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On racial justice III - Identity

by Prometheus 6
August 24, 2003 - 5:49pm.
on Race and Identity

Scott Martens at Pedantry has a VERY long post on language rights, number three in the series, titled Mediation, Collectivism, Self-Development and Political Theory . With a title like that you may not expect a discussion of racism—and you're expectations would be correct. Its a discussion that weaves together some philosophical and psychological theories I've long supported into a discussion of identity, and the nature and extent of an entity. The discussion of racism enters as an example of the application of the interwoven ideas.There's a lot…a LOT…of raw material in Scott's post, and presenting each point he raises (successfully, in my opinion) more than I want to deal with, so let me give you his summary up to the point where he goes into his example:

So, let me summarize. I have advanced three principles:

  • Individual identity is not a property of bodies. It is a property of a set of relations between people and things which are centered on the body. We can identify the structures that we live in as parts of ourselves.
  • A collective is any assemblage of things, physical, symbolic or otherwise, which we can identify with a single center of cognition and action. That definition includes people, according to the first principle. We can, to some degree treat collectives the same way we treat people, even though not all collectives are people. We can assert responsibility and lay blame on collectives. Assemblages that can not be identified with a center of cognition and action can not be identified as collectives and can not be treated at all like people.
  • The right to free self-development is the standard for establishing, defending, justifying and limiting all other rights and freedoms. It is the final tool by which policies are to be judged. It is also a context-sensitive right which may mean very different kinds of policies and priorities in different times and places.
The first two are really ontological principles; only the third is genuinely normative. To this, I want to add one more normative principle:
  • Our judgments of collectives that aren't individual human beings must be according to their instrumental value in enhancing the freedom of self-development of individual human beings. These non-human collectives are not people and do not enjoy equal rights with people. They have no intrinsic value. We are free to construct them and terminate them as we see fit, guided only by the needs of free self-development.
I am privileging one kind of collective - the kind we identify as individual human beings - above all others. I have no argument to deploy in favour of this principle, although I doubt that most people will be terribly bothered by it. I don't intend to deduce it from something else. I don't think the universe privileges people in any special way, but I do.

I actually have a critique of capitalism based on this principle, but that is for another post.

From those last two sentences in particular, I suspect that Scott and I would get along famously. Anyway, he begins his example application thus:

There is a specific example from outside of language policy that this line of thought works well with: affirmative action as a form of slavery reparations. Most of the people opposed to affirmative action will point out that there is no living slave owner in America and many Americans don't even have ancestors who lived in America when there was slavery. However, even though individual slave owners are all dead, we can still attribute liabilities for slavery to various collectives: the US government, the various state governments, political parties, church organizations, even to America as a collective entity. These collectives are still alive today.

This sounds a lot like my own position. The major difference is that I don't feel affirmative action programs as envisioned by most people addresses the fundamental problem caused by racism.

The fundamental damage of racism is caused by denying the primordial need of all social animals to belong to a collective. We need to be individuals, yes. But belonging is a more fundamental need than excelling. This need is what the conditioning of slaves took advantage of, what Jim Crow took advantage of. It is what complaints about self-segregation does not recognize (Claude McKay in his autobiography correctly noted that Black people don't recognize the difference between group segregation and group aggregation). As such, social and economic inequities are tools of racism, not causes or even results of racism.

There is a question in my mind about how to address this fundamental problem. Logically, it can go either of two ways: the mainstream can accept Black people on the same terms as white people (which is NOT saying Black people must become culturally identical to the mainstream), or Black people can build institutions, identities and methods that will strengthen us against the damage caused by isolation from what we at root consider to be our nation as much as anyone else's. Rationally, as either method would work, I have no preference between them. But functionally I have to wonder if either is possible.

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