The previous post may do something to help explain why I am alarmed by a view now current among the new movement. That is the view that we human beings should racialize ourselves more than we currently have done.
It has now become ubiquitous style to capitalize “Black” in a racial sense, putting a stronger emphasis on racial identity than the lowercase did. Several activists, like the respected historian Nell Irvin Painter in the Washington Post, go still further, to advocate that we capitalize “White” as well. Painter’s reasoning on this point is striking enough that it’s worth quoting at length:
However much you might see yourself as an individual, if you’re black, you also have to contend with other people’s views. W.E.B. Du Bois summed this up as “twoness,” as seeing yourself as yourself but also knowing that other people see you as a black person. You don’t have to be a black nationalist to see yourself as black.
In contrast, until quite recently white Americans rarely saw themselves as raced — as white. Most of them, anyway. The people who have embraced “white” as a racial identity have been white nationalists, Ku Klux Klansmen and their ilk. Thanks to President Trump, white nationalists are more visible than ever in our public spaces.
But that group does not determine how most white people see themselves. Instead, in terms of racial identity, white Americans have had the choice of being something vague, something unraced and separate from race. A capitalized “White” challenges that freedom, by unmasking “Whiteness” as an American racial identity as historically important as “Blackness” — which it certainly is.
No longer should white people be allowed the comfort of this racial invisibility; they should have to see themselves as raced. Being racialized makes white people squirm, so let’s racialize them with that capital W.
Notice something extraordinary about Painter’s claims here. Painter is explicitly claiming that, on the matter of white identity, the Ku Klux Klansmen have got it right. She wants mainstream white Americans to think more like white nationalists. Why would anyone want that? Because white nationalists “see themselves as raced”, just as (Painter claims) black people have to do. Painter thinks that this is a good thing and wants other white people to follow the Klan’s example in this regard. Indeed, she wants to force other white people to think more like the Klan; she thinks they should have to see themselves as raced. She, explictly agreeing with the likes of Dylann Roof, wants white people to be more racialized. Apparently because it’s good to make white people “squirm”.
Now contrast my own experience, as I described last time. I know what it’s like to not be racialized – even when one is not white. I know that because I’ve lived it. I know what a wonderful thing it is to not be defined by one’s skin colour – to have that “privilege” that many white people also have. I cherish that freedom, the freedom that Painter intentionally “challenges” with her capitalization. I suspect that that freedom is more precious to me than it is to white people – because in those moments of racism that I have been a victim of, I’ve also seen what it’s like to have that freedom taken away. In my lived experience as a brown person, that is what racism is and means: for me the experience of racism is the experience of being racialized, of being treated as a member of my race rather than as an individual human being. So what Painter’s passage says to me is: “black people are victims of racism, so everyone else should be victims of racism too.”
I draw a hard line against such an expansion of racialization. I will never accept any attempts to take the freedom of non-racialization away, whether those attempts come from self-styled progressives like Painter, or from the white supremacists with whom Painter explicitly proclaims her agreement on the matter. I want everyone to be able to have the mostly non-racialized life that I have had. Painter, like the Klan, wants nobody to have it. I want to help black people have the same privileges I have had. Painter is trying to do the exact opposite: she wants to take those privileges away from everyone. Especially from white people, but as a result, implicitly, also from people like me. She wants white people to “have to see themselves as raced”, just as black people do – and just as I managed to avoid doing for most of my life. Hers is an attitude straight out of the worst caricatures of socialism: i.e. that rather than bringing everyone up to a high level, it brings everyone down to the low. Painter doesn’t even entertain the possibility of getting the freedom to be unraced for black people like herself; instead, she just aspires to take it away from everyone else. As Thomas Chatterton Williams, the son of a black man from the segregated South, says:
what bothers me and worries me is that the world that we’re creating and that’s enabled by the Twitter reality that takes hold is one in which we’re not actually trying to make everybody as secure as the straight white man who used to be super-secure. We’re actually trying to make everybody as insecure as my father used to be, but everybody can catch it now.
