Philosophy Talk: The Blog

A dialogue on Biracial Identity

posted by Ken Taylor

Tomorrow show is about biracial identity.   And I thought as a way of getting the juices flowing,  I'd write a little dialogue about some of the issues to be covered.  So here goes:

 A Black Guy (BG)  and a White Guy  (WG)  are in a bar, having drinks.  You may be tempted to think that they are John Perry and Ken Taylor -- but since I'm putting words in both people's mouths,  don't hold John responsible for any of this. 

BG:      I've been thinking a lot about biracial identities,  lately because I see that my favorite radio show,  Philosophy Talk  is about to do an episode on it.     

WG:   I wonder what they'll talk about.  I mean  thanks to Obama,  biracial is the new cool, BG.   But  I don't really see that there are  deep philosophical questions connected with the  topic of bi-racial identities raise.  Do you? 

BG:  Yeah ,  I do.   Biracial identities challenge our old understanding of race.   I think  biracial people and their struggles to constitute their identities  are beginning to push our old concepts of race to the breaking point.

WG:    This is America, dude.  Race is a reality and race isn't going anywhere anytime soon.  As a black guy, you should know that. 

BG:   Whatever do you mean by that remark?   

WG:  I mean black people experience the reality of race everyday.   White guys, like me,  tend to think of ourselves as non-racialized, as if we don't have a race.   That's a form of white privilege that you black guys don't enjoy in our racialized society.    Of course,  I'm not saying that white people are right to think of themselves as non-racialized.   It's, in fact,  part of our racial consciousness to think of ourselves as non-racialized, if that makes any sense.  

BG:  It makes lots of sense.   In America,   white is racially "unmarked."  Black is racially "marked."    if you are a member of the unmarked race, you entitle yourself to think of yourself as somehow free of race and you entitle yourself to think of  the other as the racialized other.  On other hand,  if you are part of racially marked group, you aren't so free to deny race.    And if you are one of the racially marked "others"  you are sort of confronted with your racial difference, your racial markedness at every turn.   And that gives you a distinctive form of racial consciousness.   

WG:  Er, well, something like that  -- I think.    But back to biracial people.   You said that they somehow  challenge  our old understanding of race.   But I don't see it.  Think of animal and plant species.    You can cross breed animal and plant species to produce hybrids -- sometimes stable and fertile hybrids.  But that doesn't challenge our ideas about species, does it?   In the same vein,  you  can cross breed races to produce people of biracial ancestry.   Where’s the challenge to our understanding of race in that?  I don't get it.  

BG:  But you're thinking of race as if it were analogous to biological species.   But it just isn't.   Once upon a time, people did believe that there were such things as biologically grounded racial essences.   And racial essences were supposed to distinguish people from each other in socially and morally relevant ways.  But modern biology will have none of that.

WG:  Dude,  are you really suggesting that there are no races?   Let's follow the logic of that out a little.   If there are no races, then you are not a black man, I am  not a white man, and Obama is not a man of bi-racial ancestry.  But that’s absurd isn't it?    Let me put the question to you directly.  Dude, are you now, or have you ever been,  a black man?

BG:     Of course,  I am a black man.   And you are a white man, and Barack Obama  is – well, he’s something more complicated.    Everybody thinks of him as our first black president.  But isn't he  really as much and no more a white man than he is a black man?  Why isn't he thought of as our first biracial president or even just another in a long line of white presidents?   What really makes Obama black, anyway? 

WG: Wait a minute.  Wait a minute.  You're going too fast for me.   I'm confused.    You seem to want to claim that races aren’t really real.   But you defiantly – or was it reluctantly    -- admitted  to being a black man.    What gives?  You can't have it both ways.  Either there are no races,  and you are not a black man.  Or there are races and you are a black man.  

BG:  I didn't say races aren't real.  I said they aren't biologically real.   The fact that races aren’t biologically real, doesn’t mean there’s nothing to the concept of race.  National identities aren’t biologically real, either.    But national identities can matter quite a lot in human affairs.

WG:    So you think that  race is a social reality, even if it isn't a biological reality.  I can buy that.    But then I don’t see how biracial identities push our concepts of race to the breaking point, as you claim.    Think about ethnic identities.  Does the fact of people of multiple ethnicities  push our old concepts of ethnicity to the breaking point? 

BG: Well,  I'm not sure.  But race and ethnicity are different in some ways and similar in others.    I think we need a distinction.   Let's  distinguish between race and racial identifications.  I'd like to  reserve concept of race for something that pretends to be  biologically grounded and  reserve racial identifications for something socially and culturally grounded. When I acknowledged  being a black man – and I was doing that proudly, by the way --  I wasn’t  making any claim about my biology.  I was making a claim about my social and cultural heritage. 

