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'Whites Can Be Black if They Wish' says Lecturers' Union

Started by mahagonny, July 15, 2020, 11:10:26 PM

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mahagonny

Just found this. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/18/whites-can-black-wish-says-lecturers-union/

But some will doubt your sincerity:

"Mr Lennon, 53, who was born in London and whose parents are Irish, won a place on a two-year Arts Council-funded scheme, after a leading black theatre company accepted his claim to be of "mixed heritage".

Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, said allowing people to self-identify their race meant members of ethnic minority communities "lost out"."

And this: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/

"THERE'S MORE DIVERSITY IN AFRICA THAN ON ALL THE OTHER CONTINENTS COMBINED.

That's because modern humans originated in Africa and have lived there the longest."

but how about if you elect to stop being white not to get a break in the business, but just to stay out of the line of fire?  If race is just made up, can't you just pick one and say 'I'm that?' And if white people are assumed to be harboring racial bias they haven't yet detected, might some decide to stop being white? Who wants to be interrogated over their inner thoughts and assumptions? We're all African anyway.
What do you think?

kaysixteen

I think this is not worth discussing, as virtually any position, no matter how whackadox, will be found somewhere.

mahagonny

Quote from: kaysixteen on July 15, 2020, 11:22:20 PM
I think this is not worth discussing, as virtually any position, no matter how whackadox, will be found somewhere.

But isn't choosing your own race more biologically plausible than choosing your gender? Yesterday's whackadox can be today's social justice advancement. So all that would be missing is a reason to make the discovery that you are uncomfortable in your white skin, and you can do something about it. I know I have been lately.

kaysixteen

Someone who is Irish is not by any reasonable sense of history or genetics, black.  So merely asserting that such a person is black, because for whatever reason said person wants it to be so, is a whackadox position not worthy of anything but scorn.

mahagonny

Quote from: kaysixteen on July 15, 2020, 11:43:53 PM
Someone who is Irish is not by any reasonable sense of history or genetics, black.  So merely asserting that such a person is black, because for whatever reason said person wants it to be so, is a whackadox position not worthy of anything but scorn.

A statement like this one makes you well grounded, but it doesn't make you in charge.

If I were teaching out their way, I could declare myself to be black and I would be doing something that is pro-labor and pro-union. I would be making use of a newly acquired right giving them a chance to show what they do for members. And really, being hounded over suspicion of white supremacy beliefs is a practical problem in need of a solution. The solution for me cannot be to join up with Black Lives Matter, since they advocate for things I don't agree with such as the 'disruption of the western-prescribed nuclear family by supporting each other as extended families and "villages" that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable."

Caracal

Quote from: mahagonny on July 15, 2020, 11:10:26 PM
If race is just made up, can't you just pick one and say 'I'm that?'

Sigh. These would be reasonable questions if you had just landed in your spacecraft. Race is socially constructed, which isn't the same as "made up." You can claim to be black if you want, but nobody else is likely to accept that identity, and your attempt to claim blackness is unlikely to be be met positively. That reaction is going to be bound up with the whole history of race in the United States. You and your claims and choices are bound up in that and you aren't going to be able to bypass it and simply choose some fantasy of a colorblind world.

marshwiggle

Quote from: Caracal on July 16, 2020, 04:11:42 AM
Quote from: mahagonny on July 15, 2020, 11:10:26 PM
If race is just made up, can't you just pick one and say 'I'm that?'

Sigh. These would be reasonable questions if you had just landed in your spacecraft. Race is socially constructed, which isn't the same as "made up." You can claim to be black if you want, but nobody else is likely to accept that identity, and your attempt to claim blackness is unlikely to be be met positively.


As mahagonny said, how is that different from gender? Isn't gender "socially constructed"?

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That reaction is going to be bound up with the whole history of race in the United States.

So is it country-specific? Would it be reasonable in countries without a history of slavery for people to self-identify as whatever race they wish?


Quote
You and your claims and choices are bound up in that and you aren't going to be able to bypass it and simply choose some fantasy of a colorblind world.

Since biological sex is vastly more objectively determined than  race, why is self-identifying gender acceptable but self-identifying race not? It's ridiculously logically inconsistent.
It takes so little to be above average.

sandgrounder

Quote from: kaysixteen on July 15, 2020, 11:43:53 PM
Someone who is Irish is not by any reasonable sense of history or genetics, black.  So merely asserting that such a person is black, because for whatever reason said person wants it to be so, is a whackadox position not worthy of anything but scorn.

