She eschewed her lived experience
In a scenario reminiscent of the Rachel Dolezal scandal, an African history professor at George Washington University has admitted to pretending to be a Black woman throughout her career.
“I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness,” Jessica A. Krug confessed in a post on Medium.
Also a child of the hood.
Krug recently published a story for Essence named “On Puerto Rico, Blackness, and Being When Nations Aren’t Enough,” which was reposted by Caribbean news and culture site Repeating Islands on Aug. 29. According to Duke University Press’ official Twitter account, Krug’s book Fugitive Modernities was a 2019 finalist for the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.
Some modernities are more fugitive than others.
Cue trans activists explaining why this is different than men claiming to be women and gobbling up jobs/sports/whatever intended for women. A young man I know offered one time to send me a long article explaining why it was different, and assured me I would be convinced once I read it. I invited him to go ahead; never received article.
Maybe that argument looked like this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/diannaeanderson/status/1301582736931528704
Haven’t looked at it very closely,but the conclusion is “apples & oranges, totally different!”
Two thoughts, off the top of my head:
!) All that para-ontological word salad posted last week or so says this is possible.
2) I’d like to know what prompted the confession.
I’m curious about that (item 2) too.
YNnB, #2:
That was an … interesting … thread, for certain values of interesting. This in particular.
Trans men suffering from phantom penis syndrome is not the take I was expecting from the TRAs.
And this:
… which suggests that it’s wrong to identify as a different race because race is NOT rooted in physical reality. It Is, however, praiseworthy to identify as a different sex because sex IS rooted in physical reality?
Also, is gender dysphoria still required for someone to be considered trans?
Only when they feel the need to point out what big meanies we are, being so awful to people who are ill.
I once had a rather pleasant conversation with a historian who said something to the effect of “race isn’t real” or “race is a purely social construct” or something. To resist resisting such silly silliness seemed silly.
The same woman told me that there’s no such thing as progress, and there is no truth. This was a PhD, mind you. It was a quite enjoyable evening talking semantics, biology, history, and logic over Malbec.
Those are two very different statements, though. Race is very much a social construct, but being a social construct doesn’t make it unreal.
Nullius, one of my experiences during my Ph.D. program was that all the professors (and most of the students) outside the science department believed that nothing was real, it was all social construct, and “truth” didn’t matter because there is no such thing as truth. They all seemed to believe that each person’s reality was defined by that person, and equally real as the reality discovered by science (and listening to them, it seemed they actually believed any reality measured by science was not as real as any others; they were not willing to give science even as much credence as they gave “alternative ways of knowing”, including religions [especially Eastern religions], bigfoot, and other views unable to be supported by science. They seemed to think if science supported a view, it must be wrong).
This was an enormous shock to me; I hadn’t expected academics to go down such a …well, to use the obvious word, goofy…pathway.
@iknklast: I thought it was only in John Lennon’s strawberry fields that “nothing is real”. Unfortunately, the bullet that killed him was all too real.
As What a Maroon said – race really is a social construct though. There are some descriptive physical details that go with the concept but they’re squishy. The purported “science of race” wasn’t a science.
Some notes on the replies to that long Twitter thread:
While there are the obligatory “Ugh, the hateful replies!” notes, there don’t seem to be all that many critical comments among the many “Thank you for the insightful thread!” congratulations. And it seems like most of the critical stuff is actually coming from other woke pro-trans people, not from the so-called “TERFs”.
A few of the replies seemed particularly notable:
(in other words, Thank you for this great expanation, but I wish you had left out the key point the whole explanation depends on!)
(being a proper ally means accepting trans ideology as a religious faith, and not subjecting it to any sort of logical inquiry; one might just as well ask in exactly what sense communion wavers are literally the flesh of Jesus!)
iknklast: That makes me glad to have spent most of my college years in the engineering department. Engineers don’t have the luxury of denying objective truth, because that leads to collapsing bridges and crashing planes. Even in the philosophy department, though, I never encountered anyone who seriously denied truth or the existence of an external reality. Well, except in the context of radical skepticism, but the purpose of that exercise is to figure out how to escape solipsism and hopeless epistemology.
What a Maroon: You’re correct. Being partially or even wholly socially constructed does not entail that something isn’t real. Typical arguments involving social construction assume that entailment, though. Hence genderists’ focus on convincing everyone that sex and gender are social constructs.
