Joaquin: You have worked on many areas of philosophy, from abstract topics like the metaphysics of persistence to more concrete ones like the philosophy of adoption, race, and gender, but how did you get into philosophy in the first place?

Haslanger: When I was a high school student, I took a history class in which we read Plato. I thought that reading Plato was doing history, and I didn't realize it was philosophy, though I loved it. It was my favorite thing in all of high school. When I went to university, I didn't know that I would enjoy philosophy and so it didn't occur to me to take philosophy classes. However, I became interested in religious studies, which included work in continental philosophy. I studied continental philosophers’ approach to language and how language shapes our understanding of the world.

I had also done studio art and dance in college, so I became interested in the question: What is the relationship between religious experience and aesthetic experience? How is dance related to ritual? I had a chance to go to India for a while and I studied Bharatanatyam, a dance form in southern India that had been a temple ritual but became a secular art form. I was interested in trying to write up my ideas as a senior thesis. When I came back, the professor I'd been working with, and who encouraged my ideas, had been denied tenure. The person who replaced him was not enthusiastic, and so someone said, “Well you know you've done all your religious studies requirements, maybe you should go take some philosophy and you can have a joint major in philosophy and religion.” So, I went over to philosophy. I took a course in metaphysics and I found my home. I felt: yes, this is where I belong; this is where I should have been all along.

JJ: What made you decide to specialize in metaphysics?

SH: I grew up as a Christian Scientist, which is a very marginal religion that has quite unusual metaphysics. Their views are similar to those of Berkeleyan idealists; the doctrine is that the material world is an illusion. I fell far from that tree pretty early on in my teenage years and stopped being a believer, but I was always fascinated by some of the deeper metaphysical questions that I've been taught to ask in my religious upbringing. There was a part of me that was interested in finding a place where I could think through those things a bit more: What is the relationship between the material world and the spiritual world, is there such a thing as the spiritual world, and things like that.

Biana: Do you think this is what makes you different from other philosophers?

SH: Well, sometimes. When I was a student, there was a push to learn about the philosophy of W. V. O. Quine, to think that abstract objects were very suspect and we shouldn't believe in them. We should just believe in material particulars. But I thought material particulars are pretty weird. What is “matter” anyway? So, I wrote my dissertation on the problem of persistence through change. How can a material particularly persist through change? How can an object change—undergo an alteration—but still be the same object? What is essence? What is “matter”? What is form? All of these sorts of things were very mysterious to me, and I wrote my PhD on those topics. I was cutting against the grain because I did find the abstract world, the aesthetic world, and the spiritual world meaningful and no more mysterious than the material world.

JJ: Who or what influenced your overall philosophical ideas?

SH: George Bealer was my teacher in metaphysics at Reed College (where I was an undergraduate); he was an inspiration. So was David Reeve, who was also at Reed at the time. He was someone who worked on Aristotle, among other things, and Aristotle is a big influence. David encouraged me to go to graduate school and helped me find a way. George Myro was my dissertation supervisor. He died of AIDS in 1987. He was young, in his early 50s. He was a brilliant man. He was very interested in transcendental arguments, and my thesis was structured as a transcendental argument for enduring things. Paul Grice and Allen Code also influenced me in graduate school. Since then, I've been influenced by Ian Hacking, Marilyn Frye, Nancy Bauer, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Marx, Robin Celikates, and many others. There's a whole world out there of people doing wonderful philosophy. Elizabeth Anderson and Iris Young have influenced me a lot. I'm kind of a mixed batch of methods and styles.

JJ: In what way has your philosophy training influenced your overall way of thinking?

SH: I grew up in a family that was not very philosophical and, in fact, was very conservative. My parents were Republicans, my father was a traditional patriarch of our family. I was born in 1955. I was not exactly part of the civil rights movement and the women's movement of the 1960s, but I was influenced by them and became very interested in social justice issues. But I had no tools for understanding social justice. I was doing metaphysics, which I encountered through my religious background. But there came a point when my activism needed intellectual enrichment, and my philosophy was a bit too sterile. Bringing philosophy to my activism has really had a huge impact on my life; my philosophical work is very influenced by my political work. My political work is also influenced by philosophy because as I was reading more philosophers, feminist theorists, critical race theorists, my understanding of the world profoundly changed. I began to see social systems, and how social systems and systemic injustice work.

