchy” (1998, 152). The fundamental principle of this moral system is “all persons should be treated equally (by contrast with the morality of feudalism), but the racially inferior are not full persons” (152). Mills points out this principle may be overt or covert, or even denied in a Herrenvolk ethics and yet still be operative. The effect can be perceived in how the racial identity of full persons limits their ability to have empathy for those marked as racially inferior, subpersons.
Mills shows how this abstraction of personhood in mainstream ethics can serve to disguise the coloniality of ethics. He points out that the concept of personhood is fundamental in modern ethics. For example, in modern ethics, a person is conceived as a “self-owning appropriator,” such as in Lockeanism, or, the person is a “self-directing being,” according to Kantianism (152).13 If we look through the lens of the Herrenvolk framework, however, the starting point is not, in fact, an abstract population of equal individuals, but “a population that is, before anything else, racially categorized and of differential moral status” (153). Historically, this population has been divided roughly between Whites and non-Whites. In a Herrenvolk ethics, “racialized personhood” is central. Whites are considered full persons, while non-Whites are subpersons. The racial distinction is central to determining whose life has moral value and whose life has less or none at all. In a Herrenvolk Kantianism, subpersons are not “rational, self-directing entities” and depend on others (full persons) for guidance. In a Herrenvolk Lockeanism, subpersons lack the property of Whiteness, which is necessary in order to possess “full self-ownership, for the ownership of efficient nature-appropriating labor … and for full entitlement to (ownership of) rights” (154). Non-Whites, lacking Whiteness, are incapable of self-ownership, and thus full personhood. Herrenvolk ethics assumes a racial distinction between personhood and subpersonhood in its articulation of abstract personhood. As Mills states, “When one talks in general about abstract persons, then, one is really talking about [Whites]” (153). In this way, modern ethics, as Herrenvolk ethics, perpetuates the coloniality of power.14
In the context of Herrenvolk ethics, Carey-Herrera’s articulation of Chicano Ethics is a challenge to the construction of Mexican Americans as subpersons. While he does not view Carnalismo as a striving for Whiteness, it is still a claim for personhood. In his conception of Chicano Ethics, Carey-Herrera does not question the modern conception of personhood. Because he does assume an abstract personhood, he does not recognize how Chicano Ethics parlays into modernity’s underlying logic of coloniality. His focus on defending the personhood of Mexican Americans does not allow Carey-Herrera to consider how personhood is not only racialized, but also gendered. As a result, his concept of Chicano Ethics does not and cannot address the problems within Chicano politics identified by Chicana feminists, such as Sosa-Riddell, Moraga, García, Martínez, and Chabram-Dernersesian. Where Herrenvolk ethics assumes personhood is White, Carnalismo assumes all Mexican American persons are male (Chicanos). Lugones brings our attention to how the coloniality of power continues to frame personal and social relations between and among the colonized through gender. Gender relations, she argues, are a central mechanism by which systems of domination rooted in colonialism are maintained and perpetuated within communities of color.
Instead of assuming personhood as a basic element in social reality, Lugones lets us understand it as a product of social relations. Lugones uses the term structure to reference that which shapes the constitution of persons: “Structures construct or constitute persons not just in the sense of giving them a facade, but also in the sense of giving them emotions, beliefs, norms, desires, and intentions that are their own” (SAS 60). These structures construct beings with particular selves by way of specific institutional and societal roles and statuses. They grant personhood “the fiction of effective individual agency” (TSC 210).
In this conception of agency, the successful agent reasons practically in a world of meaning and within social, political, and economic institutions that back him up and form the framework for his forming intentions that are not subservient to the plans of others and that he is able to carry into action unimpeded and as intended (TSC 211). The illusion of personhood is to hide “the institutional setting and the institutional backing of individual potency” (TSC 210). A moral structure, as I am using it, produces persons who can assume value to their own lives and thus have moral worth to be respected. The moral structure of modernity valorizes “single authorship, individual responsibility, individual accountability, and self-determination” (TSC 210). It creates a social space that makes visible the value of relationships between the persons it constructs. In doing so, the moral structure of modernity distinguishes between those who have personhood, and those who lack it. Lugones shows us how this moral structure is framed by the coloniality of gender.
