An Ethical Discussion of Gold Digging
ADDRESSING KANTIAN CRITICISMS OF THE BLACK WOMAN’S Quest for UPWARD MOBILITY and Ease. Shoutout to JT and Yung Miami.
At 16 years old, I did not completely understand what JT meant when she hopped on a track with Yung Miami, sampling Khia’s iconic “My Neck, My Back (Lick It),” and rapped “Give me the cash, fuck a wedding ring.” All I knew was that it was raunchy debauchery over a lit recognizable beat that would keep me awake while cramming for my SATs, and it did for six months. And it continues to do so, even now, as I study for the LSAT and spend my days in classrooms tainted by palmed-colored faces, still asking myself “What the fuck am I doing here?” at the ripe age of 20 years old. “This is not me.”
My internal dialogue has provided me with a multitude of answers to that pervasive questions: “You’re the only person in your family of immigrants to make it this far, you have to keep going,” “You want to change the world,” “You like expensive things, you need to make money,” “You’re just as smart as your classmates, why are you even questioning yourself.” But all of these have failed to be as tantalizing as, “Just find an old rich white man, you’re hot enough.” There are plenty of white saviors in their altruistic retirement out there looking for a young black girl to save from the perils of the oppression, so what is so wrong about me entertaining one, stitching him the exotic fantasy he’s been trying to patch together in resolute privileged boredom, getting my family where we have long deserved to be, buying myself everything I’ve ever dreamed of wanting, and waiting it out until he dies. I, too, would like to be saved. And this would solve everything with minimal effort, accompanied by a drastic decline in Total Average Microaggressions Faced. Please refer to the experiment below:
Sample
Total Average Microaggressions Faced (Not married to rich white man) (per day)
In higher education: 7
In corporate workplace: 25
On the subway: 2
Alone, in stores above two $$ on Google: 9
TOTAL: ~11 microaggressions a day
Experiment
Total Average Microaggressions Faced (Married to rich white man) (per day)
In higher education: 0
*number may skew data, as I will have dropped out of college
In corporate workplace: 0
*number may skew data, as I will have abandoned my career
On the subway: 0
*number may skew data, as I will have stopped taking the subway daily
Together, in stores above two $$ on Google: 3
TOTAL: ~1 microaggression a day
As the data shows, marrying a rich old white man statistically leads to less racist interactions than not marrying a rich old white man; the marriage will mean I no longer have to partake in the rigamarole, rat run of corporate America. No more is the chain link: Racist Prestigious Private High School → Affirmative Action Allegations → Racist Prestigious University → Racist Prestigious Law Program → Racist Job → Tolerating Mansplaining → High Starting Salary, That Isn’t Actually High Considering I’m Being Overworked and I Can’t Mend My Family’s Lack of Generational Wealth in Just My Lifetime. When considering what is currently available to me – the conditions that I am required to endure due my identity in this system built upon black abjection and social femicide – the proof that I made up is right there just begging for me to sacrifice myself to it. Perhaps I should take it up in exchange for just a twinge of pleasure, security, and relaxation. I have always wanted a softer life, a few luxury bags, and maybe a house, too, with two stories.
And I don’t see why it’s so wrong. Though I might be speaking in jest about abandoning all of my interests and putting my trust in a man in any way, I am so tired. Here, in this space of “high intellectualism and career security,” I have spent many days a shell of a person, deprived of personhood on several entry points of my very being. Here, I have been reminded that I am constantly being observed as campus photographers capture me with books in hand, for the cover of the diversity pamphlet, like a monkey in a zoo. Everyone is just waiting, waiting, waiting for the day I prove I do not belong here, that affirmative action slipped up just like they knew it would. For the day I prove I am just like “the rest,” biting the hands that fed me, driven by a mind of lower faculties, hyper concerned with angrily leeching off the fruits of white accomplishment. “The monkey has not been trained properly;” “Modern women have lost the plot;” “No one wants to work anymore;” “These new Blacks are nothing like MLK,” they will say. And to that I respond, “Well even Travis the Chimp and Harambe had their bad day.”
