How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?

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I.

The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist". But if race doesn't exist, how do we justify affirmative action, cultural appropriation, and all our other race-related practices? The consensus says that, although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had different experiences which give them a different perspective from white people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of them as a specific group, “the black race”, and have institutions to accommodate them even if they’re biologically indistinguishable.

I thought about this while reading A Professor Claimed To Be Native American; Did She Know She Wasn’t? (paywalled), Jay Kang's New Yorker article on Elizabeth Hoover. The story goes something like this (my summary):

A woman named Adeline Rivers drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1928. By the time her granddaughter Anita was growing up, family legend said that Adeline was a Mi'kmaq Indian who committed suicide to escape an abusive white husband. Anita leaned into the family legend and taught her own daughter Elizabeth to be proud of her Native American heritage.

As a kid, Anita would take Elizabeth to pow-wows (Native American ceremonial gatherings) where she would play with all the other young Native girls. As she grew up, many of her closest friends were Natives, and she practiced Native American dance. By the time she was a teenager, she had taken a Mi'kmaq name, wore Native clothing, and was involved in Native political causes. In college, she wrote a thesis on Native American issues, then got a PhD in same, then got a professorship at Berkeley. She married a Crow Indian and went on trips to various Indian reservations where she studied and wrote papers about the problems they faced, and she was informally adopted by one of the Native families she stayed with. She became one of the most influential Native American academics in the country.

At some point, maybe after going to the Mi'kmaq reservation during grad school to hunt down family members, Elizabeth must have noticed holes in her family legend; it seemed that her great-grandmother wasn’t really Native American, just some ordinary white woman who drowned for unclear reasons. Although nobody knows for sure, it seems like after realizing this, Elizabeth tried to hide it - maybe from herself, but at least from others. She kept claiming Native ancestry, and even writing about her (nonexistent) Native relatives.

After Elizabeth Warren and other high-profile cases brought the issue of fake Indians ("Pretendians") into the spotlight, some people from the Native community started going after Professor Hoover, challenging her to prove her Native descent. Over time the challenges got louder and louder, and eventually she had to admit she wasn’t Native after all. Some of her students wrote an open letter demanding that she resign, which said:

» We find Hoover's repeated attempts to differentiate herself from settlers with similar stories and her claims of having lived experienced as an Indigenous person by dancing at powwows absolutely appalling. [She has] failed to acknowledge the harm she has caused and enabled."

"Nearly four hundred people" signed the letter. Her graduate students stopped working with her and switched advisors. Her department tried to prevent her from attending meetings, and made her promise not to do work on any Indian reservations. The entire academic and Native American communities are giving her the cold shoulder. She wrote an apology letter saying that she had "put away my dance regalia, ribbons skirts, moccasins, and Native jewelery . . . I've begun to give away some of these things to people who will wear them better," but privately described her life as being in “ruins".

I find this really weird!

Elizabeth Hoover had some specific level of "lived experience" of growing up Native American. She seems to have believed she was Native up until her twenties. She went to pow-wows. She grew up with Native friends, and married a Native man.

Under the consensus definition, this life history should either be enough "lived experience" to count as a Native American, or not. And it seems from the article that - back when they thought she had a Mi'kmaq great-grandmother - everyone agreed her lived experience was enough to count as Native. Nobody said she didn't go to enough pow-wows as a kid, or have enough Native friends, or that if she wasn't born on a reservation it didn't count. They accepted her as a legitimate group member who had returned to the fold.

So why does it matter that, in fact, her great-grandmother had no Mi'kmaq blood? It doesn't affect her lived experiences at all! She had the lived experience of growing up thinking that her great-grandmother was Mi'kmaq - shouldn't that be enough? If tomorrow, a new discovery proved that her great-grandmother really was Mi'kmaq after all, would she become an Indian in good standing again? Would her rivals apologize for doubting her? If so, how does any of that affect her lived experience one iota?

It would seem like one of the following must be true:

1. Elizabeth Hoover is ethnically a Mi'kmaq Indian, just as much as if her great-grandmother had been a full member of the tribe.

