Badgery, Part II

Mark has posted a response to my badgery post, but a very perplexing one. I say so because it rather persistently refuses to engage with the actual points under contention, instead continually reasserting that "people badge" and that this is often a good thing. Given that I don't disagree that many, if not most or all, people badge, and that this is perfectly fine (when, in Mark's own words, they do it "willingly and eagerly"), there's very little point in rehashing that badging can be okay.

What still seems to be under contention, and the original point that prompted the debate, is when a covering demand is not okay. So, in writing this post, I want to pin down a simple position which I think is being elided thus far. Does Mark think covering requirements can ever have negative effects on those its demanded of? If so, does he think those effects are ever bad enough so we can legitimately say "this is an unjust requirement", and speak out against the requiring party and argue they have a moral obligation to change it? And finally, do you think there are covering requirements that can be legally proscribed, by, say, anti-discrimination law (as I argue the "women and only women must wear make-up" position by Harrah's should be?).

But unfortunately, it appears we still need to clarify terms. I cited two distinctions between badging and covering demands: that the former are done willingly and the latter reluctantly, and that the former tend to be "grassroots" and the latter sent from up on high. I can't tell what Mark thinks of these parameters--he cites them, but doesn't respond positively or negatively to the first at all and only throws out a half-hearted objection to the second (which I admitted may have exceptions anyway). I say half-hearted because one of the two examples he cites for covering that is not brought down by elites (hip-hop stylings) is actually probably a bona fide case of badging precisely because it seems to have been adopted rather organically, and the second case (circumcision)--even if it was originally from on high (and since on pure historical grounds I don't think that the Bible is the literal word of God, I think it's far more likely that circumcision was intersubjectively agreed-upon by the early Hebrew community), I certainly think the manner in which it is operationalized today by most Jews is as intersubjective communal acceptance (which is why Conservative Jews such as myself, who "no longer hear divine voices", still do it even while jettisoning many other Biblical commandments). I'll concede that khakis in a business setting are similarly organic, to a lesser degree, but I do not think the anti-kinky hair or anti-uncovered women standards can be said to be so agreed upon by the effected community.

Upon further reflection, a third distinction, somewhat more complex than it appears at first glance, needs to be added. Badging always trumpets one's affiliation in a group. When I badge, I am always trying to make it more obvious that I am a member of a certain group. In it's purest form, covering is the reverse--it tries to downplay my membership in a certain group. So the example I used of a Kippah--I put it on to badge my Judaism, I take it off in rural Minnesota to cover it. But, unfortunately for analytical clarity, covering can also speak to cases where I'm making a group membership more prevalent, not less (I believe Yoshino refers to this as "reverse covering"). A woman who cuts her hair short may be covering her femininity, while requirements that she, say, wear a push-up bra and high heels serve to trumpet it instead. Yoshino groups both as covering because they both "cover" what he calls the "authentic" presentation of self--being forced to either under- or over-identify with a group represents in some sense a coercive shift away from this authentic vision, thus covering it. Make-up, incidentally, is a tough case to call, because while it is "tagged" as accenting femininity in our society, it (quite literally) covers a woman's face, masking her identity. This is why I think it is properly analogized as a cousin to a veil or burqa, and like with both, where women are forced into covering their face, that's something we should protest against (incidentally, I wasn't accusing Mark of misogyny as much as Harrah's--that they're position is morally analogous to the Taliban requiring woman to cover their face [albeit with a different cover]. If Mark believes that we can protest the Taliban's policy, but doesn't similarly protest Harrah's, then he's simply being hypocritical. And if Mark thinks the Taliban could escape condemnation simply by agreeing that woman can leave the country whenever they want to, he's consistent but delusional). But again, if a woman wishes to do any of these things--accent (badge) her womanliness through heels, or downplay it through haircuts, or do something in between with a veil or makeup--that's fine; I just object to when it's forced. So, to return to the original point of the paragraph: covering can accent or downplay one's group membership, but badging always accents it. I'll let Mark decide whether involuntarily being forced to trumpet one's identity (e.g., the Nazi "yellow Star of David" requirement for Jews) qualifies as a badge, or just reverse covering.