But what I must question is who exactly is “the rest”? Who bites the hand that feeds them and angrily feeds off the fruits of other’s accomplishments to prove their own subjectivity and superiority? After all, Harambe surely brought the Cincinnati Zoo a whole lot of visitors (money), prior to and after his murder.
In the moment that Harambe grabbed that toddler and swung him around his encampment, the zookeeper was sure to grab his gun and kill the iconic gorilla. It was in that moment that the zookeeper witnessed the gorilla’s lethal overstep, the moment Harambe threatened the subjectivity of the human being and revealed his assumed intrinsic irrationality. However, I would argue that Harambe’s “crime” against the toddler was nothing short of what had been done to him– entrapped, played with, threatened, and made a spectacle. He had forgone the ontological dismemberment between human and animal and he dared to establish himself as a living thing with agency. Ontological dismemberment establishes Harambe as Animal, the thing that exists in the Nature that Man has separated himself from to operate within the order and rationality of the State. When Harambe attacked he finally established himself as not a thing, but a Being with agency and awareness of the abuses done to him; he subverted the dismemberment that put him in the cage and instead put a human child in there with him, using that toddler as a means to express his own frustrations. At that moment, we were forced to question: Who is the Animal?
This is where my Haramabe metaphor draws its strength. What is to be said about those who disobey this dismemberment by regurgitating the oppressors' sentiments back their oppressor and retaking their agency through subversion? Those who remind us, like JT, that “Motherfucker this ain’t Disney,” and we are not Curious George happily holding hands with the Man in the Yellow Hat, singing kumbaya? Those who remind us that within this social contract we are making deals with the devil and should act accordingly?
We are quite familiar with the reactions these dismemberment rebels face from those whose comfort and social positions they threaten: Harambe’s murder being justified by primatologists and conservationists alike and the constant berating of the City Girls as black women in the spotlight who encourage “hoodrat/single mother” behavior– whatever that means. Where these visceral reactions from the public overlap is in the disdain for the marginalized not knowing their place. But the criticism of City Girls’ ideology is strengthened by a seemingly cultural hatred for Gold Digging; women– let alone black women from the 305– trying to accomplish some sense of “upward mobility,” and daring to find joy in the process is the ultimate sin and inversion of their ontology. On the basis of selfishness, much criticism of Gold Digging is rooted in Kantian Ethics: “Act in such a way as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of anyone else, always as an end and never merely as a means.” These women are not treating their partners as ends in themselves, but rather as a stepping stone for an undeserved luxury they didn’t “work hard” for, or for, what I would call, comfortability.
But in the context of shaming Gold Digging, “undeserved” and “work hard” have rather sinister connotations. In manosphere spaces— the space that labels itself as motivational to young men, but instead acts in direct opposition to female empowerment— Gold Digging is wrong when sex is not being given in return for money, otherwise all is swell. What could have once been assumed to be “working hard” in the form of capitalist labor becomes “working hard” to rid yourself of sexual agency. Prominent figure in the manosphere, now under investigation for literal sex trafficking, Andrew Tate states “Gold Digging is ‘Hi, buy me this. I don’t even like you. I’m not sleeping with you. Get me this.” Additionally, men’s magazine, MensXP, which dedicates itself to “help[ing] men become better in all areas of their life,” published an article “5 Ways To Spot A Woman Who Is A Gold Digger & Stay Away From Her,” warning,
“She uses sex very strategically with you. By that, I mean if you do something wrong she will refuse to have sex with you, psyching you to believe that her way of getting back at you is neglecting you physically. If you do something right, like buy her an expensive present, she'll probably give you the best night of your life. She uses sex as a reward system and she's conditioning you to basically pay her for sex! Through gifts and money of course.”
Having restrictions on when sex occurs, if it occurs at all, is the only thing that separates Gold Digging from being not okay under Kantian Ethics. Money in exchange for sex is just fine because that is just the way things go: men provide, women give them sex in return. When no sex is given in return the Gold Digger is a bad woman, an untrained woman, a double-irrational woman, who contributes to a generation destined for failure and immorality. That’s just the nature of things. As irrational, inferior beings women are intended to be used as a means for the continuation of male pleasure and the survival of the human race; as irrational, inferior beings women are not intended to use anyone as a means, just be the means. So when JT raps on “How to Pimp A N**ga,” “So don’t let that nigga fuck, just let him touch it a lil’,” that is when Gold Digging goes from acceptable common practice to immorality in action. This is where she subverts the Kantian and Western order of things, using the center as a means for her own pleasure, constructing them as the animals to establish her agency upon when that process was only intended to be done to her.
