« May 2015 | Main | July 2015 »
back to blogging, beeches! sometimes i refrain from current events, when i think i have nothing to say that others aren't saying already. i approve of the supreme court right now, btw.
here's the long version of anti-social epistemology, up at "social epistemology review and reply collective."
from the june 19 times literary supplement: review of thomas hurka's 'british ethical theorists from sidgwick to ewing'
| | |
|
i think people may be tiring of purely symbolic responses to substantive questions. charles blow is still spending all day complaining about what words we use to describe root, in a situation in which literally everyone is competing to condemn him most vociferously, in which the gov is calling for his death, etc. and most of the debate seems to have moved to the confederate battle flag. this is beacuse symbols and signs are more easy to adjust than real objects and attitudes. don't let people like that tell you that they also want to have a substantive conversation about race: all they want is euphemisms: all they want is unconscious racism. then again, obama talked about the word 'nigger' today, and he didn't go all 'n-word' superstitious. i've seen some black commentators here and there rolling their eyes. the symbolic stuff just takes the media down a miserable conetentless road of distraction, quite as though none of them want to do or say anything.
| | |
|
Transrace
By Crispin Sartwell
I'd like to think about Rachel Dolezal - the Spokane NAACP official who describes herself as black, though her parents describe her as white - as a transrace person, as Caitlin Jenner is a transgender person. The moral problem with Dolezal might be her seeming dishonesty or misrepresentation of herself, but that's an accusation that one way or another has been hurled at many a transgender person as well.
The idea of someone transitioning from one gender to another or from one race to another both presupposes and throws into question the categories of male and female, and of black and white. All sorts of people - men and women, black people and white people, rightists and leftists - are going to be extremely uncomfortable if gender and racial dualities break down, and a lot would be lost if they did. Then again, many wild and liberating possibilities might open up.
The idea that someone with male anatomy is really a woman deep inside - which is one of the ways transgender identity is being described in this very trans moment - presupposes the reality of the distinction between men and women, and it presupposes that the distinction is a or even the most basic aspect of human identity. It also appears to assume that there are exactly two genders, and that you must be one or the other, on the surface or deep inside. But the fact that people are migrating from one to another, or can be in a transition from one to the other also shows the duality breaking down; the road from one gender to another traverses a spectrum.
If at this moment of acknowledging transgender identity we think that we should take as dispositive people's account of their own identity, use the pronouns they prefer, and listen to and acknowledge as real their experience, why should we not do the same with race? If Rachel Dolezal feels black or declares herself to be black as a matter of deep identity, why shouldn't we extend to her the same sort of respect we do to transgender people?
Indeed, it is - obviously - even less plausible to think of race as a strict duality than to think of gender that way. It is widely held that race is a 'social construction,' the ultimate demonstration of that in the U.S. being that the child of a black person and a white person counts as a black person. Races - if the idea makes sense at all - are entirely liquid, and every combination, every point on the spectrum between races is occupied. People have been passing in one direction or another - transitioning - since there have been races.
Dolezal in many ways shows just how socially constructed the black-white distinction is. A few little signs - a spray tan and a perm, for example - and people will read your race completely differently. She shows how easy it is to do race drag convincingly. And drag - though it might be a deception in some cases - might also express outwardly how someone sees her or himself or wants to see her or himself. It might be more honest than non-drag.
Perhaps precisely because race is so obviously socially articulated and is so obviously a chaotic spectrum, it may need, in order to exist at all, to be enforced even more severely than gender. The outrage that is focused on Dolezal shows this policing in action.
Progressives have learned to respect transgender people, but they are having an extreme problem with transrace (consult the Guardian's opinion page, e.g.). Many aspects of the progressive agenda - affirmative action, for example - presuppose the reality and clarity of racial identities. White liberals can't help uplift the black community if there are really no white or black people, or if the social reality of blackness and whiteness disintegrates. Progressive politics is no less wedded to the reality and rigidity of racial identities than is reactionary racism.
If we lose the distinction between men and women, we lose a lot: rich histories of women's culture and identity feminism, for example. And if we lose the distinction between black and white we lose a lot too: black culture, black nationalism, black arts, and so on. These would be real losses. But as well, of course, these distinctions have been terribly problematic, the scenes of some of the most vicious sorts of oppression that members our species have ever inflicted on one another.
It is hard to know what might happen to us if we lose or wildly multiply racial and gender identities. New oppressions might emerge as old liberation movements die. But in our trans moment, a thousand new possibilities are emerging as well, for each person and for our society. It is an excruciating and beautiful moment, I think.
Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. He is the author of Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity.
| | |
|
the rachel dolezal reverse-passing case is pretty interesting. i see why it's a problem, especially in a situation where one might benefit from affirmative action, or have a job that is partly race-based. but...there just isn't any such thing as race either, right? a fungible social fact. so, why isn't rachel dolezal, for example, trans? maybe she can be the caitlin jenner of race. maybe people's surface doesn't always represent "who they feel like deep inside" etc. now, both in caitlin's and rachel's case, the idea of being something deep inside presupposes the duality. but keep migrating about through genders and races and pretty soon you've thrown the existence and nature of such identites into fundamental chaos, or even made yourself impossible, or problematized the notion of being male or female, black or white, at the surface or deep inside.
if your gender is a matter of how you self-identify, for example, then why not your race? if we should use the pronouns for someone that they declare or prefer (and i think we should), then why not treat people racially on the same sort of grounds? is your problem that people might reap advantages from being black? boy i don't even know where to start on the ironies.
now the sudden explosion of trans identity seems progressive, etc. but then again, many forms and moments of feminism presuppose the essentiality of gender identities. that includes affirmative action, or for example the sheer assertion that women make less money than men, and a million other things. and likewise with race: all the affirmative action and attempts to uplift the black community and black pride and so on presuppose that there is such a thing as race and that it is fundamental to identity. but what happens when - potentially in an apparently progressive way - these categories liquify completely, and all of that becomes impossible? i'd say the political reconfigurations that this entails are completely wild and unpredictable. progressive politics, no less than reactionary politics, presupposes the identities as fundamental realities. watcha gonna do?
one thing i'd predict: people are going to be more comfortable with gender-trans identities than race-trans identities. this is ironic because i'd say race is even more problematic than gender as an objective or biological fact, even more obviously 'socially constructed'. it has been liquid from the get-go, with a million variations, complications, and every possible mix. people have been passing one way or another or enacting the other, or defining themselves or one another as octaroons or whatever since they invented the concepts. but maybe for that very reason, the boundaries require extreme policing.
of course, if racial identities were to dissolve, that could be a terrible problem and a terrible loss. for example - and this would be typical of the history in various ways - it could just sort of mean that everyone gets to be a white person. you can't have black culture in a society with no or thousands of races, and that would be an astonishing cultural loss (i'd not mourn the death of white culture the same way at all, e.g.). on the other hand it might be a wild multiplicitous love-in, an opening up of a milllion now-inconceivable possibilities. race has been a nightmare too, hasn't it?
| | |
|
as you know, i am opposed to generations as explanatory entities, on multiple grounds. i've been in a comment-swap on this on aeon. so, we pretend to treat whole twenty-year-or-whatever cohorts as individuals with personalities. then, we pretend that these pretended individuals have experiences. mattmark, the anti-me in the comments, makes some pretty usual moves: 'we' were 12 when kennedy was shot; we knew hope and aspiration when we landed on the moon, then lost our simple faith in authority with watergate. my view is that this fantasy of identity needs pseudo-experiences because pseudo-persons can't have real experiences. so the pseudo-individual baby boom lost its innocence when kennedy was killed. lord knows how americans had any innocence in 1963, or any faith in authority in 1973. honestly, we didn't. with kennedy, our daddy died. people actually did cry, but it was a pseudo-trauma: a person you never met bit it. you 'knew' him entirely from television, where he inspired you with words written by someone else. it was not a real loss for almost anybody; it's quite like watching king rob bite it on game of thrones. i think what matters in both cases was that he was so pretty. be an actual person with actual connections to actual other people, not part of a giant pseudo-person with quasi-connections to fictional characters.
i think it's fair to say that one thing that irks me in some of these cases is the fact that the state is the actual imaginary individual involved; that is who or what is constructing the narrative by which we become one thing: the story we tell of losing dad when we were twelve, blasting off to the moon together when we were 18, and so on (i was born in 1958, btw, not '50 as in the example). i guess dad was a philandering, pill-popping dad, but you know that's pretty par for the course, and must be what we wanted or something. but actually, i don't like the narrative as the essence of collective identity in any way shape or form. what our generation is is just what the tv special tells, running beatles songs in the background. the times they are a-changin! the story is insanely superficial, but also fundamentally fictional, and i think the music sucks. instead of thinking about the incredible power of stories to be our identity, individual and collective, think about their incredible limitations. it's elisions all the way down, man. and it's so false.
well, that's better than dylan, anyway: more self-aware, more ironic, a little bit funny.
| | |
|
this npr commentary, in which the physicist adam frank does a very old thing - asserts that physics shows that "there are no solid objects" - really shows an endemic problem with science these days: let's go for the flashiest formulation while displaying the fact that reflecting on our own concepts is not exactly our strong suit. no, physics cannot possibly show that there are no solid objects, for that would entail, for example, that a chair can't actually hold up your butt, alright? now, what it shows, instead, is that solidity is surprising. we might say that it shows that what we meant all along by solidity is not exactly what we thought we meant. but it leaves all the objects in the universe with just the solidity they had before. it doesn't show, for example, that you could pass your hand through a tree after all, though that is quite how it sounds. when we found out water was h2O, we found out something about what we had always meant by 'water', for example, not that there is no such thing as water, right? surely you want to think about science as discovering things about this very world, not as showing that there is no this world after all.
| | |
|
Recent Comments