Who Speaks For You?

Josh Landy
What gives someone the right to speak for other people?

Ray Briggs
What responsibilities do they take on when they do?

Josh Landy
And should the rest of us take them seriously?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…;

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Contuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re asking: who speaks for you?

Josh Landy
Who speaks for me? I don’t know—my congressperson, my senator, my department chair. Basically people who are elected or appointed. That’s who gets to speak for me.

Ray Briggs
What about people who aren’t elected or appointed? Like, what if one of your neighbors goes to a city council meeting and complains about all the noise on your street? They’re speaking on behalf of the whole street, including you. And you may be really glad that they said something.

Josh Landy
What if I’m not glad they said something? Maybe I’m the one who was throwing the loud party.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah. I’ve heard about your improv nights.

Josh Landy
Yeah, exactly. So shouldn’t they check in with me before speaking on my behalf? What gives them the right to think they represent the whole block?

Ray Briggs
Well, maybe it isn’t perfect, but we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I mean, your poor neighbors need someone to stand up against you. That person is doing a public service by taking the initiative to speak out.

Josh Landy
You make them sound like heroes, Ray. I mean, aren’t they just busy bodies arrogating power to themselves in an undemocratic way. Who died and made that person president the block?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, okay, I do. I get that they didn’t get appointed. But once they were there, everyone, except you felt good about it. That is a form of democratic endorsement.

Josh Landy
All right, that’s fine for my block and everything. But where’s it supposed to end? What if someone appoints themselves spokesman for the city, the country, the world, who gets to speak on behalf of women, minorities, the younger generation.

Ray Briggs
Oh I know who gets to speak on behalf of women, a woman clearly, women are best placed to know what life is like for them. They’ve had to deal with all the crap the world throws at them for being women, and they’ve had time and incentive to think about it.

Josh Landy
Okay, but can any one women represent the entire gender? I’m not sure that’s worked out. So Well, historically, or often you get a rich, privileged person making sweeping claims about what it’s like for everyone. And they miss a whole ton of important stuff that just isn’t part of their experience.

Ray Briggs
And that’s why you need more than one spokesperson. You need rich women, poor women, women of various races, different ages, different professions. Basically, everybody needs to be represented.

Josh Landy
Sounds like you want 4 billion spokeswoman. How’s that supposed to work?

Ray Briggs
Oh, okay. It’s always going to be a balance, you’re not going to get perfect representation. But it’s really important to have somebody if I’m a member of a disadvantaged group, I need other group members to speak up on my behalf.

Josh Landy
I don’t get it. Right. I mean, you’re admitting that our spokespeople are going to be different from us in all kinds of ways. Why can’t they also be of a different gender? Yeah, but why would you want that? Well, think about it. Sometimes a woman isn’t around to speak up on behalf of other women, like in a locker room, for example, when men are saying horrible things.

Ray Briggs
Ok yeah, fine. That’s locker rooms. But as soon as that man gets outside, he needs to sit down and shut up.

Josh Landy
I’m not so sure. Sometimes it’s strategically advantageous to be represented by an outsider. Like when well, like when Bono convinced the George W. Bush administration to put tons of money into AIDS funding for Africa. I mean, given the unfortunate way the world is people weren’t listening to folks in the countries concerned and Bano made natural difference.

Ray Briggs
Is that the best we can do? Relying on some loudmouth crooner with a white savior complex. Surely you have a better post on that.

Josh Landy
Well, I don’t but a bit of a guest us. It’s our Stanford colleague Wendy Salkin, whose new book is “Speaking For Others.

Ray Briggs
But first: what does it feel like when you can’t trust your own voice to speak your thoughts reliably? We sent our roving philosophical reporter, Molly Blair Salyer to find out. She files this report.

Molly Blair-Salyer
Noah McSweeney is a 23 year old student at Santa Rosa Junior College. He has an extensive watch collection and loves to ride bikes with his friends. He also has apraxia, which is a brain-body disconnect that’s often linked to autism. He can talk, but because of the way the apraxia and his brain work, what he says isn’t always what he actually wants to say.

Noah McSweeney
For me to communicate, I need to spell or type my thoughts for them to be complete. Otherwise, my words can be fragmented versions of the truth.

Molly Blair-Salyer
So he’s learned to use different tools that help him communicate, like something called a letterboard with the alphabet laid out so he can point to each letter and spell out a thought.

Noah McSweeney
The process is really rather simple, but depending on the person, some elements can be complicated.

Molly Blair-Salyer
Or like today, he types into a keyboard that has a type to speech function.

Because it takes time for Noah’s thoughts to get out, people can sometimes get impatient and awkward when engaging with him.

Noah McSweeney
People are eager to jump in to speak for you when your words take longer to find. I encourage people to find a way to embrace the silence even though it may feel uncomfortable.

