I'm not done reading ol' boy's stuff. But I got this done, so...

I stumbled into Walter Benn Michaels’ writings via blog referrals. This is both a good and bad sign. Bad, because he was holding forth in the political equivalent of the pews of an evangelical church where I would be unlikely to see his argument evolve; good, because I did eventually encounter him, as well as a collection of his work that let me compress his evolution into a couple of evenings.

My reaction is visceral on two levels. First, he applies a literary criticism approach to analyzing social and cultural activity. This entirely too cerebral approach allows one to raise arguments representing possibilities that physical reality would constrain. Second, He speculates on human nature based on the actions of the species, homo fictus…fictional man.

Homo fictus tends toward unnecessary drama. Who do you really know that acts like a character in a book (discounting attendees of Star Trek conventions)? Even an autobiographer, if honest, admits to the vagaries of memory.

An example of the problem is his treatment of race and identity in Autobiography of an Ex-White Man. Comparing a fictional human created by James Weldon Johnson in Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man to Noel Ignatiev of Race Traitor , he concludes

The ex-colored man rejects his racial identity by concealing it; the ex-white man wishes not to conceal his racial identity, but, by rejecting it, to destroy it. The ex-colored man no longer wishes to be “identified” as a “Negro”; the race traitor—perhaps by identifying himself as black—wants to cease to be white.

As a matter of experience, Black people know “passing” was simply not considered in those terms. Those who passed for reason other than economic opportunity did want their racial identity destroyed. Brother would pass brother on the street giving no sign of recognition…family members vanished, never to be heard from again. In My American Life, Price M. Cobb, writing of his childhood in Los Angeles, said

In Los Angeles, I met several of my mother’s friends from Birmingham, several who looked almost white. My mother told me that there had been many light-skinned people in her circle at home, and some of those who came to California quickly discovered they could now pass as something other than Negro. They could disappear in a crowd. For some, their lives as colored people ended and they were reborn as Greeks, Italians, or some other swarthy skin citizen of the Mediterranean. My guess is that my mother knew of only a few such people, although she often spoke as though there were dozens.

So there were those who abandoned their identity as well as those who concealed it. And the concealment was for practical, financial reasons not something so idealistic as identity.

Combining this and other erroneous extrapolations from fiction into reality, Michaels argues

We cannot think of race as a social fact, like slavery or—to take that is even more fundamental to race treason—like class. If, as Ignatiev puts it, “race, like class, is ‘something which, in fact, happens’,” then—and this is the project of race treason—it can be “made to unhappen.” I will argue that race is not like class, that it neither happens nor can it be made to unhappen. And despite those who wish to “respect and preserve” rather than abolish race, I will argue it makes no more sense to respect racial difference than it does to try to abolish it. Indeed, the very impulse to preserve race reveals the degree to which those who imagine their accounts of race are “antiessentialist” or “performative” remain, in fact, committed to racial essentialism.

And says, based on how people actually behave (a refreshing concept that I’m not sure he takes seriously)

Either race is an essence or there’s no such thing as race.

The balance of the article is a reductio ad absurdum argument that says since he cannot find definitive boundaries to racial groups those groups are undefined. He throws enough material in from multiple direction that occasionally a valid concept arises. But it’s like building an alarm clock by putting the parts in a bag and shaking it real hard…there are more efficient ways to investigate the issue.

Looking at how people behave, what race is, is an in group. I don’t know if in groups are essences but they are definitely social constructs.

So much for the main argument.

Now, let’s look at the in group that is most familiar to you: your family. Can you write up a description of your family that a stranger could use to identify them all, on any random day they chose to search them out? Of course not.

Race is a collective phenomenon and this is the reason Michaels could not find definitive boundaries to racial groups; there are none. Like every other collective phenomenon (air pressure, wave functions) the best you can get from race is probabilities, the worst…G.I.G.O.

The entire discussion is so entirely divorced from substantive reality that the only way to dispute it is to dismiss it.