Why Rachel Dolezal Still Matters After Charleston

In the first days following the news of Rachel Dolezal’s ruse, there appeared to be some real hope emerging that, at long last, the deadlock of identitarian politics might finally be over. Compelling voices spoke up to acknowledge the simple truth, that identitarianism is essentialism, no matter how much its defenders will ornament their essentialism with the acknowledgment that race is, in the end, a social construction. No one said it more compellingly than Adolph Reed, Jr., who seemed almost poised to become the progressive voice of the new political moment: one that pays attention to serious things. 

But then, yesterday, yet another racist attack by a homegrown terrorist took place, and even before the crime scene had been cleaned up we Americans were being scolded for having considered the possibility, for a moment, that racial categorisation (and the essentialism that flows from the practice) is something we might hope to move beyond. Right away, people were being referred to, in the identitarian manner, as ‘bodies’ instead of as people. And the fact of ‘being a black body’ was reinscribed back into the natural order of things. As Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker, closing off the Dolezal affair, "The existential question of who is black has been answered in the most concussive way possible: the nine men and women slain as they prayed last night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were black."

But the existential question needs to be asked again and again, and the belief that there is a simple answer to it is part of the reason America cannot overcome its murderous pathology, cannot really end the Civil War. Rachel Dolezal grew up in a society that told her, constantly: "You're white, you're white, you're white," and she seems to have thought to herself, "Really, now, can it be so simple as that?" Dylann Roof heard the same refrain, and said, "Why yes I am!" It worked its way into his brain like a worm. I’ll take Dolezal's response to the myth of whiteness over Roof's any day, as we all should, and I refuse to feel bad about the supposed frivolity of the possibilities Dolezal's life seemed, for a moment, to open up. Since when is there a moral duty to remain faithful to the accidents of your birth, and to accurately report your vital-statistical information to the whole world? I'm with Dolezal: I don't give two shits what my ancestors say about who I ‘really’ am (unless it happens to agree with me, which in my case it mostly does). I'm not interested in whether there's a pathology behind it in her case. We all have the right to reinvent ourselves. That's freedom, and it should be spread more broadly still, not condemned and pathologized and restricted. 

I recently clicked on a link that brought me to the blog of a young Canadian identitarian. On her ‘about’ page she noted that she lived on unceded First Nations territory and was thus a settler colonialist; that she was white but of a low-income background; and that she had some ancestry from Southern and Eastern Europe that in the recent past would have marked her out in North American society as a target of discrimination. Now where have I seen this before? I thought. Who else spells out their ancestry in their very first presentation of self? Oh I remember: it was in the personal ads on the Stormfront website! (I have an anthropologist colleague here in Paris who introduced me to this dark world, and who is working, in a broadly Foucauldian vein, on American white supremacists; he thinks all Americans are bonkers when it comes to race, and likes to cite a TV show he saw during his fieldwork that featured Snoop Dogg trying to guess, from a panel of candidates, who was genetically the most African.) The white supremacists state these supposedly self-defining ‘facts’ as points of pride, rather than as a sort of helpful identification key for others to place you on the privilege map, but the implicit theory of selfhood is the same. Dylann Roof shares with the young identitarians, purportedly of the left, the same fantasies about how it is we come to be who we are. I am with Reed and Foucault and Dolezal: a motley group of course, but all at least united in their rejection of essentialism.

Again, don’t take this as an expression of fixation on what was ultimately a frivolous media spectacle. I mean it: until Americans overcome their essentialism about race, their inscription of the Black-white divide into the basic ontology of the world, Charleston is going to keep on happening. It is in the interest of white supremacy that this divide be maintained, and the left, for as long as it continues in its identitarian errancy, is being duped into helping to maintain it. 

Comments

[Carl]

Your attempt to enforce strict individual subjective realities is in fact a spook. We are all as much a product of our peers as a product of ourselves. We are fat, skinny, pretty, ugly, tall, short, black, white. At a certain point liberal attitudes fly in the face of reality and that is why the conservative population rally against what they see as metaphysical mumbo jumbo. By the way, they're not a shadowy splinter group, Conservatives, but a majority of many populations and you write as though you have no understanding of other people.

[Justin E. H. Smith]

I'm not a liberal, and I'm not seeking to explain or defend liberal attitudes.

[meika loofs samorzewski]

@Carl "Your attempt to enforce strict individual subjective realities is in fact a spook. We are all as much a product of our peers as a product of ourselves..." What are you blathering on about? was that a cut and paste comment? Did you even read the post? Do you work for Putin? (I'm clutching at straws here, that last is not an attempt to identify you. = #facepalm) And just so you know I'm a dual German-Australian national living in Tasmania of no race because the US civil war didn't happen here, and I'm of Irish, English, Polish and Scottish Jewish descent and I identify as human because identifying as a race is more meaningless in Australia than it is in the USA. Jeebus.

[Joe]

Hi Justin,

"until Americans overcome their essentialism about race, their inscription of the Black-white divide into the basic ontology of the world, Charleston is going to keep on happening."

So, this is definitely an empirical claim, and the linking of identity politics with racially motivated shootings doesn't fare well qua such a hypothesis. That you linked to a Canadian "identitarian" already spells trouble for it, but it would not be hard to find passionate, widespread racial essentialism throughout most of the rest of the Western world (having lived and worked in Berlin and Zurich, I can tell you that it is alive and well over there). Social causation is of course tricky, but my understanding is that the per-capita rate of racially motivated murder is WAY higher in the USA than in these other countries. So why should we accept your claim?

[meika loofs samorzewski]

I don't think we should map North American slave-based racial essentialism onto other xenophobic bad behaviours. From outside north American the focus by all endeavours to mention/use/identify race (just check out a wikipedia entry on some small population centre in the US and they'll list the census categories of descendants of slave owners, slaves, neither and other using race descriptors) looks weird. Admittedly here in Australia the Atlantic ocean trade marketing terms for human cargo were used with 1800s pseudo-science of categories culminating in the White Australia Policy on immigration, and South African developers of Apartheid came to Queensland to study the reserve system... but now race is only used by US influenced radio jocks and Aboriginal Australians think of themselves as original owners more than some 1800s category. That is what Justin is pointing at methinks. Move on from the race debate, let's talk about slavery, lets talk abut caste. The US debates are block and blinkered, pot holed in some category errors. Who benefits from that? It's an empirical claim as far as it points out the blockages in the debate, in maintaining the debate as about X with no opportunity to reframe it and thus recyle the same shit over and over. (as I see them in this little comment). Don't confuse the message with the meat.

[Ric]

It seems to me to be a simple analytic mistake to go from anti-essentialism to the view that we can reinvent ourselves how we please. Somethings being socially constructed does not either logically or empirically entail such a position. As with almost all concepts we use on a day-to-day basis, the huge majority of which are also "socially constructed" inasmuch as they aren't picking out some natural kind, there are nonetheless uses and misuses and areas of contention, but there being areas of contention doesn't exclude clear cases of uses and misuses of a word.