Guilt by Association

Guilt by Association

Guilt by association (GBA) treats a connection to a person or group as sufficient evidence of sharing that person’s faults or beliefs. It appears in social disputes, political campaigns, business relationships and legal arguments.

On the 2008 presidential campaign trail, vice‐presidential candidate Sarah Palin said that Barack Obama was “palling around with terrorists” since in the 1990s he had known and worked on community projects with Bill Ayers, a professor who was involved in the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Mike Huckabee echoed her sentiments: “If you hang out with somebody who has never apologized for bombing the Pentagon and the Capitol and is proud of something he should have been ashamed of, then it calls into question your judgment” (Shipman 2008). The fact that Obama had worked with Ayers was enough for his opponents to call into question his patriotism and his loyalty to America (regardless of Obama’s denunciation of the acts). As Robert Gula (2002) has noted, true logic would dictate that “what the person is saying is the issue, not who his associates are” (231).

When politics, social issues, and business collide, GBA enters new realms. Michael Hiltzik (2015), an economics reporter with the Los Angeles Times, says, “This is a new advance in ‘guilt by association’: it’s guilt by association with the non‐guilty.” He describes an attack based on a politically unpopular association even when the associated party has not been found legally guilty.

In his article for The Washington Post titled “Darren Wilson and Guilt by Association,” Jonathan Capehart (2014) featured an interview with law professor and author Alexandra Natapoff. She interprets Darren Wilson’s shooting of Mike Brown in Ferguson through this lens and discusses the 2000 Supreme Court case Illinois v. Wardlow as part of her criticism:

Police officers have been told by authorities as high as the Supreme Court that they can draw inferences in high crime neighborhoods or low‐income or urban neighborhoods. […] He [Wilson] conflates the community and the residents with so‐called gangs. And once he does that it’s as if we’re being told that his excuse for not treating Michael Brown as a child and a resident and someone who he is paid by the taxpayers to protect and care for instead that he’s entitled to conflate Michael Brown because of the color of his [Brown’s] skin and the neighborhood in which he lives with known criminals.

GBA is also used when it is found that perpetrators of horrific events belonged to a certain group. Other members of the same group, church, mosque or online forum—or people with the same medical diagnosis—may then be treated as guilty by association. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports, “Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, anti‐Muslim hate violence skyrocketed some 1,600%.” After the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, immediate connections were drawn to the video games, music, and films that the perpetrators consumed, making the pop culture (and its fans) seem guilty by their association to the killers.

Of course, McCarthyism – which came to a head in the 1950s in America with Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover at the helm – targeted individuals who supposedly were involved in anti‐American/communist activities. Thousands of people lost their jobs and reputations because of their association with other people who were thought to be communists, their connection to groups that had communist sympathies, or their interest in causes that were seen as communist (labor rights, civil rights, etc.). GBA can have dire consequences.

In a New York Times column titled “The Perfect‐Victim Pitfall,” Charles M. Blow (2014) examines how the GBA arguments against Michael Brown and Eric Garner detracted from the root problems of racism and criminal justice. He says,

The argument is that this is not a perfect case, because Brown – and, one would assume, now Garner – isn’t a perfect victim and the protesters haven’t all been perfectly civil, so therefore any movement to counter black oppression that flows from the case is inherently flawed. But this is ridiculous and reductive, because it fails to acknowledge that the whole system is imperfect and rife with flaws. We don’t need to identify angels and demons to understand that inequity is hell.

His argument relies on how the complexities of the individuals are mirrored by the complexities of the problems, yet reductive and simplified arguments about the individuals detract from the real argument at hand.

GBA can turn people into caricatures, treating its “victims” as interchangeable members of a disliked group. To challenge it, identify the particular fault being alleged and ask what evidence connects that person to it. Who someone “palls around with” can sometimes matter—for example, as evidence of participation or responsibility—but the association alone does not establish the allegation. An argument needs to explain why the connection supports the conclusion.