Reading and writing

Reconstructing Racial Identities

Author(s): K. Anthony Appiah

Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 68-72

Published by: Indiana University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3820309

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FORUM

Reconstructing Racial Identities

K. Anthony Appiah

The main theoretical gap in In My Father's House-in the opinion, at least, of its author-is the lack of a proposed alternative to the account of identity in the black diaspora that the book criticizes.' The pseudo- biological essentialist account of black identity is, in my judgment, now generally understood to be untenable; what is lacking is an alternative positive account of black identity. In the book I criticized the biological account as a proposed basis for identities in the continent as well: but I offered, in the chapter on "African Identities," some suggestions for a positive basis for a range of continentally based mobilizations of Africa as what I called "a vital and enabling badge." But what I had to say about diasporic identities was, to put it kindly, perfunctory. Katya Azoulay's critique of my work ("Outside Our Parents' House: Race, Culture, and Identity" in RAL 27.1 [1996]: 129-42) identifies this theoretical gap and rightly draws attention to it. Let me offer at least a sketch of an approach.2

In early American history, the label "African" was applied to many of those who would later be thought of as "Negroes," by people who may have been under the impression that Africans had more in common culturally, socially, intellectu- ally, religiously, than they actually did. Neither of these kinds of errors, however, stopped the labeling from having its effects. As slavery in North America became racialized in the colonial period, being identified as an African, or, later, as a Negro, carrying what Du Bois called the "badge of color," had those predictable negative consequences, which he so memorably captured in the phrase: the "social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult" (117).

If we follow the badge of color, from "African" to "Negro" to "Colored Race" to "Black" to "Afro-American" to "African-American" (and this ignores such fascinating detours as the route by way of "Afro-Saxon"), we are thus trac- ing the history not only of a signifier, a label, but also a history of its effects. At any time in this history there was, within the American colonies and the United States that succeeded them, a massive consensus, both among those labeled black and among those labeled white, as to who, in their own communities, fell under which labels. (As immigration from China and other parts of the "Far East" occurred, an Oriental label came to have equal stability.) There was, no doubt, some "passing"; but the very concept of passing implies that, if the relevant fact about the ancestry of these individuals had become known, most people would have taken them to be traveling under the wrong badge.

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K. Anthony Appiah 69

The result is that there are at least three sociocultural objects in America- Blacks, Whites, and Orientals-whose membership at any time is relatively-and increasingly-determinate. These objects are historical in this sense: to identify all the members of these American races over time, you cannot seek a single criterion that applies equally always; you can find the starting point for the race- the subcontinental source of the population of individuals that defines its initial membership-and then apply at each historical moment the criteria of intertem- poral continuity that apply at that moment to decide which individuals in the next generation count as belonging to the group. There is from the very beginning until the present, at the heart of the system, a simple rule that very few would dispute even today: Where both parents are of a single race, the child is of the same race as the parents.3

The criteria applicable at any time may leave vague boundaries. They cer- tainly change, as the varying decisions about what proportion of African ancestry made on black or the current uncertainty as to how to assign the children of White- Yellow "miscegenation" demonstrates. But they always definitely assign some people to the group and definitely rule out others; and for most of America's history, the class of people about whom there was uncertainty (are the Florida Seminoles black or Indian?) was relatively small (see Mulroy).

Once the racial label is applied to people, ideas about what it refers to, ideas that may be much less consensual than the application of the label, come to have their social effects. But they have not only social effects but psychological effects as well: and they shape the ways people conceive of themselves and their projects. In particular, the labels can operate to shape what I call "identification": the process through which an individual intentionally shapes her projects-including her plans for her own life and her conception of the good-by reference to avail- able labels, available identities.

Identification is central to what Ian Hacking once called "Making Up People." Drawing on a number of examples, he defended what he called a "dynamic nominalism," which argues "that numerous kinds of human beings and human acts come into being hand in hand with our invention of the categories of labeling them" (87). I have just articulated a dynamic nominalism about a kind of person that is currently usually called "African-American."

Because the ascription of racial identities-the process of applying the label to people, including ourselves-is based on more than intentional identification that there can be a gap between what a person ascriptively is and the racial iden- tity they perform: it is this gap that makes passing possible.

Race is, in this way, like all the major forms of identification that are central to contemporary identity politics: female and male; gay, lesbian, and straight; black, white, yellow, red, and brown; Jewish-, Italian-, Japanese-, Korean- American; even that most neglected of American identities, class. There is, in all of them, a set of theoretically committed criteria for ascription, not all of which are held by everybody, and which may not be consistent with each other even in the ascriptions of a single person; and there is then a process of identification in which the label shapes the intentional acts of (some of) those who fall under it.

It does not follow from the fact that identification shapes action, shapes life-plans, that the identification itself must be thought of as voluntary. I don't recall ever choosing to identify as a male4; but being-male has shaped many of my

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70 Research in African Literatures

plans and actions. In fact, where my ascriptive identity is one of which almost all of my fellow citizens agree, I am likely to have little sense of choice about whether the identity is mine-though I can choose how central my identification with it will be; choose, that is, how much I will organized my life around that identity. Thus, if I am among those (like the unhappily labeled "straight-acting gay men," or most American Jews) who are able, if they choose, to escape ascrip- tion, I may choose not to take up a gay or a Jewish identity, though this will require concealing facts about myself or my ancestry from others.