Lugones contends that the coloniality of power is inseparable from the heterosexualist gender system.15 The colonial/modern moral structure is not only racialized but thoroughly gendered. Within modernity, womanhood is identified with European females and femininity is racialized as White. Modern femininity is characterized by the moral values of “sexual purity and passivity” (HGS 203). Where White women are valued within modernity for the sake of reproducing the status of White men, colonized females “were understood as animals in the deep sense of ‘without gender,’ sexually marked as female, but without the characteristics of femininity” (202). Lugones contends that gender is a necessary condition to being constituted as a person in the logic of the coloniality of power. Those who lack gender are not valued as a person. She writes: “The behaviors of the colonized and their personalities/souls were judged as bestial and thus non-gendered, promiscuous, grotesquely sexual, and sinful” (TDF 743). To be a nongendered being is to be excluded from the realm of personhood. In this manner, the coloniality of gender defines the modern moral structure; it thus reveals the coloniality of ethics. Because women of color do not fit clearly the colonial/modern gender system, their lives do not have moral value. So, where White women are marginalized in the public sphere, women of color are marginalized within the community of persons. The effect of the coloniality of gender is to produce women of color as non-persons. Consequently, for women of color, the coloniality of ethics is “thoroughly violent” (HGS 206).
As Quijano notes, modernity/coloniality constrains the imagination of the colonized.16 Lugones reveals the logic that limits the ethical imagination of the colonized, particularly of those politicized straight-identified men of color who struggle for moral recognition in the mainstream political culture. Yet it is precisely this desire to be perceived as ethical actors, as rational persons, that seduces antiracist men of color into complicity with the coloniality of power. This is the contradiction of Chicano Ethics. Politicized straight-identified men of color accept a gendered identity assumed by the moral structure of modernity as a way to conceive the antiracist as a rational person. Hence, the seduction of fulfilling the role of the modern personhood. The contradiction of Chicano Ethics is its attempt to reject the imposition of subpersonhood by White supremacy while it assimilates nonetheless into the modern/colonial moral structure by claiming personhood, and consequently reproducing the coloniality of ethics.
Lugones allows us to see that mainstream ethics is ultimately based on the history and logic of coloniality. She shows us how modern ethics can serve to perpetuate colonial oppression within communities of color by people of color, especially by men of color. Lugones argues:
We see the gender dichotomy operating normatively in the construction of the social and in the colonial processes of oppressive subjectification. But if we are going to make an-other construction of the self in relation, we need to bracket the dichotomous human/non-human, colonial, gender system that is constituted by the hierarchical dichotomy man/woman for European colonials + the non-gendered, non-human colonized. (TDF 748–49)
In order to live against White racism, she calls on us to delink from the coloniality of gender, and thus to refuse positioning ourselves within the moral structure of modernity. For politicized straight-identified men of color, it is vital to separate ourselves from the limits of modern ethics in order to decolonize and re-create intersubjective relations that can transform our communities.
Recognizing the coloniality of ethics enables us to see how, when politicized men of color adopt the colonial/modern moral structure, this only further reproduces indifference to “the systematic violences inflicted upon women of color” (HGS 188). Modern ethics, by way of its logic of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, as well as its perception of social reality, normalizes the colonial world of White masculine subjectivity and, in doing so devalues the lives of women of color. A politics based in modern ethics can only “affirm rather than reject an oppressive organization of life” (187). Consequently, to refuse the coloniality of ethics makes it more possible “to place ourselves in a position to call each other to reject this gender system as we perform a transformation of communal relations” (189). Lugones, however, does not claim that an alternative moral structure or another formulation of personhood is necessary for this shift in our ethical attitude. Rather, she suggests a decolonial ethical praxis involves a creative and resistant way of thinking and living beyond a moral structure centered on personhood.
