Why not use a lens of -isms?

A typical tactic I’ve seen deployed against those who bring up issues of race, sex, class, ability, etc. is for the speaker to be accused of “always seeing racism everywhere” or “promoting the feminist/anti-racist/anti-classist agenda” and therefore unable to provide an “objective” critique of something. At first glance this seems to make sense: those having a particular bias may skew results to favor a particular interpretation of the world, or ignore results that do not conform to that view, or be incapable of recognizing counter-results. Consciously or unconsciously, of course.

But we don’t really view all bias as bad. Different schools of thought within the same scientific discipline may very well be capable of producing good ideas and evidence, even if they stand in opposition (or partially in opposition) to one another. Think sociology: conflict theory, symbolic interaction, social construction, network theory. Think engineering, and those who solve problems in a lens of classical physics, nuclear physics, or thermodynamics (or a combination). Each represents a fairly significant bias in interpreting data and generation of hypotheses, but all produce empirically accurate results at least some of the time or else we would not use them.

So when the claim “you see __ism everywhere” is used, is it a declaration that a particular worldview is not adequate in explaining the phenomena under question? If this were true, we should be able to dismiss those particular worldviews as inaccurate (or at least less successfully explanatory) than a competing theory (or none at all). This is tantamount to proclaiming that the ideas and evidence gathered by understanding sexism, racism, etc. are not valid in the face of one that is androcentric, racist, etc. Is this true? I think partially: when I dismiss someone as a racist, it’s because I think that they misinterpret or ignore a large body of incontrovertible evidence saying that racial superiority is not true, and doesn’t conform to my experience in the world.

But does the dismissal matter? I argue it shouldn’t. To not discuss the arguments someone is making, or the evidence they have gathered, is to commit a logical fallacy and succumb to an ad hominem attack on someone’s ethos. I suspect it’s deployed in order to convince someone (or yourself) that what someone is saying can’t possibly be right. It’s a cheap tactic, but effective in closing debate.

Frankly, we should be able to move beyond this stage into the stage where we evaluate the claims people make — all people, feminist, anti-racist or not — by the evidence used to support them, rather than seeking to destroy credibility of the people that proclaim them.