There are components of race that are socially constructed and some that are not. Examples of the former include the significance we (shouldn’t) assign to race and the choice of grouping A with B rather than with C or D. Examples of the latter include physical traits common to lineages/populations from different geographic regions, ranging from skin color, to hair type, to height, or to epicanthic fold.
But deciding that physical traits common to lineages/populations from different geographic regions = something called “race” is socially constructed.
Nullius in Verba,
The article Ophelia linked to a few of posts above this does a much better and more detailed explanation of what I was getting at when I said that race is a social construct, but that doesn’t make it unreal. But that reality is ultimately inside our heads. Our brains are adept at categorizing things and events in the world through the filters of our senses, but also our experiences in living in the world, including living in society. For example, I’m looking at a chair that I would say is uniformly yellow. Chances are that if you were looking at the same chair, in the same context, you would make the same judgment (assuming you’re not blind or color-blind). And yet the light that is reflected off that chair into my eyes is by no means uniform, and not all of it falls into the range along the color spectrum that we would classify as “yellow”. There are shadows and streaks and textures that affect the color and intensity reaching my eye, but because of my experience with how color works and my experience with objects in general and that chair in particular my brain is able to classify the chair as “yellow”. That’s what the brain does, and usually it does a pretty good job of things. Still, “yellow” is not really a description of something that exists objectively in the absence of observers; rather, it’s a complex interaction between the reality of objects absorbing and reflecting light, the ability of the observer to sense light along part of the spectrum, and the ability of the brain to categorize the information from the senses based on some combination of innate ability and experience.
But then the brain goes along and mucks things up by creating categories and assigning traits to those categories that don’t necessarily have any objective counterpart. Sometimes those categories are innocuous or even helpful (“furniture”, say), but other times they’re harmful (“race”). They’re real, in the sense that they affect how we perceive and categorize events and objects, but their reality is in our heads.
Ophelia:
Yes, concepts are constructs of minds that interpenetrate through interaction that we call social. Language is a socially constructed means of facilitating that interaction and conveying concepts. But by this logic, everything is socially constructed. For example, deciding that physical traits common to things that produce things with similar traits = something called “species” is socially constructed.
To be clear, my issue is merely there is a bullet to bite. What does applying the “social construct” label tell us? If every category is socially constructed because categorizing per se is an act of social minds, then every concept is socially constructed. If every concept is socially constructed, then saying that a particular concept is socially constructed has no comparative utility. Race is a social construct, but so are mass, energy, position, and time. So when we say that race is socially constructed, that doesn’t distinguish it from anything else.
What a Maroon: If I’m reading you correctly, then you’re advocating a form of idealism. That is (quoting the SEP):
I was going to say that you favor epistemological idealism (#2), because metaphysical idealism (#1) is just so batty, and because you talk about mental states as the result of external entities that impinge on the brain via sense data. Your final sentence, however, explicitly locates reality in the mind, which is a feature of metaphysical idealism. Rereading your first paragraph from this perspective changes my interpretation, making it more compatible with #1. Uncertain of what your actual view is, I am forced to leave it here.
But regardless of the nature of your apparent idealism, the ultimate question remains whether “x is a social construct” has any use. If every conceptual representation of the physical world is a social construct, then to call race a social construct has exactly as much discriminatory value as to call distance a social construct. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the speech act per se is meaningless, of course. By your color perception example, reliability and universality are perhaps the criteria with which you are most concerned. In that case, calling something a social construct could serve as a reminder of our epistemological fallibility, especially with respect to anything mediated by our senses.
Even in the philosophy department, though, I never encountered anyone who seriously denied truth or the existence of an external reality. Well, except in the context of radical skepticism, but the purpose of that exercise is to figure out how to escape solipsism and hopeless epistemology.
People tend to think a bit more seriously about these topics in actual philosophy departments. The hand wavey “My truth for me, your truth for you” stuff is the “philosophy lite” that reigns in literature and cultural studies adjacent fields.
What amazes me as someone who was an English major back in the late 80s/early 90s (became a double major and went into science for a career), is how long this particular orthodoxy has lasted. It seems like these fields have been rehashing the same few ideas for the last 35 years, with no end in sight.
Nullius, yes I do know that; the point is that race is a much fuzzier category than sex.
This is possibly not the ideal context for this, but want to post it before I forget. It’s from https://newsblur.com/site/391405/laudator-temporis-acti “Howled down”:
Is it just me, or is it reminiscent of the attacks on J. K. Rowling?
Not just you; it is quite reminiscent of the attacks on all of us. Orwell is the same of course, especially after his experiences in Barcelona.