Molly Blair-Salyer
So Noah often works with someone who is trained to do this. They’re called a communication and regulation partner, or a CRP.

Lindsey Goodrich
You got this.

Molly Blair-Salyer
Lindsey Goodrich is Noah’ss current CRP and she’s helping him respond to my interview questions. Lindsey helps Noah Intuit what he’s trying to say. And gives both physical and mental support deep breath holding his keyboard and joining him and taking pauses and deep breaths.

Noah McSweeney
Trust and compassion and intuition are key elements to being a good CRP.

Molly Blair-Salyer
And Lindsey has those things. I take it? Lindsey encourages Noah as he thinks about his response. He carefully types out the answer.

Noah McSweeney
Definitely.

Molly Blair-Salyer
Each letter he presses makes a little clack and confirmation of his choice

Lindsey Goodrich
We’ll just keep it at that.

Noah McSweeney
It all starts with Mom, though.

Molly Blair-Salyer
Noah’s mom, Mary Ellen Wells has been an advocate for Noah since the beginning. She worked with him daily for two and a half years to develop his fluency with the letterboards.

Mary Ellen Wells
When we discovered the letterboard around age 14. So he’d be about going into eighth grade. We realized, well, he has been learning all along and just wasn’t able to tell us what he knows.

Molly Blair-Salyer
For the more than 30 million non speakers around the world. There are large speller advocacy groups like I asked, which stands for International Association of spellers as communication. They work to make spelling relevant support accessible to all.

Mary Ellen Wells
Noah has the right to be able to communicate with many people, not just mom, especially as he gets into young adulthood.

Molly Blair-Salyer
Locally nonspeaking or unreliably speaking people have started to form community with one another in what no one has friends called the speller verse.

Mary Ellen Wells
There’s an online community of spellers and net we have in person people, which is incredible, actual people to do things with. So they go biking in a bike group, they’ve gone roller skating, they’ve gone to a birthday party at somebody’s house. And these are the people he feels comfortable with.

Molly Blair-Salyer
They can find common ground and support each other. I asked about making friends and if Noah feels more comfortable in certain groups.

Noah McSweeney
Spellers. It’s easier to to connect with other spellers.

Mary Ellen Wells
Everyone understands everyone else. You know, everyone is supportive and these kids don’t blink an eye if somebody’s having a hard time, they are compassionate.

Molly Blair-Salyer
Lindsey works with a lot of spellers in this community and she feels privileged to be able to help facilitate this.

Lindsey Goodrich
I definitely feel a responsibility.

Molly Blair-Salyer
Not speaking for the people she works with, but helping them speak for themselves.

Lindsey Goodrich
Being able to help someone stay regulated and help them find their voice is really empowering on all levels.

Molly Blair-Salyer
I asked Noah how he feels about his main form of communicating and if it feels worth the extra steps.

Noah McSweeney
To be honest, despite the hard work, it takes the ability to communicate, it’s always worth the effort.

Molly Blair-Salyer
He hopes that with more engagement between people of different abilities, it will lead to a better understanding that we’re all pretty similar.

Noah McSweeney
We have thoughts and feelings. We have dreams and heartbreaks. We greatly appreciate efforts made to involve us in things. Being treated as an equal, seen as capable and respected increases our overall quality of life.

Molly Blair-Salyer
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Molly Blair Salyer.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that fascinating and moving report. Molly. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Brigg,s and today we’re asking who speaks for you?

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Wendy Salkin. She is professor of philosophy at Stanford University and author of “Speaking For Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation. Wendy, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Wendy Salkin
Thanks so much for having me.

Josh Landy
So Wendy, speaking for others is a super interesting subject. How did you first get interested in it?

Wendy Salkin
Well, I think it started in Hackensack, New Jersey, my hometown. My dad was the city attorney. And so my parents would bring me and my younger sister to the city council meeting, starting from when I was about five years old. And I was really interested in the way my neighbors would go and, you know, give voice to the concerns of the neighborhood before the city council, and I thought, Well, how did they get to be in that role? How Not when I was five, five, yeah. You know, I was really interested in like, what they were doing, right, my neighbors got to have this public platform, they got to go and speak at this microphone to the mayor and to the city manager and to the other members of the city council. And I don’t know it’s stuck with me. And then I years later, I came back to it in other contexts, but I would say it all started in Hackensack.

Josh Landy
Like everything good.

Wendy Salkin
Like everything good.

Ray Briggs
So Wendy, Josh, and I have been arguing, I generally think it’s good for other people to speak up for you. And Josh somehow thinks it isn’t. So which of us is right?