WG:    NOw it just sounds like racial identifications, as you are construing them,  are very much akin to ethnic identifications or national identifications.   You seem to think we've got two things going on without being very clear about them.  We've got a set of ethnicity like racial identifications and a set of would be biological racial categories.    Is there a problem with that? 

BG:    I think there is.  I think you're finally starting to get my point.     Go back to what I was saying earlier about biology and race.  Even though we now know that racial categories are biologically empty, we still have this deeply ingrained, cultural habit of identifying ourselves in racial terms.  But it turns out that our racial identifications are anchored in, well, nothing really.  Or at least they aren't anchored in the kind of thing we once thought they were.    And I think our struggle to make sense of biracial identities helps us to see that. 

WG:  I'm not sure  I'm following this.   But let me try something out to see if I catch your drift here.  Take Barack Obama, again.    What race does he belong to?   And why exactly does he belong to that race?  Is he black?  White?  Or is he something else entirely?  In the old days,   the one-drop rule told us the answer.   If you had one drop of “black blood,” then you were ipso facto black.   But that's clearly non-sensical,  especially if we're thinking of racial categories as biologically grounded.   But suppose we let culture and stuff like that be our guide.    Given Obama's quite distinctive upbringing,  you  wouldn't be wrong to think that from a social/cultural perspective he's much more of a white dude than a black dude.  

BG:  Of course,  neither blacks as a whole nor whites as a whole are cultural monoliths.   But if Obama's life story represent some strand of some typical American subculture, it's certainly not a paradigmatically black strand of the plethora of American subcultures.   I don't think anybody would deny that. 

WG:  SO what makes this guy a black dude?

BG:   He's decided that he's black and his decision counts as authentic,  I think, because he's got one black parent.   

WG:  That seems right, as far as it goes.  But it doesn't go far enough.  Ask yourself,  could Obama just decide that he is a white man, rather than a black man or a biracial man?

BG:    I think you're onto something important here.  It seems to me that   Obama’s got two, and only two socially acceptable options for his racial self-identification.    Like a rare but growing number of people who think of themselves as  a sort of multi-racial vanguard, he could  permissibly identify himself as a biracial person – full stop.   Or he could permissibly  do the more standard and  less culturally threatening thing and self-identify as black – full stop.  But we’re not yet at the point where Barack Obama is socially allowed to self-identify as white, rather than black.

WG:    What do you mean by "permissibly"  here?    He’s the goddamn  President of the United States.  He’s free to self- identify as whatever he chooses.  Remember George Bush I and his refusal to eat broccoli? 

BG:    You and I both know that Obama isn't free to self-identify as white and deny the black part of himself. First it would so radically change his political narrative that it  would be political suicide.   But politics aside, there's a much, much broader point here that gets us right to the heart of things.   Old fashioned  white people and old fahisoned black people  have a perhaps not fully conscious,  but deeply ingrained  cultural investment in  maintaining the racial status quo.  They, in effect,  try to  force biracial people into the  old comfortable and familiar  racial categories.    For some reason -- I'm not sure why -- we pigeon-hole biracial people into the socially “marked” race – in the case of black and white in America that's  the black race  --  rather than allow them into the socially unmarked race –  the white race (at least in America from its beginning until now).   

WG:   Now I finally see why you think the struggles of biracial people to constitute their identities -- racialized and non-racialized -- is a threat to our old ways of thinking.   They just don't fit.   And our attempts to make them fit distorts many things.   

BG:  That's one reason I referred to old-fashioned white people and black people.   I think maybe some younger people are beginning to see things differently.    They are willing to allow racial identifications to be as fluid and multiple as ethnic identifications. 

WG:  You're talking about the harbingers of a post-racial age.  I think I think that's a fantasy and isn't coming anytime soon.   But  this is tough stuff and my head is beginning to spin.   I think I need to listen to the upcoming episode of Philosophy Talk to get this all straightened out.  

Thoughts on the Reader

posted by Ken Taylor 

Thanks to everybody who made our  First Annual Dionysus Awards Show  such a success.  It was a lot of fun.  We got lots of  great input from our listeners.   If you haven't heard the show, be sure to check it out.  We're trying to get it picked up as pre-Oscar special by stations throughout the public radio system.  Wish us luck with that.   

