Race or Ethnicity?: On Black and Latino Identity 9781501727245

Table of contents :
Contents
Contributors
Preface
Race or Ethnicity? An Introduction
PART I. Racial and Ethnic Identity
1. Does Truth Matter to Identity?
2. Racial and Ethnic Identity?
3. Individuation of Racial and Ethnic Groups: The Problems of Circularity and Demarcation
4. Ethnicity, Race, and the Importance if Gender
5. Ethnic Race: Revisiting Alain Locke's Neglected Proposal
6. What Is an Ethnic Group? Against Social Functionalism
PART II: Racism,Justice, and Public Policy
7. Racial Assimilation and the Dilemma of Racially Defined Institutions
8. Comparative Race, Comparative Racisms
9. Recognizing the Exploited
10. Racial Justice, Latinos, and the Supreme Court: The Role of Law and Affect in Social Change
11.Race, Ethnicity, and Public Policy
12.Race and Political Theory: Lessons from Latin America
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Race or Ethnicity?

RACE OR ETHNICITY? On Black and Latino Identity EDITED BY jORGE]. E. GRACIA

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2007 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 5 r 2 East State Street, Ithaca, New York r 48 50. First published 2007 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2007 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Race or ethnicity? : on Black and Latino identity I edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia. p. ern. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-8014-4544-6 (cloth: alk. paper)- ISBN 978-o-8014-7359-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) r. African Americans-Race identity. 2. Hispanic Americans-Ethnic identity. 3. RacePhilosophy. 4· Ethnicity-Philosophy. I. Gracia, Jorge]. E. Erss.6zs.R32 zoo7 305.868' 073-dc22

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Contents

Contributors Preface

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Race or Ethnicity? An Introduction Jorge J E. Gracia PART I Racial and Ethnic Identity r. Does Truth Matter to Identity? Kwame Anthony Appiah 2. Racial and Ethnic Identity? J L.A. Garda J. Individuation of Racial and Ethnic Groups Jorge]. E. Gracia 4· Ethnicity, Race, and the Importance of Gender Naomi Zack 5. Ethnic Race Robert Bernasconi 6. What Is an Ethnic Group? Susana Nuccetelli

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PART II Racism,Justice, and Public Policy 7. Racial Assimilation and the Dilemma of Racially Defined Institutions Howard MrGary 8. Comparative Race, Comparative Racisms Linda Martin Alcciff

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Contents 9. Recognizing the Exploited Kenneth Slzockley IO. Racial Justice, Latinos, and the Supreme Court Eduardo Mendieta I r. Race, Ethnicity, and Public Policy J. Angelo Corlett I 2. Race and Political Theory Diego A. von Vczcano Bibliography Index

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Contributors

LINDA MARTIN ALCOFF is professor of philosophy, women's studies, and political science at Syracuse University. She is currently the director of Women's Studies. Her books and anthologies include Feminist Epistemologies (with Elizabeth Potter) (1993), Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory (1996), Epistemology: The Big Questions (1998), Thinking from the Underside of History (with Eduardo Mendieta) (2ooo), Singing in the Fire: Tales of vVomm in Philosophy (2003), and Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2oo6). KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH is Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. Among his books are In 1Vly Father's House: Africa i11 the Philosophy ~f Culture (1992), Color Conscious: The Political Morality ~{Race (withAmy Gutmann) (1996), Thinking It Through (2003), and The Ethics of Identity (2005). His most recent book is titled Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a VVorld of Strangers (2oo6); he is now finishing Experiments in Ethics, which will be published by Harvard University Press. RoBERT BERNASCONI is Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He is the author of two books on Heidegger and has written numerous articles. He is the editor of Race (2001), The Idea of Race (with Tommy Lott) (zooo), and Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy (with Sybol Cook) (2003). He has also edited three sets of reprints documenting the history of the scientific concept of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for Thoemmes Press.