Wendy Salkin
Well, never wanting to offend either of the hosts of a radio program. I’d say. You’re you’re both right. Now, there are certainly concerns to have about having these informal spokespersons. But I think overall, it’s good that we have people who are willing to speak on our behalves, when we’re not able to speak on our own behalves, when they’re in the right place to do so giving visibility to our interests, educating audiences about what we need, and what we want, maybe even representing to us that we’re a member of a group that we share interests with one another and that those interests should be taken seriously by others.

Ray Briggs
So that sounds like a lot of points in my favor, or like a lot of reasons that it’s great to speak up for others. Is there anything to be said for Josh’s position that like there, there are problems with that?

Wendy Salkin
Oh, absolutely. I think there are serious concerns to have about this sort of informal role, right, the informality of it for one, right in cases of Congress, people and other elected or appointed officials, we have authorization and accountability mechanisms that make us feel confident that we’ve put that person in the place to speak for us. But if my neighbor just decides one day that what we need in you know, in the neighborhood is, you know, an alarm that blares 24 hours a day? Well, I might have concerns about that, but I have no way to unseat them from the role or at least not a reliable way to unseat them from the role.

Josh Landy
So that’s bad for me, right? It’s bad. It’s bad for me to feel like I’m represented by somebody who’s doing a bad job. Sure. Presumably, you can also be bad for that person.

Wendy Salkin
Oh, absolutely. I think that people can come into this role unbidden. Right, they might, they might not want to be in the role, but the audience takes them some some audience takes them to speak or act for a group, maybe a group that they’re a member of. And now they’re burdened with this expectation that they have to serve as a representative for, you know, all women, or all people of color when they were just going about their private lives.

Josh Landy
So that seems like it’s a pretty bad cost for some people, at least, like I was just speaking for me, I suddenly know you’re asking me to represent an entire group of millions, or even billions, some cases of people. Presumably, in some cases, it can be even worse for that in the sense that it could be it could put them in a certain amount of danger.

Wendy Salkin
Yeah, I mean, there are some people where the fact of being taken to speak or act on behalf of a group might expose some part of their identity that they don’t want publicly exposed, right. And so being associated with that group, right, a stigmatized group might put the might expose them to personal risk and sometimes serious personal risk.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about speaking on behalf of others with Wendy solchen from Stanford University.

Ray Briggs
Have you ever volunteered to speak for a group? Have you ever been drafted into doing it? Or did you rope someone else in to do it?

Josh Landy
Speaking someone else’s truth—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues

XTC
And if young Nigel says  he’s happy, he must be happy in his world.

Josh Landy
Even if you want what’s best for Nigel, should you really speak on his behalf? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs and we’re asking who speaks for you with Wendy Salkin from Stanford University, author of “Speaking For Others.”

Josh Landy
Got questions about self-appointed spokespeople? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber, and let our library of nearly 600 episodes speak to you.

Ray Briggs
So Wendy, if we’re going to have informal political representatives, which it sounds like there are reasons to want them, what should the ground rules be? So like, for example, just the person speaking have to be a member of the group that represent?

Wendy Salkin
That’s a great question. I think that, in general, there is a pull to think if it’s possible, it’s best to have group members serve as the informal spokespersons for a group, right, they might understand better what their fellow group members want, they might be viewed as more credible than a non group member. Fellow group members might trust them more, right, and so be more inclined to engage with them on as representatives or as spokespersons. And then there’s this thing that Dr. King talks about in where do we go from here Chaos or Community where he says, there’s also in many cases, this interest in self determination, right? Part of what it is for a group, and especially for a group that’s been marginalized or oppressed to be self determining, is to have a member of the group speak for that group. Now, that said, I think there are going to be contexts where it’s infeasible or in advisable to have a fellow group member speak for the group, one that you’ve discussed already, is this locker room context, which I call the locker room caveat, right? So there are these restricted access contexts where no group members gonna get in, but we really want the values interests and preferences of those fellow group members to be given voice in that forum.

Ray Briggs
Yes, so if the person is in a locker room context, like, Are there rules for like how they have to be getting information into their context or when they should step down? Like I think there’s a worry that if the person is not a member of the group, that they’ll kind of take over and hug them? Like how to avoid that.

Wendy Salkin
No, that’s a great question. I think that it really, it’s really going to be context sensitive, I think the concern that they so it sounds like the kind of this kind of case involves somebody who wants to be in the role, and maybe they’re iteratively in this situation where they’re speaking on behalf of the group. And I think there are a number of things that a person in that situation might do to right, educate themselves about the group’s interests. So they might consult group members, right. They might engage in right, some sort of deliberative practice with the group members, right, be transparent, right, speak publicly about what they intend to do so that group members know what their intentions are, when they’re in that context, and then leave themselves open to the criticism of those group members, and tolerate dissent. When there’s dissent. I think those sort of for deliberative democratic practices, put somebody in a good position to engage with the group and find out whether they’re doing doing the job. Well, of course, if you find yourself in a one off case, sort of stuck in the position of spokesperson, that may not be feasible, right? And then you just have to do the best you can you do the best you can.

