Apparently Barack "isn't black"

[nomadthethird]

Well then ultimately it seems we agree. I think you were assigning the word 'race' a definition that was 'harder', or at least more old-fashioned, than the one I was using - I mean, that's the definition you were assigning to my usage of the term. As I said at the time in the 'bell curve' thread, it's a bit like the word 'atom': it's an ancient word which is still used, but the concept it encapsulates is very different from that which was assigned to it by the first people who coined the term.

It would take an awful lot of education to change the use of race from the common-use version that exists now, though.

 

[jambo]

Gender is real in that people treat it as real so it has effects. Isn't that the sense in which we are allowing ourselves to talk about 'race'?

This is very similar to the hyperstitional argument, isn't it? As soon as these ‘fictions’ are produced ("constructed"), they function in and as reality. As a result, it isn’t that belief in race produces race as "a biological fact", but rather that such belief produces equivalent effects to those the reality of race would produce.

Exactly.

This is also I think essentially what poetix was saying here and in other posts.

"Reality is socially constructed" (there is nothing but bodies and languages)
"Race is a social construct" (languages construct bodies as raced)
"Race is not real" (the notion of race is demonstrably incoherent)

There are all sorts of things we habitually take for real that race is at least as real as, regrettably. Obama seems to bridge two "realities", one in which race is real (if incoherently so) and he is a black man, and another in which race is no longer real (has lost all symbolic efficiency) and "the colour of his skin" no longer signifies as a racial marker.

My guess is that the US itself is now a kind of disjunctive synthesis of these two realities: a racist society that has a dream of becoming a non-racist one, and a post-racial society that has not completely awoken from the nightmare of once having been something else. If so, Obama's presidency is at least a potent sign of the times.

 

[josef k.]

I just read through this thread - it seems to me that people are talking at cross-purposes here. Would anyone mind if I submitted some banal points, to try and clear things up a bit?

1) The term "Black" (like the term "White") clearly has no kind of relationship at all with biology. It is socially constructed, discursive, and scientifically meaningless. But it does have a socio-historical meaning, which it is possible to think about.

2) The question of gender, plainly, is not quite as simple - if only because it invariably tends to slide into a question of biological sex. There are, it is clear, male and female bodies, even if the borders between them are sometimes fuzzy. Sexual preference is a yet trickier matter, and clearly has something to do with language and the desire inherent in it.

3) It does not follow from the "social constructivist" position - and the idea that reality is in some sense constructed by language - that everything in reality has equal reality. Just because both reality and race are socially constructed, race does not thereby become real. Though all men are mortal, and Socrates is mortal, not all mortals are Socrates. As this thread has demonstrated.

4) Social constructivism is basically a form of sociological nominalism. It adopts a stance on universals, and suggests that these are historically and discursively generated. It then attempts to show how this happens. Social constructivism is not hostile to science tout court, despite what Sokal and Bricmont seem to believe: there is no way in which a commitment to social constructivist thinking would force someone to grant that "race" is as real an entity as, say, atoms, despite the fact that it recognizes that both are in some sense socially generated. Social constructivism does not equal sheer relativism, and to claim that it does is to construct a strawman.

 

[nomadthethird]

This is also I think essentially what poetix was saying here and in other posts.

Yeah, ok, but in order to believe the last two paragraphs of this post:

Originally Posted by poetix
"Reality is socially constructed" (there is nothing but bodies and languages)
"Race is a social construct" (languages construct bodies as raced)
"Race is not real" (the notion of race is demonstrably incoherent)

There are all sorts of things we habitually take for real that race is at least as real as, regrettably. Obama seems to bridge two "realities", one in which race is real (if incoherently so) and he is a black man, and another in which race is no longer real (has lost all symbolic efficiency) and "the colour of his skin" no longer signifies as a racial marker.

My guess is that the US itself is now a kind of disjunctive synthesis of these two realities: a racist society that has a dream of becoming a non-racist one, and a post-racial society that has not completely awoken from the nightmare of once having been something else. If so, Obama's presidency is at least a potent sign of the times.