Anyway,  I thought I'd follow up a bit on the discussion of one movie in particular -- The Reader.   David Thomson -- who was originally scheduled to be our guest but had to cancel at the last minute  -  had suggested to us in our preparation for the show that we  think about spending the entire hour talking about just this one film  --- I guess because he thinks that no other film from 2008 comes close the Reader in its depth and complexity.   I'm not sure I agree with that and we didn't accept the suggestion, in any case.   But I did find the movie profoundly interesting and profoundly challenging.   So I thought I'd ruminate about it a bit more in this blog entry as a follow up to our episode.  

I know that some people seem to find this film  morally reprehensible.    Manhola Dargis, writing about the Reader for the New York Times,  concludes his review with  the following:

Although the commercial imperatives that drive a movie like this one are understandable — the novel was a best seller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, for starters — you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn’t really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.

My reactions to this movie are completely at odds with this.   In my view,   the movie raises a number of profound moral questions and though it doesn't decisively answer those questions  -- what movie could -- it does explore -- in a way movies seldom do (though novels more often do) --  the space of possible answers to the questions it raises.  Let me explain what I mean.   Obviously  Hanna, aka,  Kate Winslett,  is the moral center of this movie. By the way, about Hanna,  Dargis says the following:

In the novel and the film — which monumentalizes every trembling lip and fluttering eyelash, turning human gestures into Kodak moments — Michael’s pain turns him not just into Hanna’s victim, but also a kind of survivor. Outrageously, Hanna is a victim too, because she took the guard job only to hide her illiteracy, as if illiteracy were an excuse for barbarism.

Dargis is surely right that both Michael and Hanna are represented as victims   -- he of her;  and she of something more diffuse and less pointed.   I suppose she is partly represented as a "victim"  of the German attempt to understand and come to grips with the past.   She is also, I suppose,  partly represented as the "victim"  of the Nazi system in which she was a participant.   But I don't think it's at all right  to say that the film  "excuses" Hanna's participation in the barbarism of the Holocaust because of her illiteracy.  The movie does nothing of the sort.  It is true that the movie doesn't take the morally "easy" way out of simply condemning Hanna's act. Certainly,   that would be the more superficially morally  satisfying thing to do -- to offer  (again) the simple, unambiguous, untroubled judgment that the Nazi's, and all who aided them,  were purely and simply evil barbarians.

Why would that be the  "easy"  way out, you ask?   Well,  my answer  goes back to a claim made a few years ago, on a show we did about evil,  by our guest, Peter Van Inwagen.  He argued, as I recall,  that the psychology of evil is incomprehensible to us, that true evil is  alien and "other."   I think something like that thought lies behind Dargis's reaction to this movie.  I say that because if you think that the Nazi's were purely and simply evil barbarians, there is nothing much  to be said or done about them except to note and condemn their barbarism. Certainly,  no "explaining" or "excusing"  is necessary.   If we are in a position to unambiguously condemn, then there's not much self-reflection called for in thinking about the Nazi's.   They were evil.  We are not.  They performed acts of unspeakable barbarism. We did not.   That was them.  This is us.   We are different. 

But I think the movie rejects this simple-minded picture and is  trying to make the point on behalf of Germans who came of age after the war  that such a proffered neat moral separation between those who lived through the war, and took part in the Nazi's atrocities and those who came of age only after the war, and therefore had no  part in those atrocities, is an illusion.   The movie makes that point in several ways.   First and foremost,  there is the somewhat opaque, but in many ways ordinary inner psyche of Hanna.  The remarkable thing about Hanna is that she is in almost every way unremarkable.  In particular,  she isn't Van Inwagen's alien other,  peculiarly capable of unspeakable acts that those her came after are incapable of.      No doubt,   Hanna is  a troubled and  wounded person, with things to hide.  But she's more than that too.   She is capable of joy and passion and a kind of love. 

You could,  I suppose,  look upon her as a sexual predator.     If Michael were a Michelle and Hanna a Hermann, we'd no doubt  see Hermann as a child molester.  Curiously,   I find that I am not quite prepared to say that Hanna  molests the young Michael -- who is, after all,   only 14, if I've got my math right -- when they begin their affair.  But it's very clear that the affair with her leaves a scar on his psyche. 

The fact that Hanna is in many ways an unremarkable person --  neither heroic, nor particularly virtuous,  but also not possessed with  an utterly alien and incomprehensible psyche of the sort that Van Inwagen suggested is the hallmark of true evil   -- is by my lights what gives the movie true moral force.  Hanna was put to a certain moral test.   She failed because she lacked whatever inner psychic resources it would have required to pass the moral test.  But I think that one of the deepest points made by the movie is that  many of who were fortunate enough not to be put the test differed from Hanna in no morally significant respect.  She and many in her generation were put to a moral test to which those in the succeeding generation were not subject.  