Josh Landy
What else give out another tricky situation that comes up from time to time where, you know, there’s a room full of people, and only one person in a particular category. And suddenly the conversation gets around to something or other where that person seems like they’re a member of a certain kind of group. Okay, so now you might think, on the one hand, we should really ask that person, right, that person is, let’s say, it’s a group of men and one woman, well, we should really consult with the one woman in the room. That sounds like the right, the responsible thing to do, she’s gonna have opportunity to know things that the men in the room don’t know. On the other hand, you might think, Why should she have to do this? Right? She probably gets this kind of burden all the time. Is it fair to ask her that? So? Seems like you kind of can’t win, like, what’s the what’s the right thing to do in that situation?

Wendy Salkin
It’s a great question. And I think that in cases like that, it’s certainly true that if there’s a person who is As a member of the group, we should think Well, they probably have some insight in what it’s like to be a member of the group and maybe what their fellow group members want, right? That’s a good insight to have a good intuition to have about their experience. That doesn’t tell us anything about whether they want to be in the role. So I think that there are sort of three rules of thumb that can help guide us about whether in that case, it’s permissible to take that person to be speaking or acting for that group. So we might first ask, Does this person seem to want to be in the position of speaking or acting for that group? Now, the woman in this meeting might have given us many indications of this, maybe she is the president of a particular right social group that speaks to the rights of women. And in that case, we say, Okay, well, we have some evidence that she wants to be a spokesperson for women, we might next ask, Well, does it seem like women want her to be a spokesperson for them, or at least some groups of women, right, and well, she was appointed to this role as a president of an advocacy group for the rights of women. So then we have some evidence there. But then I like to say also that there’s a rebuttable presumption, in cases involving members of minoritized groups. So if it turns out to be that the representative is always in this role in all contexts, across all cases, it can be a real burden. And so in cases where the person is a member of minoritized group, it’s especially important to be careful about conferring that, that spokesperson status on them.

Ray Briggs
So these are really hopeful assumptions, I think, to lessen the burden of being always asked to speak for your group. I also worry about sort of harms to some members of the group that don’t seem very well covered by these rules. So suppose we’ve got like Betty, free dad, speaking on behalf of all American women. So she’s like, We’re sick of being housewives. And I really want to say this, and I wrote a whole book about it, and a bunch of housewives kind of want her to talk as well. But there are also a bunch of American women who don’t even get to be housewives because like, you have to, like have a rich enough husband to support you. To be a housewife, you have to not be expected to work just to earn a living. It’s there all these working women that say this person is not representing, even though you know, she’s eager. She’s, like, maybe not overburdened. And she’s got a bunch of people behind her, too, who want her to speak, like, how do you represent that kind of dissent? And make sure that it’s not just the most privileged members of the group who get elected spokespeople?

Wendy Salkin
That’s a great question. And it’s a serious concern, right? Because it might be the case that Betty for Dan is the person that audiences view to be the spokesperson for women as such. And in that case, we might say, well, she has a responsibility to write educate herself about a wide array of different experiences and speak to more than one of them. Now, in some cases, that’s going to be really hard. And so one of the virtues of this sort of informal spokesperson role is that there aren’t drudgery limits on how many informal spokespersons you can have, right. So we can have 100 senators, but you can have as many informal spokespersons as you please. Right. And so if an audience is looking to find out what working women want, what working women need, and they’re you know, and and looking to Betty for Dan isn’t giving them the information that they need. They can look to somebody with that experience, somebody who’s written and spoken on it, and find out right, provided that it seems like that person wants to be in the role and provided that they’re viewed as being a good candidate for the role. They can look to that other person and say, okay, so what is it that working women need? What are their interests? What are their values, what are their preferences, and then there can be right even finer grains of distinction. And you can have as many informal spokespersons as will be given the time of day by various audiences.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about who speaks for whom, with Wendy solchen, from Stanford University. So okay, we’ve got lots and lots and lots of spokespeople for a particular cause. And you can go as fine grained as you want. Doesn’t that potentially lead to a different kind of danger, which is a kind of infighting, factionalism, and the group sort of splintering a little bit along different kinds of lines?

Wendy Salkin
Yeah, I think there can be factionalism, there can be sort of these finer and finer grains of distinction. I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing. I think that contestation and dissent and objections are I mean, maybe this is my the philosopher and me right. I think that contestation and dissent is really good for democracy. I think it’s really good to find out where the fault lines are between various groups to find out where the interests are between right, rich and poor women, right? And then to find out what where their needs converge and where they diverge. Now, that can be cacophonous. It can be difficult and it can be hurtful for the people in those conversations. But it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be engaging in that sort of contestation and dissent. Alright,

Ray Briggs
So for Senators, we have term limits. And for judges, we have recall, at least for a lot of judges, maybe not for the Supreme Court ones, is there should there be a way of recalling informal spokespeople, if they sort of repeatedly make mistakes?