The hypocrisy of when this Kantian standard is applied seems to be obvious, but it is, in fact, working just how it was supposed to. The [intersectional] marginalized individual was never intended to be a part of the normative, nor the universal. In Metaphysics of Morals, Kant defines a person as “rational beings… [who have a nature that] already marks them out as ends in themselves, i.e., as something that may not be used merely as means, hence to that extent limits all arbitrary choice (and is an object of respect).” Seems clear, until we consider the subjectivity of the term “rational” and who the title is applied to; until we consider those whose existence was determined by being used as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself; until we consider who, exactly, is not human under these presupposed pretenses. All things considered illuminates the harsh fact that critics against the City Girl’s Gold Digging establish their argument on the inherent exclusion of the marginalized from the rationality and reason of metaphysics, ethics, “human” ontology; the City Girls pay no respect to their ontological dismemberment from Man, from Beings, and from the Rich that was supposed to ensure that they’d never get the opportunity to take advantage of their Masters in the center.
Rather than detail the rich histories of the creation of gender, race, and class distinctions, I’ll highlight the ontological dismemberment that manifested in those moments.
To understand ontological dismemberment, itself, we must first examine definitions of personhood and animality. Throughout a multitude of his works, Kant establishes animals as “things,” with no sense of consciousness or rationality, and a faculty of desire which permits their choices to only be made through inclinations. As animals are distinct from humans due to their irrationality and label as “things,” animals play no part in our ethical duties and deserve no respect, according to Kant: “Respect applies always to persons only— not to things. The latter may arouse inclination, and if they are animals (e.g., horses, dogs, etc.), even love or fear, like the sea, a volcano, a beast of prey; but never respect.” You can feel love for your Yorkie, and horny for your woman, but that’s where it ends.
And it is along these lines that we come to understand personhood; people are people because they are rational beings, unlike our irrational counterparts; though we are predisposed to animality, we remain headstrong in our capability to be conscious of “I” and to be rational. Within the human is the animal, but the human is not animal because the animal is not rational and therefore the animal, as a thing, deserves no respect and harbors an existence that only serves to help prove that our empathy receptors are still working.
The ontologies of humans and animals depend on each other for the definitions that spring forth when the human separates itself from its inner animal. The human exists at the top of the hierarchy, not the other, as He chooses reason. María Luisa Bacarlett Pérez in “Becoming-Woman and Ontological Dismemberment: Reflections on women and animals” asserts that this is the definitive yet paradoxical process of ontological dismemberment, and the only way of understanding what it means to be human under the current pretenses which rely upon vague notions of rationality: “Humans never cease to be animals, but if they want to somehow distinguish themselves from the rest of the living beings, they will have to go through a whole dismemberment operation, a kind of ontological excision.” The excision then creates the fruitless and contradictory grounds for the State and participation in social contracts; the Nature emerges as a byproduct when it is excised from the superior State, just as Animal emerges when it is excised from the superior Man. Ontological dismemberment creates a cyclical binary, where though Man is needed to understand Animal and vice versa, the two separate on the basis of “rationality.” This rationality forces Man to partake in the State and leave behind Nature by entering a social contract, codified by the State, which ensures “universal” freedoms that, unregulated and violent, Nature cannot provide:
“The act by means of which the people constitute themselves a state is the original contract. More properly, it is the Idea of that act that alone enables us to conceive of the legitimacy of the state. According to the original contract, all (omnes et singuli) the people give us their external freedom in order to take it back again immediately as members of a common-wealth, that is, the people regarded as the state universei. Accordingly, we cannot say that a man has sacrificed in the state a part of his inborn external freedom for some particular purpose; rather, we must say that he has completely abandoned his wild, lawless freedom in order to find his whole freedom again undiminished in a lawful dependency, that is, in a juridical, state of society, since this dependency comes from his own legislative will.”