...don't you have to subscribe to those first three propositions? I think it's ridiculous to act as if it's especially PC to believe any or all of those three statements.

Great post as always, Josef!

 

[jambo]

Yeah, ok, but in order to believe the last two paragraphs of this post:
...don't you have to subscribe to those first three propositions? I think it's ridiculous to act as if it's especially PC to believe any or all of those three statements.

I'm sure poetix can answer that but I read it as saying that if you accept the first two then you can't simply regard race as 'not real', because as a construct it still has effects. I think that's made quite clear by the last two paragraphs.

 

[nomadthethird]

I'm sure poetix can answer that but I read it as saying that if you accept the first two then you can't simply regard race as 'not real', because as a construct it still has effects. I think that's made quite clear by the last two paragraphs.

But you can regard race as not "real" because it only exists as a cultural production, not a biological fact. In my opinion, there are not just two options, where you have to admit everything that humans produce is equally "real" or you have to believe that nothing they produce is real. As Josef K says, social constructivism is not simply relativism. It's not completely amoral. And, unlike Poetix, I think that what goes for PC language in the U.S. has little to do with social constructivism. Perhaps it's different elsewhere. I don't know.

 

[josef k.]

if you accept the first two then you can't simply regard race as 'not real', because as a construct it still has effects...

But to say that a belief in something is real, and so therefore has effects on this basis, is not the same thing as saying that the thing is itself real.

The construct is surely "belief in the category of race" rather than "race" per se.

 

[jambo]

Look I'm using shorthand and must let poetix answer for him/her self. Josef clarifies the finer points nicely, but what you say there is pretty much what poetix 2nd para says. I wouldn't argue it in quite the way poetix has but I think we all agree on this actually if we make a little effort to meet the others' intended meaning part of the way.

 

[nomadthethird]

Look I'm using shorthand and must let poetix answer for him/her self. Josef clarifies the finer points nicely, but what you say there is pretty much what poetix 2nd para says. I wouldn't argue it in quite the way poetix has but I think we all agree on this actually if we make a little effort to meet the others' intended meaning part of the way.

I hope so.

But I doubt Poetix wants to be associated with PC fundamentalism and he seems to think it's quite prevalant among social constructivists.

 

[jambo]

But to say that a belief in something is real, and so therefore has effects on this basis, is not the same thing as saying that the thing is itself real.

I know. I was just briefly pointing out that it looked to me like namadthesecond had misunderstood what poetix was saying where he/she had agreed with similar statements from myself and waffle.

 

[waffle]

I guess I would define race, then, as "the genetic component of ethnicity", i.e. that which makes an Italian look Italian and a Norwegian look Norwegian (and a Kenyan look Kenyan, etc. etc. etc.).

And what is the 'colour' of power, what is the 'genetic component' of power? If Obama walked into your living room this minute, what would your response be, what would you excitedly and immediately post here?

"Gee, somebody who looks a bit like a Kenyan has literally just walked into my living room! Can you believe it!?"

"Fock'n'hell! Power has just levitated its way into my room! It's fockin' sublime, man, fockin' sublime!"

 

[Mr. Tea]

And what is the 'colour' of power, what is the 'genetic component' of power? If Obama walked into your living room this minute, what would your response be, what would you excitedly and immediately post here?

"Gee, somebody who looks a bit like a Kenyan has literally just walked into my living room! Can you believe it!?"

"Fock'n'hell! Power has just levitated its way into my room! It's fockin' sublime, man, fockin' sublime!"

Another stunningly articulate, meaningful and constructive post there, waffle.

 

[nomadthethird]

Yes I think we are all mostly aware of all that. And we have ethnically mixed people and running water in the UK too, for the time being anyway.

Of course there are mixed people in the U.K., and there are immigrants, but it's a different cultural situation in many ways. Identity politics over here are played very differently, mostly because everyone here is a transplant and the point is to assimilate, to become as American as possible, which is to let go of any cultural baggage you carry from your homeland. As Zizek says, there's no common cultural 'grounding' here, [his example: we call the ground floor the "1st" floor where Europeans call it "0"]. Everyone feels "mixed" to one extent or another. We have to pick and choose what sorts of traditions from our heritage to keep alive, if any--when my grandparents came here it was a point of pride to work on English until you had no accent. People still have nose jobs to look "more American", i.e. more generically white.