Wendy Salkin
I think it’s really hard to put a procedure in place, right. So that’s, that’s sort of contained in the concept of an informal spokesperson, we can’t, we can’t have a centering procedure, we can’t have a sort of impeachment procedure. But it doesn’t mean there’s no tool available to us. And so one thing that our colleague at Stanford, Emily Chapman got me thinking about many years ago was, can they cultivate non reliance on a particular person and she she suggested, well, maybe that person, you know, when they come into the role, provided, they want to be in the role provided, they’re in the role sort of across cases, they can bring in other people so that they’re not the only game in town, they can teach other people to also serve in this role, so that when they end up, you know, wanting to exit the role, or, you know, when they’re in a position where they seem to, it seems hard to dislodge them from the role we have other people to turn to, to serve in that role. And in addition to that, I just think, you know, the contestation, we were just discussing, um, dissent will serve as a corrective function for people who start to be out of step with what group members want or start to espouse their own personal private agenda, rather than really speaking to what group members want.

Josh Landy
This leads to an interesting question, or at least one I find interesting, what happens when there’s a disagreement, a mild disagreement between the representative in the spokesperson and the group, because you might think was always what happens, the group is right, spokespersons got it wrong. And they need to basically listen better, and represent better what the group is saying. But you might think maybe there are some cases in which the group is making some kind of mistake, right? Maybe the spokesperson, because they’ve been out, you know, in the world of advocacy, and they’ve been talking to Congress, and they’ve been doing all kinds of research and all that kind of stuff that other, you know, that I don’t have time for, maybe they they actually know something that I don’t, or maybe they have a better strategy that we haven’t thought about. So is there a role sometimes for the spokesperson to take a kind of leadership and sort of try to craft you know, craft a message and encourage people to think about things in a different way, rather than just, you know, putting themselves in a more passive listening role?

Wendy Salkin
Yes, I think in some cases, represent these informal representatives, informal spokespersons, either can be or need to be group leaders. Now, I think of that sort of informal spokesperson role as sort of looking inward to the group and looking outward to the audience, right. And so much of what we’ve been discussing is how that Representative looks outward to the audience. What do they do as the spokesperson, what’s the message they bring to those audiences, but they have to be in communication with the represented group. And they need to right give reasons for why they engage in the representation in the way that they do. Right. So this is part of that sort of deliberative social practice between the representative and the group that they’re speaking for. And they have to listen, right, they have to welcome dissent, they have to say, it seems like the group is not right, taking up what I’m suggesting they ought to. And maybe I think that they’re getting it wrong, and I can try something out, but I have to tell them why I’m doing it. And in some cases, I might be betting my spokesperson role against it, I might say this is a really important aspect of how to advocate for access to health care or something like this, right? They’re gonna have knowledge about health care access and health care policy. But maybe the represented groups members have reasonable concerns about that strategy. So as long as they keep those sort of communicative lines open with the represented group, give reasons for why they’re representing in the way that they do, and show willingness to step down or step aside. If dissent is too great, then I think that it’s permissible in certain contexts, particularly if we know that that representative has in the past had the endorsement of the group members to try new things out right and to experiment. With how to bring that message to the relevant audiences, and if it doesn’t work out, and if trust has been broken to too badly, they may have to step down.

Ray Briggs
I think this is like all very helpful as a method for managing a certain kind of dissent about what the group should do. But there’s also this other kind of situation that I’m worried about where the representative who maybe didn’t ask to be a representative, but just got like steamrolled into Oh, you’re the person of color in the room, you’re the woman in the room has just their own personal opinions that are not particularly meant to represent the group, like, do they still get a chance to express those? Or is everything they do now in this role of group representative?

Wendy Salkin
That’s a great question. And I think that’s, that gets us back to something we were discussing earlier about whether informal representation is always a good thing. And it’s, it’s not always a good thing, because because audiences have this ability to put somebody to conscript somebody into the role of an informal spokesperson, a person who was just going about their lives and trying to share their private opinions with friends may find out that they’re stuck. They’re stuck in this position where people keep expecting their private opinions to reflect what an entire group of people wants. And that’s not fair to them. And so, here, I want to say that we need to be thinking about what the obligations of those audience members are, what are our obligations as audience members to not expect people in, you know, who are going about their private lives to serve as a representative of millions of people just because they happen to be a member of the same group as those millions of people. And so here, I want to say that the emphasis really needs to be on Well, what’s my responsibility as an audience member? How can I treat people such that they don’t end up feeling like they have to be a spokesperson for an entire group when they really just wanted to have a chat with me?