Once again to understand State, we must be able to understand it as Not Nature– the abandonment of the “wild” and “lawless” – and then we must condemn Nature just as we did to Animal. This is the duty of Persons.
The signing of the social contract drags us out of Nature, and according to Kant it is our moral duty to abide by it, as it is inherently rational in its pursuits for freedom for “all.” But let’s not beat around the bush for the sake of a sound philosophical-academic-pretentious paper, these freedoms he speaks of are non-existent for those who are still partially (perceived as) Nature-ified and have yet to completely excise themselves, or rather be excised from Nature. Women, just like Nature, are byproducts of this ontological dismemberment between Man and Animal: Woman is irrational, therefore she has not completely excised herself from Animal/Nature and is not able to partake in the social contract. She is not a person.
This part of women that is still inherently attached to Nature justifies her control within the State, and Pérez would argue that its her fertility that causes this:
“The animality, the reproductive sphere, should be contained in the private sphere, therefore, women not only are due to the private sphere, they are also subordinate to men. This status of subordination and domination is a consequence of the contract, in which the subject who has been able to tame his nature would have a prerogative over the subject who was linked to the natural world.”
I am not concerned with the speculative cause of subjugation, I just know that it is and I live it. Whether or not my child bearing capabilities or apparent lack of reason cause my subjugation to being of Nature’s lower faculties brings no solace in understanding that Woman does not only coincide with the ontological dismemberment between State and Nature, but experiences a different ontological dismemberment herself— along with the Black. This dismemberment is not with the humanity version of Man, but the gendered Man.
Women, poor people, and black people systemically experience similar ontological dismemberments, coming into being for the establishment of men, rich, and the Being as the superior origin point of Humanity. We cannot understand any of them without understanding their human deficiency which uplifts those in the center, on the other side of the dismemberment. Whether or not he realized it, Kant defines women as animalistic in nature and it would be shameful for me to not mention it even if it seems like an ad hominem attack:
“The virtue of a woman is a beautiful virtue… Women will avoid the wicked not because it is unright, but because it is ugly; and virtuous actions mean to them such as are morally beautiful. Nothing of duty, nothing of compulsion, nothing of obligation… They do something only because it pleases them, and the art consists in making only that please them, which is good.”
Kant funnily structures women’s lack as their intrinsic nature, implying that having no concern to duty, rightness, and reason is just how they should be. Women are intrinsically pushed to action by an inclination for pleasure, making it impossible for them to ever be persons. We are not rational agents and are therefore not persons; we are of Nature, having yet to reach the requirements for participation in the State. This moral standard Kant has formulated simply does not apply to us. And I reiterate, here, that women were never intended to be a part of Kantian Ethics’ moral standard on the basis of their ontology despite what modern Kantian pundits might say. And he says this clearly: “women in general have no civil personality, and their existence is, so to speak, purely inherent… [they must] be kept well away from the state, and must also be subject to their husbands – their masters – in marriage.” It is along these ontological lines that being Woman implies an animalistic deficiency that reinforces the (gendered) Man’s being and justifies her own subjugation. We come to understand Man when we see just how he has excised him from the realm of emotions, reproduction, Motherhood, beauty, sexuality, and desire through reason. Women are the tangible example of his superiority — his power and empathy— and what he could’ve been if he hadn’t escaped Nature. The gendered Man is the only Man, or person, as he subdues his animality and the Woman is his subordinate he takes along with him for the ride— the thing he needs for the maintenance of the human race, the thing he must use to get his rocks off, and the thing he uses as a means to an end. She looks to Him as the root for her existence and the structure of the State; He is what generously dragged her out of Nature along with him; He is the standard. That is what universalism means in this context, despite moralists attempting to display it as “all persons in all circumstances.” Let's adjust it to “perceived persons in their specific circumstances”!
