Living and Learning as if Binary Identities Aren’t Everything

It’s OK to be a little wrong, at least some of the time, so if you find this post a little wrong, please consider the possibility that I’m not all wrong. (This is related to the post.)

The exchange below, from May, has stuck with me. I had suggested in an essay on “teen births” that the category doesn’t make sense, analytically. Our exchange started with Angry Allosaurus quoting me, angrily:

I’m glad they went from transmen to the issue of teenagers versus women, because the latter is maybe the clearest example of reifying an arbitrary distinction into a dichotomy: child versus adult, a distinction that has been changed by law and policy many times over, and to this day varies across legal jurisdictions within and outside of this country. And yet, to this person, a teenager cannot be a woman, anymore than a transman can be, in ways that matter (like, by bearing children), a woman.

This raises the issue of social science analysis versus social identity in a substantive way. We need reasons for the categories we use in either the social science or social identity arenas, but our purposes sometimes differ. It is a challenge to even have conversations that cross these boundaries, such as when I interact with an angry stranger over a point of demographic science. Social scientists should engage on this, because some dominant political approaches to social identity categories can undermine our work, and public understanding.

Identity is complicated

Personal story: I arrived at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1988 having spent most of my first 21 years in the small college town of Ithaca, NY. In the first semester of my freshman year, I enrolled in a large course, “Afroamerican and African Studies 100,” taught by the sociologist Walter Allen. I had been out of school a few years, and the nine books or so he put on the syllabus were very daunting. I distinctly remember, over the first weekend, sitting down to read, Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, by Robert Farris Thompson — in its entirety, because that’s what the syllabus said to do. The syllabus also included The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, by Aldon Morris; There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America, by Vincent Harding; and The Rastafarians: Sounds of Cultural Dissonance, by Leonard E. Barrett. It was a crash course in a version of Black studies that was pretty diasporic, challenging (for me) not just because of the lengthy reading list but also because the class was at Michigan, which meant (in that class) mostly Black students from the Detroit area, which is not Ithaca.

In between high school and college (which lasted three years), I had played drums in a reggae band in Ithaca. By the time I arrived at Michigan, I had long dreadlocks (no photos, please), which I shortly cut off. Reggae drumming had been very hard for me to learn — partly because it was just learning music (I had little training), and partly because of the cultural distance. It felt like unlearning rhythm as much as learning it. But I took lessons and studied and practiced (under some good mentorship, plus bootleg videos), and toward the end I believe I was getting the hang of it, and the band did pretty well. I’ll come back to this.

At some point, either that semester or shortly after, Vincent Harding came to speak at Michigan. (Back then, when important scholars came to speak, students would pack the lecture halls, maybe because we didn’t even have cable, much less Internet.) Harding’s book was new, and he was putting Black history in perspective at an important time. Jesse Jackson had won the Michigan Democratic caucuses in 1988, while advocating an ethnicization of Black identity, epitomized by the term African American. My own professor Allen was quoted in the New York Times saying of the term, “This is a significant psychological and cultural turning point. This makes explicit what was implicit. First we had to convince everyone to come into the fold as black. Now we are clarifying what that means.” At the same time, on the other hand, people were using starting to use the term “people of color” to refer to a pan-ethnic or -racial political coalition for civil rights, and some Black activists felt that was an erasure of Black identity and self-determination. Look at 1988 on this ngrams timeline:

The point of this story is that, at the Harding talk, my TA from Allen’s class (who had graded my final paper without a single mark except, ‘B’), took issue with Harding on the issue of “people of color.” In my recollection, my TA was against Black people accepting the term “people of color” because of the erasure of Blackness. She prefaced her question for Harding with, “I’m from Detroit” — and he interrupted her, “So you’re really Black,” prompting appreciative laughter before she continued (he went on to disagree, arguing coalition politics was more important at that point). This stuck with me because it was a recognition of the fluidity of identity, the idea that Blackness might be experienced — and measurable — in more than a dichotomous way.

And what this has to do with Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris was an undergrad at Howard University in the mid-1980s, a few years before my college days. Now, as she rises in political visibility, the racist right and nativist Black activists are once again tag-teaming to undermine her Blackness for political gain (see this review, from 2019). American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) activist Antonio Moore recently posted about Harris: “Black immigrants are not Black Americans nor African American. … The lack of clarity around Blackness has been the playground of the Black immigrant and the biracial that has one white wealthy parent. Creating a sort of fence straddling that gave us Obama and Kamala and so many others.” Of course, Kamala Harris is not an immigrant, but was born in Oakland, California. She has lived her life as a Black person. (This hectoring is also in cahoots with a fanciful legal challenge to her eligibility, as an “anchor baby,” to serve as president.)

On “The Breakfast Club” in 2019, Charlamagne tha God asked Harris about people who “question the legitimacy of your Blackness.” She responded, “I think they don’t understand what Black people are. Because if you do, if you walked on Hampton’s campus, or Howard’s campus, or Morehouse or Spellman or Fisk, you would have a much better appreciation for the diaspora, for the diversity, for the beauty in the diversity of who we are as Black people.” At the end of the interview, she added, here: “I’m Black. And I’m proud of being Black. And I was born Black, I will die Black. And I’m proud of it. And I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”*

The Blackness of Kamala Harris is a matter of identity, and in that way is related to the issue of transmen having babies, as men. She was born the child of educated elites, descended on her father’s side from Jamaican slaves and/or slaveholders, and she became an educated elite, too (a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha). The complex details of her background and upbringing are important for understanding her place in the social order, but they do not determine her identity, which is categorically Black and African American (as well as Indian American).

We do not want to go down the road of imagining birth determining identity — racial, gender, or otherwise — in a fixed, binary way. That’s not how biology and identity interact. Whether or not Kamala Harris’s ancestors owned slaves in Jamaica does not determine her Black identity today. Binariness should not be an aspirational, normal status. People who aren’t trans also combine male and female and gender fluid aspects to their existence — and recognizing that would probably be good for everyone, including trans people. Identity may be — or be expressed as — binary, but experience rarely is, and as social scientists we need to help make this clear.

I try to impart to my students that our knowledge on issues of identity — especially regarding race, sex, and gender — is partial and evolving, and we would be fools to pretend that at this moment in history humanity has finally figured it out once and for all. The pendulum has recently swung hard toward natural, biological elements of identity. Remember It was not long ago, in historical terms, that Radicalesbians declared (in 1970), “lesbianism … is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution.” The idea of homosexuality as a condition of birth was considered offensive by these radical feminists, and they believed lesbianism would end with the fall of patriarchy.

Transmen have female aspects to their existence although they are socially categorical men, and teen mothers have aspects of adulthood to theirs although they may be socially categorical girls. A politics that insists the categorical statement, “transmen are men” applies absolutely, analytically as well as socially, is not pursuing knowledge in the way social science does. There has to be a way to understand and communicate this while also advancing essential human rights and liberation.

I am categorically not Black (and except in the eyes of some Nazis, I’m all White). But spending several years learning and playing reggae and all that went with it changed me in some ways, apparently forever. There is some Jamaican Blackness incorporated — or appropriated — into my musical experience that I can’t unlearn. If you count Black people in the Census — as a matter of identity — you would of course not count me. But if you were trying to measure the presence of Black culture in this society at high resolution, there is something there you might want to identify, something that came from my experience, not my birth. What do you know, a sociologist who doesn’t think in binaries.

* Side note: The current federal statistical standard from the Office of Management and Budget defines “Black or African American” as, “Individuals with origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa, including, for example, African American, Jamaican, Haitian, Nigerian, Ethiopian, and Somali.”

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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