HB: Was there a significant event in society that influenced you to go into activism? Or maybe a significant event in your life that triggered this rage?

SH: I've written about this and it is a public fact, so this is not a radical disclosure. But I'm going to talk now about sexual violence. When I was a senior undergraduate, I was asleep in bed when someone in a ski mask broke into my apartment with a knife and raped me. That changed my life. I was enraged and I couldn't believe that for no reason, for no reason at all, this terrible violence and very traumatic experience happened to me. I became committed to feminist work that was opposing rape culture, violence against women, and domestic violence. Those issues mattered in a way that I couldn't put down, it was pressing on me in a deeply personal way. As time went on, I became more interested in race, class, and disability. It really started with that experience of rage in the face of this violent act.

JJ: One of your big ideas in philosophy is the social construction of race and gender. What does social construction imply? What does it mean for something to be socially constructed?

SH: The idea of social construction often emerges in the context of a debunking project. A fairly simple way to put the idea is that to be socially constructed is to be caused by social causes, or there's a social factor involved in the production of it. In claiming this, you're trying to criticize or debunk a naturalistic understanding of it. For example, when you say that gender is socially constructed, you're saying gender is not determined entirely by sexual anatomy or by physical features. When you say race is socially constructed, you're saying race is not a biological category; it's a social category. Much of the ideology of sexism presupposes that women are by nature submissive, nurturing, inferior, and whatever. Racist ideology presupposes that certain groups of people—picked out by appearance and ancestry—are more intelligent, other groups are more violent or lazy. The idea that this is “natural” seems to justify the treatment of people in ways that are unjust. The social constructionist comes in and says you are wrong. These categories are categories that you've created, and the features and general characteristics that you attribute to individuals in those categories are either mistaken or have been produced by the very systems that have created the categories to start with. It's a debunking effort to dislodge certain background assumptions that fuel injustice.

JJ: Your idea of social construction is something like: here's a reductive account of what it is for someone to be gendered, but you're not just reducing gender in terms of sex or biology though; there are social structures present in them as well.

SH: I hesitate to embrace the reductive claim. Moreover, people talk about gender in different ways. On some accounts, gender is a matter of gender identity. On some accounts, race is a matter of racial identity. On these views, gender and race aren't just a matter of the shape or appearance of your body, it's (also) about how you understand who you are, what group you are part of. This is already a kind of debunking.

I have a particular approach to social construction according to which we interpret gender, race, and other “debunked” categories as positions within a broad social structure. Of course, my version of social construction isn't the only version of social construction. Although in some of my work I talk as if I am analyzing concepts, I think this can be confusing. Ian Hacking has distinguished “concept construction” from “object construction” (Hacking Reference Hacking2000). To say that a concept is socially constructed just means that the concept has a particular history: how we use it has evolved, and it could have evolved in a different way. “Object construction” concerns how things, persons, or groups come to have certain properties: do they have those properties “by nature”? We're talking about concrete reality—What makes me White? What makes me a woman?—not a concept. What are racial groups (not racial concepts)? How did they come to be? So, I'm interested in talking about laws and social systems, and norms that play a role in producing identities such as racial or class identities.

JJ: You mentioned Ian Hacking's idea of social construction, but how do your ideas differ from those of other social constructionists or constructivists like Bruno Latour, Bergman and Luckmann, Paul Boghossian, and John Searle?

SH: Some people focus on concepts: to say that a concept C is socially constructed is to say that C doesn't capture anything real. So, when people say race is socially constructed, they sometimes mean that race isn't real, it's an illusion. We go around in the world thinking there are races because that concept has come down to us through these problematic processes, but there are no races. Races are like witches—an illusion we project onto people. Others, such as John Searle, take institutions to be the core phenomenon. “We” make something money; “we” make something the Supreme Court (Searle Reference Searle2010). This involves, on his view, the assignment of a status function: we decide that pieces of paper or metal that look a certain way are going to be the holders of value and the medium of exchange (which end up being money), or that a certain group of people get to be the Supreme Court because we have designated them as the Supreme Court. On this approach to social construction, institutions and institutional artifacts are created by us and our collective intentions. My view differs from both of these.