The capitalization of “Black” and “White” is not itself the core problem here. Rather, the problem is that Painter, in a way common within the new movement, wants us to make race a greater part of one’s identity than it otherwise would be. As another example, I’ve been alarmed that our ubiquitous online forums (Slack, Zoom, Discord) have moved away from thumbs-up or other hand symbols in a visibly artificial yellow skin colour, to ones that correspond more closely to actual skin colours – thus making us defined more by our races and not less. (Perhaps yellow isn’t itself the right universal colour given its association with racist stereotypes of East Asians, but if that’s the concern, I’d rather have a representation in light gray, or even blue or green or purple.)
As far as I’m concerned, the whole point of affirmative action, or of recognizing implicit bias, is to move us away from a world where race defines us – to get us to a point where we can be defined as individual human beings and not by a biological appearance we had no choice in. I am in favour of affirmative action because I think it helps us get to this point – it remedies the discrimination that continues to limit black people’s opportunities on the basis of their race. By contrast, as far as I can see, racializations like Painter’s encourage the exact opposite: they freeze us into racial categories indefinitely, trap us deeper in that prison. (Just as the Klan does – a comparison that Painter, again, embraces on this point.)
I cherish my post-racial life, where, despite my brown skin and Indian name, I have had the freedom of “being something vague, something unraced and separate from race” – the freedom all people should have. I seek a world where black people too have that freedom. I am the foe of anyone who seeks to take that freedom away from me. I have no more patience for those who seek to take it away from white people. Let us continue to seek freedom for all – but until we get it, freedom for some is better than freedom for none.
Two weeks from now I’ll be travelling on vacation, so I will take my first break from regular blogging in a long time. Love of All Wisdom will return on August 28.
Where do these silly labels come from and how does anyone ‘racialize’ anything? Now, if you are speaking of manner or figure of speaking itself, that is another story. I used to believe myself articulate. Learned English from family, among friends and in school. Now, in what would have been common discourse twenty years ago, I have no idea what some people are saying to me. Nothing wrong with my hearing. I just don’t understand what is being said, or the context, structure of the conversation. If I indicate this to a speaker, that party behaves as though insulted. Maybe I have been racialized? If so, maybe it is I who has been insulted? I avoid contact with people now. Because, well, one just does not know their agendas.
I don’t think I would recommend avoiding contact with people as a solution, but I do understand the motivation for it.
Right after the passage by Nell Painter quoted above, she goes on to say: “Others have come to similar conclusions. In June, Kwame Anthony Appiah of New York University said…” But when I read that piece by Appiah, I didn’t get the impression that he was advocating racialization! She might want to re-read Appiah? He didn’t say anything about forcing people to see themselves a certain way. He said: “What about Visconti’s argument that white people don’t think of themselves as white people? If he were right—and he isn’t—we could still ask: Should it be that way?” Appiah never answered that question the way that Painter did. He concluded that we should not forget that racialization has, historically, happened (“let’s try to remember that black and white are both historically created racial identities—and avoid conventions that encourage us to forget this”), but that’s very different from advocating racialization.
Yeah, that’s why I wanted to stress the post wasn’t about the capitalization itself. I think there are some arguments one can more reasonably make for the capitalization, and Appiah’s is one of them. I’d still disagree with him – I think that capitalization is likely to encourage people to see themselves more in terms of racial identities, rather than help them see the historical contingency – but at least he has the right motivation behind it.
Great post!
Thank you.