Kant is not alone in his interpretation of the Woman’s nature and he did not create this ontological difference. You can look at Hegel, Rousseau, and the Bible to see the same sentiment about our inherent lack of sense and reason. They, too, operate on the basis that women are intrinsically different somehow and somehow a circle must be fit into a square so we can encompass some arbitrary term— “rational.” There is always a return to our usefulness for others rather than a disregard for such a useless term like “reason” and useless, and rather systematically biased, restrictions on the ontology of persons. Are women truly irrational or were none of us allowed to go to school by the time these preconceptions were already set in stone? What came first, the chicken or the egg?
I, personally, think that such moral standards don’t matter as people pick and choose whichever one they feel like using depending on how they’re feeling that day: “I’m famished, let me cosplay a Hedonist for the day,” or even “I need to get into college, Ethical Altruism for 800, please.” But I have the capacity to acknowledge that when critics of Gold Digging rely on Kantian Ethics for their criticism, they are witfully attacking women not from the lens of how persons are to treat fellow persons, but from the lens of how things, or animals, are supposed to treat their masters according to their ontology. This is what gives their argument ground when they attack Gold Digging when no sex is given in exchange for money. Animals are never supposed to use their owners in this manner, they are only supposed to be used and be the example of what their master is not. The Animal is there to verify that the Man can still preserve his humanity: “So if a man has his dog shot, because it can no longer earn a living for him, he is by no means in breach of any duty to the dog, since the latter is incapable of judgment, but he thereby damages the kindly and humane qualities in himself, which he ought to exercise in virtue of his duties to mankind” (LE 27: 459).
Understanding the ontology of the Woman– her utility and intrinsic animality – only gets further complicated when we introduce race to the discussion. And our beloved Kant is often credited for inventing the concept of race itself, and his words are not too far off from the past, present, and future interpretations of the “Black/Negro.”
Who is the Black?
Well She is Nothing, here. Let me explain.
Just take a look at what Kant says. In his early anthropological works, he was unafraid to say Blacks don’t “attain the threshold of normative equality” and we are “natural slaves” (CITATION). And many Kant fanatics argue to ignore this and notice how he changed his mind later in his life, but I cannot pretend as though his early interpretation of my people has faded with time. Perhaps he changed his mind, but the world has not.
In Ontological Terror, Calvin L. Warren argues that within an antiblack world “the world needs the Negro, even as the world despises it.” This is because the Black, through ontological dismemberment, shows us the horror of metaphysical Nothingness while the rest of humanity gets to Be. In a world of Beings, something must Not-Be to show us exactly what Beings aren’t– just as Women and Animals show the Man that he is Man. As Black bodies continuously get mutilated and abused, as Black personhood is deprived, and as Black narratives remain cyclical, the value placed on acceptable notions of Being becomes formidable. Being is desirable as the Being gets to persist and stand strong. Martin Heidegger’s monolithic interpretation of Greek philosophers’ definition of “Being” in Introduction to Metaphysics establishes that “Being stand[s]-in-itself as arising and standing forth (phusis) but, as such, ‘constantly’ that is, enduringly, abiding (ousia).” Using this ancient definition, the Black does not have this privilege of Being as her existence has been firmly tainted by violence and terror, in a constant state of “falling.” No one knows if tomorrow she will be murdered and her dead body will be posted on Twitter; if tomorrow she will go missing and no one will care for her as they did for Gabby Petito. She shows the world why no one would want to Not-Be. So as the Black is forced to exist in and for the State, she is their own proof of their own superiority, she is abject systemically, metaphorically, and ontologically:
“The term black is precisely the puzzle, the great abyss, of something outside the precincts of ontology. It is a metaphysical invention, void of Being, for the purpose of securing Being for the human. It has something like existence but no recourse to the unfolding of Being or the revelation of its withdrawal. It is nothing — the nonhuman, equipment, and the mysterious.”
And well, the world we live in is, in fact, antiblack, so Warren’s theory doesn’t seem too far off to me. The Black exists within the White Man’s Beloved State – not on her own regard– and yet she isn’t. She is not a person, nor an animal, but a tool to come to conceptualize whiteness and her own inferiority– her existence as a Being, justifies her abjection within this system. “The world needs this labor” (Warren 6).
