Presented at a conference on ``Others'' in Discourse: The Rhetoric and Politics of Exclusion, held at Victoria University, University of Toronto May 9 1993
ABSTRACT
Members of minority groups often resist the stigma imposed by the majority by taking pride in their minority group identity. I argue in this paper that this can be a serious mistake, unless the political usefulness of such identification is cle arly divorced from its metaphysical and psychological aspects. For the root of racism and other forms of intolerance is group essentialism, and that is precisely what "group pride" risks falling into. True tolerance requires a kind of mental dualit y at the levels of language, thought, and behaviour. It requires us to recognize that no inferences about individuals can be made from statistical truths about groups, unless a group is stricly homogeneous in that all its members possess a genuine stochas tic property or propensity. This is never relevantly true of any human groups including so-called sexes or ``races''.