Okay, hopefully we've cleared up terms. Now, we have to examine the interplay between them. As I concluded in my last post, we shouldn't reflexively condemn a badging or covering requirement, nor should we automatically sanction them. "A critical view" is the best stance to take. Sometimes, Mark argues, a requirement to cover is actually just a requirement to badge. But for someone who really seems to think badging is important, Mark's position is actually fraught with considerable peril towards badging. Take my African-American female attorney who may wish to badge her Blackness ("Black is Beautiful") by wearing her hair in a natural style. I say that a corporate policy that requires her to straighten her hair is a covering requirement (I'd also say that's it's racially discriminatory, as it imposes economically differential burdens on one race vis-a-vis another. Mark--inexplicably, given the time I've spent on it--has never addressed this gaping problem in covering/badging regimes. I'll return to that below). But from Mark's point of view, it also should be seen as an anti-badging stance. The woman is being prevented from badging her Blackness. If badging is as important as Mark says it is, this should not be something that he is so sanguine about.

Not persuaded? Well, let's take an example apparently nearer to Mark's heart: circumcision. What if the law firm prohibited circumcised males from working for it? Circumcision has no intrinsic relation to legal performance--but then, neither does kinky hair. Mark might say that people don't see circumcised penises in a legal context, so the covering requirement is unreasonable. Aside from this being a concession that some measure of reasonability can be brought to bear on covering demands, this isn't necessarily true. Many corporate firms treat (or are treated) by their clients to various jaunts and activities which may put attorney and client in close personal contact. In a gym or country club locker room, one's circumcised status may be rather easy to ascertain, and the firm may say that this doesn't present the "image" the company wishes to give off. The next objection is that it's a more extreme example than requiring a Black woman to straighten her hair. But is it? Kinkiness is a biological fact, while circumcision is (nominally, at least) a choice. While I don't know the price tag on genital reconstructive surgery, I'd be skeptical that it costs more than a life-time of buying hair straightening chemicals. Ultimately, I think we'd agree that the anti-circumcision policy is simply backdoor discrimination against Jews, and I think anti-kinky hair policies are backdoor discrimination against Blacks for the same reasons.

Mark's last argument (that I can anticipate) is that the company should be allowed to require Jews to have reconstructive surgery as a condition for working there--and if Jews don't like it, they can simply move elsewhere. Even if I believed that such a policy could be contained in isolation, I'd still oppose it as antithetical to the purpose of anti-discrimination laws. But more importantly, there is no reason to believe that such a policy would necessarily stay contained to one firm. If the market has a "taste for discrimination" (and in an anti-Semitic polity, this is not difficult to imagine), the covering burden could be replicated across the corporate sphere. Operationally, this would simply neuter anti-discrimination law--assuming Mark thinks we can prohibit companies from taking a "no Jews allowed" position, then we can't allow them to take a "no circumcised males" position either. And if Mark thinks that its a good thing that Jews wish and are able to "badge" their Jewishness, he needs to recognize the threat his current stance poses to our ability to do that.

The entire above argument can be reprised with kippahs, instead of circumcision, as the barred badge. On the one hand it makes the argument weaker--its easier to take off a kippah than it is to reattach foreskin to your penis. On the other hand, it makes the argument stronger: anyone who believes that, for a religious Jew, it is a simple demand to just take off the yarmulke is deluding themselves, and Jews would and have resisted bitterly requirements by social institutions to require them to do so. Anyone who knows anything about Jews would underestimate the severity of the demand to remove a kippah would be, and if such a demand were presented and duplicated across the market, it would pose a serious barrier to Jewish participation in the workforce.

The final issue which I'm going to continue to press until Mark deigns to give a satisfactory answer is the issue of covering/badging as differentially imposed burdens. While Mark rather patronizingly dismisses Ms. Jespersen's case (hint: while in some circumstances its flattering to call a woman a "young lady", when its in the context of dismissing the complaint of someone whose been fired from her job of 20 years, it's really just insulting), he doesn't actually grapple with the circumstances the case presented--indeed, he labors long and hard to obfuscate them in his summary of it. Hence, a 20-year employee becomes a "young lady", a uniform and absolute requirement to wear make-up becomes "dress regulations," her continued and undisputed exemplary service was dropped entirely, as was the critical fact that Harrah's literally made it more expensive to be a woman and work at their casino. All Mark has to offer against my conclusion is that Harrah's motivation wasn't internal misogyny, rather, it was a response to its perception of how its clientèle wished to see the women. How Mark thinks this helps his case eludes me--all it does is shift where the misogyny is coming from. Instead of being endemic to Harrah's, now its something the entire market demands. I don't think Harrah's can be excused for reifying societal sexism, and worse, for Mark's case, it just strengthens the "taste for discrimination" point I made above--which indicates that no matter where Ms. Jespersen goes, she'll always be dogged by the requirement to veil herself in make-up because "the market" demands its women to be covered. This makes it more critical that anti-discrimination law intervene, not less.

