I’m definitely on team cultural appropriation is awesome, at least in most circumstances (the primary exception being if you are behaving disrespectfully, eg black face).
I go for (2) on the second trilemma, with some (1). Many things seen as cultural appropriation aren't wrong, and the things that are are **cultural** appropriation, not **racial** appropriation, so (2) definitely applies.
I had a similar reaction reading the article, but I think there's an additional dimension here. One of the things the article talks about is how she was always beading and wearing stereotypically native jewelry and dress. She's contrasted with a candidate for the Native American studies position she eventually got (which, BTW, is maybe not officially affirmative action, but I think it's likely she wouldn't have gotten that job if she were known to be white) who interviewed in a three piece suit, and was asked if his tie was a native pattern (it wasn't). There's an idea that the department preferred a white person who acted overtly native, and in particular, satisfied their stereotypes of what it means to be native, to an actual native who didn't. This arguably selects for people whose native identity is more tenuous; if you're undeniably native, you might not feel the need to overtly demonstrate it.
But of course, this is ultimately a critique not of Elizabeth Hoover, but of the people who hired her, which I think is fair.
She is also getting lumped in by association with purposeful fakers like Rachel Dolezal by people who don’t actually read the story.
One element is that yes, it is cool and sometimes useful to take these labels today, but it isn’t cool to *say* that these labels are useful- after all, Native Americans are a repressed minority.
Another element here has to do with trans stuff- trilemma #1 comes dangerously close to acknowledging that people can in fact be valid “transracial”, which conservatives will pounce on for the absurdity and which transgender people don’t want to be analogized to.
Second, I think that one could also say that (the genetic part of) race has the same relationship to population genetics that color has to wavelengths of light. In both cases we draw some boundaries on some continuous thing. Population genetics and wavelengths of lights are continuous.
What I thought was meant by "race is a social construct" is that there's some genetic reality to ethnicity, but that the way we categorize ethnic groups as belonging to various "races" is more arbitrary. So at various times Italians, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jews have been categorized as non-white, but now they're generally considered to be white.
Ethnicity still gets fuzzy around the edges, especially when trying to deal with a blood quantum, but there are clear clusters who mostly marry within the cluster and who have obvious phenotypic differences from other clusters.
“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)”
I take this (and the inverted/parallel case of the “white” guy raised on the reservation) more as meaning you don’t like telling people they can’t be part of something they want to be a part of, and likewise object to others doing that. This preference cuts across rationales, hence the apparent inconsistency of saying (in the case of the guy) “lived experience trumps genetics” and (in the case of the girl) “genetics (kind of sort of) trumps lived experience.” In both cases the real trump card seems more to be something like “Who am I (or the tribal elders or whoever) to call for this person to be expelled?”
My comment here is sort of tangential, and is mostly on the idea/value of "race" as a concept. On the one hand, race is certainly just as "real" as dozens of other concepts that no one questions the validity of, but I think I have been convinced that it isn't (or maybe shouldn't be, I'm not denying reality, but rather make an aspirational statement) be _important_. This stems mostly from my views on individualism. You can say lots of things about groups of people, but almost every single thing you can say about those groups is a thing that, in any specific instance, am not going to care about the group trait and instead am going to care about the specific individual in question.
About the only reason why these kinds of group/colelctive traits might matter is that there are (or at least could be), policies whose goal is either greatly obstructed or maybe even made entirely impossible by group realities (since the policy is targeting those groups). This is true, but I'm almost always against those policies for reasons completely unrelated to their efficacy or lack thereof.
TO make a more direct comment on the article: when it comes to this particular situation, I personally think that genetic doors to cultural groups are generally a bad idea. I understand the reasons (which you point out) that they get implemented, but they are, in my opinion, bad reasons, or at least reasons that aren't justified by the harms caused.
Take your specific example about native americans being swamped by the hordes of white people who would want to adopt their culture. It seems to me like this is a non-problem. White people can do what they want, try to join the culture, and they will either do so well enough that existing members of the culture will accept them as assimilated or not. In other words, the principle of free-associate renders this concern moot. If there is some big group of "fake" native americans, the "real" ones don't have to associate with them. And the culture will only actually get diluted to whatever extent it's members don't care enough about preserving to it maintain it, at which point the problem is not the "fakes" but rather the lack of caring of the "real" members. And that problem doesn't seem impacted by the existence of poor-imitators.
> The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist".
Open offer to any expert believe`n gamblers out there; we test if races exist by finding 1000 claiming to be Russians from born in Russia, who are as white as snow; and we test if they have sickle cell if none of them have sickle cell you give me a million dollars, if there is sickle cell at 1/10th the global rate ill give you 10$, and I'll tell all my racist family, racist friends, and racist community that race doesn't exist
Once in a life time opportunity; you can fight racism today.