In contrast to the concept of the “structure,” Lugones describes the anti-structure as a state where “there are no structural descriptions” (SAS 60–61). It is liminal, “the place in between realities, a gap ‘between and betwixt’ universes of sense that construe social life and persons differently, an interstice from where one can most clearly stand critically toward different structures” (59). The anti-structure is inhabited by living beings that are not totally defined by dominant social categories, and thus who do not stand “with respect to others … as in a hierarchy” (PIS 60). Based on Lugones’s conception, I pose the moral anti-structure as the liminal space that exists outside of the realm of personhood.
The abstraction of personhood implies a particular epistemic perspective, a viewpoint of society that is distant from embodied interactions. The concept of personhood implies what Lugones calls a “bird’s-eye view”: a perspective “perched up high, looking at or making up the social from a disengaged position” (TSC 207). The spectator of this perspective, the “strategist,” is assumed to be a full person with the rational capacity to view reality as a whole. Framed by this disembodied point of view, the strategist adheres to what Lugones names the “logic of purity,” a mode of thinking premised in a “unity underlying multiplicity” (PIS 126). The strategist only recognizes a social reality composed of beings who, like the strategist, possess full personhood.
Instead of the top-down perspective of the “strategist,” thinking in the moral anti-structure demands a viewpoint from street level. So, in contrast to the “bird’s-eye view” of modern ethics, Lugones suggests a different starting point: “the location of the theorizing subject is from within the midst of impure subjects negotiating life transgressing the categorial understandings of a logic of binaries that renders hard-edged, ossified, exclusive groups, as well as succumbing to the reductions of that logic” (ED 197). A decolonial ethics is informed by the perspective of the streetwalker that can perceive “underneath” the moral structure and sees the “other” side of personhood. This mode of perceiving necessitates what Lugones calls a logic of impurity, or “the logic of curdling”: “According to the logic of curdling, the social world is complex and heterogenous and each person is multiple, nonfragmented, embodied” (PIS 127). This logic of impurity is not limited by the boundaries of modern personhood. As such, it makes it possible to perceive that those outside the realm of (White and gendered) personhood do not exist purely as subpersons or non-persons. Lugones tells us: “Impurity grounds the need for an against-the-grain sociality that one is moved to discern, sustain, affirm amid those subjected who harbor the ambition to become nonsubjected subjects” (ED 196). Within the moral structure of modernity, resistance to oppression by so-called subpersons and non-persons “is conceptually disallowed as moral” (TSC 211). In contrast, engagement with decolonial ethics facilitates an understanding of those who undermine or do not conform to the fiction of personhood within the moral anti-structure. Thinking within the moral anti-structure, as a callejera, social reality is “a tense, contested terrain” because one can see the dynamic effect that the conflict between oppression and resistance has in producing social reality (ED 200).
For decolonial ethics, the moral structure and the moral anti-structure both exist. Lugones explains that this requires the development of a “duplicitous perception” in order to simultaneously recognize the activities both within and outside the realm of personhood (TSC 225). Such a mode of perception allows for the understanding of “subpersons” and “non-persons” as resistors. She emphasizes: “The streetwalker theorist keeps both logics in interpretation but valorizes the logic of resistance as she inhabits differentiated geographies carrying with others contestatory meanings to praxical completion” (TSC 218). So, rather than focusing on personhood, decolonial ethical praxis focuses on the intersubjective phenomenon where intentions and meaning are generated. Through relational practices, resistant values—values that work against the coloniality of power—become discernible. The perspective of la callejera allows for making sense of the values of resistance generated by social practices and relations take place underneath the moral structure—values not necessarily articulated or understood in terms of personhood.
