{"id":53773,"date":"2017-05-04T01:53:29","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T01:53:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=53773"},"modified":"2017-05-04T01:53:29","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T01:53:29","slug":"this-is-what-a-modern-day-witch-hunt-looks-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=53773","title":{"rendered":"This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

New York Magazine<\/a>
\nDaily Intelligencer<\/a>
\n2017-05-02<\/p>\n

Jesse Singal<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nRebecca Tuvel<\/a>, a philosophy professor and the target of a protracted online pile-on<\/a>.<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

In late March, Hypatia<\/em><\/a>, a feminist-philosophy journal, published an article titled \u201cIn Defense of Transracialism<\/a>\u201d by Rebecca Tuvel<\/a>, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis<\/a>, as part of its spring 2017 issue. The point of the article, as the title suggests, is to toy around with the question of what it would mean if some people really were \u2014 as Rachel Dolezal<\/a> claimed \u2014 \u201ctransracial,\u201d meaning they identified as a race that didn\u2019t line up with how society viewed them in light of their ancestry.<\/p>\n

Tuvel structures her argument more or less as follows: (1) We accept the following premises about trans people and the rights and dignity to which they are entitled; (2) we also accept the following premises about identities and identity change in general; (3) therefore, the common arguments against transracialism fail, and we should accept that there\u2019s little apparent logically coherent reason to deny the possibility of genuine transracialism.<\/p>\n

Anyone who has read an academic philosophy paper will be familiar with this sort of argument. The goal, often, is to provoke a little \u2014 to probe what we think and why we think it, and to highlight logical inconsistencies that might help us better understand our values and thought processes. This sort of article is abstract and laden with hypotheticals \u2014 the idea is to pull up one level from the real world and force people to grapple with principles and claims on their own merits, rather than \u2014 in the case of Dolezal \u2014 baser instincts like disgust and outrage. This is what many philosophers do…<\/p>\n

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

Tuvel structures her argument more or less as follows: (1) We accept the following premises about trans people and the rights and dignity to which they are entitled; (2) we also accept the following premises about identities and identity change in general; (3) therefore, the common arguments against transracialism fail, and we should accept that there\u2019s little apparent logically coherent reason to deny the possibility of genuine transracialism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,8,6462,6941,20],"tags":[2986,26921,12972,20241,26919],"class_list":["post-53773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-philosophy","category-usa","tag-hypatia","tag-jesse-singal","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-rachel-dolezal","tag-rebecca-tuvel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53773","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=53773"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53774,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53773\/revisions\/53774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}