Amod, I have never thought of myself as a “White” person. I grew up in a neighborhood where almost everyone was either Italian-American or of Ashkenazic Jewish descent and other ethnic, racial, and religious groups were a rarity, so my identity was not “White” but primarily “Jewish” as opposed to “Italian”. On the other hand, it helps, I think, to develop the insight that “others” (and not just Black and Brown others) see me primarily as a White person with all the historical baggage that both correctly and incorrectly entails. If I travel to China, for example, I will be a 白人 (literally a “white person”) before I will be anything else — American, Jewish, Buddhist priest, etc. and that will inevitably come with a number of stereotypical conceptions—some correct, some mistaken—of what I am like. While we aspire to a world where skin color is no more important than eye or hair color, I don’t think it helps to be blind to the way others will, for historically conditioned reasons, almost necessarily see us—at least at first until they get to know us—with all the stereotypical assumptions that go along with that. Knowing how we are seen gives us the power to respond to the situations we find ourselves in.
Yes, I think we should try to be aware of how others see us – which is often more complex than the very American concept of race. In Thailand the word used to describe people with European origin has nothing to do with whiteness; it is farang, from the word français – since the French were the first Europeans they encountered. And while nobody would call me a white person here, Thai people referred to me as farang all the time.
Seth, when you said, “If I travel to China, for example, I will be…”, was this statement based on what people said to you when you traveled in China recently? (I’ve never been to China but have worked in other countries.) I ask because it seems that there is an important difference between presuming that people in China will think about me in a certain way, versus really going to China and hearing a lot of people tell me (explicitly or implicitly) that they think about me in that way.
Presuming that people in China will racialize me may or may not empower me to respond appropriately, depending on whether it happens to be true of the people I meet. That presumption could cause me to blame someone for being racist because they treated me badly, when really the other person was just in a bad mood and social categories had nothing to do with it. (I expect we all know this; I’m just bringing it into the conversation.)
It also seems important to differentiate “how I am seen” from “the vocabulary that other people use to talk about me”. Just because people in China talk about me in a certain way doesn’t mean that’s all they see and think about me. If people take time to observe, they can see a lot more subtlety than they can talk about. When Painter said “until quite recently white Americans rarely saw themselves as raced—as white” or when Appiah said “What about Visconti’s argument that white people don’t think of themselves as white people?” it sounds circular or question-begging (white people seen as white people) in part because in their writing Painter and Appiah are already doing all their business in racialized language and are not differentiating the potential plenitude of seeing or thinking from a comparatively limited vocabulary.
Nathan, I did not base my example on a visit to China—I have never been there—but just on my rudimentary understanding of Mandarin. I wasn’t making an assumption about how Chinese people think or talk about “white people,” but only noting that they have a vocabulary word for us that literally means “white people.” I will leave it to others who have actually lived in China to judge how much Han Chinese seeing me for the first time might initially classify me as a 白人 (white person), a 外國人 (a foreign person), or a 美國人 (American) and what the connotations for each of these currently are. In any case, I would initially be an instance of a category and not a unique individuality until we had a chance to better know each other. That is my point—that until we get to know each other we see each other as examples of a certain type, and that inevitably comes with a certain history, which in America is likely to be at least partially racialized. That doesn’t mean we are necesssarily “racists,” but only that we are human beings who are embedded in cultures with certain past histories. Why does that seem so bad to acknowledge?
Yes, “we are human beings who are embedded in cultures with certain past histories” but we are also, to varying degrees, anthropologists and epistemologists and psychologists and historiographers. Saying “that until we get to know each other we see each other as examples of a certain type” is positing a theory of person perception. Is the theory correct? It seems plausible to some degree but also doesn’t seem like the whole story in all situations. In any case, I would say that what’s even more empowering than having a theory about how others see me is having a meta-theory about the theory that permits me to modify the theory using new information.
