In the following, comedian Wanda Sykes wonders why African Americans have suffered much less, if at all, from the current opioid health crisis. Ironically, it’s largely because of implicit racial biases within the medical profession.
Here is just one of the studies that supports Sykes’s contention in the performance. The idea that the medical profession, today, still harbors negative stereotypes originating during the period of slavery, is hard to accept. Even harder is the specific bias involved regarding a human being’s capacity to suffer, or lack thereof. While not the focus of discussions here, it often can meander into the philosophy of mind and the problem of other minds, but it is important to steer the conversations back to the ethical realm, where this most properly belongs. We introduce the argument by analogy form, and have students evaluate the treatment of mostly Black people addicted to crack cocaine in the 1980s and how they were typically treated (as criminals), and the “health” crisis of today’s opioid crisis which predominantly affects white people who are over-prescribed opioids for their pain.
Working from sections of Daniel Kelly and Erica Roedder’s Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias and Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works, we analyze the concept of propaganda in the context of policing vs. health care and the language implicitly used that demarcates differential treatment of white folks and Black folks addicted to drugs. For one example, the justice department pushed 100-1 harsher sentences for crack-cocaine use, found predominantly in Black neighborhoods, over purer powder cocaine, used in proportionately similar numbers, but in white areas: “The goal of establishing the sentencing disparities is not consistent with law and order, but the ideal used in the service of that goal is law and order” (Stanley, 60).
It is an irony that is missed by most who have not lived through such experiences.
This is not easy to see, as the positive-sounding language employed to fight the “war on drugs” via “law and order,” for example, can obscure the consequences of differential treatment toward groups of people where there are no actual relevant logical differences between them.
But perhaps utilizing certain argument forms can render visible the sorts of disparities noted above. First, we cover various argument forms and the differences between deduction and induction. The focus here is on the inductive form in which students seek comparisons between/among various states of affairs, and reason toward a conclusion based on relevant similarities.
Here we introduce the legal parallel of “similar cases ought to be decided similarly.”
Students are asked to evaluate two scenarios, one in which an ethical conclusion is plausible enough to most people to garner general agreement, and another which is our target case in which there might be wide disagreement regarding what to conclude about it.
They are asked, “What are the morally and logically relevant differences between the two situations?”
If there are none, then reason and morality would push us to treat those situations similarly.
Students are offered an example of an argument by analogy including some evaluation by Susan Stebbing in her Thinking to Some Purpose. Her case study is the story of King David and Bathsheba, where David is brought to realize his wrong-doing, not directly, but by way of a story that he comes to learn is analogous to his own situation. Stebbing claims that this allegory avoids the “fallacy of special pleading, since we pass judgment first, and are then shown the application to our own case” (90). She continues, “When the point was brought home to him [David], he was enabled to see that what held in the case of the man he had condemned held also in his own case” (90, my italics). But when the issue involves more delicate matters where critique could be interpreted as an affront to one’s cherished beliefs, values, or, in the case of David, one’s sense of self, a direct, explicit, completed argument might be counter-productive, precluding the possibility for the cognitive-emotional space “to elicit from David a disinterested judgment” (90). The class then discusses variations on this story, one where Nathan omits his last line “You are the man!” and we consider if such a change might make the analogy more effective, even if (or especially because) it is far more indirect, requiring more cognitive work from David; might he not have come to the same conclusion on his own, and thus, be more likely to take ownership of his fault? People rarely like being told “you are wrong!”
In Sykes’s performance humor is more than a mere vehicle to garner a guffaw, even if the comedians themselves claim that is all they intend to do (Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” might pop up here).
Humor can also be a means of raising consciousness about something that should be obvious, but has somehow eluded our awareness.
Once her comparison is made in the narration, students are “enabled to see” how ironic it is that the current opioid crisis has not dramatically affected the Black population. Humorous narratives that make use of analogies are often very successful means to encourage students to think critically about difficult moral dilemmas, and they can do so in part due to bypassing many common biases. Good comedians (and good philosophers) with these tools are often very well positioned to render what has been unjustly normalized into something about which we ought to say, “that is absurd!”
Further Reading:
Kelly, Daniel, Roedder, Erica. 2008. “Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias.” The Philosophy Compass. Vol. 3 No. 3: 522-540.
Stanley, Jason. How Propaganda Works. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Stebbing, Susan. Thinking to Some Purpose. London: Penguin Books, 1941.
The Teaching and Learning Video Series is designed to share pedagogical approaches to using video clips, and humorous ones in particular, for teaching philosophy. Humor, when used appropriately, has empirically been shown to correlate with higher retention rates. If you are interested in contributing to this series, please email the Series Editor, William A. B. Parkhurst, at parkhurw@gvsu.edu.
Chris Kramer
Chris Kramer is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Santa Barbara City College. He wrote his dissertation on “Subversive Humor”, half about humor, half about oppression. Readers will laugh and cry, but mostly cry, and mostly because they are reading a dissertation; what has become of their lives?