Regardless of the issues in this case (not as straightforward btw as the newspaper report makes out), it is perfectly normal to be black and Irish. It's a modern multicultural society and immigration into Ireland has happened for decades now.

polly_mer

Quote from: hmaria1609 on June 27, 2019, 07:07:43 PM
Do whatever you want--I'm just the background dancer in your show!

pigou

Why not just make up an ethnic heritage in addition to the race you identify with? As long as you don't go and get your DNA tested for publicity, nobody will be any wiser. We're not going to fact-check whether someone's grandparents came from Ireland, so why would we fact-check whether one of them was Black?

Rachel Dolezal is the exception that shows just how hard it is to get caught with this. She headed an NAACP chapter and taught a university course in Africana Studies, having convinced people that she was Black. If she hadn't gotten national media attention or if her story had been even slightly harder to falsify, she'd probably still hold those offices.

Caracal

Quote from: pigou on July 16, 2020, 06:04:39 AM
Why not just make up an ethnic heritage in addition to the race you identify with? As long as you don't go and get your DNA tested for publicity, nobody will be any wiser. We're not going to fact-check whether someone's grandparents came from Ireland, so why would we fact-check whether one of them was Black?

Rachel Dolezal is the exception that shows just how hard it is to get caught with this. She headed an NAACP chapter and taught a university course in Africana Studies, having convinced people that she was Black. If she hadn't gotten national media attention or if her story had been even slightly harder to falsify, she'd probably still hold those offices.

Right, race was constructed as a system of categorization for the purpose of establishing white supremacy. In various ways, at least in the US, that actually meant it needed to be vaguer and not based solely on "objective" criteria, such as appearance or ancestry. That's why in the US attempts to apply the one drop rule were always pretty halting, even though there was an intellectual movement to establish race as scientifically based. In the early 20th century, various state courts held that race was determined only by community assessment, rather than ancestry. It wasn't in the interest of lots of white southerners to have their ancestries scrutinized too closely. Ironically, doing that would risk undermining the system of racial supremacy.

The result is a system that ends up being flexible around the margins in some very complicated ways. So, yeah, people can claim all kinds of things. If you decide you are going to identify as black, and you don't have to deal with the reality of other people perceiving you as black in most of your life, and you didn't grow up within a black community, lots of people might reasonably conclude that you are adopting this identity for opportunistic reasons, or as a way of resolving personal conflicts. And Gender is also socially constructed, but in very different ways, so I think that's a red herring.

Parasaurolophus

Quote from: polly_mer on July 16, 2020, 05:35:08 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal

Also Rebecca Tuvel's In Defense of Transracialism and the later symposium on it. Honestly, the article is not great, and the symposium is not very good at all, but Tuvel at least identifies the question and begins the process of trying to answer it.

Quote from: mahagonny on July 15, 2020, 11:10:26 PM

If race is just made up, can't you just pick one and say 'I'm that?'

Social construction indicates that a concept is substantively mind-dependent, it's true. Mind-dependence comes in many forms, however. The alien I'm imagining right now is mind-dependent; so is the concept 'cool'. But my alien only depends on an individual's imagining, whereas being cool depends on what lots of people think. Likewise, the concept of citizenship is mind-dependent, too, but it's a concept that's institutionally defined and reified. A lot of people make the mistake of emphasizing the 'constructed' bit at the expense of the 'social' bit, but it's the social bit that does all of the heavy lifting.

Nor does social construction entail that the concept's vehicle is non-existent. 'Weed' is a socially-constructed concept, as is 'food', but the things we classify as weeds and food not only exist, they have a deep genetic structure, too.

Race and gender are tricky, because they don't just depend on individual minds, they depend on broader social perceptions. And it doesn't help that people routinely conflate sex and gender (sex is biological and mind-independent, although the insistence on a strict duality, or on chromosomal definitions, is scientifically problematic, while gender has to do with social presentation, traditionally the social presentation of sex). Sex and gender are easier to tease apart because we've spent longer doing so, thanks in large part to successive feminist movements, and the distinction is increasingly widely socially accepted. The conventions have shifted in a way they haven't for race, and that's why self-identification of gender is acceptable, but self-identification of race isn't.

It's worth pointing out, however, that our concept of race is especially incoherent. People still tend to think it's biological and mind-independent, but the reality is that it simply tracks steretypical groupings of phenotypical features. And while yes, those phenotypical features are controlled by genes, the problem is that those genes aren't consistently or uniquely distributed among the right target populations.

