The demand for recognition in these latter cases is given
urgency by the supposed links between recognition and
identity, where this latter term designates something like a
person’s understanding of who they are, of their fundamental
defining characteristics as a human being. The thesis is
that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence,
often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person
or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if
the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining
or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.
Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a
form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted,
and reduced mode of being.
Thus some feminists have argued that women in patriarchal
societies have been induced to adopt a depreciatory
image of themselves. They have internalized a picture of
their own inferiority, so that even when some of the objective
obstacles to their advancement fall away, they may be
incapable of taking advantage of the new opportunities. And beyond this, they are condemned to suffer the pain of low
self-esteem. An analogous point has been made in relation to
blacks: that white society has for generations projected a demeaning
image of them, which some of them have been unable
to resist adopting. Their own self-depreciation, on this
view, becomes one of the most potent instruments of their
own oppression. Their first task ought to be to purge themselves
of this imposed and destructive identity. Recently, a
similar point has been made in relation to indigenous and
colonized people in general. It is held that since 1492 Europeans
have projected an image of such people as somehow
inferior, “uncivilized,” and through the force of conquest
have often been able to impose this image on the conquered.
The figure of Caliban has been held to epitomize this crushing
portrait of contempt of New World aboriginals.