We’ve talked before in past blog comments here about Eugene Gendlin, and his theory of “thinking beyond patterns” would be an interesting competing theory to consider in contrast with the theory that we necessarily see others as examples of a certain type. Gendlin: “My project is to think—about, and with—that which exceeds patterns (forms, concepts, definitions, categories, distinctions, rules). […] Forms never work alone, always only within a wider and more intricate order. The question is: Can we think with this more intricate order? Can we let it function in our thinking? Can we think anything not just as formed, but also as the greater intricacy? […] Thinking with more than forms is possible because the assumption is overstated, that concepts and social forms entirely determine—what shall I call that which they determine?—experience… “
Nathan, granted seeing someone as a “type” isn’t the whole story, but on the other hand it is certainly a part of the story. I didn’t mean to imply that racialization completely or necessarily mostly determines how we see ourselves and others in a various situations, but it certainly plays a role above 0%. For example, while most of the time I do not identify as being “white,” there are certain sitations in which I experience being “white” more acutely—for example when I am the only “white” person attending a Black church service, or when I am the only “white” person at a social gathering. That awareness of being “white” doesn’t mean I identify as being white, but that I suspect —rightly or wrongly—my whiteness has some meaning for those around me—that it gets noticed in some way. And sometimes, at social gatherings, the other people around the table joke about this with me, which helps break the ice by making the unverbalized context explicit in a friendly way.
Reading this, it occurs to me that a distinction should be made between [1] racialization as description (observing that other people are speaking or acting in a way that indicates racialized thinking, or observing that I am thinking in a racialized way or that I expect that others are thinking of me in a racialized way) versus [2] racialization as prescription (declaring explicitly or implicitly that people should think in racialized way). When Amod says he is “against racialization”, I take that he is against racialization as prescription. Racialization as description is helpful insofar as it’s true of a given situation. It’s helpful to notice if I feel white in a black church service, or to notice what degree I do. I suspect there is considerable psychological diversity in degrees of racialized thinking even in a black church service. I would agree with Amod that it’s probably not helpful to say that certain people should feel white in a black church service or should feel black in a white church service. (Seth, I know you’re not saying the latter, I’m just making new distinctions.)
Well said!
Yeah, “description” in this sense is not what I would think of as racialization. Description is when we’re in a situation of already being racialized, and simply acknowledge that fact. When I called to look at an apartment in rural Ontario and the guy told me the apartment was already rented as soon as he saw me drive up in person, it wasn’t until much later that I realized that was almost certainly about race. In the moment that it happened, he was racializing me – but I didn’t know he was racializing me until I thought about it later.
So I guess rather than framing prescription and description as two kinds of racialization, I would put it as a distinction between racialization on the one hand and the observation of racialization on the other. And I am 100% on board with saying that a lot of racialization is implicit and unacknowledged even to those who do it, and that therefore we need to observe racialization more in order to do it less.
Amod, when I wrote the preceding comment, I was thinking of a different definition of racialization than you implied in the post and in your last comment. I forgot to go back and look again at what you said about racialization, and now that I did, I see that for you, being racialized is the verb form of racism, so racialization is equivalent to racism, and being against racialization is equivalent to being against racism. This is also apparent in your apartment example: the landlord who racialized you was being racist.
The conversation between Seth and I diverged into a different definition in which racialization is something different from racism, more precisely the imputation of a racial group without necessarily implying racism (where racism is the presumption of the superiority/inferiority, acceptance/rejection, etc., of a racial group): in this definition, racialization is a prerequisite for racism but not exactly equivalent to it; for example, people could racialize themselves without being racist toward themselves, as in people who embrace a white or black identity but oppose being treated better or worse than others for belonging or not belonging to that group.
I agree that the distinction between racialization and observation of racialization is a better one than prescription and description, but it’s also important to notice that there are two different definitions of racialization at play in this conversation, implying two different processes being observed.
I wouldn’t quite agree to that as a characterization of my position. I do think all racism is racialization, but I wouldn’t say all racialization is racism. I mean a certain amount of racialization is required for affirmative action, or other corrective measures, and I wouldn’t call those racist. And while I do think a view like Painter’s contributes to racism, I don’t think I would go so far as to call her view itself racist.
Thanks for the clarification. A better summary of your position might be something like “Against racialization more than is temporarily required for correcting structural racism while expanding freedom from racialization for those who want it”, though that would make for a terrible blog post title.
