Metaphors are great. They can make us see something in a new light: Think of universities as the beating heart of humanity and see what it does to your understanding of these institutions! Metaphors can also reduce complexity: Think of the atmosphere as a glasshouse and see how it helps your understanding of global warming! We use metaphors all the time. About every seventh lexical unit we speak or write is metaphor.
But not all metaphors are great. Some make us uneasy. Holocaust metaphors, for example, often do. Should we really say, as PETA did in a notorious campaign, that we are committing the Holocaust on our plates, or that, as gay liberation activists did in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic is the Holocaust, or that, as we sometimes do jokingly, someone is a grammar Nazi? One source of uneasiness may be simple disagreement: one may think that there is no Holocaust on our plates, that the AIDS epidemic was a terrible tragedy but not an intentional, systematic destruction of a group, or that, while someone may take correct grammar overly seriously, they don’t have a plan to systematically eradicate all grammar mistakes in the way the Nazis had a plan to systematically eradicate all Jews. But even these negated metaphors may still make one uneasy. Perhaps there is something wrong with using Nazism and the Holocaust metaphorically at all, even when what is being said is correct—that someone isn’t a grammar Nazi, for example. But what exactly could be wrong with such true sentences?
Thinking about contentious metaphors, I came across bell hooks’s work on metaphors that likened women’s oppression to that of black people or chattel slaves. These woman-slave metaphors may now have gone out of fashion, but they were hugely popular with early women suffragettes in the nineteenth century and again with the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s when hooks herself was writing. Especially white feminists drove home their point about their own subordinate status by presenting it as akin to “the status of Negro servants”; they spoke of “the third world of women” or the “woman as slave,” as hooks quotes from the works of her contemporaries. And John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang that “Woman is the N*** of the World”.
hooks finds these metaphors appalling for a number of reasons. There is, most simply, their falsehood. White women don’t have it as bad as black slaves did. “If the situation of upper and middle class white women were in any way like that of the [most] oppressed people in the world, such metaphors would not have been necessary,” says hooks flatly (142).
But this simple falsity is not the only problem. hooks worries that the fault might lie not only with the metaphor’s target but also with its source, with the fact that black people are at all referenced in the metaphor, which is much like the Holocaust examples. Two of her concerns are relatively easy to understand. One we might call a misrepresentation critique, the other an instrumentalization critique. First, hooks worries that black people are misrepresented in the metaphors white women use to talk about their plight. In particular, these metaphors misrepresent black people by forgetting about black women. If women are black people, then what are black women? Ain’t I a Woman? is therefore the title hooks gives her book. (In philosophy, Rachel Fraser has recently defended such a misrepresentation critique.) Second, white women instrumentalize black people for their own political gain. As hooks writes, white women “used black people,” they “appropriate[d] the black experience” (142).
Misrepresentation and instrumentalization critiques go some way to explain the unease about the Holocaust metaphors with which we began. Perhaps these metaphors misrepresent the Holocaust in some way. Or perhaps the metaphor inappropriately uses or exploits the memory of the Holocaust for its own aims without giving due respect to its victims.
Next, hooks said something I didn’t understand: that with the metaphor suffragettes and other feminists draw “attention away from the slave towards themselves” and “their concerns” (141). Metaphors, hooks suggests, direct attention: they draw attention away from the source and towards the target. They distract from the source. Worse, they “dispose” or “get rid” of the source, as hooks says further. How are we to make sense of this? Surely, the woman-slave metaphor doesn’t get rid of slaves or dispose of black people in any literal sense. Metaphors are not weapons of mass murder. What hooks seems to mean instead is that metaphors dispose of their source as a subject of conversational or cognitive attention. Woman-slave metaphors sweep slavery under the carpet of the conversation. But how do they do that?
If we imagine a conversation where such a woman-slave metaphor is used—in the context of a feminist consciousness-raising session in 1970s New York, perhaps—hooks’s idea starts to ring true. Let’s call our protagonists Adrienne, Betty, and Shulamith. Here is how their imaginary conversation might go:
Adrienne: Women are house slaves. You make breakfast, you do the dishes, you vacuum the apartment, you make the beds, you prepare dinner; now, more dishes need to be washed. Even at night, the husband wants to be served and, the next day, the toil begins again.
Betty: You’re right. And there is not even a way to escape, no Underground Railroad to Northern freedom!
Shulamith: I’m not familiar with this idea of the house slave. Did they have it better than the other slaves? And what were these other slaves called again? I’ve heard it before; it wasn’t “outdoor slave” but something similar…
To my ears, something is off with Shulamith’s contribution. She certainly does not continue the flow of the conversation as Adrienne and Betty may have imagined it. Instead, Shulamith derails the conversation; she starts talking about what was previously background to the conversation. She brings up what had already been swept under the carpet. She makes what we might call an uncooperative conversational move. Here is what we can imagine Betty and Adrienne thinking or even saying in response:
Adrienne or Betty (confused and slightly annoyed): That’s not the point, Shulamith. Who cares about house slaves and other slaves?! The point is that women are oppressed!
This gives us a first, intuitive grasp of hooks’s distraction critique: metaphors make it so that their source domain is swept under the conversational carpet. Excavation requires an uncooperative move that disrupts the flow of the conversation. If we assume that speakers typically shy away from such moves, that a norm of cooperation governs most conversations, then we can predict that a metaphor’s source domain will typically stay under the conversational carpet. It will not become the main topic of the conversation. And so, the metaphor has successfully distracted from it, just as hooks suggested. If, additionally, we remember that the woman-slave metaphor hooks was concerned with was endemic at her time, we can understand how this metaphor distracts from slaves and black people not only locally, in one short conversational context, but across the board within the women’s liberation movement. Local distraction may not be such a big problem, but more global distraction starts to look quite bad. Will there ever be time to talk about slavery and the oppression of black people or will it always be conversationally backgrounded? This was hooks’s worry. I develop it in a longer paper in which I also draw on ideas from philosophy of language by Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, and Paul Grice.
I am unsure what hooks would have thought of this reconstruction of her argument. Perhaps she would have thought that none of this philosophical fluff is needed, that her idea about distraction in metaphor is clear as it is. But, certainly to me, it is now clearer. And I can better express one potential source of my unease with the Holocaust metaphors with which we began: by making the Holocaust a metaphor’s source, the metaphor makes it harder to make the Holocaust a topic of conversation in its own right. It now takes an uncooperative speaker to redirect the conversation to it. Sure, distraction is not always bad. Sometimes certain topics don’t require our attention. But at a time of war in the Middle East and increased antisemitism also in the West, a good understanding of past antisemitism seems especially important. Acquiring this understanding via ordinary, cooperative conversation is what frequent Holocaust metaphors make more difficult.
Paula Keller
Paula Keller is a philosopher at the Ethics Institute in Utrecht. She works on political philosophy, social epistemology, and philosophy of language. Aside from metaphors, she has published on testimony and objectification; currently, she is thinking about the utopian imagination.