2. Many pure-blooded Indians who were raised in Indian culture as a child and currently think of themselves as proud Indians - aren't Indians at all. After all, the consensus says their blood counts for nothing - only their lived experience. And Elizabeth Hoover had quite a lot of lived experience and still doesn't qualify. So you must need a very large amount of lived experience to count. Maybe you have to have lived on a reservation your whole life or something.

3. Race is at least a little based on genetics, and not on lived experience.

II.

Let’s start by talking about (3).

I'm against the claim that "there is no such thing as biological race" - it's one of those isolated demands for rigor that we don’t stand for around here. You can do cluster analysis on a bunch of genomes and circle the nice, legible shapes representing Europeans, Africans, etc.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-PCA-reflects-self-identified-race-ethnicity-and-language-of-ATLAS-participants-A_fig1_365445594

People use the claim “there’s no such thing as biological race” for a lot of purposes, mostly to confuse and deceive people, but here it’s worth focusing on the tiny sliver of justification for such a claim: the biological clustering of populations isn’t exactly 100% the same as socially-defined racial categories. This is unsurprising, since no two definitions of a word point to exactly 100% the same extensional cluster. All words are weird clusters of correlated traits that break down into a million dazzling-but-confusing facets the closer you look at them, and words describing race are no exception.

Consider for example the Jews. Jews do share some common genes, with interesting features like the Cohen modal haplotype and usually some similar Middle Eastern genetic background regardless of where they ended up.

But they also form a legal cluster: the people who are defined as Jews by the official halakhic definition - someone whose mother was Jewish, or who converted in an official ceremony. This can get arbitrarily complicated, with halakha (Jewish law) having opinions on how to sort out each weird edge case (like IVF!)

But they also form a religious cluster: people who currently practice the Jewish religion.

And they form a cultural cluster, consisting of people who consider themselves “cultural Jews” and have names like Weinberg and Goldstein and maybe speak a few scraps of Yiddish, even if these people are atheists.

None of these clusters are exactly the same. There are some people who are genetically 100% Jewish whose families converted to Christianity centuries ago and don’t even know they have any Jewish connection. There are extremely observant Orthodox Jews who aren’t Jewish by the halakhic definition, because at some point in their line a Jewish father married a Gentile mother and they raised their family Jewish without her officially converting.

(and each of these clusters breaks down even further! There are people who are halakhically Jewish according to Reform rabbis but not Orthodox rabbis. There are probably a few edge cases of people who are genetically Jewish according to 23AndMe’s definition but not Ancestry.com’s.There are people who are culturally Jewish in the sense of speaking Yiddish but not caring about Israel, and other people who care about Israel a lot but don’t speak Yiddish.)

But in real life there are very high correlations between all these clusters, such that someone who’s a practicing religious Jew is overwhelmingly more likely to be genetically Jewish than someone who isn’t, and someone of Jewish descent is much more likely to be culturally Jewish, and so on. So it’s reasonable to have a word “Jew” which unprincipledly smushes together cultural, halakhic, genetic, and religious definitions, so we don’t have to write an entire PhD dissertation to describe someone’s exact level of Jewishness to a communication partner.

I kind of imagine each of these definitions - religion, culture, genetics, etc - as an axis in concept space, and the category “Jew” as a hypersphere drawn around the exact typical Jewish person, whoever that is. You can be a Jew if you’re irreligious but have Jewish blood. And you can be a Jew if you have no Jewish blood but follow the Jewish religion. But if you neither have Jewish blood nor follow the Jewish religion, you’re not a Jew. Probably there’s some tradeoff here, where the less blood you have, the more you have to follow the religion before other people will consider you Jewish, and vice versa.

(the Jews are lucky because they have halakha. Even though halakha is just some rules that some random Jewish person and/or God invented, they’re a strong enough Schelling point that everyone else sort of kind of agrees to respect it when deciding who’s Jewish, even though non-Jews - and non-observant Jews - are under no obligation to do this.)

The category “Native American” must also work like this, right? It’s an unprincipled combination of lots of different facets - genetics, legal tribal membership, culture, lived experience, etc.