Mark is certainly right that badging is important. I desire to badge my Jewishness, because I am quite proud to be Jewish. But this does not mean I like the idea of being forced to wear a Yellow Star of David to mark me as a Jew. The badge of my Judaism should come from within the community, not imposed from outside. Personally, at the very least I think it's obvious that companies can and should be proscribed from initiating covering requirements that differentially burden and impose greater economic costs on certain groups. Covering requirements often fall on this differential axes, and are suspect for that reason alone. But I also believe that the psychic burdens of covering are worthy of concern too, and if Mark agrees that one's ability to badge one's group affiliations are important, he should too. I should not be put in a position where badges of my Judaism are seen as dirty or ugly or the type of thing which a good law firm hides in a back room. To take the position Mark does is, more often than not, actively hostile to most badging, and perpetually relegates minority groups like Jews and Blacks to subordinate status.

Badgery

Responding to a part of my reading of Jouvenel, Mark Olson cites back to his own response to Covering (which I recommended he read) to argue that people "badge" more often than they "cover." (Go ahead, read that again to be sure you get the thread. I'll wait).

"Covering" is when people downplay (but do not necessarily deny) a part of their identity or presentment in order to better move within dominant social circles. For example, a Black person might straighten her hair, rather than wear it natural, because the law firm she works at associates the latter hairstyle with "ghetto" people and not professionals. This woman is not denying her Blackness, but she is covering it--making it less noticeable and more easily integrated within the White mainstream. The cost, most obviously, is that the woman cannot wear her hair as she likes or feels most comfortable with (even though hairstyles have no intrinsic connection to legal performance), and less obviously, often economic costs--buying straightening chemicals is time-consuming and far more expensive than natural styling would be.

"Badging", as Mark defines it, is when people voluntarily alter their appearance to signal their membership in a group. The Amazons of myth, who cut off their right breasts (to better string back their bows) might be an example, or perhaps a fraternal order which initiates its members be giving them a marking, uniform, or tattoo. Olson continues:

Most people don’t cover, they badge. We significantly alter our public persona, behavior and speech in order to signify joining, to willingly if not eagerly show our membership our assent and unity with various groups in our society. The missing part of Mr Yoshino’s dialectic is a recognition of the value men (and women) place on badging, for I found little if any recognition that badging forms a universal and important part of every culture.

The distinction between "Covering" and "Badging" appears to lie on two axis. First, covering is done grudgingly and under (implied) threat of sanction, while badging is done voluntarily, "willingly if not eagerly" to signify membership in a group. I badge when I want to proudly announce my membership in a group; I cover when I need to minimize my membership in a group to move comfortably or effectively in a social arrangement. If I wear my kippah in Synagogue, I'm badging; if I take it off while going to the store in very-not-Jewish Northfield, I'm covering. Second, I'd argue that there is at least an implied difference in the originating point of a "badge" versus a "cover." The former should ideally stem from the bottom up--the people who are badged should, broadly speaking, determine that a badge is necessary and what the badge is. Covering demands, by contrast, tend to come from up on high. They are societal demands, not consented to by their targets, often the expectations of social elites or corporate executives. There are exceptions to this (an army uniform, perhaps), but by and large I think it holds. And even the army uniform I think may be better described a justifiable requirement to cover which is later adapted as a "badge" by the people it is imposed upon.

To start with, I'm not sure why Mark is so sure that people are more likely to badge than cover. Perhaps maybe upper-middle class White Christian heterosexual males are more likely to badge than cover, because there are likely to be fewer characteristics they possess that require covering in the circles they move in. However, I think it is facile to assert, without argument, that a Asian gay male professor is more likely to badge than cover--or that the benefits he gains from badging outweigh the harms he experiences from covering. To be frank, it displays a sort of arrogance for Mark to transpose his social position (in which the "badge" he wears to signify his membership in the cycling community--shaving--outweighs whatever covering he has to do) over and on top of the narrative of another whose life experience has made him cover more than badge. Mark simply has no way of knowing how badging versus covering affects people who are differently situated from him, and he's epistemologically wrong to assume that he knows, much less is so sure that he knows that he'll overwrite their own narratives with his own.