These resistant values are not necessarily articulated by individual persons, but emerge from concrete relational practices. In contrast to the modern ethical idea of personhood, Lugones points out the idea of “active subjectivity.” She describes it as “alive in the activity of dispersed intending in complex, heterogeneous collectivities, within and between worlds of complex sense” (TSC 217). Active subjectivity is an embodied, collective movement of resistant energies that inhabits in the moral anti-structure. For a decolonial ethics, active subjectivity is the source for values of resistance generated underneath the abstract realm of personhood. Decolonial ethical praxis involves striving to perceive, move with, and amplify these values toward a transformation of the oppressive situation. With the sensibility of the streetwalker /la callejera, decolonial ethics operates as “a tactical strategic practice” (TSC 222). Lugones explains the tactical strategic practice is one in which “one places, takes up, follows, aids, resistant emancipatory intentions in the midst of active, resisting subjects who are indispensable to each other if their intending is to inform their social reality” (TSC 224). A tactical strategic practice is attuned to the immediate context as well as the wider fields of power where these intersubjective practices are located. By engaging in this practice, the decolonial ethicist participates in a socially creative process in which collective relationships, rather than individual persons, generate resistant values from practices that work against/in spite of/within mainstream political culture.
By moving beyond the moral structure based on personhood, decolonial ethics suggests a way to resist White supremacy without succumbing to the hegemony of the gender dichotomy, and the accompanying perpetuation of violence against women of color. As discussed previously, the logic of coloniality links personhood to gender identity; that is, in order to be a person, one must be a “man” or a “woman.” In a modern ethics of antiracism, women of color must be assimilated into the moral structure of modernity. However, if a politicized man of color relies on the concept of personhood to formulate an ethic-politics of antiracism, it can have the effect of limiting it to heteropatriarchal norms and marginalizing those folks of color whose resistance to racism does not fit or exceeds those norms. Lugones writes: “If we only weave man and woman into the very fabric that constitutes the self in relation to resisting, we erase the resistance itself” (TDF 749). Linking resistance to gender identity can have the effect of obscuring the moral anti-structure. So, first of all, masculinity is not elemental to resistance in a decolonial ethics; insofar as masculinity is tied to personhood, it can actually be an obstacle because an ethics of decolonial resistance depends on its decentering of personhood in viewing fellow resistors. And, if, second of all, straight-identified men of color want to undo White supremacy, then their resistance to sexism cannot be reduced to the terms of “gender equality,” as it is formulated within the dominant moral structure, but they must give attention to and move with the resistant values of nonheterosexual people and women of color that evade the colonial/modern gender system. For politicized men of color confronting White racism, to thoughtfully inhabit the moral anti-structure would offer a manner by which working against violence against women of color can become a premise for an antiracist politics. Through the cultivation of resistant values the active subjectivity can grow into an intentional community against oppression. By forging an “impure community,” the oppressive situation can be transformed (IC, C). To engage in decolonial ethics is to see both the life oppressed in the moral structure and the resistant life in the moral anti-structure. In resistance to the coloniality of ethics, Lugones suggests conceptual conditions that abandon the colonial/modern gender system. In contrast to a modern ethics that pivots on the notion of personhood, a decolonial ethics searches to create impure communities through the generation of resistant values by active subjectivity.
Since antiracist politics assumes a moral view in its struggle against White supremacy, it is vital for us, politicized men of color, to consider the ethics that frames our politics. When Chicanos accept heteropatriarchal norms for an ethical stance, this has the effect of reinforcing the oppression of Chicanas as well as nonheterosexual members of the community. In her essay “History and the Politics of Violence Against Women,” Antonia I. Castañeda writes:
The legacy of the Americas is violence and exploitation based on sex, gender, race, sexuality, class, culture, and physical condition—based on the power and privilege to exploit and oppress others that each of those elements confer on us. … Where do each of us stand on each of these interlocking elements? I would ask each of us to interrogate ourselves, our individual gender, sexual, racial, and class politics, and our power and privilege in each realm.