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the ethics of speaking up with Wendy solchen, author of “Speaking for Others.”

Ray Briggs
How do we encourage people to step up and speak up for us? And how do we make sure the wrong people don’t? Where are we going to find the next generation of leaders?

Josh Landy
Speaking up or stepping back—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Pet Shop Boys
How can you expect to be taken seriously?

Josh Landy
If you’re a self-appointed spokesperson, what are your chances of being taken seriously? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Wendy Salkin from Stanford University. And we’re thinking about speaking for others.

Josh Landy
So Wendy, before the break, we were talking about cases where people, they just want to speak for me, right? This is my personal experience, my personal opinion, I’m not here representing the whole of New Jersey and your wonderful case, or the whole of Britain, in my case, so whatever, right? It makes me think of the world of the arts, you know, because you have people like James Baldwin saying, you know, the reality of man as a social being is not his own reality. That artist is strangled, who’s forced to deal with human being solely on social terms. And Toni Morrison said something similar, in the foreword to her novel Suhler, that, you know, she was, she felt sort of constricted by the fact that critics would read these novels, as attempts to represent an entire population, as opposed to well, this is I’m talking about these few people, I’m talking about these individuals, I’m talking about myself. Personal Everett more recently, seems to be suggesting, you know, that same kind of straight jacket, that especially minority writers seem to be placed in, you can’t not talk about the group. So what do you think folks in the art should be doing? Or maybe another way putting is what should we be doing as readers, viewers, listeners and so on? To, you know, to give people space to not be representatives of a whole group?

Wendy Salkin
This is a great question. And and I’ve been thinking and writing about this right now, too. And one of my favorite things that James Baldwin says in that quotation is writers are not congressmen. Right. And he’s making this sad, right? He’s tired. He’s writing about Richard. Right. And he’s saying he should not have been expected to speak on behalf of all black people. Right. And I think that the answer is partly similar to something I’ve already mentioned, which is, well as audiences, we can try to ask, does this person want to be in this role? But I think the answer is going to be a little more complicated in some of these cases, right? Because we’ll say, well, they are knowledgeable, sometimes expert parties who have special insights into what it’s like for a group or its members, and they willingly take on a public forum, they speak on matters concerning that group. And so in some cases, we might think, well, can somebody who is in that public role who wants to be in that public role also say, and yet, I’m just speaking for myself? And so I think it’s this is really context dependent, I think, right? So one question that the audience needs to ask. And we can ask, unfortunately, we can ask many writers and artists this question, do you intend that this be representative of a broader experience? And some authors will say, yes, some artists will say yes, others will say no. And we can go from there. And we can also look at what the reception of that artist’s work is, right? Do the members of the group see themselves accurately reflected in the the artists work? And if the answer is yes, then that gives us some evidence that they may want to be represented by this person, or that person’s work in some capacity. And if they don’t, then they’re free to dissent. They’re free to say, this doesn’t speak for me, right? This person’s novel, this person’s public statements on this person’s articles, they don’t represent my experience.

Ray Briggs
I’m wondering if there’s a way to split the difference actually here. Just thinking about like consuming art. Also, I’ve been thinking about like reading social science papers, which is kind of an interesting genre, because you have a bunch of like anonymous people who get asked by the researchers about their experience. And then what the researchers are supposed to do is to get a good enough sample that they can generalize. So one way you might approach this is just like asking a bunch of individuals about their own experience, and then making sure you have a good enough sample to generalize. And then you don’t have to ask anybody to like unofficially speak for others? Do you think that’s a viable strategy? And like, why or why not?

Wendy Salkin
I think that helps us get a sense of a wide range of experiences and opinions, but it doesn’t, it’s not going to get us out of the thick of things all together, because they still have to make choices about what interviews to keep in the final article, or book or write how to frame the data that they get, even how to ask the questions, right, certain ways of formulating those questions are going to prioritize certain respondents interests, or concerns or ideas over others. And so even here, I think people in those positions are going to have to reflect on how they construct their research questions, right? How they engage with those communities, and many people do many people in their written right social scientific research, say, this is how I constructed this question. And this is how I made this is why I made these methodological decisions. And so there’s a lot of transparency about research method that helps us see where things could have gone better, unfortunately, right. We iterate on these research questions, and we put research through a peer review process that I know many people have concerns about. But we we scrutinize how that research is conducted. And that can serve as a backstop on some of the concerns that you’re you’re bringing up right.

Josh Landy
Okay, you know, whether or not social science can do some good work. I think I’m convinced by you, Wendy, that we’re probably not going to get to a position where we don’t need these spokespeople? Right spokespeople? You know, yeah, sometimes that goes, well, sometimes it goes badly. But they’re doing a really important service for us when it goes well, because I often can’t be there at the meeting. And even if I was I wouldn’t know what to say. And even if I did, I wouldn’t say it as well as that person who can speak for me. So how do we as a society go about getting to a point where we have more good spokespeople? And less of the not so good spokespeople?