Suppose a white person was adopted at birth by the Mi’kmaq Indians, grew up on their reservation, speaks their language, never even met another white person until he was an adult (let’s add that for some reason he has unusually dark skin and eyes for a white person, so he didn’t look different from the other Mi’kmaqs and experience an unusual childhood on that basis). When he grows up, he is 100% identical to the other Mi’kmaqs in every way except genetically. Does he count as Mi’kmaq? I don’t know the tribal law on this issue. But common-sensically, if for some reason I have to decide this question - like that the other Mi’kmaqs decided to expel him from the tribe and I have to either sympathize with him or tell him he deserved it - in that case I think he’s pretty Mi’kmaq.

But suppose a genetically Mi’kmaq person was adopted by a white couple in Topeka and raised as a completely normal white child. Suppose she had light skin and never even knew she wasn’t white until she took a genetic test as an adult. Is she a Mi’kmaq? Um. I think if she was trying to “reconnect with her roots”, and felt some kind of deep spiritual attachment to Mi’kmaq culture on that basis, I would feel pretty bad telling her she couldn’t and she was a poser and an imperialist and the tribe should refuse to interact with her.¹

I guess this means that maybe I sort of kind of grudgingly accept (3), that race is at least a little bit based on genetics (along with other things).

If that’s true, you could imagine drawing the bounding hypersphere for the category “Native American” in such a way so that Elizabeth Hoover would just barely make it inside based on her lived experience if she had 1/8th Native blood, but is just barely outside (even given the same amount of lived experience) if she doesn’t.

III.

But the categories are made for man, not man for the categories. Even if the category “Native American” is a hypersphere in some conceptual space, we get to decide how much to weight each axis.

(I like the phrase “Native American hypersphere”. It sounds like something from an Erich von Daniken book.)

And I think, even though in theory we could use genetics, there’s a pretty strong argument for basing it on something like “lived experience”. That argument is: it seems kind of bad if your whole life can be retroactively invalidated by getting the wrong results from a 23andMe test, and “lived experience” is the only potential basis that prevents that.

Suppose you believe in “cultural appropriation”. That means that it’s bad and evil for someone to do too much work within a culture they don’t belong to.

On the other hand, everyone seems to think it’s really valuable to do work within a culture you do belong to. Native Americans who create great specifically-Native-American art and literature, or who open Native American restaurants, or who become leaders and activists within the Native American community, are hailed as heroes. We tell minorities that enhancing the culture and recognition of their specific minority group is one of the most valuable things they can do with their lives. Half of the art world is now minorities talking about the Their-Minority-Group experience.

You see the trap. You spend your whole life building on the culture of your identity group, because that’s what you were told to do. Then you get a 23andMe result and - oops, you weren’t in that group after all. Now retroactively, instead of being a hero, you’re a colonizer and imperialist who needs to be unpersonned to protect your group purity².

So here’s another trilemma:

1. Either you stop worrying about cultural appropriation.

2. Or you stop using a genetic component in whatever definition of race you use to define cultural appropriation.

3. Or you accept that some well-intentioned people who tried to build art around their identity group will retroactively be vilified as colonizers, through no fault of their own, after their 23andMe results come back.

I definitely support 1 here. I think cultural appropriation is great. It produced a bunch of great works of art and nearly all good food. But I can understand why Native Americans don’t agree with this, and I don’t expect to be able to convince everyone of my position today. So that leaves (2) and (3).

(there’s a missing step here, something like 1.5: maybe people should stop caring about their cultural identity. This is attractive to me when I think about other people. But I place a decent amount of value on being Jewish, enough that if somebody told me that somehow I wasn’t Jewish, I would need to re-evaluate my self-identity at least a little. I don’t want to force other people to do something I wouldn’t go for myself.)

And (3) seems - kind of cruel and horrible. I don’t know, maybe there are exacerbating factors in the Elizabeth Hoover case - she did lie for a while, and maybe there was some sense in which she “should have” always known. But you can imagine a case where there weren’t these factors, and it still seems pretty cruel and horrible.

It also seems unnecessary! Nobody has discovered any gene in the Native American genetic cluster that significantly changes who you are as a person or affects your ability to participate in Native American culture. So using genetics as a basis in her case seems like destroying her life because of a completely meaningless finding.

IV.

I realize the more sensitive among my readers might be worrying that I, as a white person, have no right to criticize the Mi’kmaq Indians’ membership policies. This is a fair concern. But I worry that all of this is white people’s fault.

