Essentialist Thinking is a Trap

It’s easy to slip into essentialist thinking. Part of this ease results from our reliance on perception to inform our sense of reality. When we observe objects in space, we lack the ability to directly observe constituent parts. Instead, we see the whole, and attend specially to the borders that seem to connote object permanence. This observation is not meant as condemnation – it is legitimately difficult to resist the tendency to view objects in space, be they inanimate or social, as containing some essence that gives rise to a definition of what it is to be that thing. That said, it is important to recognize that the bias towards essential thinking gets in the way of desirable social change.

Humanity can chalk up some major L’s to essentialist thinking. The belief that groups of people have essential characteristics has been used to justify treating those groups in atrocious ways. Essentialist thinking also prompts people to believe less in the mutability of people, their characteristics, or their plight. Essentialist thinking impedes scientific progress. For example, Shtulman and Schulz (2008) show that essentialist beliefs about the nature of animal species is associated with a misunderstanding of the theory of evolution via natural selection. They also document how, historically, the scientific community’s commitment to essentialist beliefs slowed the adoption of the work of evolutionary biology. Importantly, people are not fixed, forever doomed to think in essentialist terms. Deeb and colleagues (2011) show that essentialism biases about ethnic groups can be attenuated by exposing children to people with varying ethnic backgrounds.

Framed in this manner, we turn to modern takes on what is needed to progress in society, and what inclusion and belonging must look like in the desired end state. Some of the loudest supporters of inclusion, equity, and diversity peddle in essentialist tropes. Arguably, this type of thinking hurts the exact type of progress we want. But it feels almost irresistible to apply the same type of essentialist thinking to people who resemble the oppressor class of the past 600 years (e.g., cis white men) in the same way that they have applied essentialist thinking to the rest of us during that span of time. In what follows, I encourage all of those interested in social justice and social progress to resist that temptation, recognizing that the essentialist bias itself is a construction of those oppressors in service of their sociopolitical aims. As Lorde (1979) argues, the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house; adopting the mindsets associated with those who have committed some of history’s worst atrocities is not the path toward justice, equality, equity, and belonging.

Recently I came across Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s wonderful treatise, The Disordered Cosmos (2021). Part memoir, part physics primer, part manifesto: this book is an excellent read. I borrowed it from my library, but a third of the way in I decided to buy a copy for my children to share. Indeed, across the book’s 300+ pages, I have only one major quibble with its orientation: it dabbles heavily in essentialist thinking. It is telling that a highly accomplished scholar of both the physical and the cultural world can lapse into arguments laced with essentialist bias, further evidence of how difficult it is to move beyond this type of thinking. Prescod-Weinstein (2021) begins with an acknowledgement of how everything we know and everything that has ever existed is comprised of the same elemental stuff (e.g., quarks). Yet, over the course of the book she makes repeated references to cis white men as if they exist as a homogenous group, all of whom are determined to reinforce “settler colonialism” and inflict racist, patriarchal, sexist, sexual violence on the rest of us. It is difficult to highlight that we are all made out of the same stardust in one breath, but then then curse cis white men (as an essential category of humans) for behaving evilly in the next. To make myself exceedingly clear, Prescod-Weinstein is absolutely correct to highlight the evils of the people who have impeded scientific progress, diminished the sanctity of science by using it to further racist agendas, or limited the role of women and femme gendered people via sexism, sexist erasure, sexist paternalism, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. However, it is better to be specific and narrow in the definition of one’s enemy, and it is better to avoid framing the evil actions of evil actors in essentialist terms. Just as the notion of Blackness was constructed, by people for (largely nefarious) aims, so too is the notion of whiteness a construction.

Diversity breeds conflict, and this was true predating the Enlightenment, the European engine of war capitalism (to borrow a phrase from Sven Beckert), and the ensuring period of settler colonialism that followed. A cursory glance at recent human history (e.g., the last 3000 years) shows how misjustice and mistreatment arose from gender diversity, religious diversity, and variations in status: within plenty of ethnically homogenous societies. People have been persecuted for expressing unpopular opinions, or simply having thoughts that were inconsistent with the mores of their day. And this fact is not limited to European history: intra-group diversity also bred conflict amongst indigenous communities across the global southern diaspora from Tenochtitlan to Boriken, from Bharata to K’gari. As Schimmelpfinnig and colleagues (2022) document, diversity carries with it misunderstanding, limited contact, and otherness, all of which inherently lead to mistrust, less liking, suspicion, and conflict. Thus, it is important to view group identification with this in mind: not every evil action on the part of members of a dominant social group is bred from their essential characteristics. Instead, the dynamics of diverse group interactions can be seen a reliable cause of a great deal of negative (i.e., exclusionary, demeaning, threatening) social action.

Indeed, such conflicts are not the special province of humans. Even within organisms, we can find evidence for the conflict that arises from diversity: especially in situations in which intra-organism structures compete for metabolic or other resources.

We face huge problems requiring widespread cooperation (think climate change/planet preservation/preventing mutually assured destruction). Essentialist thinking and payback models get us nowhere, only continue the othering that got us into the mess we’re in.