We cannot change the last 500 years, but we can change the next 500. We must take personal responsibility to act against rape, sexual violence, racism, sexism, homophobism, classism. Every time we remain silent and do not take a stand against these interlocking evils wherever we encounter them, we become complicitous with them and we reproduce them. (1998, 317–18)
Historically, antiracist politics, including Chicano nationalist politics, has assumed a basis in modern ethics. Such an antiracist politics challenges the person/subperson divide that grounds White supremacy, countering with the claim that such a division does not exist. Carey-Herrera does this in his conception of a Chicano Ethics by expanding the notion of personhood to include Chicanos. However, he never questions the historical paradigm of personhood. Quijano indicates the coloniality of power is embedded within the notion of personhood. As Mills contends, the notion of personhood is theoretically abstract, and historically rooted in Whiteness. The effect of assuming personhood as a basis of antiracist politics is to affirm a White morality and thus be unable to recognize resistance to that morality. Because an antiracist politics presumes a particular ethics, it is necessary for politicized men of color to rethink and enact an ethics delinked from the logic of coloniality.
In understanding how modern ethics is produced by the interlinked racial and gender logics of colonial oppression, Lugones offers a way to think of an ethics of resistance that goes beyond the notion of personhood. Modern personhood is racialized and gendered. The use of personhood not only results in subpersonhood, but can have the effect of turning women of color into non-persons. Lugones argues personhood is not innate, but is constituted by structures, and its very abstractness obscures violence at the street-level. By offering a way to think outside those structures, she suggests ways to undermine the coloniality of power at the mundane level of daily, embodied relations, and interactions.
In making sense of practices of resistance within complex situations of oppression, Lugones gestures toward a decolonial ethics. Decolonial ethics is not based on universal principles or norms, or on establishing an alternative moral framework. Rather, it is an ethics that exists within and is attentive to praxis. Lugones’s decolonial gesture is motivated by making liberation from the logic of domination praxically possible. Rather than attempting to discover or construct a moral structure, decolonial ethics searches for and takes up resistance among the colonized as it already exists.
A decolonial ethics makes clear the necessity of rethinking how we perceive resistance within the context of oppression. The elaboration of a decolonial ethics, Lugones suggests, involves three aspects. The first is inhabiting the anti-structure, the social space that is obscured by personhood. Related to living in the anti-structure is thinking from the anti-structure, which requires a viewpoint that does not begin from abstraction. From the perspective of the streetwalker, what becomes perceptible is active subjectivity and the intentionality that emerges through the relationships of a collectivity. It is through attention to this active subjectivity that one can discern the values of the praxis of resistance, values that are not predefined or conceptualized in modern ethics. A decolonial ethical praxis means endeavoring to think and live in the moral anti-structure.
Lugones challenges us, politicized straight-identified men of color, to (re-)consider how our focus on fighting oppression is based on a collusion with the colonial/modern system. In this chapter, I have attempted to show how this collusion emerges among men of color in community-based movements against White supremacy, in part through the seduction of personhood into modern ethics. Modern ethics leaves the coloniality of gender undisturbed. A decolonial ethics is an invitation to reflect on how we act, think, and live in the context of multiple colonial oppressions. In order to think and perceive resistance to oppression, Lugones argues, it is necessary to live, move, and think within the moral anti-structure. This requires the decolonial ethical agent to trespass through the map of oppression hidden by the dominant moral structure.17 Modern ethics, as an attempted source for oppositional struggle for justice, prevents the oppressed from recognizing differential resistance within their own community. Accordingly, modern ethics inserts the logic of the colonizer into the relations of the colonized. Where the adherence to modern ethics is a commitment to self-colonization, a decolonial ethics can show us how to create an alternative ethical sense that lives beyond the limits of heterosexualism, and how to learn to love ourselves in a new way.
1.In this chapter, I capitalize the term White to emphasize “Whiteness” as an ideology that is distinct, though not separate, from the racial description of individuals.
2.I owe much to the work of Anzaldúa (1987), Moraga (2000), Trujillo (1998), Córdova et al. (1990), García (1997), and Sandoval (2000) in my own intellectual development as a Chicano theorist committed to decolonizing feminist principles.
3.In the rest of this chapter, I use the term modern ethics to refer to modernist ethics, a moral philosophy embedded within modernity.
4.See Hoagland (1988). In her work, Hoagland provides a thorough criticism of “modern patriarchal ethics.”