In my view, societies are best understood as a collection of systems, systems that organize things taken to have a positive or negative value. We need to coordinate in order to distribute, produce, and get rid of things of value and disvalue. Systems rely on a division of labor. It is convenient, then, to think that some groups of people “naturally” function in particular nodes in the system because this would seem to have the consequence that their place in the system is “given” and can't be changed.

Women are situated in a system of reproduction, sexuality, and childcare. This is a system that has been created by us as part of a distribution of labor. Then we say that women love to do those things, or it's natural for them to do those things, or it's determined by their biology that they do those things. Or in the case of race, we say that people of color can't manage to hold leadership positions, or they squander their opportunities. This masks the fact that it's just a result of how we have organized ourselves—our education systems are rigged; our healthcare systems are flawed. But it's hard to get out of a node in the system once one has been socialized to occupy it; you will be similar to other people in that node; you'll get to be good at doing the labor that is expected; you will identify with the node you occupy and it will seem “natural” to you. When social constructionists say that the position—gender, race, and so on—is socially constructed, they are debunking the idea that it's natural or inevitable or immutable for a certain group to occupy it. It may still be good for some people to occupy that position, but insisting that you occupy it because your body has certain genitalia or skin color is misguided and unjust.

HB: Can you elaborate on these kinds of systems in the case of gender, race, and class?

SH: One of the best ways to think about race and class is how economic systems needed certain groups of people to do certain kinds of labor. In the early years of colonial settlement, Europeans, Africans, and Latin Americans had come to the United States. Some of them were indentured servants, some were working for low wages, some were slaves, and they were being exploited by landowners. Barbara Fields, in particular, decided to look at the process by which races emerged in this economic moment (Fields and Fields Reference Fields and Fields2012). It was imperative for the system to work so that the poor do not rise up against the rich; the landowners had to prevent the workers from gaining solidarity and protesting against the kind of treatment they were receiving. So, the powerful used the strategy of “divide and conquer.” If the rich Whites could build solidarity with the poor Whites and get the poor Whites to hate non-Whites, then the rich Whites would be in a better position to maintain power and control; Whiteness became a source of social value. The horrible institution of slavery could then be legalized and enforced based on skin color. This division between White and Black in the United States was not a division about who worked hard, or who was intelligent, or who deserved what. It was a product of a capitalist maneuver to divide and conquer.

This creates a looping effect. Black people were enslaved, denied education, property, opportunities. If you don't give someone an education, they're not going to be able to read. The fact that they can't read makes it seem they shouldn't vote if you think voters should be educated. If a group is not voting, they won't be represented in public office. But those in public office decide who gets an education and how. There's a looping effect that keeps a particular group of people poor, uneducated, and unrepresented. This is the kind of story that social constructionists want to tell about how race emerges in a particular social and economic context.

HB: We haven't broken free from this?

SH: No, we haven't. As Michelle Alexander argues, slavery in the US was replaced by a system of legal segregation, and now mass incarceration; throughout there is a constant, pitiful lack of civic education (Alexander Reference Alexander2012). This is all still happening. There's a whole system that reinforces the creation of racial categories; they are not “natural” categories but rather are socially imposed to maintain an economic and political system.

JJ: You're dealing with real things, emerging things, emerging categories, and you're not just concerned with concepts or institutional facts per se, but more of how this kind of power structure brought about and continuously brings about these types of social structures and social categories.

SH: It's a set of social relations. Social relations are relations like landlord–tenant, employer–employee, husband–wife, parents–children, you and your neighbors. We stand in such social relations and with those social relations come norms. You're supposed to treat your neighbor differently than someone who's from somewhere else. In New England (or at least where I live), you help neighbors shovel their sidewalks when it snows; you help them by bringing them food if they're sick and things like that. There is no authority who controls or manages who counts as a neighbor. There's no Searlean assignment of status function. These are relationships and norms that emerge over time as part of local culture. It's an organic conception of society. Society evolves given certain pressures; for example, capitalism creates pressures for profit, but we also are motivated to care for and to love others. Martha Nussbaum explores this in her Frontiers of Justice (Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum2009). Right now, with COVID-19, you see that there's an incredible outpouring of caring and concern that wouldn't be obvious under normal conditions. There are connections and networks of relationships that become more significant when circumstances change as dramatically as they have. Society starts to change because society is made up of these relations.