It is understandably hard, as groups have wielded incredible power (through their groupiness) to harm whole communities. It is hard to see through the pain of intergenerational trauma to appreciate that for any real progress to occur, we have to work with the fuckers. But the undeniable truth is that the problems we face require an “all hands” approach. The problems we face require seeking out the common ground that provides the thread of universal sameness between those who resemble (or descend from) the patriarchal capitalist oppressors and those who resemble (or descend from) the righteous oppressed.

Low level biological phenomena have much to say about the human condition: we are not as special or complex as we think we are. The issue is that we have this irksome capacity for reflective thought, and this undying need for sense-making, leading us to constantly fit plausible causal narratives to data/observations, independent of the veracity or verifiability of those stories.

We cannot allow ourselves to fall into the trap, created by white supremacists, of thinking that history began when Europeans decided to venture away from Europe. Doing so ascribes too much power and intentionality to those European imperialists, capitalists, and colonizers that laid the foundation for the modern globalized world. Instead, when we move away from a mode of thought that elevates human’s capacity for free will and intentional action, it is easier to recognize Europeans’ catalyzing role in establishing a global order for what is it: a historical accident, an event that had some non-zero chance of occurring at nearly any point in the short history of humans due to a predictable set of extenuating circumstances and happened to happen then through them.

Humans who migrated north out of Africa and away from the heat of the equatorial sun, into regions of the earth that are far less fertile and forgiving as those in the global south: no wonder they sought to escape and find new lands. But the European merchant armies and their state-sponsored terrorists (fuck pirates) did not have a monopoly on subjugating tendencies, either over the arch of history or even contemporaneously in their own time. Intra-group conflict within West, Central, and East Africa would often lead to warring, the spilling of blood, and the enslavement of innocents. These practices predated the European fueled war capitalism of the enlightenment era. In places like what is now known as Nigeria and Ghana, the habit of condemning defeated enemies to a life of servitude was indigenous and laid some of the infrastructure for the centuries long trans-Atlantic chattel slavery system.

With these reminders, the goal is not to exonerate or in any way excuse the atrocities of any white supremacist, dead or living. Instead, the goal is to get us to arrive at a fundamental truth supported by the human historical record and concordant with the theories and evidence spanning multiple branches of science: diversity breeds conflict, yes, given real or merely perceived competition for limited resources, yet it can also fuel progress. Once we recognize this, then we, as a species can use our capacity for reflective thought to determine how we want to move on from there. Do we want to continue to play the game, set before us by white supremacists, in which we become entrenched in essentialist thinking about who constitutes “us” and who constitutes “them?” Do we want to continue to play status games, using a newfound and hard-earned ability to command authority in social discourse to turn the tables and give “them” a taste of their own medicine? Do we want to use our limited energy to engage in rent-seeking, scoring points in an interminable match that produces no winners - only losers - until the clock runs out (planetary death)?

Or do we instead want to use our wondrously mysterious brains to expand the notion of who truly constitutes “us,” expanding the breadth of our moral circle so that the largest “we” in the history of humanity can stop playing games and start working together to solve our major problems in earnest? My hope is that these questions are purely rhetorical, as there is really only one acceptable answer to them (for those of us who are committed to improving the fate of humanity, raising all boats, and postponing planetary death).

In TDC, Prescod-Weinstein takes a step in the right direction when she calls on all people from the African diaspora to empathize with indigenous peoples throughout the global south, collectively the most visible victims of Europeans’ war capitalism and the colonialism that followed. Standing in solidarity, forming bridges across arbitrarily drawn ethnic lines (e.g., the distinction between Black and Native Americans; Gayle 2022), is an absolute must. However, she continues to play the unhelpful game by directing this guidance only towards the heavily melanated among us, instead of all potential readers of her work. As a result, the cry for solidarity across the indigenous diaspora rings hollow as it tacitly excludes any reader who due to random chance does not share a Black or Brown cultural heritage (unfortunate because, if they are reading that far into her book, that white person would be a prime candidate for becoming an effective partner in the long-standing fight for progress).

Us versus them thinking is foundational to the white supremacist project and is anathema to sustainable progress (as Heather McGhee deftly argues in The Sum of Us). Progress gained towards tangible measures of equality over the course of history were produced via collaboration; the activists did not unilaterally cause the change they desired. Organizers got results through forging meaningful bonds with those in the oppressing group (e.g., often cis, often white men, or more generally people with power whose privilege arose from white patriarchal supremacy). Douglass befriended Lincoln, even though the latter was not morally invested in conferring the full slate of human rights onto America’s enslaved population. Douglass befriended Lincoln, he didn’t shun him. In 2022, a dysfunctional American congress managed to pass a law enshrining people’s rights for same-sex marriage, a passage that in the end urged cooperative action from 39 republican representatives, most of whom were white and most of whom were male.

Unlike intracellular structures, unlike bacterial and fungi, unlike any species on earth, humans carry the ability to decide if they want to establish meaningful bonds with unlike others. We even choose to do this across species (under the guise of pet ownership). Our brains make us special, but we largely still abide by principles that govern the behavior of all living things. We don’t need to essentialize evil (and place it squarely in the lap of cis white men) in order to fight for progress. If we value inclusion, then we must find the way to build bridges between the historically oppressed and the historical oppressors. This is how we reject the way white supremacy has infused our thinking, not only its substance but its essentialist style.

Copyright Lawrence Williams 2023