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Contributors

J. ANGELO CoRLETT is professor of philosophy and ethics at San Diego State University. He is the author of numerous articles and of the following books:Justice and Rights (forthcoming); Interpreting Plato's Dialogues (zoos); Race, Racism, and Reparations (zoo 3); Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis (zoo3); Responsibility and Punishment (3 rd ed., zoo6); and Analyzing Social Knowledge (I 996). He is editor-in-chief of 17ze Journal of Ethics: An International Philosophical Review (I9panic/uitino Identity, 48tT 24. "This [i.e., Gracia's] conception of who we arc is open and pluralistic, allowing the coexistence

of other, multiple, and variegated identities." Gracia, Hisp,mic I Latino Identity, 69. 25. Ibid., 6o; Corlett, "Latino Identity," Public Jljfairs Quarterly 13 ( 1999): 273-95.

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feelings, preferences, etc.), or when I am seen as having multiple identities, then such identity becomes so contingent logically, changing temporally, that it relinquishes that aspect of identity-talk in which whatever warrants the designation as someone's "identity" must be something logically necessary, metaphysically essential, temporally fixed, deep, and comprehensive (exhausting her self). Gracia's treatment is, to my knowledge, the most rnetaphysically informed, sensitive, and meticulous elaboration of any such ethno-racial identity. 26 His discussion focuses specifically on the "panethnic" (better, multiethnic) category that he calls "Hispanic identity," but he means it to have more general application. Gracia initially spells out his membership conditions for someonc's being Hispanic, with which he seems to identifY her having a Hispanic identity, by concentrating on the person's ancestors, especially their history and geography.27 Comparing his account to Wittgenstein's famous treatment of games in terms of "family resemblance," he insists "there are no common characteristics to all those people whom we wish to call Hispanics;' only a network of similarities linking one Hispanic person to another. 28 This creates obvious tension with his claim that all Hispanics share "a common identity of a familial, historical sort." 2 For a shared ethnic identity appears to be a shared quality, insofar as an identity seems to be a quality. Even if having an identity is not having a quality, having an identity is a quality. 30 Gracia's claims pull in opposite directions: one has to go. Gracia must abandon either his antiessentialist claim that Hispanics share no features, or his claim that we share Hispanic identity. 31 Given the difficulty of identifYing such a qual-

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26. These paragraph' treating Gracia's book are excerpted and adapted from Garcia, "Is Being Hispanic an Identity?" Philosophy and Socipectives on normative issues, see Garcia, "AfricanAmerican Perspectives, Cultural Relativism, and Normative Issues," in A)Yican-Americm1 Perspectives on Biomedical Ethics, ed. Harley Flack and Edmund Pellegrino (Washington, DC Georgetown Universitv Press, 1992), rr-66. See also Garcia, "Revisiting African American Perspectives and Medical Ethics," in AfricanAmericarl Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity, cd. Lawrence l'rograis and Edmund Pellegrino (Washington. DC: Georgetown University Press, torthcoming).

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Of course, we can and must learn from our experience, whether or not shared with others similarly socially classified. However, everyone-and especially those from within stigmatized, silenced, and disadvantaged groups-ought to reject any claim that it is these groupings that constitute our identities (orAlcoff's "forms of identity"). It is not such factors that make us who we are. 57 It is moral conviction that shapes a decent person's political commitments, and mere group loyalty and conformity cannot shape the moral conviction of a sensible person. That holds whether the groupings are real or imagined, natural or artificial, subjective or intersubjective or objective, imposed from without or adopted within, resisted or embraced, malignant or strategic. Alcoff's lesson in intellectual history is instructive, but it does nothing to show that the self is somehow constituted by gender or race, as those classifications are used in rulegoverned social practices. To the contrary, in an old article of mine, and giving no thought at the time to issues of purported social identity, I built on a suggestion of John Searle's to propose that the canonical form of a statement of a constitutive rule is'S should be counted and treated as P' That requires that S exist prior to, and independent of, any rule's constitution of her as a p. It follows that constitution cannot go all the way down, contra the followers of Richard Rorty. Anyone's essence whatever it is can only preexist her social categorization and, what is difierent, her constitution as someone of this or that type. There are many other troubling positions in which Alcoff's discussion finds merit. That what I am as a self is partially influenced by external forces is no news. If, however, what I am as a self is determined by external forces, especially insofar as this includes some people's malignant designs, which is what Alcoff seems to think, then we are caught in (really, we are victims of) heteronomy of the worst sort.We are other people's creatures. That is appalling, whether or not one thinks it blasphemy. Relatedly, Alcoff's distinction between someone's public identity and her subjectivity, besides being murky and fishy, is also dispiriting and dangerous in the context of her further view that the public, in forming my public identity, also therein constructs my subjectivity, fixing its content. "The 'internal' is conditioned by, even constituted within, the 'external,' which is itself mediated by subjective negotiation. Subjectivity is indeed located." Note that the "location" of which she speaks here is my position in the social net and hierarchy that other people devise. Note also that Alcoff defines 'subjectivity' as "my own sense of myself, my lived experience of myself, or my interior life." Only the very easily pleased will find much comfort in Ale off's concession that the external forces 57. Alcoff, "Who's Afraid of!dentity Politics?" 3 r2.

