Guest post: Identity and its complications
Originally a comment by Sackbut in Miscellany Room 6.
The various discussions about transracialism and transgender ideology spurred some thoughts that I couldn’t quite fit anywhere, so I thought I’d put them here. It’s possible I’ve already related this story before, but it came to mind again.
My father was black, my mother was white, and I am one of those light-skinned people who might be considered black by the One Drop Rule. When I was in high school, decades ago, before all this “identity politics” and postmodern Critical Theory stuff became current, I was considering applying for an Achievement Scholarship, an award from the same outfit that does the National Merit Scholarship, but reserved for black students. The criteria for qualifying as “black” were not about measuring ancestry, nor were they specifically about any internal sense of identity, but rather “perceived as black by one’s peers”.
I often said I was black, and I have been accepted as black in certain circles, but I never really lived as black. I didn’t have a large number of black friends; I didn’t follow black musicians; I didn’t use black vernacular or slang; I didn’t wear clothing or hair styles popular among black people my age. In contrast, I knew other light-skinned people for whom being black and immersing themselves in black culture was an important aspect of their lives; that was very much not me.
I mentioned the possible scholarship application to some friends, and they obligingly agreed to refer to me as black if asked.
It occurred to me to compare this with transgenderism. Someone who has light skin and has little or no experience dealing with life as a black person suddenly decides to declare he is black and to take resources set aside for black people, and he asks people suddenly to acknowledge him as black, because he was born black and has always known, despite not living that way. This strikes me as somewhat parallel to the case of man who grew up male, lived with all the attributes of being male in modern society, suddenly “discovering” he is female, always has been, and demanding both resources set aside for women and acknowledgment that he is now a woman. The big difference is, of course, that I have a genuine factual basis for my claim, and this other man doesn’t.
But this other man demands society cater to his declaration, counterfactual as it is, and society bends over backwards to oblige, including changing policies and laws. People who even question his claim get called bigots and risk losing their platforms, jobs, children, friends. It makes no difference that he grew up and lived a male life, and it doesn’t matter if he changed his living pattern to mimic the stereotypical situations of women; the declaration is sufficient.
But someone like Dolezal gets excoriated and shunned for making her parallel claim. Dolezal was actually living as black. She was working for the advancement of black people. She would meet the criteria for the scholarship on that basis, despite the pesky factual issue. I, on the other hand, did none of these things. My great-grandfather was one of the founders of the NAACP, but I was never a member and I never worked with them. I just had the right bloodline. My biology was correct, but the scholarship required more than that.
I noted, too, that the scholarship required outside validation of blackness, that this was important. We know that, for people who identify as trans, this outside validation of their “identity” is of paramount personal importance, hence all the emphasis on pronouns and all the policies and laws that require people to validate a trans-identified person’s “identity”. I can’t imagine a similar set of draconian rules requiring validation of declared racial “identity”.
This makes me think of a time when I worked in a government job in Oklahoma. They establish eligibility by a set of points on a register, and you have to have a good reason for passing up the top people, who received the most points on a test, added to any points for other things such as experience and minority status. The current register for a job had women in the top ten positions; women received one additional point for minority status, which sometimes was enough to move you up a space on most registers. So the ten (actually, I think it was more than that) most qualified individuals were women. The agency I was working for did not hire women (I was an intern; they put women in temp and intern positions to look like they were complying with affirmative action). They did not want any of the women, but could not pass them up to get to the man they wanted, who was less qualified in terms of both test scores and experience. He was a white man, had lived his life as a white man, but they were able to find some trace of Native American ancestry and get ten points added to his score, which moved him up to third place on the register. They were able to hire him, giving him a perk meant for people who had actually suffered the prejudice and reduced opportunity of being Native American in a bigoted country. Once more a white man brought up in privilege (he was in the upper middle class, his parents paid for his college, he did not work through school, nobody grabbed his ass everyday, nobody assumed he was inferior, and so on). He would not have identified as a woman, of course, because the one point added for being a woman would not have moved him up a single position.
Recently, a TRA finally defined “man” and “woman” for me. “A man is whoever society says is a man.” “A woman is whoever society says is a woman.” I was a bit gobsmacked. It would of course explain the need for validation, but I don’t think the person who gave me these definitions was particularly well versed in trans ideology.
Sackbut, your identity experience mirrors the Australian aboriginal in some regards.
This seems all quite clear cut and easy to follow until cases arise where a person has all the outward signs of aboriginality, eg, skin colour, facial features, modes of speech, etc., yet is denied their claim under (c) above. There have been a few cases of this.
On the other hand, there are many, many people who show no outward signs of aboriginality but who are accepted under (c). This was reinforced for me when I was speaking with an aboriginal social worker about the differences I perceived after returning from 11 years in New Zealand. I was telling her how it was impossible to go through a single day without interacting with Maori, be it at work, in a shop, a pub, or a social setting, whereas in Australia I could go weeks without interacting with an aborigine. She asked me how I knew people were not aboriginal. She had a point because they were aboriginal by self ID and community acceptance.