More importantly, "badge" seems to valorize presentation-altering requirements in a way that often just doesn't seem to fit. I had to wear a polo shirt and khakis when I went to work at a law firm. I presume (though never asked) that they expected me to keep relatively cut and short hair. To say the shirt, pants, and hair were a "badge" of my office rings less hollow than it rings ridiculous.

The paradigmatic case I use to illustrate the harms of covering is Jespersen v. Harrah's Casino, and it showcases this and the other problems with being too quick to replace "covering" with "badging." Decided by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last year, the court held that Darlene Jespersen could be fired from her position as a bartender at Harrah's after 20 years of service because she refused to assent to a new requirement (for female bartenders only) to wear makeup. Specifically, Harrah's brought in "image specialists" that gave "make-overs" to each employee, creating a "personal best" picture which supervisors were told to compare the presentment of the employee to everyday. For women, this makeover invariably included makeup requirements. Jespersen tried wearing the makeup for awhile, but stopped, saying it made her feel "dolled up" and put a barrier between her and her customers. So she stopped, and in spite of 20 years of undisputed and continuing exemplary service, she was fired.

Let's start with the obvious: it would be absurd to call make-up a "badge" of Jespersen's job, just as much as it would be to call khakis a badge of being a Library Assistant at Williams & Connolly. To call either "badges" twists the meaning of the word so out of sync with common usage as to make it effectively meaningless. Next, we can note another problem elucidated by Jespersen's case, critical to the point I and Yoshino make but overlooked entirely by Mark: the possibility that presentment-altering requirements can be differentially imposed upon different social groups. In this case, only female bartenders were required to wear makeup. In fact, men were prohibited from wearing makeup at all. Two implications flow from this. First, forcing women to wear makeup isn't just a differential burden, it costs them extra money. Men had their own requirements as well, and its true that the bar on men wearing make-up imposes a covering burden on men as well, but eyeballing the schema Harrah's set up makes it pretty obvious that women will have to spend more to adapt to it than men. This is discriminatory on face--it makes it more expensive to be a woman and work at Harrah's than to be a man and work there. Second, the Harrah's case reminds us that sometimes, covering requirements can be premised upon subordinating perceptions of the "proper" position of a given social group. While women should be free to wear anything they like on their face if they so desire, the idea that women "need" to (literally in this case) "cover" their faces, whether with make-up or a veil, is emblematic itself of deep-seated misogyny. Indeed, while I strongly oppose states (or companies) which require woman to be veiled, there is at least somewhat of a glass house here that I wish Mark would recognize. We have an obligation to at least interrogate badging and covering requirements when they perpetuate racist, sexist, or otherwise subordinating ideologies.

Moving forward, look at where the covering requirement originated from. Again, it's ludicrous to suggest that the make-up rules grew out some fraternal bonding initiative amongst the bartenders that Jespersen refused to accede to. This was a corporate policy, sent from on high, that had virtually no relation to Jespersen's ability to do her job but required her to make significant physical alterations at her own expense anyway. Nor was this requirement a reasonable expectation Jespersen could expect to have to endure as part of entering the bartending community. She had been their for twenty years, and executives unilaterally changed the rules on her to require her to mark herself as they liked. Finally, to act as if there is no costs (in a free labor market) to being fired from the job you've held for 20 years is absurd--particularly when the termination is for non-performance related reasons--and since she sued, she has to deal with the costs (monetary and non-) of that as well.

The moral of the story is that, while I sometimes badge and I sometimes cover, being coerced into covering is distressingly common, it's really bad when it happens, it's more likely to happen to already marginalized groups, and it has significant costs that remain worthy of address. By and large, we shouldn't force people to alter themselves so as to live happy, productive, socially tolerated lives. When we do require it, we need to ask why its justified, and we need a pretty good reason. Fostering fraternal bonds or social solidarity can be part of that reason, but it needs to be warranted--the demand for solidarity needs to outweigh the harm of the covering requirement, and the fraternity argument can only be used when solidarity is part of what's at issue (which, in Jespersen's case, it really obviously isn't). A critical view remains, as always, the best choice.