JJ: Your work on the social construction of gender and race not only aims to provide the theory of these social categories, but to provide a social critique of them as well. How do you understand the idea of a social critique? Is this change revisionist, ideological, or political?

SH: One form of social critique is an ideology critique. The social constructionist strategy challenges an ideology of “naturalness” or “givenness.” It aims to demonstrate that what you think is natural, inevitable, immutable is not actually so; this is a critique of a certain set of background assumptions and background beliefs and illuminates new possibilities for women, disabled people, the elderly. For example, not all elderly people are frail or asexual, so you begin to allow for the possibility of different ways of relating to members of the group. You can see it's not natural or inevitable that people or members of the group have certain features.

The real issue for social critique is what makes a social system unjust. There are many perspectives from which you can criticize the particular social formations that we live in. We know that violence against women, police brutality against people of color, and mass incarceration are unjust. We have a near consensus that the police should not kill Black people for no reason and that domestic violence and rape are wrong. But why does this still happen if so many recognize that it is wrong? What are the structures that sustain it? It's not just a question of individual actions or bad actors. The police are part of a system that allows this: a system of policies and laws, but also equipment, buildings with a particular architecture, a form of dress and comportment. It is a system with its own culture and with a history that affects how it works and how it evolves in response to complaints or protests. Individual police officers are trained, permitted, and even encouraged to take a certain approach toward the constituency that they're supposed to protect. This training embeds them in the system.

When you do a social critique, you look at the system, norms, values, and the institutions that make up the system that has to be criticized. In the United States, one of the problems with the police is that they're allowed to carry assault weapons and use tanks and military-style equipment. This is ridiculous because you don't need assault weapons to protect the citizens. The system, for example, creates circumstances that make the police scary to those they “protect,” and so people don't want to cooperate with them.

We ought to invest in social workers, mental health workers, drug rehab. The money that's going into military-style weapons should be put into sustaining and protecting neighborhoods or communities where people can live together in peace and justice. Of course, there are bad actors, but getting rid of bad actors won't solve the problem. Criticize the system. That's part of what social critique does.

HB: Let's talk about your recent commentary on Kate Manne's Down Girl (Haslanger Reference Haslanger2020; see Manne Reference Manne2017). You expounded on capitalist systems and argued against patriarchy as the main cause of oppression. This seems to be very much related to your discussion on police brutality.

SH: Society is a system of systems. One way to think about systems is that they're organized around the resource that they produce and distribute. For example, a healthcare system produces and distributes healthcare, health, and well-being. A transportation system produces and distributes mobility. An economic system produces and distributes wealth and the means to satisfy basic needs. One question that has been part of the feminist debates for fifty years now is if patriarchy is a system, what does it distribute? Some feminists have wanted to say that patriarchy manages and controls reproduction and sexuality. Then, there's a different system, capitalism, which manages and controls the wealth. White supremacy that manages and controls, well they're not quite sure what it manages and controls. But labor, possibly. Status, possibly. This model doesn't seem to work to me because I don't really see gender as being like transportation, which is a resource that gets organized and passed around. Sexuality might be, but I don't think the only site for the creation of gender is sexuality or reproduction. I also think that you can't really think of patriarchy as a single system without understanding that it's also embedded in capitalism and white supremacy. So, all of these different systems are deeply embedded with each other, these big systems.

We live in this complicated system of systems, healthcare systems, education systems, transportation systems, political systems, economic systems. In each case, there are dimensions of those systems—structures—that privileged men, white people, rich people, able-bodied people, and so on. In order to target racial or gender injustice, it is hard to know what it would be to target the “gender system” or the “race system” because gender isn't a system like healthcare, policing, politics, the economy. We target the gendered structure of healthcare and reproduction, the racial structure of policing and labor. The systems that produce and distribute resources and privilege or subordinate groups of people cannot really be separated from patriarchy, white supremacy, or capitalism; this is to say that race, gender, and such are not “separate systems” but are structural features of systems that produce and distribute things of value/disvalue.

