Trans-Racialism

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Discussion

Rhyd Wildermuth:

"Adolph Reed’s analysis of the esoteric or mystical nature of race and racism within the neoliberal Anti-Racist framework helps elucidate specific contradictions we often encounter within Woke Ideology. For instance, Woke Ideology generally concedes that race has no biological or physical basis and is instead a social construct. However, race is posited as something that cannot be transcended or switched because race is something nevertheless inherent (and inherited) in individuals.

This contradiction is seen best in the matter of Rachel Dolezal, a self-identified transracial woman who was outed by her parents as being white in 2015. During that time, Dolezal was the chapter president of the Spokane, Washington National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and had been living as a black woman for many years.

Outrage over Dolezal took several forms, including accusations that she culturally appropriated blackness and that by being in her role of chapter president of a black organization she had stolen the job from a deserving black person.3 As the revelations about her occurred at roughly the same time that several celebrities publicly identified as trans women (most notably Caitlyn Jenner), Dolezal’s claim to be transracial initiated a significant popular and academic debate about transgenderism and transracialism.

It’s also worth noting that these debates occurred at a particularly contentious political moment in the United States, a time when social justice, intersectional feminism, police killings of black people, and the alt-right were constant discussion topics on social media. That moment saw the sudden popularity of sites like Everyday Feminism, relentless media attention to Alt-Right figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer, and violent Antifa protests against them. Black Lives Matter protests had also just begun the year before, and 2015 later became dominated by the extreme rhetoric of the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.

Rachel Dolezal’s claim to transracialism during such a time should be seen as a politically important moment, because transracialism represented a doctrinal threat to the foundations of the newly-forming Woke Ideological formation, especially to the early unification of anti-racist politics with the new conceptions of gender and identity.

The doctrinal threat can be summarised quite simply, as it was the common response by many to the matter: “if a person can change their gender, why can they not change their race?” The corrolary to that question was also asked, “if you cannot change your race, doesn’t that mean you cannot change your gender?”

What was really at stake was the matter of identity and especially of declarative identity. From the logic of declarative gender, not only can individuals define for themselves their gender identity, society is then obligated to accept and acknowledge their declarations. In other words, if a person was born a man, has male and even very masculine features, yet says he is a woman, then he therefore is and it is bigoted and oppressive (specifically transphobic) to act or think otherwise. By this same logic, however, if a woman who was born to white parents and lived most of her life appearing as a white woman then claims to be a black woman, she would also need to be accepted as such.

Of course, the really severe backlash against Dolezal’s claim to transracialism revealed that most people were quite unwilling to accept this. Black activists and media figures were particularly vociferous in their attacks on her and on transracialism in general. Several noted in particular that transracialism could not easily occur in both directions: that is, though it might be possible for a white person to “pass” successfully as a black person, a black person with particularly dark skin would not be so successful.

Such an argument, however, became a challenge to the logic of trans identity, since “passing” as the opposite gender is not considered a prerequisite to actually being trans. In fact, the idea that a trans person should successfully appear as their declared gender is considered to be transphobic and a bigoted enforcement of patriarchal gender norms.

What arose from these contradictions can be seen as a dialectical conclusion which, like most such conclusions, created a new contradiction. Importantly, that conclusion resulted in a rather metaphysical and esoteric conception of identity closely resembling the idea of a soul. This can be seen best in the most definitive response to conflict between transgenderism and transracialism, an explanation by two academics published in the Boston Review several years later:

...being Black isn’t simply a matter of internal identification; it is also a matter of how your community and ancestors have been treated by other people, institutions, and governments. Given this, we think that race classification should (continue to) track—as accurately as possible—intergenerationally inherited inequalities.

...Notice that this argument does not apply in the case of gender and gender inequality. Gender inequality, unlike racial inequality, does not primarily accumulate intergenerationally, if only for the obvious reason that the vast majority of households are multi-gendered. While parents often are responsible for ingraining patriarchal ideas and rigid gender norms in their children (it is extremely difficult to avoid!), this is not a “passing down” of socioeconomic inequality itself but, rather, of a socialization that perpetuates gender inequality.

We think that the reasons in favor of trans-inclusive gender classification outweigh the reasons against it, and that the reasons against transracial-inclusive race classification outweigh the reasons for it.

This is not to say that gender inequality is ahistorical. To the contrary, gender inequality is rooted in historical and continuing manifestations of sexism and misogyny, from policies that economically exploit women and undermine their reproductive autonomy to social practices like sexual harassment and rape culture. Young girls inherit the same sexism and misogyny that their mothers faced as young girls, regardless of whether they are transgender or cisgender. But importantly, all women inherit the historical accumulation of societal sexism. This marks a central difference between transgender-inclusive classification in the category “woman” and transracial-inclusive classification in the category “Black.” While transracial individuals like Krug and Diallo eschew much of the weight of anti-Black oppression and white supremacy, trans women and cis women alike are burdened by the legacy of patriarchy.

...Someone cannot make themself more likely to experience the intergenerational health and economic impact of systemic racism simply by identifying as Black (much less, as philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah observes, simply by refusing the word “white”). This intergenerational inequality is inherited independently of what persons might hope, believe, or desire about themselves, or even how they present themselves. Given the severity of this inequality, we need conceptual and linguistic tools that illuminate populations that inherit this inequality, and are thereby entitled to reparations. We believe the importance of preserving these tools vastly outweighs the good of respecting Diallo’s or Krug’s racial self-identification. Moreover, this logic cannot be wielded against transgender-inclusive gender classification for the simple reason that gender inequality is not accrued intergenerationally and that it affects both transgender and cisgender women. Put simply, then, we think that transracial-inclusive race classification would undermine our ability to track racial inequality, and for reasons that are irrelevant in the case of transgender-inclusive gender classification."

In other words, though there may be no genetic or biological traits that form the basis of race, racial inequality is nevertheless an inherited trait, something that “accrues intergenerationally.” A black person inherits racial inequality, while a trans person does not inherit gender inequality. Racial inequality, then, is something transmitted or inherited, something a person is born with or into, and thus it cannot be transcended.

Adolph Reed’s observation that anti-racism poses racism and white privilege as a kind of animate force or Original Sin is instructive here. Teasing out the consequences of “intergenerationally-inherited” inequality, we see that it mirrors the Woke Ideological belief that a white person is born into privilege and also cannot transcend their whiteness. Thus, race can be posited as an essential or inherent feature that bears with it inviolable traits without actually being related to the physical body of the person (race as an essential or biological trait) at all.

To sound a bit like a medieval theologian for a moment, where then do these inherited traits actually reside if not in the body? The answer appears to be within a non-physical body both external and internal to the individual, occupying a social space through its intangible yet really-existing social reality. In other words, a soul.

A white person therefore cannot become a black person because they bear the indelible mark of whiteness (privilege that always operates and benefits them), just as a black person bears the indelible mark of blackness (inequality they inherit intergenerationally that will always disfavor them in social, economic, and political relations). But because race has no basis in physical reality (again, it is a constructed/made-up category created during the Enlightenment and the birth of capitalism), it is located outside physical reality just as the soul is seen to be in Christian theology."

(https://rhyd.substack.com/p/the-metaphysics-of-woke-identity?)