Wendy Salkin
You know, I come to this question by thinking that it’s kind of an unavoidable social role, right. And I do think that informal representatives and formal spokespersons play an important role for many communities. And so how can we have more good, good informal representatives than bad? So I’ll start by going back again to audiences, right? We were all members of audiences that that forced people into this role. And so if we can be responsible about who we’re asking to serve in this role by asking ourselves, right, these these three questions, right? Is this person someone who wants to be a spokesperson? Is this somebody that members of the group would want to be a spokesperson? And then is this somebody who always is in this position of being a spokesperson because they’re a member of a minoritized group because they are uniquely situated in some respect, and just attending to that I think will get us We’ll help us avoid burdening people with the roll who really don’t want to be in it. But then I think on the other side of things, just the attention to the fact that any one of us might be a spokesperson, right, find it. You know, I’ve mentioned, I often give this example of myself, you know, I grew up in New Jersey, and I say, Hey, I, you know, imagine that I’m the informal spokesperson. For people who grew up in New Jersey, I do that all the time. And I imagine at this point, there’s some audience who takes me to be speaking or acting on behalf of people who grew up in New Jersey, I might say, well, maybe I don’t want to be in this role. And so I can publicly try to disavow it and say, Listen, there are better claimants to this role than me. Or if I find out that I’m in that role, I can try to do a good job of it and just attend to the fact that it’s possible that people hear me speaking and think, Oh, well, what Wendy’s saying it may be the case that other people who grew up in New Jersey share this opinion. And I have to be careful about that fact.

Ray Briggs
I have another like, maybe a suggestion for reducing the pressure on people who get elected informal spokesperson for all of New Jersey or whatever, which is that we kind of have these days like fictional, informal spokespeople. So like, characters who are representation can do a lot of this. So like, one thing I really loved about the Netflix, Netflix show Sex Education, was I had great disability representation. It’s just like this whole range of disabled characters who were entire people. Yeah. And in some sense, like, I didn’t have to worry about them getting to have their personal lives because they are not real people. They’re fictional characters. So do you think we can shunt some of the like pressure off onto fictional characters who, yes, have to be written and invented by real people, but don’t have to like, go home and take off their shoes and let their hair down?

Wendy Salkin
I think that for certain types of representative functions, it’s going to be great to have these fictional characters who live right. They, they live on the page, they live on television, they live in our minds and in our conversations, but they don’t have to shoulder the burden. I think that that’s a great solution. I also think that in some for some cases, right? We can’t have fictional characters go to the city council meeting for us, right? We need a real person to do that. We can’t have a fictional character. You know, negotiate with lawmakers, we need real people to do that. And so in that case, I think we have to say, we want to try to find somebody who is willing to be in this role. Somebody who we think has the right, the right intentions, has knowledge of the group, and that the group would accept so so yes, I’m all for fictional representatives. But I also think we’re going to need real people to do some of the hard work of being informal spokespersons,

Josh Landy
Okay, I want to go back to Hackensack New Jersey.

Wendy Salkin
I always love going back to Hackensack New Jersey.

Josh Landy
It raises me a question about credibility because you say you’re often you know, electing yourself representative of New Jersey. I some you know, I lived in New Jersey, not from New Jersey, I’ve lived in New Jersey, I like New Jersey. I’m wondering who has more credibility? So interesting question, right? Because on the one hand, you might think obviously, you have more credibility. You grew up there, right? You know it better? On the other hand, somebody might say, Yeah, but you’re biased. You’re saying how great New Jersey is because you are New Jersey? Yeah. Whereas with that Josh Landy guy, he’s not from there, if he says it’s a great place, maybe it is a great book. So who has more credibility as someone you know, an insider or an outsider?

Wendy Salkin
That’s a good question. I think it took, you know, credibility is conferred by an audience. And so we would have to ask the audiences who are putting both of us in this role of, you know, informal spokesperson for New Jersey, well, who’s more credible on this, and we have, you know, and so it can be good to have, you know, group members like me, right person who grew up in New Jersey, and has ties to that place, give, you know, up to the minute information about that place, right? Because I have, you know, friends and loved ones still still there. But if someone thinks that I’m biased that I, you know, I’m, I can’t be trusted because I’ve got, you know, I’ve got a stake in this. They can go to you and they can find out what your you know, what you’ve gleaned from your experiences in New Jersey about what people in New Jersey wants, right? Be it you know, less congestion on their roads or not being confused with being you know, a community just across from New York and having an independent identity. They can go to you and you can you know, they can view you as a credible, maybe more neutral party on the matter.