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fixing my social location and therein forging my identity do so in a process that is "mediated by subjective negotiation." That is like your cheering because, when everyone jointly decides what clothes you are to wear each day, you also get a vote. Even if you got two votes where each of the rest gets only one, your situation is thoroughly heteronomous. More plainly put, you are oppressed. Only what is at stake here is not merely what you wear, but your identity, what you are. SH Alcoff thinks it "obvious that one's identity in this full sense, one's positional consciousness, will play a role in one's actions." She talks illustratively and admiringly of speakers at a political rally who "spoke as young people ... as African-Americans and Latinos ... as U.S. citizens." 59 Yet, we can ask, what is it for someone to speak as an E, that is, as a member of a certain ethnic or racial group? More important, what is it for her to reason, or believe, or feel, as one? Is it merely that she thinks or feels what she does on grounds partially affected by her belonging to that group? Alcoff says of the speakers that "their identity made a difference in what they knew about and how they approached a problem." That may be true, but it seems too modest. It will not be enough to give most partisans of robust identity politics what they want. Such partisans want these categories to dictate how we should react and what we should think. For Alcoff, "to self-identifY even by a racial or sexed designation is ... to understand one's relationship to a historical community, to recognize one's objective social location, and to participate in the negotiation of the meaning and implications of one's identity." I have no complaint, of course, with understanding or recognition. Couching either in talk of"identity," however, suggests that this historical connection and social location capture and exhaust the real self, and I find that claim unsupported, unjustified, degrading, and dangerous. (Talk instead of "multiple identities," which some prefer, may block the monopolization, but it is of doubtful coherence and threatens the self with schizophrenia and irrevocable sundering.) Alcoff claims that "a realistic identity politics ... recognizes that social categories of identity often helpfully name specific social locations from which individuals engage in, among other things, political judgment" and concludes by

58. Ibid., 336-37. Similarly, Alcoff's rather carefree adoption of Gooding-Williams's repellent distinction between someone's "being black" and her "being a black person" is outrageous both philosophically and morally. just what is the ontological, and thus moral, status of those people who are Black but do not undertake "to make choices, to formulate plans, to express concerns, etc., in light of one's identification of oneself as black?" (Alcoff, "Who's Afraid of Identity Politics'" 339- quoting GoodingWilliams) .They are, ex hyporhesi, Black. Are they. then, I3lack nonpersot.ts, Black subpcrsons? Is this where the politics of identity lead us, back to the racist's rhetorical sewers' .\(Citizenship in US. History (New Havcn:Yale Unive"ity Press, 1999). 4· Ibid., I 9· s. Mark S.Weiner, Black Trails: Citizenship .from the Begitmings of Slavery to the End of Caste (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). 6. See the classic study by Victor C. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism. From Wlzite Settlement to IM>rld Hec~ernony (New York: Verso, 2005); see also Howard Zinn's indispensable A People's History of the United States: 1492-Prescnt (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2003).Another work that still remains a breakthrough, though it has fallen off the field of vision of contemporary scholars, is Benjamin B. Ringer's massive 'We the Pe,rple' and Others: Duality and Amerim ',Treatment '!fIts Racial 1\llirwrities (New York:Tavistock, 1983).