If, on the other hand, I fall into the class of those for whom the consensus on

ascription is not clear-as among contemporary so-called "biracials," or bisexu- als, or those many white Americans of multiple identifiable ethnic heritages (see Waters)-I may have a sense of identity options: but one way I may exercise them is by marking myself ethnically (as when someone chooses to wear an Irish pin) so that others will then be more likely to ascribe that identity to me.

Collective identities differ, of course, in lots of ways; the body is central to race, gender, and sexuality, but not so central to class and ethnicity. And, to repeat an important point, racial identification is simply harder to resist than ethnic iden- tification. The reason is twofold. First, racial ascription is more socially salient: unless you are morphologically atypical for your racial group, strangers, friends, officials are always aware of it in public and private contexts, always notice it, almost never let it slip from view. Second-and again both in intimate settings and in public space-race is taken by so many more people to be the basis for treating people differentially.

This much about identification said, we can see that Du Bois's analytical problem was that he believed that for racial labeling of this sort to have the obvi- ous real effects that it did have-among them, crucially, his own identification with other black people and with Africa-there must be some real essence that held the race together. Our account of the history of the label reveals that this is a mistake: once we focus, as Du Bois almost saw, on the racial badge-the signifier rather than the signified, the word rather than the concept-we see both that the effects of the labeling are powerful and real and that false ideas, muddle and mis- take and mischief, played a central role in determining both how the label was applied and to what purposes.

This, I believe, is why Du Bois so often found himself reduced, in his attempts to define race, to occult forces: if you look for a shared essence you won't get anything, so you'll come to believe you've missed it, because it is super- subtle, difficult to experience or identify; in short, mysterious. But if, as I say, you understand the sociohistorical process of construction of the race, you'll see that the label works despite the absence of an essence.

Perhaps, then, we can allow that what Du Bois was after was the idea of racial identity, which I shall roughly define as:

a label, R, associated with ascriptions by most people (where ascription involves descriptive criteria for applying the label); and identifications by those who fall under it (where identification implies a shaping role for the label in the intentional acts of the possessors, so that they sometimes act as an R);

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K. Anthony Appiah 71

where there is a history of associating possessors of the label with an inherited racial essence (even if some who use the label no longer believe in racial essences).

In fact, we might argue that racial identities could persist even if nobody believed in racial essences, provided both ascription and identification continue.

There will be some who will object to my account that is does not give racism a central place in defining racial identity: it is obvious, I think, from the history I have explored, that racism has been central to the development of race-theory. In that sense racism has been part of the story all along. But you might give an account of racial identity in which you counted nothing as a racial essence unless it implied a hierarchy among the races5; or unless the label played a role in racist practices. I have some sympathy with the former strategy; it would fit easily into my basic picture. To the latter strategy, however, I make the philosopher's objec- tion that it confuses logical and causal priority: I have no doubt that racial theo- ries grew up, in part, as rationalizations for mistreating blacks, Jews, Chinese, and various others. But I think it is useful to reserve the concept of racism, as opposed to ethnocentric or simply inhumanity, for practices in which a race concept plays a central role. And I doubt you can explain racism without first explaining the race concept.

I am in sympathy, however, with an animating impulse behind such propos- als: which is to make sure that here in America we do not have discussions of race

in which racism disappears from view. As I pointed out, racial identification is hard to resist in part because racial ascription by others is so insistent; and its effects-especially the racist ones-are so hard to escape. It is obvious, I think, that the persistence of racism means that racial ascriptions have negative conse- quences for some and positive consequences for others-creating, in particular, the white skin privilege that it is so easy for people who have it to forget; and it is clear, too, that for those who suffer from the negative consequences, racial iden- tification is a predictable response, especially where the project it suggests is that the victims of racism should join together to resist it.

NOTES

1. This is the burden of Lucius Outlaw's ongoing critique of my work-and I should like to acknowledge here my gratitude for his persistence against what must seem to him my invincible ignorance.

2. This account is to be found in more detail in the second part of my essay in Appiah and Gutmann.

3. This differentiates race in the United States from its operations in Brazil, where color (which can be shared by parents without being inherited by their children) is more determinative.

4. That I don't recall it doesn't prove that I didn't, of course. 5. This is the proposal of a paper on "Metaphysical Racism" by Berel Lang at the New

School for Social Research seminar on "Race and Philosophy" in October 1994, from which I learned much.

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72 Research in African Literatures

WORKS CITED

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father's House. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. and Amy Gutmann. Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Harcourt, 1940. Rept. with intro. by Herbert Aptheker. Milwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1975.

Hacking, Ian. "Making Up People." Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy. Ed. Edward Stein. New York: Routledge, 1992. 69-88. Rept. from Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought. Ed. Thomas Heller, Morton Sousa, and David Wellbury. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1986.

Mulroy, Kevin. Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech UP, 1993.

Water, Mary C. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

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