Thoughts about trans-racialism

When people ask me what I am, my response is "whatever the LAPD, or the NYPD calls me", the point is that race is a social construct; meaning it's only use is social.

It's kind of like the idea of Nobility, if everyone thinks thinks you are nobility, you're nobility; if you say your nobility, unless people believe you, you're not.

However, when it's accepted that there is such a thing as nobility, and then certain assumptions are taken with that, someone could claim to be nobility (which basically means that he is claiming that people call him nobility), even though he is not recognized as such. When he's claiming to be nobility, even though he may feel "noble", there are assumptions that other people (rightly) have, one is that this person is recognized by other nobility, that they have access to wealth, grew up a certain way, and so on.

It's the same thing with being "black", you're black if people consider you black in the relevant context, if the community your a part of puts you in that category.

A person from Somalia growing up in the US might just be categorized as black, had he grown up in another society he may have been categorized as Muslim, or Somali.

Here's the point. Race is not something you are, it's something societies (sometimes) categorize people as.

You go back 2000 years "black" or "white" weren't categories that were relevant, there's nothing innate about race, nor is it a chosen idenity.

I don't choose how people see me, I'm mixed and what people consider me depends on the context, I grew up in a certain culture which makes me identified (by my mannerisms accent and such) with that culture, had I grown up in another I would be identified as something else, it's not up to me it's contingent.

Had I began to act as though I were something else (meaning I would pretend I had grown up a certain way and pretend that I was seen a certain way), no matter how I feel about who I am, I would be deceiving other people, plain and simple.

Rachel Dolezal has to lie about her past and how she was viewed by society, that isn't trans anything, and it certainly isn't equivalent to trans-sexuality; it's just deceit.

That's my opinion anyway.

There's this, which I found interesting -
The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black
http://www.thestranger.com/features/2017/04/19/25082450/the-heart-of-whiteness-ijeoma-oluo-interviews-rachel-dolezal-the-white-woman-who-identifies-as-black

You can immerse yourself in a culture you weren't raised in, learn the language if it is not your primary language, learn about it's history, appreciate it's art and music but you can do all these things without appropriating it as your own. I don't really understand what her motivations were but she's not transracial, she's just faking being an African-American woman.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/15/jenner-dolezal-one-trans-g...

I liked this Adolph Reed article on the subject.

Not really new, is it? ...i've met a lot of white rastas and white indians (of the hare krishna not American sort but even then history is replete of those too ...grey owl being the most reknown)

Nothing wrong about adopting cultural identities is there? Jeez...How many Irish and Scots descendants still wear the kilt and play the bagpipes and do the dancing as if they never left the home countires hundreds of years ago.

Oh Yeah, but that's different, a white guy becoming a rasta, or something like that is adopting a culture, that's fine; but he isn't presenting himself in a way that would imply he had a different experience than he had.

In otherwords he doesn't have to hide his parents.

sam bauer #7

‘You don't think cultural appropriation is wrong? What about black face?’

Good questions. Context and power relationships are important.

‘Black face’ is usually taken as disrespect to black people due to its minstrel show history.
Some folk wishing to be ‘Scots’ could be seen as a kind of complement - again due to an interpretation of history. When a small boy I wanted to grow up to be an Apache. If people shout, “Geronimo!” when they jump out of an aeroplane, etc., are they being disrespectful or paying an indirect complement?

Black face is not Cultural appropriation ... it's mocking a Group of People using racist stereotypes ....

Cultural appropriation is impossible to avoid ... no one "owns" culture ... of course unless you're a fascist who believes that culture is somehow the property of a nation or ethnicity.

Also it isn't "culture'" which are oppressive or dominant, it's classes and money.

There’s a world of difference between putting on a kilt or listening to the Dropkick Murphys and the kind of blackface/cultural appropriation Dolezal has done, a lie which she built her profession on.