This helps us think about intersectionality. Intersectionality shows that you can't think about healthcare merely from the point of view of gender, or race, or wealth. All of these things are embedded in any particular practice in healthcare, or education, and they are inflected by different dimensions of power and privilege. The healthcare system is patriarchal, white-supremacist, capitalist. Of course, patriarchy and such affect different systems in similar ways—women, people of color, workers, the disabled, LGBTQ persons are made vulnerable in interacting ways. But as I see it, it is not helpful to treat the similarities across systems as an additional system. There are structural injustices that occur in healthcare, transportation, education, the economy, and so on.

HB: Are you opposed to the intersectional analysis of oppression? Or do you actually affirm this?

SH: I affirm it. Intersectionality has to be understood not as white supremacy and patriarchy interacting with each other as two separate systems but as the way systems organize resources that we're interested in, like healthcare, food, education, and things like this. There is privilege along the lines of race, gender, and wealth, but that “privileging” is built into how this distribution of resources is going. These material systems are shaped so that certain people end up getting or being deprived of the goods.

I'm interested in the processes by which all of these systems end up stratifying society. I don't think it's helpful to think that you just add another system on top of the transportation system, called the gender system, or white supremacy. White supremacy is in every system in different forms and is not a system in the same way that transportation is a system.

Of course, this all depends on how you think of “systems” and what “systems” are. I agree that there are different understandings of what it is to be a system, and sometimes the term is used just to refer to a set of things working together to produce an effect. Because there are patterns of gender injustice, racial injustice, and such, you might want to say that there is a system that produces these effects. I am not denying that one can use the term in that way. But I think that can also be misleading when it comes to intervention—as if we can identify the system of patriarchy and intervene in that. Instead, we need to identify the ways that particular healthcare and labor practices produce injustice, and we should not bring a theory of patriarchy to the practices and assume that it will be the key to our analysis. The analysis should be bottom-up, not top-down.

HB: If you look at this intersectional system, it is important that we also look at the bigger structures such as health, transportation, defense, and finance in order for us to overcome these injustices.

SH: That's the right idea. It's useful to begin with a material system that is directly organizing us to distribute a material good. Material goods like health, education, transportation, power, poverty, citizenship, and those sorts of things. These are the systems that are organizing us. Once you see there are many different ways of organizing us, you could have all these different kinds of education, health, and whatever systems like that in society. A society picks a particular configuration of these systems in order to make it work. Some societies organize all that so it creates a racial hierarchy. The capitalist ones do so in a way that it creates a class hierarchy, and some of them do it in a way that creates a gender hierarchy. We have to intervene in the context of healthcare, politics, and the economy. The distribution process is encoding racial, gender, class, and ability privilege all at the same time. Those are the sites of intervention. I don't know how to fight for gender justice in and of itself in the system of gender. I know how to fight for gender justice in politics, in the economy, in healthcare, in education. These are our material systems, and what I'm trying to do is locate those moments or those places in those systems where women are systematically disadvantaged.

Again, one might say that the system of patriarchy is the system that unites and organizes how all of these subsystems subordinate women, but the problem is I don't think it's systematic. I think it's kind of a mess. That's what gives me hope. There are different mechanisms by which it's working, and the fact that it's as fragmented as it is gives me hope that we can leverage, change, and make progress because you're going to start undoing it in all of the different sites where it occurs.

HB: How does your view differ from the likes of bell hooks or Iris Marion Young, who talked about these systems of oppression as well?

SH: I don't really think of hooks or Young as doing a systems approach. A lot of what hooks talks about are identities and social norms that are certainly a crucial part of the process. She is a cultural theorist and a cultural critic doing really important work. She shows us how symbols and norms and ideology play a role in understanding social categories. The role of culture in oppression is something that I've tried to highlight in some of my work. I don't see myself at odds with hooks; I care about ideology and about ideology critique as well. However, I am more grounded in a Marxian sense of materiality. I am interested in the ways in which society distributes material resources, and whether the way of distributing is flawed or unjust.

