Countering Belief Resistance: Reflections on Tommie Shelby’s Tanner Lectures

As someone who spent a substantial portion of my college years delving into the Tanner Lectures, relentlessly citing Amartya Sen's 1979 Tanner Lectures “Equality of What?” throughout my college essays and conversations (and now this post), I was already acquainted with the impact they can have. Yet, this year, I had the incredible opportunity to attend one of these lectures in person — and it lived up to every expectation. 

The Tanner Lectures, comprised of annual lectures and seminars, aim to advance, recognize, and reflect on outstanding scholarly work on human values.  And now, rubbing shoulders with some of the most renowned Tanner Lecturers in philosophy, including John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, and Martha Nussbaum, Tommie Shelby adds a new chapter to the rich tradition of these influential lectures and their continuous inspiration for young scholars like myself.

Tommie Shelby's lecture exemplifies the ideal model for how philosophical discussions in the realm of human values should unfold.

Understanding the ‘Political Ethics’ in a Political Ethics of Belief

Tommie Shelby, the Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences, Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies, and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, began his first lecture with a rigorous delineation of the nature of racial stereotypes and why they wrong individuals and groups. Shelby dove into the epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of language underpinning stereotypes in a way that reminded me of some of my own philosophy courses, where my professors would meticulously parse complex ideas into bite-sized pieces for us undergraduates to digest. In a similar manner, Shelby distinguished stereotypes from implicit biases and group prejudices. In contrast to these attitudes, a stereotype is a conscious and faulty belief in a demographic generalization, which often and most offensively manifests as a generic statement: Xs are Y (e.g., Latinos are uneducated). These generic statements wrong because of the ways in which they are held, mainly as having resistance to counterevidence. Shelby argued that this resistance breaks a civic duty we owe to historically marginalized groups, one which demands greater care in the formation and uptake of our beliefs about them.

Commenting on this first lecture was none other than the two-time Tanner Lecturer K. Anthony Appiah, Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. In their discussion, Appiah and Shelby focused on the inherently wronging nature of generic statements. During this conversation, I found myself resonating with Appiah's claim that Shelby’s first lecture left little room for disagreement, partly due to its clarificatory nature but mostly because of how persuasive it was. 

And struck by the potential implications of Shelby's ideas, I seized the opportunity to ask him about the broader ramifications of his conclusions, particularly whether they raise the evidential threshold for social science when studying stigmatized groups. He answered that it imposes even greater demands on this kind of research than on regular belief acceptance, given the former’s higher downstream effects.

Practical Implications of Resisting Stereotypes

After clearly defining racial stereotypes and their complexities in the first lecture, Shelby turned his second lecture to the practical implications of resistance to stereotypes, focusing on resisting stereotypes in general and advocating for counter-stereotypic resistance in particular.  The latter refers to a strategy in which the stereotyped group engages in three interrelated courses of action: (1) ideological debunking of stereotypes with research, science, and informed criticism; (2) public education on the heterogeneity of the stereotyped group; and lastly, and most controversially, (3) counter-stereotypic conduct, where the affected group offsets stereotypes by avoiding actions and discernable attitudes that may lend them credence, even overturning expectations, such as responding to the stereotype that Latinos are uneducated with encyclopedic knowledge or being well-versed in high culture. (I would recommend watching the lecture to see how this differs from the contentious politics of respectability).

The commentary, this time, came from the domain of political science by Jennifer Hochschild, H.L. Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard. The discussion between Hochschild and Shelby delved deeper into the subject of counter-stereotypic resistance and challenged each other's perspectives as Hochschild voiced her concerns with what she deemed Shelby's "persuasive" approach, or at least found qualifications to its application. More specifically, she attributes the recent spike in racial stereotypes to three possible sources:(1) a psychological outburst of long-buried beliefs, (2) a political legitimization of racial stereotypes by authority figures, and (3) their use as a scapegoat for deteriorating economic conditions. Hochschild argued that Shelby's counter-stereotypic resistance can only address the psychological explanation, leaving the political and economic ones untouched. For Shelby, however, change in policy and economic conditions will not happen without the type of solidarity that can only be achieved by confronting stereotypes directly.

Interdisciplinary Insights

On the third and last day, the conversation extended into the social sciences and religious studies with a seminar featuring comments from Lerone A. Martin, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor in Religious Studies at Stanford, and Brian Lowery, the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. This discussion had an open format, allowing students and faculty members to chime in and circle back to concerns raised by Hochschild the previous day, challenging Shelby's notion of counter-stereotypic conduct once more. However, it seemed to me that many of these concerns, including Hochschild’s, were rooted in a misinterpretation of this conduct's intended role. Whereas the conduct was often challenged on grounds that there are other, and more effective, strategies to pursue, Shelby appears to argue not for counter-stereotypic conduct to be the sole or superior solution but simply for its justifiability and for its place within the larger tapestry of initiatives combating racism in general, and racial stereotypes in particular. 

This three-fold approach—philosophical rigor, practical evaluation, and interdisciplinary discussion—provides meaningful philosophical discussions on human values, of which Shelby's lecture was exemplary. As I prepare for a conference in March focused on the philosophy of economic methodology, I aim to incorporate some of Shelby's insights into my own research, where I will explore the extent to which the political duties we owe to marginalized communities also have consequences for social science, such as by imposing stricter standards for statistical significance or by affecting how we evaluate welfare. I trust that others, too, will find great value in watching the lectures and discussions.

Watch the Tanner Lectures recordings to learn more about stereotypes, race, and resistance: Lecture 1; Lecture 2; and the Discussion Seminar. 

Juan N. Pava is a Research Associate in the Tech Ethics and Policy Rising Scholars Program at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. He is actively engaged with Stanford HAI’s emerging work on the intersection of new technology, the social sector, and the global south.