Following the arc of your thought over several essays and years, it seems you will likely (need?) to get to a point where you stop supporting affirmative action – at least to the degree that it is based on racial categories. Much has changed since King’s time. Specific AA based on real and impactful distinctions can be justified, but at this point, AA based on race has become counterproductive.
We can see the negative outcomes of racial AA in contemporary culture war, and also in concrete outcomes (it is helping those like yourself who are already privileged; those who are in need of the most help are not helped by AA – what they need is much more complex).
We can affirm King AND note that it is now PAST time to stop racialized AA…
Look, this is admirable and all, but it cannot work. Race matters because white liberals care that blsck people care that they’re socio-economically unequal with whites. For race to stop mattering, either blsck people have to stop caring about being unequal, or the inequality has to go away.
The former is obviously not going to happen. As for the latter, I think this won’t happen either. But you don’t consider that because you deny the very possibility that heritable differences exist between racial populations for behavioral traits. This is not scientifically defensible.
There’s no proof that “implicit bias” or systematic whatever is causing black kids to do poorly on the SATs. And it’s this poor performance that makes them unable to get into good colleges on appreciable numbers without affirmative action. And the usual arguments about educational opportunities are just wrong. Poor white kids do better in school than well off black kids. Headstart does not produce any lasting improvements. The failure of school voucher lottery programs to improve poor students performance casts doubt on the very notion of “good schools” even being a thing at all independent of their students.
Affirmative action also does not work. I mean, it works in a brute force sense where technically you have more black kids in good colleges than otherwise (though even then this favors wealthier and especially foreign black students). But entirely predictably, black kids have much higher dropout rates (because they’re in a program that they could not get into on the basis of their academic ability) and the ones who do graduate have much lower literacy and numeracy abilities than white graduates (blsck graduates have worse literacy and numeracy than white highschool grads on average). And then you’ve got the quite substantial social cost of having less capable people doing jobs after graduation. IQ strongly predicts job performance, and now on the basis of having a degree from a good college, demanding jobs will be done by less capable black people rather than more capable e.g. Asian people. And it’s ironic because this absolutely makes Asians pissed off and view things on explicitly racial lens I.e the very thing you claim to want to avoid. And it certainly doesn’t make black people care less about inequality. They feel more entitled to socio-economic equality because they feel they’re entitled to certain types of job and levels of income based on the degree they “earned”.
Affirmative action made sense 60 years ago when it seemed like segregation had held bl6sck people down, and the MLKs of the world said a decade of affirmative action would allow black people to catch up. This failed miserably, and by many measures black people are more unequal now than when segregation ended (inequality for most metrics was stable or decreasing during segregation). So now increasingly Byzantine narratives are required to make sense of racial inequality if you assume that populations magically evolved to be behaviourally identical from a genetic standpoint. But no, they’re all just wrong. IQ is equally predictive of life outcomes for black people as it is for white people, most of the black white IQ gap is already present in kids before they even start school and increases to its maximum value in line with the general increase in heritability for all traits with age.
Inequality is inevitable in a cognitiviely unequal society without some kind of totalitarian redistribution scheme, but of course such a scheme will make white Americans actually have a sense of racial identity and view things in terms of group interests, again the sort of thing you want to avoid.
The only way to meaningfully help black people is 1, a UBI which helps guarantee a basic level of income for black people (and everyone else) especially as it becomes harder for black people to compete in the job market (as the good jobs be one more cognitively demanding), 2, testing the cognitively ability of black kids fairly early on to identify who needs to be put on a track for vocational training thay will allow them to get a job that is suited to their abilities instead of pointlessly trying to go to college, and 3, reduction in immigration and implementing trade policies that help protect American industry so there are more jobs available to black people that match their abilities.
I believe such policies could actually have a meaningful impact on the standards of living for black Americans. But of course, this won’t make race stop mattering as long as black people feel they are entitled to the same level of wealth as white people and access to the “good” careers thay other races have. But nothing will solve this besides a radical cultural change wherein these frankly inevitable inequalities aren’t seen as important.
Thank you for this insightful commentary.