Juliana Uhuru Bidadanure has been invited by the Collège de France assembly at the suggestion of Professor Samantha Besson.
Post-Rawlsian egalitarianism has been shaped by two main currents. Distributive egalitarians, first, argue that a just society is one in which everyone receives their fair share of X (Sen 1979; Dworkin 1981; Arneson 1989; G. Cohen 1989). Most internal debates have thus centered on determining the correct currency for egalitarian justice: opportunities, primary goods, resources, welfare, opportunities for welfare, or capabilities. The second current in contemporary egalitarianism is relational. Relational egalitarians contend that we should move beyond the distributive paradigm (Young 1990; Anderson 1999; Scheffler 2003). Instead of focusing on the possessive relation between a person and their holdings and the comparative relation between individuals, relational egalitarians encourage us to examine the various ways institutional contexts and inegalitarian modes of relating influence outcomes. They urge us to expand the considerations that fit into discussions of equality: not just possessions and distributions, but also respect, recognition, and the avoidance of oppression and domination. They advocate for understanding justice as the establishment of communities whose members can relate and stand as equals.
My approach to equality is significantly influenced by relational egalitarianism. My first book, Justice Across Ages: Treating Young and Old as Equals (OUP, 2021), applies the insights of relational egalitarianism to age-group and generational justice. I demonstrate that issues of age and time illustrate the necessity of a relational component in egalitarian justice. However, I have also grown concerned that “relating as equals” is quite an opaque notion. Some progress is needed to develop theories of relational egalitarianism that are as precise and action-guiding as some distributive theories once were. This is the focus of my new book project, tentatively titled Inferiorized. The book employs a negative strategy: I study inegalitarian modes of relating that we have reasons to avoid and establish a positive account of what relations of equality entail in the process.
Written at the crossroads of philosophy and social science, the book presents a typology of prevalent inferiorizing modes, ranging from infantilization and objectification to demonization and animalization. It offers precise definitions of these “debasement technologies” (Chamayou 2008) through historical and contemporary case studies, highlighting their specificities, social functions, and the policies they are often associated with. My varied case studies range from the demonization of immigrants and welfare recipients, the infantilization of older community members, and the animalization of Tutsis during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. The book’s most significant philosophical contribution is the development of a new relational egalitarian framework. Its key social scientific contribution is its precise typology, which can be mobilized to study and measure social inequalities. I will collaborate with social scientists at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequalities to create a new relational measure of inequalities.
At the Collège de France, I will present a new chapter of my draft book on what I call “trashification” —a form of objectification in which individuals are perceived as trash and treated accordingly. Since trash holds negative value and must be discarded or hidden, trashification represents a particularly extreme type of objectification and should be recognized as such. Drawing on contemporary examples and utilizing existing theories of objectification as a foundation, I develop an account of the uniqueness of trashification and illuminate its specific wrongness. My starting point is the example of the widely used “white trash” slur and the trashification of poor whites in the American South and beyond. The dominant narrative is discussed by author Cedar Monroe, who grew up in a poor community in Washington State: “Poor Whites, always pushed westward as the vanguard of land acquisition by large corporate interests, finally went as far West as possible. There, many of us were thrown away, just like the trash heaps that surrounded the tent cities spreading up and down the coastline. Trash people living among trash: that is the dominant narrative about our lives.” (Monroe 2024).
One specificity of trashification is that it does not always involve instrumentalization or toolification – the use of individuals as instruments or tools for one’s ends. While many forms of objectification are deeply linked to exploitation, trashification often results in neglect, non-assistance, and abandonment instead. Like waste, the trashified are seen as unusable and must disappear. Objectification is wrongful because it constitutes a form of relating in which we treat individuals as mere means to an end (Nussbaum 1995). Trashification, by contrast, is often wrongful because people are regarded as untouchable, unrelatable, and discardable. The trashified are perceived as worthless, and entire communities are abandoned to die. They die young from medical neglect, preventable diseases and infections, police brutality, suicide, or overdose. Their deaths are normalized, expected, and overlooked. From this example, I extend my study to the trashification of unhoused individuals throughout American cities and the case of the untouchable Dalits in India.
The notion of trashification is essential for understanding a range of severe contemporary cases of marginalization and for making progress on relational egalitarianism because, not unlike segregation, it results in a severance of ties that are a prerequisite for relational equality.