For one thing, Irish American identity is an actual thing, it’s an immigrant identity which has it’s roots in Irish refugees fleeing over here from persecution by the English. I don’t live in America but where I live Irish cultural identity is very strong, 40% of Quebeckers have Irish ancestry, it’s one of the reasons why Quebec culture is so different from French culture (from France.) Similarly, a lot of the Scots Canadians here trace their ancestry back to fleeing English persecution after the failed Jacobean rebellion. It’s not unusual for people to retain parts of their cultural traditions, especially when ancestors were compelled to leave their homes by forces of oppression. Clearly Irish and Scottish people have moved here after the original settlers who fled the English crown but nobody’s faking being part of a marginalized identity in order to gain sympathy and money in the same way as Dolezal has done. Oddly enough though, as an English person in Quebec, I wouldn’t dream of pretending to be Irish, I would feel that to be entirely inappropriate.

Just because it’s “not new” doesn’t make it OK now. Grey Owl is an icon, amongst British people, he largely has a legacy amongst Canadian native people as another in a long line of white folks appropriating their culture and propagating noble savage stereotypes. Archie Belaney could have advocated for the Canadian wilderness without dying his skin with tea bags. It’s no different from the current controversy about Joseph Boyden, a prize winning novelist who has been claiming (non-existent) Ojibway heritage, while Canadian First nations have been objecting to his stories which traffics in stereotypical portrayals of indigenous men and women for years (while at the same time native writers struggle to find a platform of their own.)

There’s a whole world of difference between aculturation , when cultural traits are adopted into a different groups. ie the Irish influence on Quebec music, or cultural appreciation, ie my undying love of the Wu Tang Clan, and cultural appropriation, in which people profit from taking somebody else’s identity, expressly against their wishes. In Dolezal’s case, she’s a white woman from Montana who literally got a job as a spokesperson for black people. On the other hand, nothing new at all.

A Mohawk writer’s opinion on Grey Owl and other aboriginal impersonators.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/doug-george-kanentiio-impersonators-have-caused-aboriginal-people-great-harm

Auld-Bod

I've no idea if shouting "Geronimo" is perceived as an insult, and if it is it's probably much less of an insult than the way his grave was desecrated and his scull stolen but this is a very interesting book, which amongst other things discusses the use by the US military of native names and symbols, ie Apache helicopters, officially designating hostile grounds (eg Afghanistan) "Indian Country."
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20588662-an-indigenous-peoples-history-of-the-united-states
Also, the National Congress of American Indians lodged a complaint about the military operation to kill Bin Laden being called Operation Geronimo.

I don't think it is at all ... cultures don't dominate, classes and institutions do. I don't think it's smart to try and shift over the Language of domination to symbolic cultural issues.

Look; when Rich kids listen to punk Music, it's Cultural appropriation (working class culture being taken by the upper class).

But that isn't a problem, that isn't oppression, what's oppression is what makes the working class stuck in poverty.

I think her reasoning for doing it in the first place is interesting. As I recall she attended a majority African American university and felt that she was being sidelined or ignored or something due to her race. Once she 'transitioned', her thoughts and ideas seem to have then been accepted by the black community based on the positions she came to hold within it afterwards.

I would like to know if the content of her thought changed simultaneously with her 'race' or if it remained consistent throughout. If its the former then you could probably just chalk it up to simple career maneuvering on her part. However if its the latter I think that would say something significant about the limitations of identity in politics.

Cultures don't exist as something separate from classes and institutions. The white, anglo cultural hegemony imposed on native people didn't just happen, it was a carefully orchestrated act of literal and cultural genocide, using institutions such as the military and education and forced appropriation of land for the capitalist class to exploit and to appease the working classes by giving out land, in the form of the homesteading movement etc.

