Well.
Discussing Bruce Jenner’s imminent transition to Caitlyn Jenner a few weeks ago, I made the following observation:
But he thinks of himself as female, and that is bound to set up exhausting internal tensions. Surely, rather than disdain, we owe respect to those who have lived with those tensions and thrived in spite of them.
As I mull this over, something else occurs to me. Jenner has expressed a desire, for now, to be referred to as a male; presumably, that will change at some point in the future, and he will ask that he be referred to as a female, and by whatever new name he gives himself. As an editorial matter, and mindful of the difficulties he has overcome along the way, I see no reason why his wishes should not be respected.
But here’s the thing: After all of Michael Jackson’s famous bleachings, could it ever be appropriate, if it were editorially relevant, to speak of him as a ‘white man?’ Something about that bugs me, though I can’t say what exactly, and I think I would resist doing it, though I can’t say why exactly. A binary block of my own? Dunno.
The matter is before us now in the case of Rachel Dolezal, a (just resigned) NAACP official in Washington who was born ‘white’ but identifies as ‘black,’ and who undertook to change her appearance in order to — What? Pass?
There is a lot here to think about, and it doesn’t parse easily.
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Almost universally, science and medicine accept that gender identity and sexual orientation are real things, innate and irrevocable settings in our individual operating systems. With equal unanimity, science and medicine reject the concept of race as objectively meaningful. So glib comparisons of Jenner to Dolezal don’t stand up; Jenner really is in some sense — plumbing be damned — a woman. But none of us are white or black or any other handy identifier; we are homo sapiens.
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But … wait. Those persons we identify as black have a well-documented propensity for sickle cell anemia. Is that natural selection at work then, with cultural pressures toward black unions reinforcing and isolating a genetic trait?
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As a child in school, in the years before the civil rights movement really formed-up, my social studies text book spoke of three major people groups: Caucasians, Asians, Ethiopians. Is that still a staple of early education? I don’t know. What was that actually about, anyway?
I have seen North Carolina textbooks from the 1930s, and they explicitly declared that Ethiopians are less intelligent, but generally stronger, than Caucasians. Reading them, one has the distinct sense that it is something like comparing my boxer dogs to the neighbor’s yappy little Yorkshire Terrier.
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We tend, I think, to conflate race and culture. Most of us (white folk, anyway) tend, for instance, to avoid visiting predominantly black neighborhoods when possible; we aren’t avoiding blacks per se, however, but the crime and violence we associate with predominantly black neighborhoods; that’s not racism so much as common-sense prudence, but tends to reinforce and exacerbate the isolation that inhered in “separate but equal.”
There are suburban Detroiters who haven’t been inside the city in decades.
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The eradication of Jim Crow laws should be counted moral progress — but there is a cloud behind that silver lining: the associated “black pride” movement doubtless slowed assimilation of blacks into the mainstream of American society. We all know what the epithet ‘Oreo’ means — and who uses it.
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Returning to race and culture, we have a black president who was born to a white woman, and who spent much of his childhood living with white grandparents in Kansas, and Barack Obama exemplifies I think the distinction I want to make between race and culture.
It’s easy to imagine standing in line with he and the girls at the local Starbucks, and the prez impatiently rolling his eyes as they try to settle upon an order. But Nicki Minaj of “you a stupid hoe” notoriety? Not so much.
Obama is in some sense — culturally, I think — like the majority of Americans, though disparaged as an Oreo during the 2008 campaign.
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It was Lyndon Johnson who demanded that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s include public accommodation protections for minorities, and for that he should be celebrated. Without it, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that blacks would still not be sitting at lunch counters here in North Carolina.
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Just yesterday the Southern Baptists, now whooping it up at their annual meeting, adopted yet another resolution urging racial reconciliation. I question the sincerity of that, given that they are an engine of the Republican Party decline into the political arm of a regional religious and racist movement; I think it is no more than cynical recognition of the fact that they are in decline and there are a lot of unexploited black people right here on their home turf. But economic forces move people much more swiftly than platitudes about brotherhood, so good.
So, then: What about Ms. Dolezal? I can no more refer to her as black than I can refer to Michael Jackson as white, even if biologists insist that the distinctions are objectively meaningless. Still got that binary block, I guess.