dailynous | Rebecca Kukla: First off, I am befuddled by how many people are interested in
describing what was in Rachel Dolezal’s head and are willing to offer
armchair diagnoses of her purported mental illness or condemnations of
her motives. Not only do I not know what was in her head, but in fact,
the more the conversation focuses on this particular person’s inner
life, the less interesting I find the whole issue. The interesting
question, I take it, is how to think and talk in general about people
who identify and present as belonging to a race other than that assigned
at birth, whatever their reasons and causes. I will focus on some
meta-concerns about how we are talking about that question.
I am disappointed in how quickly almost everyone, including
friends of mine who are strong anti-racist and trans allies, have been
willing to engage in (1) ridicule and body-shaming – unabashedly mocking
her hair and skin tone for instance; (2) confident descriptions of her
as a liar who is choosing to pretend to be something she is not; and (3)
fast and confident claims that she can’t claim black identity because
she is appropriating a culture, hasn’t grown up with the black
experience, can opt out at any time, etc. My main reaction to all this
is that it’s surprisingly historically short-sighted and lacking in
epistemic humility. So many times, ‘we’ (those of us with a recognizable
and reasonably well-established embodied, socially positioned identity)
have encountered a new way of being, and have responded with ridicule,
shaming, and charges of lying. So often we think that forms of identity
that have no clear social place are hilarious and clearly a pretense and
that their bearers are fair game for humiliation. Honestly, I don’t
know if Dolezal experienced herself as lying, or as making a voluntary
choice to deceive, and more generally I don’t know whether or how there
might be a legitimate place for transracial identities, as opposed to,
in effect, race ‘drag,’ which is what almost everyone seems to assume is
going on in Dolezal’s case. But I have learned from experience that
body shaming and ridicule are always unhelpful and problematic,
and that what we shame and dismiss one year we often come to understand
and defend ten years later. I also know that people are driven to lie
and deceive in seemingly incomprehensible ways when they find themselves
without any socially recognizable way of being. As for the confident
claims that Dolezal, or people like her, have no right to black
identities because they didn’t have a lifetime of black experience, or
because they are being appropriative of the experience and identity
markers of an oppressed group, or because they want access to a
community that their bodies preclude them from properly joining, or that
their presence in black spaces threatens the integrity of those spaces
for ‘real’ black people: well, I feel the pull of those arguments for
sure, and I don’t want to dismiss them. But boy do they sound exactly
analogous to ‘feminist’ arguments that were used to vilify and undercut
the entire reality of trans women back in the not-too-long-ago day. I
just don’t have the confidence that would allow me to proclaim
immediately that this time the critique fits, that there is no
real phenomenon here, no human need or way of being that requires
understanding and a reconfiguration of my settled concepts. Can’t we
learn from the past and proceed a little more slowly?
One final point: I’ve seen several philosophers online say that
before we can settle what to think about the possibility of transracial
identity, we need to know more about the metaphysics of race. I think
this is exactly wrong. The question is not what race ‘really’ is,
because whatever the difficult answer to that, we are all walking around
with a phenomenological sense of self that does not hinge on or even
include this answer, and race has a powerful social life independent of
its proper metaphysics. Whether transracial identity is possible and
should be given social uptake strikes me as a thoroughly political
question about how various ways of claiming and recognizing identity do
and don’t do harm to individuals and to communities. I can’t imagine how
this hinges on metaphysics. Even if there was some real thingamajig in
people that constituted their race, such that if they claimed to have a
different one then they were saying something false (and does anyone
think that, seriously?), I can’t see how that would settle any of the
interesting questions about how people experience themselves and what
sorts of identity-building we should acknowledge, support, or challenge.
