Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity

2. How Real Is Race?

39 2 How Real Is Race? The Abolition of Race Few would deny that social identity has become a primary means for political action within liberal democracy. However, many bemoan this fact, and “identity politics” has become a pejorative, frequently denoting at best an unproductive approach to social change—as, for example, in Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s 2009 confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate.1 Within the academy, furthermore, a strong body of work has emerged over the past two decades in opposition to the concept of identity.2 Some critics argue that the multiplicity of identity vitiates any stable notion of the category, while others charge that many identities—and racial identity in particular—have no real referent, and therefore amount to nothing more than useless fictions. Indeed, race probably ranks among the most controversial social identities in the contemporary United States insofar as people often question its very legitimacy as a justifiable social distinction. Many in the United States cling to their own racial identity as a central part of their existence, while others consistently deny that they (or anyone else) even has a race because they see race as illusory. A quick read of Ward Connolly’s so-called Racial Privacy Initiative (which would have eliminated California’s use of race as a means of classification) reveals much about the contradictions in public discussions about race. Two clauses from the text of the failed ballot measure are worth singling out: (a) The state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin. . . . (g) Nothing in this section shall prevent law enforcement officers . . . from describing particular persons in otherwise lawful ways. Neither . . . the legislature nor any statewide agency shall require law enforcement officers to maintain records that track individuals on the basis of said classifications.3 40 · How ReAl Is RAce? Among other things, this initiative explicitly provides for the retention of racial profiling on the part of the police while freeing police departments from having to keep track of the race of the people they arrest or detain. The ballot measure, promoted using liberal, antiracist rhetoric, would thereby have frustrated all attempts to demonstrate discriminatory patterns of surveillance, arrest, or harassment by police. What ultimately swayed many white voters in California to oppose the measure, however, was not fear of police profiling, but fear of disease and a perceived need to use race to track harmful medical conditions popularly associated with biological conceptions of race.4 Race clearly matters, and yet throughout its history as a concept, it has presumed the truth of various biological fictions that have not held up to contemporary scientific scrutiny. In this chapter, I explore some of the contradictions between social and biological conceptions of the reality of race and suggest that what is needed now is creative experimentation with racial identities rather than their abandonment. Furthermore, in shaping that experimentation, people must thoroughly engage with the mutual constitution of race with gender, sexuality, and other aspects of identity. In other words, we should measure the success of creative experiments with racial identities, at least in part, by their ability to evolve an understanding of the importance of race in relation to both the multiplicity of identity and the resistance to structural forms of discrimination, domination , exploitation, and oppression. Despite notable challenges, a deep suspicion of identity in general and racial identity specifically has proven highly influential among many intellectuals in the humanities—and, as the Racial Privacy Initiative and Sotomayor hearings demonstrate, among many outside of the academy as well. (Within the field of philosophy, for example, a highly vigorous debate has taken place, primarily within African American philosophy, regarding the reality of race and its desirability as a concept. That debate, however, has not been broadly influential outside of its home discipline and has rarely considered race as a category mutually constitutive with gender and sexuality, preferring to analyze it in a state of presumed isolation .5 ) Against the current of intellectual suspicion of identity generally and racial identity specifically, I argue that racial and other identities can prove useful, productive, and transformative, and that their progressive political potential can benefit from a substantive account of their material reality in contexts of mutual constitution. How ReAl Is RAce? · 41 If social identities—understood as related to but distinct from the “self”—make a significant difference to how people live their lives, the...