I'm also very sympathetic to Young's work. She is a bit more of a materialist than hooks, as I read her. I'm tracing out some of the themes in Young's work to develop them and put them in a slightly different framework. So, although we differ on many of the details, I don't think my methods or my projects are at odds with either Young or hooks.

JJ: You mentioned injustices and our idea that some social structures are unjust. Does it mean that this idea of being unjust or being just is outside the system? Is ethics somewhere out there and not part of society itself?

SH: I have a couple of papers on this. One is called “Political Epistemology and Social Critique.” Another has just been published in a festschrift for Axel Honneth, “Taking a Stand: Second-Order Social Pathologies or First-Order Critique?” Much of ethics and political philosophy try to use our intuitions about what is right and wrong and good and bad to come up with an ideal theory of how one ought to live, organize ourselves, and organize our societies. I think that this process suffers seriously from status quo bias. A lot of our normative beliefs about the world are flawed. They're flawed because we've grown up and been tutored to have a certain ideology about what's good and bad, and right and wrong. Through this process, we reflect on our considered judgments, we canonize them and we put them in a coherent abstract structure. Then we evaluate our world in light of that. That's a very flawed way to think about critique and justice. We can't just step outside of our framework, because we have to use some tools to think with; but we cannot simply use the tools we take for granted either because we must presume they are flawed. My moral epistemology is really grounded on consciousness-raising.

Thomas Kuhn had a view about scientific progress: any scientific program relies on a paradigm that organizes our thinking about a range of phenomena. But the paradigms are always inadequate in some way or another. They always face recalcitrant data and moments when explanations fail. Those who attend to how things fall apart propose an alternative paradigm that does justice to that phenomenon that was inadequately understood from the dominant paradigm. They could say, look, this reveals aspects of the world that we haven't seen before. This reveals connections that had been invisible to us.

Broadly speaking, I think that's what consciousness-raising does in the moral domain. When people are marginalized, their experiences are not captured by the mainstream moral categories or by the mainstream political sense of justice; when those who notice this join together, there's a process whereby the group can come up with a better interpretation of what's going on, a better interpretation of the wrongs. I insist that the new paradigm, if it is to be acceptable, must meet epistemic standards of betterness. It does better justice to the phenomenon; it's coherent, and so forth. We can aim for some kind of situated objectivity, and then you say, look, this is a different paradigm that shows that if we think about things this way, we gain moral knowledge.

For example, back in the day, domestic violence was just a private matter between a husband and his wife, and so the police couldn't intervene. There was a set of assumptions around domestic violence: husbands are entitled to control their wives, or it's probably the woman's fault, or it is what the woman deserved. Through consciousness-raising together, those who were survivors of what was then considered “wife-beating” (and their supporters) came to recognize that such violence is not morally different from public violence—it is an assault on individuals who are entitled to their rights. You can't say just because my husband/wife/partner did it to me, it's not an assault. It is still an assault. The term domestic violence was coined as part of this effort.

This critique offers a paradigm shift for breaking down the public/private distinction that came out of consciousness-raising. This produced moral knowledge. You gain the knowledge that violence done privately, behind closed doors, in someone's house, is still wrongful violence. Being private, or occurring in the context of marriage, doesn't make it permissible.

I'm suggesting that instead of creating an abstract moral philosophy in the seminar room, you learn from people who are marginalized and those who experience other forms of moral injustice. You create a movement where we work together to try to come up with a new paradigm in understanding injustice. Why is this unjust, and how is it affecting us? One of the advantages of this view is that it helps us deal with the historical and cultural specificity of these injustices, and how we can possibly overcome them. Slavery in the United States, the Holocaust in Europe; these are historical legacies that create frames of meaning and understanding—frames that could then be used as part of an abstract account of, say, how reparations are going to work. By using consciousness-raising of the people who are directly affected by injustices, we can begin to think about how to reshape society, norms, and social relations in a way that's going to be more just.

HB: How do these social critiques apply to the current global situation, in particular the COVID-19 pandemic?

