The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity

4. “Becoming” White: Race, Reality, and Agency

I have suggested that much of the discourse on the relation between race and biology is mired in positivism. In other words, it is presumed that, in order for something to be biologically real, it will admit of necessary and sufficient conditions that effectively carve nature up “at its joints” in a way that is mind-independent. This is a manifestation of the politics of purity insofar as it demands of biological taxonomy that it produce discrete groupings with clear and distinct boundaries, in that it takes biological reality to be distinct from cultural production, and in its appeal to these distinctions to account for liberty in terms of the internal and necessary versus the external and contingent. By making this reference to positivism, I am alluding quite clearly to the phenomenological tradition, and this is because that tradition provides such rich resources (though I do not mean to imply that it does so exclusively) for resisting the politics of purity and articulating a more liberatory vision of racial reality. phenomenology and the ontology of race Phenomenology, from Husserl on, has been characterized first and foremost by a commitment to placing human consciousness at the center of philosophical investigation. Since consciousness is understood as fundamentally 4 “Becoming” White: Race, Reality, and Agency a kind of directed openness—consciousness must always be consciousness of something—phenomenology as a philosophical approach entails two important aspects. First, consciousness must be understood more as an activity than as a state or property, and in so doing we must recognize the extent to which attending to an object of consciousness is not a matter of the passive reception of information or impressions, but is always to a greater or lesser extent an active project of meaning making. Acts of perception, for example, always entail an active moment on the part of the perceiving agent. She does not simply receive perceptual stimulus as static and pregiven quanta of data but rather she sorts, interprets, and apprehends the objects of her perception as (meaningful) objects. Second, since consciousness itself is always this kind of open activity, its own meaning and content is always just beyond our grasp, and thus the task of understanding can never be complete. It is for this reason that Husserl has been referred to as the Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (Natanson 1973). It is in this sense of phenomenology as an infinite task that it can, in Husserl’s view, achieve true scientific rigor. According to Dermot Moran: For Husserl, the ideal of science and its achievements can only be understood when the subjective acts giving rise to the scientific outlook are themselves examined and clarified as to their nature, and when their subjective and cultural specificities are taken into account. Phenomenology , for Husserl, was precisely the dream of a science which would keep the guiding ideal of rationality operative in the sciences secured in the clarification of the fundamental meaning-constituting acts of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. (2000, 145–46) Phenomenology, in the Husserlian tradition, is thus at its heart an effort to keep science honest with itself. Rather than assuming that proper science is conducted in such a way that any given investigator can stand in for any other, Husserl is inviting us to take seriously the way in which the particularities of our subjectivity, and especially the particularities of our specific bodies, condition our epistemic efforts (Husserl 1970, 217–18). The point is not, however, to demonstrate the relativism of science or endorse some version of skepticism but rather to enhance the rigor of scientific endeavor by making the status of science itself, as a fundamentally human exercise, an object of rational inquiry. In this way, phenomenology’s insights about science 107 “Becoming” White: Race, Reality, and Agency are very much in keeping with recent developments in feminist epistemology and philosophy of science (see Code 1991; Longino 2001). We can better understand the world by taking seriously the peculiarities of the act of understanding itself as it is, and must always be, manifest in a particular subject. Thus, if I seek to understand a phenomenon, I must make it the object of my consciousness. But as an activity, my consciousness of the object is itself a phenomenon that impacts the meaning of the original phenomenon I am seeking to understand. Thus I must attend not only to the phenomenon in question but...