It's really simple, if someone tells you that something you are doing is disrespectful and hurtful to them, especially within a context have been a historically oppressed, it's at the very least nothing more complicated than courtesy and politeness to at least give it some consideration when they ask that you stop. To dismiss people's objections to what is received by them as a racist insult on the grounds that it's something which as always happened or that it's really class we should be really worried about, it's pretty damned insulting. It's up to the person on the receiving end of racism to decide whether it's racist or not, not the person dishing it out.

As for rich kids liking punk, that's not cultural appropriation, punk isn't a cultural identity, it's just a musical genre.

Musical genres exist separately from culture? Can you explain where culture ends and where it begins?

No, obviously it's a part of culture. I was responding to the absurdity of suggesting that rich people liking punk was in any way comparable to the kind of cultural appropriation that marginalized people have so often complained about being racist. Like suck it up kid, it's fine for people to continuously insult you in a racist way after many, many requests to stop it because some geezer in Chelsea has a large collection of Subhumans records on vinyl.

It wasn't me suggesting that cultures and institutions exist separately, it was Rommon -

My point was that cultures do dominate ie English speaking culture in Canada and the US and they do dominate because institutions and classes enforce this.

I see. I guess I thought their point was that culture has the effect of coming in after the fact to normalize what has already been put into action by classes and institutions. Not that it was necessarily a separate force.

The white identity for instance came into being following the combined efforts of african slaves and european indentured servants to overthrow early colonial governments here in north america. The actions of classes and institutions engineered the resulting divide between those two groups artificially via the legal system. The cultural norms which then reinforced those ideas of separation for each group only developed after the fact.

We forgot to mention Senator Elizabeth Warren and her claim to be Cherokee.

Was it simply a family myth she repeated or was she purposefully using it to acquire extra street-cred. Yes, motive and context is everything.

Of those Scots and Irish heritage mentioned, many were presbyterian Scotch-Irish (originally Scots Border reivers transplanted to Ulster by James VI) who were the earlier emigrants to the USA, not the later Irish potato famine emigrants. It may be urban legend but i heard that the term hillbilly came from those Scotch-Irish singing folk songs about William of Orange - King Billy.

And apologies, fleur, but i think you have absorbed some of the romanticism about Scot exiles.

Most Scots emigrants were sent to the colonies by their own clan chiefs and not by any invading English( who were ably assisted by the Scots lowlanders in the Jacobite war, btw). The Highland Clearances were a later development.

All I'm saying is that sometimes dogma needs to take second place to the objections of people who feel oppressed by certain behaviours, even if those actions are not meant maliciously. If someone has been subjected to racism, for generations, we owe them the courtesy of taking their point of view into consideration when they ask people to desist from a certain action which they feel is racist. They're the better judge of what is racist than the person carrying out this action. Race is a social construct but if you've been subjected to racism your entire life, that's probably not a particularly useful sentiment.

An example, which has nothing to do with race but something from my own life. Sometimes people are hurtful and undermine other people with no malicious intent and don't even know they are doing it. I have a non-binary trans co-worker who uses the pronoun "they" and a shortened, gender neutral version of their birth name. They hate being referred to by their full name, it really upsets them. I have another co-worker, who is a really decent and lovely guy, who kept calling them by the full birth name. I had a little word with him and he was mortified that he had upset our co-worker, he had no idea he had upset them and stopped immediately. It's not always done with malice, sometimes people don't realize they're oppressing someone with their words or actions but if someone asks you to cut it out, don't dismiss it out of hand.

Whatever, it doesn't make make putting on a kilt on Burns Night in any way comparable to blackface. fwiw, nearly all the Irish immigrants to Quebec in the nineteenth century were descendants of the survivors of the coffin ships, there's a mass grave a couple of miles from where I am now of about 6000 of the unlucky ones who died from typhus in fever sheds on landing here.

Fleur I don't disagree with your sentiment but I think I take issue with your reasoning. Nobody owes anyone anything. I don't oppose racism because it's morally wrong I oppose it because it's false and acts as a means of control. I would never strive to be disrespectful to anyone due to my own personal nature but it feels as if you are the one who might be raising this ideal into a self-evident point of dogma.

