{"id":41215,"date":"2015-05-25T01:52:03","date_gmt":"2015-05-25T01:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=41215"},"modified":"2015-05-25T01:52:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-25T01:52:03","slug":"blackness-and-blood-interpreting-african-american-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=41215","title":{"rendered":"Blackness and Blood: Interpreting African American Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blackness and Blood: Interpreting African American Identity<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Philosophy & Public Affairs<\/a>
\nVolume 32, Issue 2<\/a> (April 2004)
\npages 171-192
\nDOI: 10.1111\/j.1088-4963.2004.00010.x<\/a><\/p>\n

Lionel K. McPherson<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of Philosophy
\nTufts University, Medford, Massachusetts<\/em><\/p>\n

Tommie Shelby<\/a><\/strong>, Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy
\nHarvard University<\/em><\/p>\n

In his Tanner Lectures, \u201cThe State and the Shaping of Identity,\u201d Kwame\u00a0Anthony Appiah<\/a> defends a version of liberalism that would give the\u00a0state a substantial role in deliberately sustaining, reshaping, and even\u00a0creating the social identities of its citizens\u2014our identities as African\u00a0American, women, Hispanic, gay, Jewish, and the like. He calls this\u00a0role \u201csoul-making,\u201d which is \u201cthe political project of intervening in\u00a0the process of interpretation through which each citizen develops an\u00a0identity with the aim of increasing her chances of living an ethically\u00a0successful life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Appiah believes that an ethically successful life is integral to an objectively\u00a0good life. \u201cA life has gone well,\u201d he tells us, \u201cif a person has mostly\u00a0done for others what she owed them (and thus is morally successful) and\u00a0has succeeded in creating things of significance and in fulfilling her\u00a0ambitions (and is thus ethically successful).\u201d He supports a liberal\u00a0democratic, soul-making state that not only would seek to protect\u00a0persons from harming themselves but also would seek to promote for\u00a0citizens the kinds of lives that are good or valuable, perhaps even if these\u00a0citizens failed to recognize how such governmental interventions would\u00a0contribute to their objective well-being.<\/p>\n

According to Appiah, our social identities can themselves be a major\u00a0obstacle to our pursuit of an ethically successful life. This is likely to\u00a0happen when a social identity is incoherent, when it has \u201ca set of norms\u00a0associated with it, such that, in the actual world, attempting to conform\u00a0to some subset of those norms undermines one\u2019s capacity to conform to\u00a0others.\u201d He believes that many existing social identities are incoherent\u00a0in just this way. Further, he maintains that people who suffer from an\u00a0incoherent social identity should want to be suitably informed about its\u00a0incoherence, because social identities are among the tools with which\u00a0we shape and give meaning to our lives. \u201cThe incoherence of a social\u00a0identity,\u201d he argues, \u201ccan lead to incoherence in individual identities: to\u00a0someone\u2019s having an identity that generates projects and ambitions that\u00a0undermine one another.\u201d In previous writings Appiah advocated tolerance,\u00a0not state soul-making, for confused or incoherent social identities.\u00a0But here he argues that, when ordinary dissemination of the\u00a0relevant facts fails to reform faulty social identities, it may be legitimate\u00a0for the state to intervene in order to increase the chances that citizens\u00a0will attain their autonomous ethical aims…<\/p>\n

…The case that Appiah makes to demonstrate the incoherence of African\u00a0American racial identity proceeds as follows. He argues that the\u00a0common-sense criteria for ascribing African American racial identity are\u00a0inconsistent with the facts. This argument rests on the claim that many\u00a0Americans, including most African Americans, accept the so-called one-drop\u00a0rule<\/a> for black racial designation: a person is black if and only if she\u00a0has at least one traceable black ancestor. The rule has the peculiar consequence that some African Americans may be physically indistinguishable\u00a0from whites….<\/p>\n

…In trying to make sense of African American attitudes about their\u00a0racial identity and its relation to their ethical aims, it may be more revealing\u00a0to work from observed social practices to conceptual commitments,\u00a0rather than the other way around. As a thought experiment, imagine a\u00a0group of persons who regard themselves as belonging to the same race\u00a0and who live within a larger multiracial society. Further suppose that\u00a0within this racial community, call it the \u201cblack nation,\u201d racial essentialism\u00a0is both widely accepted and treated as practically important.\u00a0We would expect the lives of such a people to be, in some significant\u00a0respects, structured around this shared belief and joint practical\u00a0concern. Within the black nation there would be sharply defined, public\u00a0criteria for racial identity. Community leaders would seek to regulate\u00a0carefully the criteria for proper racial ascription. Using these criteria,\u00a0members of the community would closely track the racial lineage\u2014for\u00a0instance, at birth and marriage\u2014of fellow members. There would probably\u00a0be norms against both interracial marriage and interracial sex,\u00a0given the latter\u2019s propensity to produce hybrid offspring. Members of\u00a0the black nation would not only contest any assertion or suggestion that blacks are naturally inferior but also would insist on the recognition of\u00a0the natural, i.e., biologically based, virtues of blackness. There would\u00a0be commercial enterprises whose business consisted in researching the\u00a0racial ancestry of prospective political leaders, spouses, and in-laws.\u00a0Terms such as \u201cmulatto<\/a>,\u201d \u201cquadroon<\/a>,\u201d and \u201coctoroon<\/a>\u201d (or their functional\u00a0equivalents) would be the standard nomenclature for referring to interracial\u00a0progeny, rather than the more vague terms \u201cmixed race\u201d and\u00a0\u201cmultiracial\u201d that now have some currency; and these designations\u00a0would not be understood as falling under the racial category \u201cblack,\u201d as\u00a0this would be a misnomer. Dissemination of the facts about the prevalence\u00a0of passing<\/a> and interracial reproduction would be cause for alarm,\u00a0not merely surprise, within the black nation…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blackness and Blood: Interpreting African American Identity Philosophy & Public Affairs Volume 32, Issue 2 (April 2004) pages 171-192 DOI: 10.1111\/j.1088-4963.2004.00010.x Lionel K. McPherson, Associate Professor of Philosophy Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts Tommie Shelby, Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy Harvard University In his Tanner Lectures, \u201cThe State and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,6941,20],"tags":[3222,20114,9859,3223],"class_list":["post-41215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-philosophy","category-usa","tag-lionel-k-mcpherson","tag-lionel-mcpherson","tag-philosophy-public-affairs","tag-tommie-shelby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}