The world needs her, and yet it hates her. Her presence of Nothingness within an antiblack world “shatters ontological ground and security,” encouraging metaphysics to dominate her, to regain control of the categorization that it created. She’s here to remind them of their cherished personhood, rationality, and Being. They have deprived her of substance and agency, and willfully excluded her from notions of universalism.
What has been created of metaphysics, ontology, ethics, and western philosophy in general offers no place for the Black – nor the Woman or the Poor – in its world. We can look at the words of some of the icons like Kant, or we could simply take concepts like universalism, democracy, and rationality for our villain. The farce of equality has been very pervasive and calculated. So when Warren argues that “Being is not universal or applicable to blacks,” he can broaden the scope to include Gianni Vattimo’s words in Nihilism and Emancipation, and he would be justified to do so as “philosophy follows paths that are not insulated or cut off from the social and political transformations of the West (since the end of metaphysics is unthinkable without the end of colonialism and Eurocentrism).” Notions of morality and ethics have been thoroughly built upon how well the marginalized can perform their own subjugation, how well we can remain useful to the center. There seems to be no room for progress and self determination.
What now?
Kant says, “Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone’s freedom in accordance with a universal law” (CITATION). So I reckon we let our actions be wrong. Marginalized freedom cannot coexist with everyone’s freedom. That would be world destroying. It would be like swinging a wrecking ball through all understandings of personhood, governance, and social scripting. Just swing it, then.
We don’t really need to ask the philosophical canon to broaden the scope of personhood at all, when women like JT and Yung Miami are doing it for themselves. Knowingly or not, they’ve taken the wrecking ball. They have gotten on the mic and spat, “Where my bad bitches lookin' for a athlete?” (City Girls 0:27). They have retaken the sexual agency that had been stripped from them through all the years of antiblackness, poverty, and womanhood– all of which coinciding and compounding upon themselves. Now, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, where he “suggests the hyper-sexualized nature of the black woman, not discriminating in her choices of sexual partners,” comes into direct conflict with the City Girl Philosophy. If she desires one, she now looks for a specific partner with a long list of requirements. She has re-centered the center, taking action not for what is useful for Men or Beings (White People), but rather what can be useful to herself and her own personal desires. Now we ask the center to be useful to us.
There is constant feminist discussion of how Gold Digger Panic is a misogynistic and racist farce, all of which are threaded with eloquent paragraphs arguing that we must find Self-Respect and Hard Work! Or perhaps, sprinkled with a little bit of “If we want justice and financial freedom, VOTE!” Lest I mention current acts of voter repression to give this counterargument any validity. To that, I’d point them right back to Warren:
“The praxis of voting, is all there is without an end in sight. African American political participation is an interminable cycle of reproduction, a continuous practice of reproducing the means of reproduction itself. This irrational fidelity to a means without an end gives rise to ‘the politics of despair’—representation for its own sake and the apotheosis of singular figures—and a politics without hope.”
Perhaps, through this they would come to understand how anti-marginalized the system is and finally let go of their grip on ideations that imply we could somehow rely on systems built against us for our own freedom. Perhaps, if Kantian Feminists could relinquish themselves from “reason” they would come to understand that Self-Respect under his ethics intrinsically encourages us to remain silent so our freedoms can coexist with our own oppressors. All of these arguments implicitly hold Eurocentric notions of personhood and freedom in high regard, telling us to strive for their same creations that have left the soil we stand upon tainted with our blood. Fit the circle into the square.
Sure, Gold Digging is immoral if you are looking to Kant for your moral standard— if you’re looking to oppressive systems to find marginalized consciousness and freedom. But there is no need to hold even a flicker of light to the ontological dismemberment that has been imposed upon the marginalized. Personhood can and should be determined outside of the western canon, and outside of blindly accepted notions of disrespect, violence, and backwardness. It is in this formulation that the City Girls are actively rewriting what it means to be a black woman in America, and to be a person in general. When they absurdly claim, “Tell him he gotta spend a bag to get a reply” they prove that they can, in fact, “do better” than the inferiority that was placed upon them. It is an active denial of the nature of things, an active acceptance of the irrational and lawless, an active claim to Being where Nothing was once found. And Fanon did tell us that one day the native would finally laugh and ensure her knife is close when utterances of white values and western thought befalls upon her ears.