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Edmrdo Mendieta

Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott that Blacks were inferior and thus unworthy of citizenship, and with Plessy v. Ferguson the court ruled that "separate but equal" institutions were legal, thus condemning Blacks to unequal treatment and a regim.e of apartheid segregation. In Korematsu v. United States that the court found that racial minorities could be interned on the basis of racial profiling. 7 One may argue along with Haney Lopez that the Supreme Court has contributed to the construction of race by the way in which it has made laws that have directly affected the "material geography of sociallife." 8 This is a good way of talking about race, for race must be measured and quantified by the ways in which social agents are able, or unable, to transverse the "geography" of social space. Indeed, when we speak about race, we are dealing with the ways in which racially marked social agents are either allowed or disallowed to transverse the geography of political space. Segregation, separate but equal, ghettos, prisons, and slums involve coordinates in a social topography. 9 We can discern race by the way in \vhich social space is marked and distributed. As Eric Yamamoto put it: When we talk about race in the US we are talking not just about skin color but also the cultural shape and content of our polity [that is, what Lopez called the material geography of our social life]. Color and culture, intertwined, influence who gets in (immigration), who participates politically (electoral districting and multilingual ballots), who gets incarcerated (three strikes and you're out), what languages are spoken (English only legislation), what customs are allowed (housing arrangements, spiritual practices), how educational opportunities are parceled out (slotting according to "cultural traits"), and how social services are delivered (medical care, welfare). Designations of cultural difference are used effectively by some in dominant power positions to justifY excluding racialized groups from the polity. 10

Social space, however, is also delimited and circumscribed by its social weight and density, and it is marked by what I like to call "affect," or the "emotive." Race is also a matter of affect, of how we feel about racially marked agents. If we are racist, it is not primarily because we are convinced of the validity and 7· See Eric K. Yamomoto, "Critical Race Praxis: Race Theory and Political Lawyering Practice in Post-Civil Rights America," Michigan Law Review, 95 (1997): 821-900; and Louis H. Pollak, "Race, Law, and History:The Supreme Court from Dred Scott to Grutter v. Billinger," in Daedalus:]oumal of the Amrrican Awdemy ~/Arts and Scimces 134 (2005): 2()-41. 8. Lopez, White by Lau;, 17. 9. I develop this argument at length in Eduardo Mendieta, "Plantations, Ghettos. Prisons: US Racial Geographies," Philosophy and Geopraplzy 7 (2004): 43 -6o. See also the book I co-authored with Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005). 1o. Eric K.Yamamoto, "Critical Race Praxis," 821-900.

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eloquence of racial prejudices, but often because we feel racism, we feel hostility against the racially marked. 1 1 Race and racism are primordially about atlect, about the ways in which we feel and thus emotively map social space. And the Supreme Court has contributed to the emotional education of citizens by regulating the ways in which they can be intimate. 12 As counterintuitive as this may sound, one of the most fundamental ways in which citizens are socialized as citizens is by socializing their affect, that is, by educating their emotions. Indeed, patriotism and nationalism are reflections of the way in which citizenship is related to the emotional life of citizens and a nation. 13 Citizenship is not just a matter of rights and duties; it is also an institution sustained by a series of moral assumptions and attitudes expressed in affect. Affect and the moral psychology of a polity condition and reflect each other. One may say that national character-what makes different nations and people distinguishable and discernable-is precisely the combination of affect and their corresponding moral psychology. To citizenship, therefore, corresponds a moral psychology that adds moral values to certain emotions. Emotions such as regard, respect, gratitude, admiration, solicitude, anger, fear, contempt, disgust, shame, even hate can, must, or may be experienced with regard to some members of the polity. Indeed, it is this moral psychology that the politics of virtue seeks to educate and modifY. Within this moral psychology we find respect, gratitude, sacrifice, loyalty, and deference. but also contempt, disregard, arrogance, and derogation. 14 This moral psychology regulates the way in which strangers and co-citizens interact in the life-world of democratic public space. 15 At the heart of U.S. citizenship are a series oflaws that have instigated, muted, and quieted racial affect by regulating intimacy among citizens. I argue in what follows that no decision of the Supreme Court illustrates better this insight than Brown v. Board of Education. This decision, fifty years old in 2004, epitomizes brilliantly that law contributes to the construction of race by mapping social geography and by conditioning civic affect. Law constructs race by regulating the I I. Paula M. L. Moya, "'Racism Is Not Intellectual': Interracial Friendship, Multicultural Literature, andAnti-RJcist Moral Growth,"unpubJi,hcd manuscript (200\), 1-33. 12. See Randall Kennedy. Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Pantheon, 2003); Rachel F. Moran, Interraciallnrimacy:The R~~uhiTi