Philosopher Wendy Salkin tackles the ethics of speaking for others

Wendy Salkin, an assistant professor of philosophy in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences, weighs in on unofficial spokespeople in her new book, Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation (Harvard University Press, 2024). Salkin’s book digs into a phenomenon we’ve likely all observed or participated in without evaluating its usefulness. 

Informal political representation happens when a person or a group is treated as speaking or acting for a group or individual, without having been elected or selected through any systematized procedure. Informal political representation encompasses Greta Thunberg advocating for her generation on the issue of climate change; #metoo’s Tarana Burke speaking for survivors of sexual assault and harassment; and a sole Black person in a room being treated as if they speak for all Black people. Here, Salkin discusses her book’s analysis of the ethics of informal political representation within a diverse democracy. 

This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

Question: What drove you to write a book on informal political representation?

Salkin: I first became interested in informal political representation when I read Linda Alcoff’s influential paper “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” W. E. B. Du Bois’ “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” and Suzanne Dovi’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, “Political Representation.” I realized that informal political representation was discussed across a wide variety of different disciplines—including philosophy, political science, Black political thought, bioethics, disability studies, feminist theory, law, sociology, literature, and negotiation theory—but no one had brought all these disparate conversations together. I wanted to synthesize all those ideas and arguments to provide a systematic account of informal political representation.

More recently, I have wondered whether some of my interest in this topic in fact has roots closer to home. My parents took my sister and me to city council meetings in our hometown of Hackensack, New Jersey, from a pretty early age. I watched our neighbors take to the microphone during the public comment period to give voice to the interests of our neighborhood—though I certainly did not have the concept of informal political representative at age 5. 

Question: What makes an informal political representative, or IPR, a positive or negative spokesperson?

Salkin: IPRs often voice the interests of groups that are neglected by formal political representatives. For example, Kim Kardashian has in recent years emerged as an informal political representative for prisoners. IPRs can also make overlooked groups visible, as Indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchú did in speaking to the Guatemalan government on behalf of Indigenous communities. 

Sometimes, IPRs raise group consciousness or even contribute to group formation—making groups visible to themselves by impressing on their members that there is such a group, that they ought to regard themselves as group members, that they share politically salient interests with other group members, and perhaps also that they ought to regard themselves as having obligations to fellow group members. 

At the same time, informal political representation can be perilous. IPRs can have outsized control over the public narratives of the groups they represent without the represented having much recourse to object or protest. One cannot, after all, impeach the unelected. 

IPRs may wield their power to influence without fear of reprisal or rebuke. So positioned, IPRs may gravely mischaracterize a represented group, unfairly prioritize some group members’ interests over others, or pursue their own political agendas and aspirations at the expense of the group members’ interests. Without adequate response, these and other dangers seem to counsel against the continued practice of informal political representation. The question at the center of my book is this: How may IPRs undertake activities central to their roles without harming or wronging those they represent?

Question: You argue that in some instances someone is a positive IPR even though they don’t belong to the group they are representing. Can you give a contemporary example?

Salkin: There are many good reasons to prefer IPRs who are members of the group they represent over IPRs who are not. For instance, in-group IPRs often know much more about the group members’ values, interests, and preferences than nonmembers do. 

But there are some contexts in which having a group member represent the group is not possible or, although possible, is inadvisable. For example, it is sometimes risky for a person to reveal themself to be a member of a group: Undocumented Americans face deportation, and scholars in repressive societies face political imprisonment. Yet members of these groups benefit from the public expression of their values, interests, preferences, and perspectives. In such contexts, nonmember IPRs can give voice to the imperiled groups’ concerns free from fear of the harms that could befall an exposed group member. Nonmember IPRs may even owe it to such groups’ members to help give them a voice.

Question: People in minority groups are often asked to speak for the whole group. How can a person respond in cases where they are considered an IPR even though they do not want to be?

Salkin: In many cases, members of minoritized groups are not asked but are in fact simply assumed to speak for the whole of the group of which they are a member. When this happens, these “conscripted IPRs,” as I call them, have good reason to disavow the role, raise objection to the audiences that have conferred the role on them, or simply to ignore the role's conferral. Unfortunately, many audiences have an objectionable tendency to persist in treating the conscripted party as a representative for the whole group even in the face of disavowal, objection, or ignoring. Given this objectionable tendency, one of my aims in the book is to shift the focus away from what the conscripted IPR should do and toward what conscripting audiences should do—namely, stop foisting an unsought representative role on people who do not want it.