Civility discourse smuggles in exclusion of those deemed different

Evidence

George W. Bush reads Adam Ferguson, when he reads at all! Though not without a touch of predictable parochialism: Note at once a central implication of this lingering Hobbesian logic. “Decent dispositions” and “politeness” are better predicted from the familiar, those “one is used to,” from those one takes to be more like oneself (and so predictably more prone to behave like one), those sharing one’s sense of the civil, the familial, of “our” values, and so potential members of your civil society, than those outside your circle of civility. The different become at once the differentiated, and the differentiated the divorceable, the alien and excludable in the self-perpetuating logic or pragmatics of differentiation. The discourses of civility and civil society entail commitment to the rhetorics of civilization, and by extension to the logics of “born again racism” elaborated in Chapter 1 above. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 208

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how polite discourse itself functions as a gatekeeping technology — ‘civility as the velvet glove of racial exclusion’ — an essay on how calls for civility in public debate can encode who counts as worthy interlocutor.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier discussion of ‘born again racism’ and to work on discursive racism — how language norms quietly sort insiders from outsiders. — connects to: Political discourse redefines contested terms so opposition becomes definitionally impossible; Universalising models of conviviality inevitably exclude those who cannot embody them. — Farhan Samanani, Conviviality and its others: for a…, 82; Framing natives as uncivilized precludes their equal citizenship. — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 86 (+5 more)