SH: I think it's a bit easier to think about how it works for #BlackLivesMatter because it has a longer history in the civil rights movement. The resistance has gone on for a very long time in the context of the United States. Understanding the history of racial subordination, desegregation, and the great migration, the work of Black scholars and activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and their intellectual legacy, all this is important for framing how reparations might or might not work. Millions of people have been unjustly treated. Historical and contemporary conversation with them is essential to understanding their experience, their sense of wrong, and to formulate adequate restitution.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, my analysis is much less developed, but it clearly interacts with issues of race and class and who counts as essential workers. In the United States, we don't have decent healthcare, but it's quite interesting how COVID-19 has raised consciousness about what counts as an essential worker. The restrictions on mobility, work, transportation, and such divided essential workers from inessential workers. Essential workers are people who drive the buses, work in pharmacies, the grocery store workers, people who unpack groceries, or the truckers who bring the groceries. These are all essential workers. Many of these people are people who are ordinarily invisible. They are incredibly exploited, and they don't get any recognition. But suddenly they are visible, and visible as essential to our well-being.

In the context of COVID-19, there's a possibility of consciousness-raising about who is an essential worker. It's not the bankers or the real estate brokers, it's not the people who are making the megabucks. The people who are essential to maintain life in our society are the people who are the least respected, least recognized, and least paid. This is a moment for building a movement that could potentially increase the appreciation of essential workers, but it has yet to flip into a full-blown movement.

JJ: You're not only a professor of philosophy, but you're also a social advocate. What is it like to work with other radical thinkers? And do you consider yourself a radical thinker?

SH: I hope I'm a radical thinker! I think that's a term of honor. I don't think it's something that I could really attribute to myself because that would be a kind of hubris and arrogance. I aspire to be a radical thinker. It's a wonderful thing to have a community of people to think with, and I do have a very strong feminist philosophy community. I work with critical race theorists and critical race philosophers. I am part of another group of people who are basically just a bunch of sixty- and seventy-year-old radicals. I am also allied with people at MIT and other places across the United States and elsewhere who care about these issues. We try to leverage our power as academics to make a difference, make a difference to help those marginalized or excluded from the academy but also others who suffer from how our society is structured. That keeps me going, getting up, and working my butt off every day because that's what really matters to me. I do love writing, doing philosophy, and teaching. This term, I'm teaching a course on gender and development with another radical colleague. Our focus is on how to make a difference in development without having it be an instance of colonial privilege. We work to empower groups of people who are facing extreme hardship: waste-pickers, women gold-miners, AIDS orphans, those facing food and water insecurity and sexual exploitation. Our question is, how do you do that in a way that is politically appropriate, and especially in this class where gender is an important issue?

I try as much as possible to integrate my activism in my research and in my teaching. I have a backpack ready to go in my front hall. A backpack for demonstrations. It's a clear backpack, it contains a bottle of water, some goggles and milk of magnesia for teargas. It has an ID (not my driver's license) and a portable cell phone battery. My cell phone has an app that allows you to send videos directly to the ACLU. The backpack also includes a tambourine. I need a tambourine because I'm often holding a sign and you can't clap so you need a tambourine because you only need one hand to make plenty of noise with it. I probably have ten different foam-core boards with different things written on them; some have been used many times. That work matters to me, too.

JJ: As a professional academic philosopher, you have devoted most of your life to thinking about things that matter in our social lives; would you say that this career is worth it?

SH: It's hard to know. It's been meaningful to me. Is it worth it to me? Yes, it's all-consuming, and it gives me great joy and great despair. It's everything and so it's worth it to me. Is it worth it in the sense that all this effort has really made any difference at all? I think those are the sorts of things that one can't necessarily know right now in the middle of it. There's a passage by Rebecca Solnit in Hope in the Dark that means so much to me and keeps me going:

If I'd done something else, maybe I would have gotten too depressed to do anything or I would have just been really bad at it. Counterfactuals are really hard for me to evaluate, but this life I have now is a meaningful life for me. I do what I can to live my values, to have integrity. My family is a really important part of my life and not just as a group of people I love. I live in a nontraditional family. In addition to my philosophical work and my activism, I'm exemplifying my values every day in my family, and my children are carrying these values forward. That means the world to me.