That doesn't mean that Hanna gets a free pass.  She is not excused. Her atrocities are not explained away -- despite what Dargis says.   I think the movie makes that point forcefully and clearly.     But at the same time, in recognizing that Hanna is just an ordinary person with an unremarkable psyche,  the movie  also raises a very deep puzzle about what exactly we are condemning when we condemn her.    Of course, we condemn her acts.  But we'd like to condemn more than her acts.   We'd like also to condemn the inner psyche that produced the acts.   That's why the judge tries to discern whether Hanna  "willingly"  joined the SS.   But if it turns out that Hanna's psyche is not so unlike our own, is not so alien and other,  what then?  How are we really to distinguish ourselves from Hanna?   

This  has to do with the problem of what  philosophers call moral luck.  Hanna was unlucky in her circumstances  -- or in the combination of her circumstances and her character.   Suppose that she had been born in Britain rather than in Germany.  In such circumstances,  the very traits that made her a willing SS guard, might have led her to willingly enlist in the British Red Cross.   And then we might have praised rather than blamed not just her acts but the inner character that led to those acts.    But the point is that it's the very same inner character in the two cases.  So on what basis do we condemn its expression through acts here, while praising its expressions through acts there?

I said earlier that the movie explores the space of possible answers to the moral questions that it raises.  I'm thinking of a couple of different things.   First, recall the scene near the end when Michael goes to New York to meet the jewish woman who wrote the book about the death march from Auschwitz.   She is stern and steadfast in her refusal to grant any absolution to Hanna.   And I do not think that the movie represents her as being somehow wrong in doing so.   Rather,  the movie takes note of and accepts that attitude as one entirely legitimate attitude among others that we might adopt.  Michael,  recall, makes no attempt to change her attitude toward Hanna.  Indeed, he seems rather  silenced in the face of such moral certainty.  Just as the court offers no answer to Hanna's biting question  "What would you have done,"  Michael has no response to the survivors refusal to offer any kind of absolution to Hanna.  

Though the movie takes note of the fact of felt moral certainty and does nothing to challenge it,  it also doesn't rest with moral certainty as the final and sole legitimate response.  Exhibit A for the movie's refusal to rest with moral certainty is the complexity of  Michael's own attitudes towards Hanna.  His welter of attitudes are as complex as could be.   I'm not sure that I can even fully describe the totality of his attitudes.    On the one hand, there is his  deeply passionate affair with her, that both opened up a certain realm of human experience to him and left him  scarred. The Hanna of his youth haunts his memory.    On the other hand, there is his subsequent encounter with her and his startling realization that she took part, willingly, it seems, in the atrocities of the past.  To the very end,  he wishes to be assured that she has "learned something from the past."  This bespeaks a kind of enduring condemnation.     But there is also more.  There is, of course,  Hanna's  refusal, driven by I am not quite sure what --  a kind of shame, I suppose --  to reveal that she is illiterate even when it might have saved her from years in prison and his silence in the face of that refusal.  He cannot even bring himself to see her to speak to her about what he knows and she knows.  And then there is the mercy he offers her years later,  through his subsequent act of recording books for her again.    Or is this a way of seeking absolution for himself?   You could see his failure to come to her aid as a kind of moral cowardice, driven by revulsion and shame, perhaps.  But if it is a kind of cowardice, it is the kind that disguises itself as "respect."    

So how, ultimately,  should we understand  the moral relationship between  Michael - who I suppose is some sort of stand in for the generation whose moral task it was to narrate the history of Nazi Germany as somehow both a chapter in its  own history  and a chapter from which it is determined to make  a decisive break  --  and Hanna -- who I suppose is a stand in,  not for the main movers and shakers of the Nazi era, but for the millions of ordinary Germans, inwardly indistinguishable from the average run of humanity, without whose cooperation the Nazi's could not have carried off their barbarism?   How are we to understand that moral relationship?  

The movie doesn't really tell us, I think,   because it doesn't really know.   It leaves us with no simple answers.  But I do think it leaves us with a profound question.   Again,  as a protective impulse, we may tell ourselves that  evil is other,  alien and distant.  But the reality is that it lives just around the corner in the souls of people little different from ourselves.   Only if we come to grips with that fact,  I think the movie is trying to say,  can we really come to grips with the past. 

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