Juliana Uhuru Bidadanure has been invited by the Collège de France assembly at the suggestion of Prof. Samantha Besson.
Post-Arawlsian egalitarianism has been shaped by two main currents. Distributive egalitarians, firstly, maintain that a just society is one in which everyone receives their fair share. Most of the debates within this first camp have focused on determining the nature of the good X central to egalitarian justice : opportunities, primary goods, resources, well-being, or capabilities. The second current of contemporary egalitarianism is relational. Relational egalitarians argue that we need to go beyond the distributive paradigm to better envision equality. Instead of focusing on the possessive relationship between a person and his or her possessions and the comparative relationship between individuals, relational egalitarians encourage us to examine the different ways in which institutional contexts and unequal modes of relationship influence our positions. They encourage us to broaden the parameters we take into account when thinking about equality : beyond goods and their distribution, we need to consider respect, recognition and the absence of oppression and domination. They invite us to understand justice as the establishment of communities whose members see and treat each other as equals.
My approach to equality is fundamentally influenced by relational egalitarianism. But the notion of a relationship of equals remains somewhat opaque. Progress is needed to develop theories of relational egalitarianism that are as precise as some distributional theories have been in the past. This is the subject of my new book project, provisionally entitled Inferiorized. The book adopts a negative strategy : I study the modes of unequal relations that we have reason to avoid, and draw from them a positive proposal of what relations of equality entail. Written at the crossroads of philosophy and the social sciences, the book presents a typology of the most serious and common modes of inferiorization, from infantilization and objectification to demonization and animalization. It offers precise definitions, highlighting their specific features, their social function and the public policies with which they are often associated.
At the Collège de France, I plan to present a chapter on what I call " trashification " - a form of objectification in which individuals are perceived as waste and treated accordingly. Given that waste has a negative value and must be discarded or hidden, trashification represents a particularly extreme form of objectification. Drawing on contemporary examples and existing theories of objectification, I clarify the specifics of this mode of inferiorization. My starting point is the very common insult of " white trash " in the USA. Trashification has many faces, but one specificity is that it does not always imply instrumentalization - the use of individuals as instruments or tools. Rather, trashification often results in neglect, non-assistance and abandonment. Like trash, trashified people are perceived as unusable and must disappear. The evil of objectification is that it treats people as pure means to an end. On the other hand, the injustice of trashification can be characterized, in some cases, by treating people as untouchable and disposable. The trashified are perceived as worthless, and entire communities are left to die. They die young from medical neglect, preventable diseases and infections, police brutality, suicide or overdose. Their deaths are normalized, expected and little noticed. I extend my study to other examples, including the trashification of the homeless in American cities and the case of India's untouchable Dalits.
