Occasionally, John and I preface a remark with the phrase, “As a black man …” And yet we’ve both declared many, many times that we believe that race should play a far less important role in how individuals understand their own identity than it currently does. What gives? In this excerpt from our most recent Substack subscriber-only Q&A session, a commenter asks us whether we’re contradicting ourselves.
33 Comments
31 more comments...No posts
I make sure that I do not preface my remarks with "as a Pole" when criticzing Polish antisemitism, or "as a Jew" when criticizing Jewish stereotypes of Poles as responsible for the Holocaust. I was born in Poland. My father is Polish. My mother was raised in an assimilated Jewsih family in Warsaw, and she survived the Holocaust. When I criticize Polish antisemism and am accused of being bigoted against Poles, that's when I say I was born in Poland and that I lived there for eight months in 1988 and for three months in 1992. When I criticize overly-broad Jewish stereotypes of Poles and am accused of antisemitism, that's when I say my mother was a Holocaust survivor.
Still, my ethnicity is very much secondary to my identity. I regard it as a form of mental illness that is responsible for a high percentage of human conflicts when people identify themselves PRIMARILY as members of a particular ethnic, national, racial, etc. group.
I believe anyone in a society who has had sufficient contact with members of another racial or ethnic group, and who has enough empathy or ability to use their imagination, can understand pretty well what it is like to be a member of a different group. On the other hand, I doubt anyone who has not spent time in a much different society on a different continent, such as with a tribe in the Amazon, is cabable of imagining what it is like to be a member of that group. It' probably possible to imagine to a limited extent with enough self-education.
But there are categories of people whom it is impossible to understand unless you are a member of them. For instance, I survived years of near-pyschotic depression as a result of a brain infection that was exacerbated a thousandfold by incompetent doctors. There is no language availabled to describe what it's like to experience involuntary suicidal ideation every second of the day and night., or to be incapable of speaking much of the time because it causes too much psychic agony, for years without remission.
So I think that in some instances, identifying oneself as a member of a group does signify epistemic knowledge that is unavailable to a meaninful extent to other people. But the experience of that group has to be very far outside the norm of typical human experience.
I have not watched the response yet, but I have always taken it to mean that nobody has a monopoly on what it means to talk as a black man.