So yes, there's an incredible amount of genetic diversity in Africa--way more than elsewhere. But we lump Africans together as 'black' because their skin tends to be darker, and lump them in with African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean people, etc. Similarly, we lump 'Asians' together on the basis of hair and skin type and eye shape, even though Koreans, Mongolians, Chinese people, Japanese people, Vietnamese people, etc. all look pretty different--to say nothing of people from India, Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. And people are not very good at identifying other people with unfamiliar phenotypes (honestly, the number of people who think my hooded eyes are actually epicanthic folds...).

Similarly, think of the category 'white' and its extension: does it really include all of the historical Mediterannean peoples? Do we include Turks and Syrians and Egyptians and Moroccans and Algerians? The distinctions race tracks are not especially robust, and they're not at all genetic, even if each individual phenotypical feature we care about is clearly expressed by a gene or genes. In fact, where genetics are concerned, you'll find that there's less genetic variation between individuals who share a language than there is between individuals who look alike (race-wise). And yet race doesn't track language!

For another perspective on the incoherence of our racial concepts, think about how race works in the US. The way we usually think about it is in the terms set by Jim Crow and so on: the one-drop rule for Blackness. But Indigenous peoples have never been subject to a one-drop rule (at least in part because doing so would require extending land claims to far too many people). In fact, until just a few years ago in Canada, Indigenous 'status' was passed through men only. So if your mother was Indigenous and your father wasn't, you weren't Indigenous; but if your father was Indigenous and your mother not, you were. That's totally ludicrous (and deliberate: it was part and parcel of a program of actual and cultural genocide).

Different racial concepts are applied differently to different peoples, depending on the interests involved. They don't track deep structure. But they do track deep-seated conventions, and as with conventions everywhere, different historical accidents and precedents result in different conventions. That's why you can change your gender to match your personal identity, but not your race. In a different world, the answer might be different. But we're not in that different world.
I know it's a genus.

polly_mer

Quote from: Caracal on July 16, 2020, 07:37:20 AM
The result is a system that ends up being flexible around the margins in some very complicated ways. So, yeah, people can claim all kinds of things. If you decide you are going to identify as black, and you don't have to deal with the reality of other people perceiving you as black in most of your life, and you didn't grow up within a black community, lots of people might reasonably conclude that you are adopting this identity for opportunistic reasons, or as a way of resolving personal conflicts.

Michelle Lujan Grisham (current governor of New Mexico) has been floated as a potential vice-presidential candidate because she is a woman of color with high political office.  While Gov. Grisham's family background is indeed Nth generation new Mexican, a picture of Gov. Grisham or a recording of her voice doesn't align with a stereotypical Hispanic New Mexican.

I don't think Gov. Grisham is being opportunistic, but I also don't imagine too many Hispanics in New Mexico and other Southwestern states saying, yep, Gov. Grisham could be anyone's abuela and I hope mi hija grows up to be just like her now that the barriers are down for our people.
Quote from: hmaria1609 on June 27, 2019, 07:07:43 PM
Do whatever you want--I'm just the background dancer in your show!

marshwiggle

Quote from: Parasaurolophus on July 16, 2020, 07:57:57 AM


Different racial concepts are applied differently to different peoples, depending on the interests involved. They don't track deep structure.

So race is not a well-defined thing....

Quote
But they do track deep-seated conventions, and as with conventions everywhere, different historical accidents and precedents result in different conventions. That's why you can change your gender to match your personal identity, but not your race. In a different world, the answer might be different. But we're not in that different world.

...but yet it's somehow something one cannot in any way "choose".

If those aliens care about consistency we're obviously doomed.

It takes so little to be above average.

Parasaurolophus

Quote from: marshwiggle on July 16, 2020, 08:05:07 AM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on July 16, 2020, 07:57:57 AM


Different racial concepts are applied differently to different peoples, depending on the interests involved. They don't track deep structure.

So race is not a well-defined thing....

Quote
But they do track deep-seated conventions, and as with conventions everywhere, different historical accidents and precedents result in different conventions. That's why you can change your gender to match your personal identity, but not your race. In a different world, the answer might be different. But we're not in that different world.

...but yet it's somehow something one cannot in any way "choose".

If those aliens care about consistency we're obviously doomed.


'Cool' is not a well-delimited concept, either. And you can't choose to be cool. (In fact, doing so would be paradigmatically uncool.) Conventions exert a lot of power over the human world, especially the social world.
I know it's a genus.