Josh Landy
Well, Wendy, you have been an admirable spokesperson for all of your positions. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Wendy Salkin
Thank you guys so much for having me. This has been such a pleasure.

Josh Landy
Our guests has been Wendy Salkin, professor of philosophy at Stanford University, and author of “Speaking For Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation. So Ray, hat are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I love the way that Wendy has driven home for us not just the responsibilities of speakers, but the responsibilities of listeners to think about the kinds of burdens they’re placing on speakers and think about where they’re getting their information. So I’m going to try to be a better listener this week.

Josh Landy
And viewers right, I think we’ve got responsibilities of viewers and readers of novels and movies and TV shows. We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now, the spokesman for fast talkers everywhere—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Booker T. Washingon made a speech at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition.  He said, “I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race.”  What WAS that great and intricate problem faced by the white people of the south?   They didn’t have black people working for free any more?  Well yeah, that’s a pretty big problem.  And I guess because of this the white people of the south, and now white people all across the land consider themselves an underrepresented group with grievances.  They have lost so much you guys!  Gone With the Wind shows us what they lost.  Plantations and horses!  Hoop skirts and chamber music.  Fabulous meals and mint juleps on the veranda!  Surrounded by servants, who must harvest and plant and cater to every goddam whim and are not paid one single dime.  You’d think that a simple moment of reflection and regret would yank our fallen Bubbas out of that dreamland.  Black people are still angry about all that, you know.  But strangely, not as angry as white people.  They all look with teary eyes back at the antebellum south, and hold weddings and senior proms at the restored plantations.  Conservatives are still not only dining out on all this, they’re going out of their way to turn back the clock to, I dunno, whatever golden year was the birth of a golden time for goddam white people.  So why haven’t black people helped southern white people work out their great and intricate problem?  Well racists are indeed endangered, because their leaders are racist, which makes it hard to sustain a group outside white only compounds.  They believe that’s the point!  Racism helps us all!  You get the economy, we get the plantation.  Let’s make that happen!  Anyway, there’s a lot of complaint in the endangered white men world about allegedly oppressed groups represented by Woke, and Black Lives Matter, and Me Too.  Propaganda goes after the cute little lefty subgroups mainly by undercutting their informal persuasive representatives, and any potential role models.  Woke means drag queens reading fairy tales to five year olds.  Is that what you want?  Well, actually, that sounds kind of fun.  George Soros, who has more money than God, funds everything, and don’t let them tell you he doesn’t.  Greta Thunberg is a commie spy, probably really a midget, promoting the global warming hoax.  Michelle Obana is really a man.  Look at the Adam’s Apple!  The left is more restrained in their attacks, even though the right’s reps are a sorry bunch of former Fox hosts, fallen generals, pool boys, think tank dropouts, vicious debutantes, and podcasters, the brightest star of which is Charlie Kirk, who is truly the best conservative for these times.  He started out as a teen hustling for Republican teens, but quickly moved up through the ranks of drum beaters, to found Turning Point USA, an instant monolith, ostensibly to bring in youth to Trump, but that’s about as far as it got, youthwise.  Cause Trump doesn’t care about young Republicans unless they’re beating up protestors.  But he liked Charlie’s untiring sycophancy.  So he expanded.  Now he’s best known for amplifying and enhancing Trump lies on his 3 hour daily radio talk show AND podcast.  He’s skilled at repeating Trump lies, which Trump can then re-repeat to claim he heard it from Charlie Kirk.  It’s all a bit lazy as far as propaganda goes, but it works, even though teen hopeful Charlie Kirk is thirty years old now, and the young Republican schtick was played out in 1970.  On the other hand, thanks to skimming, I suspect, Charlie Kirk owns a mansion near Phoenix, with a nearby apartment, and a beachside Florida condo.  He is married to a beauty contest winner and has a prize winning daughter.   Oh, Charlie’s also the go to guy if you want to promote white supremacy and then say “no I never.”  Just one instance.  In January, 2024, Kirk blamed DEI programs for national aviation issues, saying “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’”  Bringing us back again to the delicate problem which is clearly that white privilege is not being given the deference it is privileged to have.  Remember: every time you insult a black person with a job, a white boy gets his wings.  Won’t you give now?  Help the white boy get a Mega Maga burger and cold fries at the DRUNK FLUNKY tequila bar tonight.  Just past the airport, follow the signs.  Twenty dollars is all it takes, and that includes two beers for the lucky white guy, if he gets there during happy hour. I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Josh Landy
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny.

Ray Briggs
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research

Josh Landy
thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from subscribers to our online community of thinkers

Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco, we’re our program originates,

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. Thae conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and explore our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And i’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Charlie Kirk
I believe that we need to build horizontally, not vertically. Developers don’t like it when I say this, but it’s true: the higher the building, the more liberal the voter. We should encourage people to spread horizontally and not vertically.