That younger self was almost eight years ago. When I penned the essay I criticize here, I was only a few weeks away from my appearance on Project Censored 94.1 KPFA Berkeley and several other markets in California and nationwide (you can listen to the show here)). On that show, I made a rebuttal to anti-Black Lives Matter commentaries, in particular a July 9, 2016 op-ed by Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald, “The Myths of Black Lives Matter,” published in the The Wall Street Journal. I was invited to be a guest because of an op-ed, “Changing the Subject From the Realities of Death by Cop,” published in the July 20, 2016 issue Truthout.
I have since walked back my critique of Mac Donald’s work (see, e.g., my June 2019 essay The Problematic Premise of Black Lives Matter). More than this, I now find her analysis compelling, confirmed by careful empirical scholarship (see my review of the literature in a June 2020 essay, The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters). I will not rehearse my thoughts on the question of racism in the criminal justice system in today’s contribution. Instead, I critique my July 20, 2016 essay titled Identity and Possibility when I was on the cusp of my awakening. Over the next few years, reconsideration of my inventory of opinions, accelerated by my experience in Sweden during the summer of 2018, would shake me out of the progressive bubble my existence as a university professor had me floating in. This process would see me find my way home to my core liberal sensibilities and renew my commitment to scientific materialism.
Standing back, the spirit of “Identity and Possibility” moves in the right direction; however, the language used reflects my socialization (on reflection what I thought was survival) in the woke factory of higher education. In a dialectical fashion, the critique will correct errors and highlight what remains correct. My hope is that this will serve to illustrate the process an increasing number of those who identify as “on the left” are going through, rediscovering leftwing populism and the centrality of democratic-republicanism to the ethic of individualism, self-governance, and self-actualization. The words in italics are from the original essay. I include all the text here unaltered, but if you wish to read the piece as you would find it, here’s the link again: Identity and Possibility.
We are born without any labels. Depending on when and where a person is born, a number of labels are assigned. I did not choose to be white. I did not choose to be a boy (and, now, a man). I did not choose to be heterosexual. I did not choose to be an American. All of these labels represent historically-variable and socially-constructed things that, taken together, comprise identity. The identity is imposed and learned. There is nothing essential about these categories. They are, nonetheless, social facts.
Perhaps “label” isn’t the right word (see Othering Through Labeling). For this essay, I will substitute for it the term identity. That’s what I meant, I think. We are born with an identity, some features of which indicate objective reality, while other features are ascribed, or assigned. (The word “label” makes identity feel too subjective.) A man’s core identity is not what or who one thinks he is but what and who he is. I did not choose to be white, this is true; whiteness is an ascribed status and I cannot jettison it. Whiteness is not an assignment. Same with ethnicity. My origin will forever be American (just as my wife, who is a US citizen, will forever be Swedish). Race and nation are, to be sure, historical things. As such, they are socially constructed things to a significant extent. At the same time, the constellation of phenotypic characteristics that make up my racial identity are rooted in biology. Natural history is not socially constructed.
I was not assigned male at birth, even if that status is significantly ascribed in the sense that it is not achieved (although some men could be better at manhood). However, even if aspects of my gender are ascribed, my identity as a man is a natural fact that cannot be changed. It is true, then, that I did not choose to be a boy and now a man, but not in the way I suggest in the essay. Being a man is not an imposition that I learned to live with. Neither is my whiteness. Race and gender are essential categories, as well as what French sociologist Émile Durkheim calls “social facts” (that is, in their relations and roles). I cannot change my core identity even if I might wish to resist the social impositions associated with them. (Gender comes with essential features that run much deeper than those that come with race. I am a distinct genotype relative to my female counterpart.)
At the time I wrote “Identity and Possibility,” I would likely have told you with some caveats that gender was assigned but changeable. This was before my gender critical current self. Back then, I thought the “T” in LGBTQ was gay adjacent. I did not know the “Q” was a methodology of transgressing the normative boundaries that, among other things, safeguard children (I will be dropping a lengthy essay on the methodology of queering soon). Then, in this process of awakening I am describing, I investigated the origins of gender ideology. No rational person survives that journey with the same mind he had when he began it.
This is why so many people cover their eyes and plug their ears of keep their mouths shut. Self-education is understandably scary; even the dimly aware intuitively worry that if one opinion falls, then many more may follow. As opinions as rationalizations fall away, the falsity of the negative heuristics that protect the hard core of the system becomes naked and a change of paradigm may occur (borrowing language here from Hungarian philosopher of science Imre Lakatos). Paradigm shift is for many people a terrifying prospect because it usually means alienation from the tribe.
I could emphasize the labels assigned to me and embrace an identity that I did not choose. If I embrace my white heterosexual male identity, and pursue this as a politics, then I become racist, sexist, and heterosexist person. Yet, as a person who is forced to wear the white heterosexual man label whether I embrace it or not, I am still marked as an oppressor. I must take the blame for something I did not choose to be. If I attempt to refuse to wear the label, then I am denying my privilege. Thus, I am not even allowed to complain about this situation, because to do so is an expression of privilege.