If I try to imagine why Native Americans care so much about these kinds of things, I come up with two issues:

1. If any (genetically) white person could choose to identify as an Indian, lots of them would, because Indians are cool. But there are many more white people than Indians, so they would soon outnumber the (genetically) real ones. Even if the white “converts” made some attempt to get the culture and social connections right, they could never get it exactly perfect, and the existence of Indians as a cultural group would be lost.

2. Natives don’t want other people competing for the limited number of good affirmative action jobs reserved for them, of which “professor of Native American studies” is an especially clear example.

Since they need some criteria to bar entry, and genetics are hard to fake, they use genetics.

In this sense, I suppose that “person’s life is unfairly ruined by a genetic test” is just a member in good standing of the general category of “person’s life is unfairly ruined by some hard-and-fast law”:

• Someone does their surveying wrong and builds their casino two feet over the California/Nevada border, and has to demolish it and start over because gambling is illegal in California.

• Somebody had a very minor mental health problem when they were young, and now they’re totally better, and they want to join the army, but the army bans people with a history of certain mental health problems.

• An 18.001 year old has a relationship with a 17.999 year old (who claimed to be 18) and is prosecuted for statutory rape.

These are all unfair, but they’re all natural consequences of having laws at all, which have to make various trade-offs that reduce the complicated spectrum of fairness into a hard-and-fast “up to this point is okay, but past this point isn’t” binary determination.

I think it’s completely fair that Elizabeth Hoover isn’t allowed to claim membership in any tribe, or get affirmative action benefits (which AFAIK she never officially claimed), or collect money from Indian casinos.

But morality and social norms are supposed to be a different thing from law. In some spheres, it’s more important to have hard-and-fast rules enforced by the government in a supposedly unbiased way; in others, it’s more important to let communities make judgments using their own vague social norms. So it weirds me out to see Elizabeth Hoover’s communities, operating in the exact sphere where they have the most leeway to show kindness and understanding, operating as executioners.

So I admit I judge all of Elizabeth Hoover's ex-friends who have turned against her. They can legitimately be angry with her for not admitting she was biologically white the moment she figured it out, and for making up fake facts about her tribal heritage after that point. But they should be clear that they're angry at her for lying, not for "being a fake Indian".

(Probably there's some principle of standpoint theory that says that I as a white person am not allowed to judge Mi'kmaq Indians. Fine, far be it from me to challenge standpoint theory. But many of Elizabeth Hoover's ex-friends who turned against her are white, and I judge those people.)

In particular, I think this is a story about cancel culture. When people talk about the “planet of cops”, they mean that people import some the norms of law - zero tolerance, inability to consider extenuating circumstances, social unity in enforcing brutal punishments - into the sphere of morality, without also importing the other norms of law that make it possible to do those things justly (like independent judges and jurors who aren’t at high risk of being punished for their decisions, or people hammering out what the laws are beforehand).

I don’t know, I don’t have a great conclusion here. I wrote this post because everyone else was mocking Hoover and saying it was great that she was finally “caught”. Unless I’m misinterpreting her story, that doesn’t seem right to me. She seems like someone who’s been victimized by a perfect storm of our culture’s weird beliefs about cultural appropriation, intellectual/artistic focus on racial experience, cancel culture, and affirmative action. Whether or not you usually support these things, this was a unique case where a lot of seemingly-justifiable heuristics came together and destroyed someone’s life for no reason. I don’t know if we can do better, but I hope we think more about how we could.

1. Another advantage that Jews have over Native Americans is that, being a somewhat unified religion, there’s a conversion process. If someone who had been practicing Judaism their entire life and loved it a lot was unexpectedly found to be halakhically non-Jewish, everyone would give them the easiest conversion process in the world, snip snip and you’re done. You can read the Hoover story as a sort of tragedy caused by the lack of Native Americans having a similar institution.

2. There’s an interesting symmetry here with the surprisingly-common story of “white nationalist takes a genetic test, learns they’re not white, has to figure out what to do about it”. The article talks about other white nationalists’ reactions when they hear about some of these people:

They will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.'” Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry”.

This is weirdly tolerant (okay, aside from the Jewish conspiracy thing) compared to anyone in the Hoover story. In Bizarro-America, the only people who don’t think people’s value as human beings depends on their genetically-determined race are the white nationalists!