Nullius,
Well, no, I wasn’t trying to put forward any kind of idealism, and most especially not the metaphysical idealism you mention. What I was trying to describe was (my understanding of) the theory of embodied realism. It’s been a long time since Ive been in graduate school and done hardcore linguistics as anything more than a hobby, so I may be muddling things up a bit, but to bring it around to the present discussion (and because I work best with examples):
First, picture a tree. There’s a pretty good chance (assuming that you’re not looking at a particular specimen of a tree) that you’re thinking of an object with a long, straight trunk and crown of leaves; it may look something like the lollipop tree that kids draw, or it may be more like an oak with a branching trunk, or maybe it’s more willow- or pine-like. But the point is that you have a lived experience, you’ve interacted with trees, and so your mind has formed a prototype of a tree that allows you to organize your experience, and to make a quick identification of novel trees (and draw conclusions about their natures, life cycles, etc.). Now your prototype of a tree may be quite similar to mine, or it might be very different, but I’m willing to bet that if we walk around looking at things in the wild, we’d agree in virtually all cases which objects are trees and which aren’t. What’s more, I’d wager that nearly all languages (with perhaps some exceptions for languages spoken by populations that live in the arctic or in deserts) have a word for “tree”, and, ignoring metaphorical extensions, would agree for the most part on which objects constitute trees and which don’t (though there may be some difference of opinion over whether such things as palms or bamboo should be included in the category “tree”).
The point I’m trying to make is that trees are real objects in the real world; they exist whether there’s a mind around to perceive them or not. But the category “tree” is the product of embodied minds that perceive and interact with the world, and that are able to discern patterns and make generalizations about the world (and note that this doesn’t mean just humans; I suspect that squirrels have a very highly-developed category of “tree”, even if they can’t label it linguistically). Moreover, the representations of the world that we create have to be accurate enough to allow us to function successfully in the world: you may go around thinking that trees are merely products of our minds, and don’t exist in the real world, but a few attempts to walk through a tree will likely cure you of that delusion*.
But there are categories in our minds that have no counterpart in the real world, such as gods. You probably have a prototype for the concept of “god” as well–perhaps an old white man with a long beard, or a giant lion, or a cockroach–even though I assume you would agree that gods don’t actually exist. Still, gods are real in the sense that the concept exists in our heads and may affect the way we interact with the world (even though they are not real in the same sense that a tree is real).
I’d argue that, as a concept, “race” lies somewhere along the continuum between gods and trees. There are some literally superficial characteristics that we use to assign people to a race, but the concept itself doesn’t really match anything in the real world (again, the article that Ophelia linked to above explains that point a lot better than I can).
*I was going to make a point about naive physics, and how it’s good enough for most situations even though we now know it’s wrong, but this is already getting too long.
Ophelia:
Then surely the thing to point out is the fuzziness, rather than the concept’s means of construction. When I hear “socially constructed”, my mind interprets that through my philosophy experience.
What a Maroon:
There’s nothing objectionable in this distinction between the things “out there” and the things that go on “in here”, so to speak. It is, after all, the difference between intension and extension.
Entities that do not exist in the physical world, such as gods, can be said to exist in a “world” of concepts. Indeed, this is an intuitive move in making sense of statements like, “After that day, only one Jedi existed in the galaxy.” In practice, people speak of and reason about fictional universes using terms like existence and reality. Treating concepts as having existence (of a certain kind) allows intension to “latch” onto something.
However, it is one thing to say that the “tree” or “race” concepts are products of minds. It is another thing to say that trees or races are a social constructs.
As for the article, I find its arguments uncompelling and guilty of basic reasoning errors. For instance, it says, “Geographic ancestry is not the same thing as race.” On some conceptions of race, this is true. On others, it is not. The article, though, does not acknowledge the simple fact of language that words can and almost always do have multiple meanings. Instead, it says race is this, and if you think race is something else, then you’re just wrong.
It says, “Sure, different human populations living in distinct places may statistically have different genetic traits—such as sickle cell trait (discussed below)—but such variation is about local populations (people in a specific region), not race.” And yet, the distinctiveness of local populations is does, in fact, constitute race under some conceptions.
For any complex subject, it’s a simple matter to find perspectives or positions that are easily torn apart. Goodman finds it easy and expedient to show the paucity of race as mere skin color, and so he does. To the extent that he does that, I’m on board with him. Not so much with the rhetorical overreach.
But then, I’m a pedantic asshole.