By Richard Morgan
Posted September 22, 2011 at midnight
The Commercial Appeal
Quick on the heels of its fame in "The Blind Side," Memphis has been
home to the nation's highest-grossing theater for "The Help." Both are
stories about race and wealth, but also of honor and the dignity of
hard work.
Those points are not lost on Kwame Anthony Appiah, one of the nation's
eminent philosophy professors, currently at Princeton University. He
was in Memphis Wednesday to talk about his newest book, "The Honor
Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen." He spoke at Rhodes College
(where, incidentally, all incoming students are required to sign an
honor pledge).
In an interview earlier in the afternoon, Appiah touched upon the
unique roles of honor and ethics in the South.
"The Civil War was 150 years ago, but it has a huge place for the
people who lost. It just doesn't matter to the people who won," he
said. "It's the same reason Vietnam doesn't care about the war with
us; they know they won. But in the South, there's still a kind of
embarrassment, resentment, anger -- or maybe anger's too strong. To
remember it is to remember having lost."
He made the point that racial equality was not about the Founding
Fathers' ideals about all men being created equal, but rather about
the honor of hard work. "American slavery does two things," he said.
"First, it dishonors black people and, second, it means that part of
the meaning of that dishonor is that menial labor is dishonorable. The
black people were incidental."
There is still a lot of conscious and unconscious racism in America
and in the world, he added, but the root situation is one of honor --
a point he extended to the current civil rights debates concerning
homosexuals, one made all the more salient this week by the end of the
U.S. military's "don't ask don't tell" policy prohibiting open service
of homosexuals. Being the military, matters of honor were integral to
the arguments of closeted officers.
Appiah made a connection between the two: "Slavery was an economic
system. But it was also an honor system. However low you were as a
white person, you had an honor above any black person. Heterosexism is
not about economy; it's about family. But the idea of honor is the
same. To call someone gay, especially in bullying terms, is to
dishonor them. But now we have this moment, all the It Gets Better
videos, where gay people are having their Frederick Douglass moment,
where someone who is supposed to be dishonorable shows himself as an
amazing gent and refutes the notion that a person is bad just because
they are black or gay."
The defining sense of honor in America -- besides perhaps military
service -- is the premise of the American Dream, the belief that
dedicated hard work leads to prosperity. As the economy drags its feet
and increases in unemployment match increasingly angry voters the
nation is again facing, Appiah argued, a kind of man-in-the-mirror
moment about how we honor work.
"We have to not just pretend to have respect for one another --
although that would help -- we have to actually respect each other.
"You can't do that when words like 'trailer trash' are part of the
conversation.
You're calling people trash," he said, adding, "If you're a janitor in
America, no matter how kind people are to you, you know that they
think that if their kid ended up with your job that'd be a disaster.
And that has to change. That is not a system of honoring each other."
--
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