‘Civility’ and the Civilizing Project

Abstract

Calls for civility have been on the rise recently, as have presumptions that civility is both an academic virtue and a prerequisite for rational engagement and discussion among those who disagree. One imperative of epistemic decolonization is to unmask the ways that familiar conceptual resources are produced within and function to uphold a settler colonial epistemological framework. I argue that rhetorical deployments of ‘civility’ uphold settler colonialism by obscuring the systematic production of state violence against marginalized populations and Indigenous peoples, relying on the colonial conceptual framework of ‘civilized’ vs ‘savage’, and excusing death-promoting rhetoric under the guise of liberal disagreement.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Elena Ruíz for her helpful and generous feedback on this paper.

Notes

1 See John Locke’s theory of property for an example of conceptual work constructing settlers as entitled to Indigenous land. As Ruíz (forthcoming) puts it, Locke’s theory was ‘explicitly oriented toward providing ontological justification for the removal of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands using culturally arbitrary conceptions of labor and ownership’.

2 This is not a new argument. It is worth noting that when I make this argument as a white woman, I might get some pushback, and I might be challenged, scolded, or perceived as difficult—but I am usually understood just fine. When people of color and Indigenous people make this argument, it is often treated as conceptually incoherent and construed as evidence against their ‘rational nature’ or their status as knowers.

3 See Oxford Dictionaries’ public website Lexico, which focuses on current English and modern usages, for this definition.

4 She writes, ‘This dissection has crippled the possibility of nationhood for the nations that straddle the international border. Neither Canada nor the United States stopped at separating our confederacies by international boundaries. Instead, both federal governments took it upon themselves to further separate one village from another by establishing reservation borders, setting up a pass system, and limiting movement through violence both legal and illegal. These conditions severed connections to relatives, and continue to impair our economic, trade, cultural, social, ceremonial and political being. The impairment of trade destroyed the original economies and lowered the standard of wealth accumulation for Indigenous people. Wealth is the measure of leisure time. Time is the measure of artistic and conscious development’ (2015: 116).

5 She explains, ‘These conditions limit authority over family and preclude the Indigenous assumption of citizenship and power. They have obliterated our ability to define family and determine citizenship in our own terms, and led to the general belief that we are not entitled to any space at all. At the same time that our mobility, emotionality, and morality, and our concepts of justice, family, and being have been altered, concepts of disentitlement upheld by settler society dominate our lives. These conditions continue to threaten and stymie Indigenous survival (Maracle 2015: 118).

6 This justification of settler colonialism by reference to settlers making the land produce beyond its ‘natural’capacity is also present in Zionist rhetoric about ‘making the desert bloom’.

7 Consider how the notion of civility in the American South was used rhetorically as a weapon against the civil rights movement. Activists who disrupted the normative structure of daily life as dictated by white supremacy using methods such as sit-ins, boycotts, protests, and marches were deemed ‘uncivil’ and ‘un-American’. In response to these criticisms, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. penned his now-famous Letter from Birmingham Jail. In it he writes,

I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season’.

The white moderate that King describes is paradigmatically concerned with civility as a commitment to order over to justice. As historian William Chafe, author of Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom, explains, ‘Civility was what white progressivism was all about—a way of dealing with people and problems that made good manners more important than substantial action’ (8). Civility continue to maintain this legacy of prioritizing good manners while sacrificing the possibility of substantive action and change across a range of contexts by maintaining a pretense of compassion, concern, and reasonableness while actually silencing dissent.

8 There is, of course, a deep irony present in settler ideology portraying itself as ‘forward-looking’ in contrast with Indigenous peoples and knowledge systems, given that it is the former not the latter that is responsible for the global climate catastrophe that currently threatens all present and future generations.

9 Ruíz (manuscript) demonstrates how the structure of the legal notion of ‘testimony’ originates from and upholds the ongoing project of settler colonialism. I contend that the concept of civility also functions as what Ruíz (forthcoming) identifies as a ‘settler epistemic tool that structurally quiets critical analyses of settler structural violence in order to mitigate cultural liability for settler colonial violence and its continuing project of dispossession’.

10 Ruíz (2012, 2019a, 2019b, forthcoming) introduces the notion of hermeneutic violence and characterizes it as violence done to structures of meaning and intelligibility. This includes violence done to land, waterways, artifacts, textiles, and other loci of meaningful social relations and webs of knowledge within Indigenous epistemologies.

11 Consider an example of a death-promoting rhetorical practice. Referring to trans women as ‘male’ promotes their deaths by upholding the ideology that justifies incarcerating trans women in men’s prisons, denying them life-affirming and life-saving medical care, discrimating against them and prohibiting them from accessing life-saving women-only spaces such as homeless shelters and domestic violence shelters, and acquitting cis-het men who murder them and resort to a ‘trans panic’ legal defense to excuse their acts of homicide.

12 The civilization/savage discourse has long been central to justifying colonial projects abroad. As one illustration, consider that Theodore Roosevelt took conquest to be responsible for quelling ‘chaotic barbarian warfare’. He suggested that peace naturally followed conquest and that the fact was ‘due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where barbarian peoples of the world hold sway’ (Roosevelt 1900: 38).

13 See also Salaita’s (2015) Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom. In it, Salaita analyzes the public and academic responses to the now infamous incident regarding University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign response to his criticism of Israel’s settler colonial occupation of Palestine.

14 This includes the internal colonialism evinced through state subordination of populations of color, such as the militarized brutality exercised against Black Lives Matter protestors by police in Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, and New York. All of these cities have police departmetns who have trained with Israeli Defense Forces under the guise of learning counter-terrorism tactics.

15 Consider the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada as an example.

16 This phrasing comes from Collins (2000), who describes the justifying function of controlling images as making the structures of oppression that produce them seem ‘natural, normal, and inevitable’.

17 The final item on Missouri’s ‘20 Ways to Promote Civility and Respect at Missou' list reads, ‘The world always looks better from behind a smile!’