Good posts Fleur.

I’ve found all these posts interesting as some of this identity stuff is jumbled up.
In the early 1970s an apprentice I worked with had just been over to Northern Ireland for the 12th July celebrations. He told me a number of American lodges had come over for the walk. One was comprised of Native Americans who wore traditional clothes under their orange sashes.

recuperation

This is certainly true. However there was a heavily stratified class system imported to the Americas from Britain, right from the very start of colonization, despite American mythology about equality etc, and as such was a class system which was manipulated by the ruling classes to enforce white supremacy, ie the lowliest of white person could still be further up the hierarchy than ay POC on the continent, even at times when that would not be in their own class interests.

recuperation

Sorry mate but yes we do. We owe people dignity and respect, until such a time they prove themselves unworthy of it. It is the very least we can do as human beings is to treat each other with empathy. Sometimes people turnout to be asses and reserve my right to withdraw that empathy if I think they don't deserve it - and I've developed a very low tolerance for people who annoy me these days - if we can't take care of each other, then there really isn't much point. If my dogma is to defer to marginalized people when they say something is abusive, I don't have a problem with that.

Auld-Bod

That's weird! On the other hand, I've just come with a hair breath's of committing to do a masters degree, part of which would have involved an all expenses paid two weeks in Dublin. I've been second guessing my motivations about that. Maybe it was the free trip.....

To owe something to someone in this basis assumes the existence of a score keeper. That certainly can't be a human as this entity would need to be objective (not to mention immortal and all-seeing) which a human could never be. So at this point you are essentially relying on a cosmic being for this score keeping. Which might very well be that case for you but unless you can prove its existence this brings us to a stopping point which we cannot overcome.

As for whiteness it wasn't something that existed here initially but you're spot on with the class system imported from europe. The first slaves in north america could own property, make use of the legal system, mingle with europeans and even buy their freedom. They and the indentured servants were essentially of the same class at that point. Only their eventual cooperation in opposition to colonial governments made the creation of race as a means of separation a necessity for those governments and their successors.

Nobody's keeping score. It's called having a little courtesy.It goes a long way.

By the 1650s with the Slave codes in Virginia, slaves had no rights whatsoever and the bulk of chattel slavery happened after this.

Courtesy is completely subjective. What is courteous in one place is incredibly rude somewhere else. That's not a solid basis to act from.

The Virginia slave codes were enacted in 1705 and explicitly set the basis for what would become the system of racial supremacy, a new idea altogether. But this was in response to things like Bacon's rebellion. These laws are the artificial basis on which the "organic" cultural norms of racial supremacy were based on. The actions of classes and institutions preceded the actions of culture which had to have their conditions created in the first place before they could take hold. The indentured servants did not voluntarily separate themselves, they had to be forced via a legal system. Only later did it appear to be their voluntary actions which led to that continued separation.

Unless you're in a completely foreign culture, what is courteous or not is easy to know. You may not like the word, so what about settling for "treating everyone like human beings"?

The first of the Virginia slave codes were enacted into law in the 1650s, before the Bacon rebellion. Although it is true that Bacon's rebellion was an uprising which involved people of all races, slaves and indentured servants alike, it was not exactly a liberation movement. Bacon himself was a wealthy landowner with an immense personal, political rivalry between himself and the Virginia governor and the rebellion was in essence about demands that landowners be allowed to native people from their lands and settle them. The rebellion's manifesto proposed the extermination of all indigenous people. The motivations of the slaves and indentured servants who took part in this rebellion were more likely to be about gaining their freedom than exterminating the natives. There was certainly evidence of a good deal of co-operation between slaves and w/c white people in the early settled America but at the same time it was by no means universal. I'm pretty sure that white supremacy was a thing before the laws enacted in response to Bacon's rebellion, look at Columbus or any other European settler colonist. Like class hierarchies, it was also an import.