So I've been reading
Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, by Kwame Anthony Appiah.
It's a short, but pretty fascinating book about the intellectual milieu in which Dubois developed his sociological understanding and thinking, in particular about race. Dubois studied social science at Harvard and then at the University of Berlin, went on to write a number of famous books which are still worth reading, and was one of the founders of the NAACP in 1909. Dubois' studies and early writings all took place during the peak of scientific racism, and it's very interesting to see how his conception of race develops over time, in response to both developments in anthropology (Boas was highly influential) and some of the philosophical schools of thought he encountered in Germany.
A lot of the book is concerned with Dubois' attempts to reconcile his somewhat romantic view of a kind of collective black destiny with a more academic understanding of race. So, for example, In
The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he writes:
Quote:
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.
Appiah discusses how this romantic ideal of a "message for the world" born out of a kind of black racial solidarity (reflecting at least in some part a view of racial identity influenced by the scientific racism of the time?) is complicated over the next 40 years, so that Appiah writes:
Quote:
And what was a Negro? Well, that was a question about which Du Bois thought a great deal over many decades. Negroes, he would have said, were a race. Yet race, as he knew better than most, is an elusive concept; indeed, he called the story of his own life "the autobiography of a race concept," implying that his own understanding had changed over his long life. At times, as we'll see, he spoke of a vast family, of shared descent and common impulses; at other times, of the inheritors of a common memory; but in the pithiest of his many attempts at a definition he said, "The black man is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia." (7)
Anyway, that's all background, the reason I wanted to post about it in this thread is that in the last chapter of this book Appiah (who has also written other philosophical works on identity) provides maybe the best succinct explanation of sociological theories of
identity that I've seen, and I think it serves as a nice backdrop against which to develop something I said earlier in this thread (I think): that to some extent all politics is identity politics. Here's Appiah again:
Quote:
There are four crucial dimensions to the contemporary philosophical theory of identity. (The formulation is my own, but I take it to capture a widely shared understanding.) First, social identities -- this is an insight from labeling theory in sociology -- depend for their existence on there being labels for them. This is because people respond to others and think of themselves by way of these labels: we think of people as Caucasians or Canadians or Catholics and then respond to them as such; we think of ourselves as Americans and do (or don't do) things because that is what we think we are.
So the first point is metaphysical: nominalism about social identities is preferable to ontological realism. What holds groups together is often not a shared essence but simply a shared name. The first point, then, in a slogan, is that social identities require labels.
Social-identity labels are often contested at the boundaries: we have no consensus as to whether the daughter of an African-American man and an Aleut, raised in Alaska, is "really black," or the son of an African and a Native Hawaiian is "really Hawaiian." These are the sorts of things we must accept there can be endless argument about, even if those engaged in these arguments may not regard them with this sort of ironic distance. The contestability of the boundaries is, by the way, the main reason why philosophical nominalism seems like the only view about identities that will do. To say that the boundaries are contestable isn't to say there are no clear cases. If, once the evidence is in, you judge that Barack Obama isn't a man and Denzel Washington isn't African-American, we will have lost our semantic bearings altogether: there can be clear answers to questions about the ascription of concepts with fuzzy edges...
Quote:
And indeed, the second dimension of identity that I want to point to is precisely that there are norms associated with social identities: norms of identification, as we might call them, which specify ways that people of a certain identity ought to behave; and norms of treatment, ways that people of a certain identity ought or ought not to be responded to and acted upon.... My shorthand for this second claim is that identity is normative.
These "shoulds" and "oughts" need not be especially glorious; nor need they be specifically moral. It is a philosopher's mistake to forget that "oughts" and "shoulds" are not the special property of morality. That men shouldn't wear skirts isn't a moral truth; indeed, I don't think it is a truth at all. Nevertheless, we live in a society in which there is a norm to this effect: people don't just expect men not to wear skirts, they expect them not to do so because they recognize that men ought not to do so....
But the norms (like the criteria of membership) are not usually agreed to by all -- there are those cross-dressing men -- and there are often interesting disputes about them. It is part of our understanding of these norms, then, that they too are contestable.
Quote:
The third dimension of identity flows from the second. Because there are norms of identification, people who identity through the labels as X, act sometimes as Xs; by which I mean that one reason they act as they do is that they are motivated by the thought, "I've a reason to do A because I am an X."
The last point makes explicit the fact that we now see identities as centrally subjective, in the sense that their importance derives from the role they play in the conscious thoughts and acts of those who bear them. So identities, we now think, are nominal, normative, and subjective: all of these being features, of course, that may explain why we routinely speak of them nowadays as socially constructed.
Appiah goes on to discuss the multiplicity of social identities, and a few other related ideas like George Herbert Mead's "generalized other".
So Dubois, who began with a rather Hegelian idea of a "Negro blood" with a message for the world (a rather ontologically realist view of race?), and who was drawn to Africa by way of trying to flesh out what it meant to be black, also came to recognize that "a black man is a person who has to ride Jim Crow in Georgia," that is, to recognize both the social genesis of race without denying the enormous importance of race in his own life --
because of the social conditions which gave rise to the concept.
There's probably too much to unpack (and this post is too long) in relation to politics, but I think the biggest point is that the social processes which create meaningful group labels in relation to shared socio-political interests intrinsically create identities that are relevant to politics, particularly because socio-political changes happen mostly via social movements and not just by individual action. This is true for all kinds of people that we don't always think of as practicing "identity politics": those who identify with "conservative" labels (whether political, or religious), or for the many people I've met at Democratic state conventions who talk about their family as a "union family" and the associated sense of identity that goes along with this, and so on.
This doesn't mean that it isn't also possible to do "identity politics" poorly, i.e. because it's almost always necessary to find a way to transcend or unify social identities (to create larger shared social identities!), and so if everything is "us vs them" all the time, or with too much absoluteness, then that can be problematic. But at the same time the point is also that all politics will always involve social identity, so that on the opposite extreme it also doesn't make sense to inveigh absolutely against "identity politics".