5.See LaFollette (2000) for an overview of these different schools of thought. In his work Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), Charles W. Mills argues that the racist legacy of colonialism is generally unacknowledged in mainstream philosophical discourses. He remarks that “race barely exists” for “mainstream First World political philosophy” (1998, 97). I believe the same can be said for mainstream First World moral philosophy.
6.Soldatenko argues that the future of Chicano thought must include an “ethical turn.”
7.Patrick Carey-Herrera elaborates on the argument first put forward by Elihu Carranza (1978). I will focus on Carey-Herrera’s interpretation for this essay.
8.In his work, Carey-Herrera uses the term Chicano to refer to all members of the Mexican American community, assuming the masculine as representative of all genders. In the rest of this section, I will show the limits of this gendered conceptualization for an antiracist ethics.
9.See also Rodríguez (2009). Rodríguez makes the argument “that the connection between the trope of the family and Chicano cultural nationalism holds much more symbolic (and material) currency than tracing nationalist roots and routes to the phantasmatic geography of Aztlán” (29).
10.Coloniality characterizes the relations of power that condition the existences of both the colonizers and the colonized (and both of their descendants) on the global scale. While Western thinkers conceive of modernity as an autonomous phenomenon, uniquely generated by Europe, he argues that such a portrayal neglects the role of colonization of the “New World” as well as of Africa and Asia in its production. In fact, he argues, modernity/coloniality originated at the point of the formation of “Europe” (and the “West”) as a geo-political identity that “discovered” “America” (itself created as a geo-political identity). According to Quijano, modernity/coloniality articulates a Eurocentric rationality that expresses the demands of a “First World” capitalism, affecting all aspects of global society.
11.See Eze (1997) for a brief overview of some major modern philosophers’ views of non-Europeans, such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, and G.W. Hegel. In his essay, “On the Treatment of Barbarous Nations,” John Stuart Mill writes: “To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into … In the first place, the rules of ordinary international morality imply reciprocity. But barbarians will not reciprocate. They cannot be depended on for observing any rules. Their minds are not capable of so great an effort, nor their will sufficiently under the influence of distant motives. In the next place, nations which are still barbarous have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners” (1874, 252–53).
12.Maldonado-Torres (2008) argues that modernity established an “ethics of war” between Europeans and non-Europeans.
13.Mills does not include utilitarianism since personhood is not a necessary element, as it is for the moral philosophies of Locke and Kant. However, as the quotation in note 14 shows, the Utilitarian J.S. Mill did not consider “barbarians” to have full personhood equal to those of “civilized nations.”
14.Mills makes a distinction between a “symbiosis” view and a “multiple traditions” view of U.S. political culture. The symbiosis view understands Whiteness and classical liberalism as inseparable, while the multiple traditions view claims that these two aspects of U.S. political culture are separate—though sometimes mutually supportive, but sometimes in conflict. While it is beyond the scope of this essay, I think a decolonial perspective maintains that the symbiosis view is true, and that an oppositional view must be gathered from non-Occidentalist histories (located in the exterior of Whiteness and classical liberalism).
15.Citing the work of Oyèrónk
Oyěwùmí and Paula Gunn Allen, Lugones argues that heterosexualism did not exist in non-European societies before European colonialism. The imposition of heterosexualism up-ended preexisting social relationships within indigenous familial, communal, and political structures. Lugones argues that this gender system is an instrument of colonialism as much as are those of race and class.
16.Quijano writes: “[I]n spite of the fact that political colonialism has been eliminated, the relationship between the European—also called ‘Western’—culture, and the others continues to be one of colonial domination. It is not only a matter of the subordination of the other cultures to the European, in an external relation; we have also to do with a colonization of the other cultures, albeit in differing intensities and depths. This relationship consists, in the first place, of a colonization of the imagination of the dominated; that is, it acts in the interior of that imagination, in a sense, it is part of it” (2007, 169).
17.Lugones offers the image of the map of oppression, “a map that has been drawn by power in its many guises and directions and where there is a spot for you” (IP 8). See also this book’s chapter 11.
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