Black identity appropriation has nothing to do with ending racism.
Yesterday, I found a string of recent news stories and twitter entries which attacked the Black Lives Matter movement and Critical Race Theory, the academic discourse which underlies much of contemporary anti-racist thought.
One of the stories focused on white Americans, who falsely pose as people of color.[1] They were taken up as a “proof” that the Black Lives Matter movement widely exaggerates the extent of racial discrimination in the US, and that Critical Race Theory itself is both harmful and outdated. Why, otherwise, would there be so many white people pretending to be black, in pursuit of personal gain? Doesn’t the white desire to be black stand, in itself, as an evidence of black privilege?
I am not going to enter a debate on whether the Back Lives Matter movement is necessary or not (of course it is!), but the questions themselves do merit some attention. If white people portraying as blacks has nothing to do with ending racism, then what is it about?
Let’s explore this a bit.
The most well-known case so far has been Rachel Dolezal, a black community leader who claimed to be Afro-American until 2016, when her parents revealed that she was all white. She is not the only one, however, and this month alone, two more persons have admitted publicly that they have faked being black for years. One of them was a professor of African American history at George Washington University, and the other a black community leader from Indianapolis.
The list of people who have made headlines for appropriating a Native American identity is probably even longer. Interestingly, what all seem to share is that they have occupied professional or social positions in which pretending to be a person of color has provided them added value, for instance as professors in Native Studies or Black History, or as black community activists and leaders.
In my earlier posts, I have discussed the phenomenon in terms of race shifting, a concept coined by anthropologist Circe Sturm. In her book Becoming Indian: The struggle over Cherokee identity in the 21st Century (2011) Sturm examined why Americans who have previously identified as white are now turning, to newly-found Cherokee identities. Later, the concept has been developed further especially in Canada, where the number of people self-identifying as indigenous is also growing exponentially. Between the Canadian census of 2006 and 2016, the number of people who identified as indigenous grew by 39,3%, at pace which cannot be explained by natural birth rate only.
In both Canada and the US, the fact that white people are turning to indigeneity reflects the relative success of indigenous cultural revitalisation and the development of indigenous rights. Indigenous peoples are seen increasingly as rights holders, and interest in indigenous arts, cultures and spirituality is also growing.
All race shifters do not, however, turn to indigeneity out of cultural appreciation. In his recent book Distorted Decent: White Claims to Indigeneity (2019, Minnesota) Canadian sociologist Darryl Leroux examines how white Canadians down how in Canada, legislative change to improve the rights of Métis and Inuit people was opposed by local white-rights groups, who feared that their own rights would be curtailed– in other words, that they would lose some of their white privilege. When the new laws passed, these groups changed strategy and re-organized themselves under a claim that they, too, are indigenous – and hence entitled to those rights they had previously opposed.
A strikingly similar development has taken place in Finland where the establishment of the Sámi Parliament in the 1990s, and especially speculations over Sámi land rights, provided the initial impetus for a long-term conflict over the boundaries of Sámi identity. In both places, race shifting movements are now considered as a significant challenge for the development of indigenous rights and self-determination; in Finland the situation has escalated so much that the Sámi have even taken the issue to the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
Black people in the US and Canada have not experienced similar collective empowerment. However, these countries do have a system of affirmative policies which seeks to combat the excess of structural racism and discrimination, for instance through recruitment and admission policies, scholarships and other professional and study opportunities that are earmarked for people of colour.
Although these policies are in place to address structural racism, on an individual level they do provide a space in which portraying falsely as black or native can seem attractive. This, of course, does not prove that blackness would have become a privilege. What it does prove, is that there are white people who are willing to abuse anti-racist policies for personal gain, and that the practical implementation of affirmative action is not working very well.
In the large picture, the phenomenon shows that white and settler national identities are no longer as appealing as they used to be. Perhaps being white has simply become boring and devoid of meaning. When Circe Sturm interviewed “Cherokee” race shifters, she discovered that while their motivations could vary considerably, ultimately all sought to dissociate themselves from “whiteness”, which had come to symbolize excessive individualism, rootlessness and other ills of the contemporary society. However, according to Sturm, this is also what actually defined their privilege in relation to their Cherokee counterparts. The fact that they felt able to voluntarily dissociate themselves form their own skin color – from whiteness – confirms their positioning on top of the racial hierarchy.
So, to conclude: yes, I can agree that race shifting is a symptom of a world in which old racial hierarchies are increasingly contested. However, as a phenomenon, it has emerged to counter that development, and to take advantage of any opportunities that current efforts to undo structural racism present to people of color. White people portraying themselves as blacks is therefore not about ending racism – it embodies contemporary extension of white privilege.
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[1] https://www.rt.com/usa/501178-fake-black-satchuel-cole/
This essay was published originally in in the Norwegian language online publication forskning.no (publication date 14. October 2020), with the title “Hvorfor utgir hvite personer seg for å vare svarte?”. https://forskersonen.no/etnisitet-internett-kronikk/hvorfor-utgir-hvite-personer-seg-for-a-vaere-svarte/1755291
The project leading to this application has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 845232.
