Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris told a TV interviewer the other day that she had promised Joe Biden that she would always share with him her “lived experience, as it relates to any issue that we confront”. That sounded comforting, but should it? This expression has a fairly standard application among qualitative sociologists, where it comes up in work that explores individual subjectivity. How to record and communicate “lived experience” has been a topic of earnest professional debate, sometimes involving appeals to the philosophical traditions of phenomenology. Yet the future vice-president assuredly wasn’t promising a former vice-president to deliver the results of a technical sociological method applied to her own case.
Needless to say, the expression has, over the past decade or so, escaped the academy and assumed a somewhat different set of meanings. At first, it tended to designate firsthand experiences that were specific to women, minorities and other vulnerable groups. During last year’s Democratic primaries in the United States, one supporter of Julián Castro (who served in Barack Obama’s cabinet) was quoted saying: “It is important to have somebody who has the lived experience of being a brown person in this country on that stage – a dark-skinned Latino man.” Yet semantic sprawl had already set in; it turns out that “ordinary people” could be in possession of lived experience, too. Elizabeth Warren, before her run in the primaries, said that politicians such asBarack Obama, being overly impressed with hopeful economic statistics, were blind to “the lived experiences of most Americans”. Pete Buttigieg, another contender, remarked that when Democrats were over-focused on Trump-bashing, “it didn’t seem like we were talking about the lived experience of Americans”. If you were the sort of person who felt estranged from the coastal elites, it emerged, you, too, might have lived experience.
And what made the phrase so powerful was the unappealable authority it seemed to represent. As Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, that most American of poems, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” You can debate my sociopolitical analyses – those facts and interpretations are shared and public – but not my lived experience. Lived experience isn’t something you argue, it’s something you have.
Yet if lived experience was once viewed as a way to speak truth to power, power has learned to speak “lived experience” with remarkable fluency. Consider what happened when, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, Senate Republicans set out to counter a Democratic bill for police reform with a milder proposal of their own, one backed by Senator Tim Scott, from South Carolina. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, declared: “It’s a straightforward plan based on facts, on data and lived experience” – the lived experience evidently supplied by Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate. Somehow the lived experience of Cory Booker, the black senator who introduced a Democratic police reform bill, offered different lessons.
Experience, alas, is never unmediated and self-interpreting. Ideology, though it can be shaped by experience, also shapes our experiences. The twins Shelby Steele and Claude Steele – a former professor of English and a professor of psychology – draw on their lived experience to produce opposite pictures of the black American condition. Claude has emphasised the detrimental effects of racial stereotypes; Shelby sees the real threat in efforts, such as affirmative action, to remedy racial disparities. Justice Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, draws from his lived experience to confirm a bootstrapping position (If I can make it, so can you), just as the late Congressman John Lewis, hero of the civil rights left, could do so to confirm the need for social intervention (I almost didn’t make it). There’s no guarantee what message people will take from their experience: no guarantee that we’ll all be singing the Song of Myself in the same key.
When we’re thinking about policy, then, how much weight should we give to private experience? Pressed to explain what she had in mind, Harris listed some elements of her biography: growing up a black child in the US, serving as a prosecutor, having a mother who was a teenage immigrant from India. There’s no doubt, of course, that these are the sorts of experiences from which a person could learn a great deal. And stories drawn from our own experience can be powerful ways of recounting what we have learned. But identities are too multiple and complex to allow any individual’s experience to count as truly representative.
Take being black. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an immigrant because she was studying at Berkeley, and she went on to be a university professor at McGill in Canada. Her father, born in Jamaica, is an emeritus economics professor from Stanford. Harris has doubtless experienced racial discrimination: in the US, that’s almost guaranteed for a person from an ethnic minority who spends any time out of the house. But her upper-middle-class upbringing, not to mention the fact that she spent five years of her teens in Canada, means that being black has affected her differently than it would someone who came from a background of modest education and means.
The point isn’t that being middle class means you’re not an “authentic” black person. It’s that, as with all of us, her experience has been particular. People who have served as prosecutors will be found on the left, the centre, and the right. And the children of some Indian immigrants to the US will have voted enthusiastically for Donald Trump. There isn’t a black experience, shared by all black people, or an Indian immigrant experience, shared by the children of immigrants from India, or even a prosecutor’s experience, shared by all prosecutors.
What makes the invocation of lived experience such a powerful move – the fact that it’s essentially private, removed from inspection – is exactly what makes it such a perilous one. No doubt a story about an injustice you’ve experienced, or a positive story about a state school or a public hospital, may be more powerful than some abstract evocation of equality. Still, people across the ideological spectrum will have their own perceptions of injustice, their own stories of public-sector success or failure. And so I hope the vice-president-elect will offer, alongside her lived experience, her considered judgment. We go wrong when we treat personal history as revelation, to be elevated above facts and reflection. Talk of lived experience should be used not to end conversation but to begin them.
Kwame Anthony Appiah is professor of philosophy and law at New York University and author of In My Father’s House