I am wrong to say that I would be a racist, heterosexist, and sexist person if I embrace my white heterosexual male identity. Obviously, it would be absurd to reject my heterosexuality. Indeed, at 62 years of age, I still lean into it every chance I get. When I wrote this essay, I would described myself as “antiracist” (and “antifascist,” “antitheist,” etc.), believing along with other proponents of critical race theory (albeit with less zealotry) that it was not enough to be neutral on the question—one had to be something of a race traitor and actively denounce his white male privilege. As the race hustlers tell us: “One cannot be a non-racist in a racist world.” I am ashamed to admit that I used to believe this. Am I still an atheist and an ardent opponent of fascism and racism? Of course. These commitments have only been deepened.
When I look back at this essay, part of me is embarrassed to have written it. I have had to resist the urge to unpublish the essay. I didn’t even remember it until the other day when searching for a recent post Facebook returned what would become the essay. Lemons into lemonade, I suppose. At any rate, it is true that, whether I reject or embrace my identity, I will be forced to suffer the consequences of that identity. White men have become the bane of existence for those keen on othering themselves. Even if I deny this in the next paragraph, there are those who will try to force me onto the horns of a false dilemma—that if I deny white privilege I express white privilege. Damned if you do….
However, I am not stuck on the horns of a dilemma. I can choose to be an person who criticizes and struggles against the oppressive structures that have made me a white heterosexual man. This is morally compelling because these are the same structures that make a person a black homosexual woman, with all the forms of oppression that come with those labels. I can recognize, to take one of those labels, that we do not live in a colorblind society while, at same time, believe that it would be desirable to live in a society where color labels are no longer applied and carry no meaning except as facts in history books.
On the bright side, you can see movement in my thought. I am still (self)shackled by the imposition of identity back then, which is to say that constructed identity portrayed in the woke scheme of oppressor-oppressed, but I wish for a world in which identity no longer matters. After all, I am not responsible for being born the way I am. Today, I would put it this way: I wish for a world in which identities are no longer used to advance the woke schemes that breed antipathy towards individuals based on the unchosen parts of their identities. (See my July 2020 essay The New Left’s War on Imaginary Structures of Oppression in Order to Hide the Real Ones; see also The Origin and Character of Antiracist Politics.)
We were recently treated to an example of the kind of thinking I am criticizing here, albeit I assure you I was never this bad (my voluminous writings back me up on this), but sometimes a ridiculous example illustrates the point in an immediate and unambiguous way. So here is The View’s Sunny Houston arguing that Caitlin Clark’s popularity is due to several privileges: racial, appearance, and height.
I have come to wonder whether those who are oppressed by the imposed categories of a multilayered system of oppression are actually pursuing radical politics by embracing the labels assigned to them and retreating into groups based on them. I understand why Martin Luther King, Jr., in combating the psychological trauma of white supremacy, told children that their skin was beautiful. But was King seeking to reify the prevailing racial categories and build a new society based on the color differences the oppressor originally developed to maintain the capitalist order? No. Clearly he wasn’t. So why are others?
My thinking is moving even further in the right direction in this passage. I want for everybody, as did MLK, Jr., the lifting of the imposition of the ideological commitments ascribed to the categories of identity that we cannot change. Putting this another way, why organize society around the phenotypic differences the ruling class emphasizes as a fundamental part of its exploitation of labor? To be sure, we must continue to recognize gender to safeguard girls and women from male oppression, but the reality underpinning this safeguarding is irrelevant to the question of race given its qualitatively different biological character. Nor does it make any sense to organize society on the basis of sexual orientation (not to be confused with gender identity). Who cares who loves who or what men consensually do behind closed doors?
Am I allowed the observation that none of these labels are essential and to express a desire for a world in which there are no labels? Or am I making an error in thinking this is, or for wanting it to be possible? If the latter, what is my error?
My final paragraph is wrong in denying that identity in some of its features is essential, but I have explained this already, and the spirit here is righteous in its desire for a world in which the unchosen pieces of identity is no reason to restrict freedom or limit self-actualization. Nor should opinion trigger such restrictions and limitations. As Thomas Jefferson told the Danbury Baptist Church, government can only reach action (see my post The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom where I embed Jefferson’s 1802 remarks in sharing passages from Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, enacted into state law on January 16, 1786).
We might say that, although my head was a bit muddled in the summer of 2016, my heart was in the right place, except that is not exactly correct. More accurately, the university life, being something akin a total institution (not completely but pretty damn close), graduate school programming coupled with the obligations that come with tenure had me somewhat at a disadvantage in the emerging age of woke politics. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells us (see the YouTube clip above), 2016 was only a few years after the cultural revolution—with its cancelling and safetyism—was becoming palpable. Swept up in the social currents while stationed at one of the core nodes of knowledge production, I was pushed to a point where I found elements of the worldview I had uncritically accepted incredulous. This would not have happened is my rational self was still present and critically taking it all in. I found my way out. I am not sure everybody can.
There is much more to the story of my intellectual and political evolution. Obviously. Awakening is a process. My blog documents this. Perhaps this essay isn’t as significant of a moment of self-reckoning that I find it today. In hindsight, however, given the drastic shift in several of my positions only a few years later, triggered by my horror at seeing firsthand Sweden’s sharp decline in the wake of the Islamic invasion, I believe it was. Thanks for reading my blog. I commit to you that I will always be honest with you when I make errors in thinking.
freedom and reason 