There's no common cultural ground that we as Americans appeal to for our identity outside of pop culture. Seriously. None. There's some noise made about the constitution and our democratic values, but that's about it. To be American is to be very conscious of your own process of producing your own cultural identifications.

 

[Mr. Tea]

1) The term "Black" (like the term "White") clearly has no kind of relationship at all with biology.

I really don't see how anyone can say this with a straight face. People look the way they do because of their genes, right? Is that not biological? Obviously how people perceive themselves and are perceived by others is modulated by sociology and demographics - hence Barack Obama, in the predominantly white USA, is identified mainly as 'black' - but it's ludicrous to suggest that biology has nothing to do with it.

 

[nomadthethird]

I really don't see how anyone can say this with a straight face. People look the way they do because of their genes, right? Is that not biological? Obviously how people perceive themselves and are perceived by others is modulated by sociology and demographics - hence Barack Obama, in the predominantly white USA, is identified mainly as 'black' - but it's ludicrous to suggest that biology has nothing to do with it.

Biology has something to do with looks, but it doesn't have all that much to do with all those little random associations that fly around in someone's head around the term "black" or "white"--the connotations, stereotypes, etc. Most people don't think of "blackness" and think "there's some sort of vague genetic similarity between people who all look black", they think of the Rodney King beating and/or Martin Luther King, etc etc.

Edit: I take that back, there are tons of people who only think of "black" as a genetic predisposition that includes all sorts of bad traits (which can be found across all populations, but this is ignored). Racists hear "black" and think of a fantasy "black man" with all sorts of hideous imaginary traits and who the racists believes is a product of his own bad genes, whose children will suffer the same genetic affliction.

 

[josef k.]

But Kenyans do not look the same as Ethiopians. Yet in the US, they would both be called "Black." Why? Not because of genetics...

All I'm really saying here is that there is no ethnic group "Black" - no more than there is an ethnic group "White."

 

[Mr. Tea]

OK, so the terms are nuanced with social connotations - I admitted as much in my post - but josef said they have "NO RELATIONSHIP AT ALL with biology". That just seems to be social constructivism taken to a bizarrely extreme degree; you might almost as well claim that the terms "tall" and "short" are meaningless since "height is socially constructed" (just because there may be extraneous social connotations associated with tall or short people).

 

[nomadthethird]

"Fock'n'hell! Power has just levitated its way into my room! It's fockin' sublime, man, fockin' sublime!"

That would probably be my reaction. Usually celebrities are disappointing in person, they look so much smaller than you imagined they were. But Obama is tall and lanky.

 

[jambo]

Everyone feels "mixed" to one extent or another. We have to pick and choose what sorts of traditions from our heritage to keep alive, if any--when my grandparents came here it was a point of pride to work on English until you had no accent. People still have nose jobs to look "more American", i.e. more generically white.

There's no common cultural ground that we as Americans appeal to for our identity outside of pop culture. Seriously. None. There's some noise made about the constitution and our democratic values, but that's about it. To be American is to be very conscious of your own process of producing your own cultural identifications.

Yes I get what you are saying, there's a different ambience around the notion of cultural identity. Perhaps that lack of ground is what I have perceived as a weird hollow (lack) at the centre of American life when I have visited. I also felt that as opportunity though.

It's not as if everyone just arrived there though. And how much of modern British cultural identity is really built on stuff that's older then the USA? Obviously there are parts of the UK where people can agree on what it means to be English, Scottish or Welsh and feel themselves to be that, but I think it's quite different in the large metropolitan centres and London in particular.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Obviously there are parts of the UK where people can agree on what it means to be English, Scottish or Welsh and feel themselves to be that, but I think it's quite different in the large metropolitan centres and London in particular.

London's just fucking mad, it's somehow the most and least British part of Britain at the same time.