The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist" but why isn’t Elizabeth Warren Native? - It’s easier to degrade people if you give them an opportunity to save face and pretend that’s not what’s happening. Most people are actually perfectly willing to be degraded provided there’s some theoretical limit to how far they think it’ll go.
If race doesn’t literally exist, the victim thinks then maybe someday the social construct will fade away, and they’ll stop demanding I atone. Maybe one day I will suffer enough degradation to atone and they’ll stop telling me that I’m terrible.
Surprise, surprise! They actually do just hate you. It’ll never end. And you deserve what you tolerate.
It's possible that *everyone* resents the affirmative action, but it is suppressed when a person fits into the category.
When that person is revealed not to be in the category, the suppressed resentment is released and boils to the surface, causing reaction that is surprisingly large.
This is magnified when there is significant amounts of money at stake.
Culture is meant for sharing, that’s one of the best things about it. 90% of the time, complaints about cultural appropriation are just veiled hatred of the majority group, using weaponized vocabulary to gain status and play power games.
People shouldn’t be limited to making art, food, clothing, or events from only their race, however race is defined. It’s absolutely silly and needs to be mocked as a concept.
I read posts like this and laugh, thinking with half of my brain that it must be satire. "Surely Scott understands perfectly well what's going on. Surely he isn't actually puzzled and asking these questions sincerely." Then the other half of my brain kicks in.
The chief driver of race discourse in the U.S. is the social and political advantage of particular groups (tendentiously called "disadvantaged.") There is little interest in descriptive accuracy or logical consistency in that discourse, because such would not serve said advantage. Simple as.
One can talk about genetic factors or whatever, but that only irritates people because it impedes the purpose of the exercise.
I find myself reminded strongly of an argument Coleman Hughes made in "The End of Race Politics." Hughes claims that most people who say they believe that race is a social construct are lying or self-deceived. If they really believed that race was a social construct then they would take it less seriously, not more. Most "woke" types treat race with deadly seriousness, which indicates that they are actually extreme racial essentialists. (I've heard a similar argument made about TERFs, they claim to believe that gender is a social construct, but they act like extreme gender essentialists who believe that men have evil essences).
This also has given me a new perspective on a conversation I've had before with other people about the race of various alien characters. Under the "lived experience" view, Superman would be white, even though he is a space alien, because he has grown up raised by white people and is perceived as white by most people he knows. The Martian Manhunter, a shapeshifting superhero who has taken various human forms over the years, would vary based on continuity. In the "Supergirl" TV series he has spent many years in a civilian identity in the form of an African American man, Hank Henshaw, so you could argue that he is black in that continuity. In the Post Crisis DC comic universe by contrast, he has created the identity of a white private detective named John Jones, so I suppose he might be considered white after living on Earth for a long time. In the "Justice League" cartoon, where he has no secret identity, he is not any human race at all (although he might eventually be considered Asian since he assumes the identity of a Chinese man near the end of the series).
It looks like she's receiving harsh treatment not because of an innocent mistake about ancestry, but because she was found to have concealed the truth for some time, and in doing so misrepresented herself in a fashion she ought to have known would engender outrage among that community. I think you might be underrating how much that perceived breach of trust, as a social matter, transforms her story from what might have been dealt with as good faith mistake, into a story of bad faith deception, rendering her untrustworthy, and anathema based on the violation of taboo.
Clearly the people in favor of shunning her are choosing to take an uncharitable view of the circumstances, but that may be the appropriate stance if their priority is to avoid weaking the taboo.
This is a brave post, given that it seems bound to attract both scorn from the Hoover-vilifying crowd *and* uncomfortable snide comments from people who care entirely too much about race science. You deserve credit for writing it honestly and earnestly.
Using Jews as the "good" example here (for several meanings of "good") is a bit insane.
1. Exposing other people (who observe some form of Judaism or consider themselves culturally Jewish - whatever that means by now - or have close family members who suffered from antisemitism, or have suffered from it themselves in some fashion) as fake Jews because of their lack of maternal Jewish ancestry is, at least, *a* Jewish national sport, to about the same extent that football (aka soccer) is the national sport of Mexico. It's probably more popular than an earnest belief in God; you don't need to believe in God deep down to believe that He set down the true rule on who is a Jew (or that he gave the land of Israel to the Jews, etc.).
This actually shows that AA or land rights are something of a distraction; people will engage in this sort of behavior even if the reward in keeping others from the group because of who their parents were is purely psychological.
2. There has been a growing divergence between different "Jewish clouds" since at least the end of the 19th century. The number of people that would be at least somewhat Jewish according to hard-core antisemites (or if they got a Nobel Prize) is probably about thrice the number that are counted as part of the "core population" of Jews in population surveys. In the US, isn't that core population again about twice the number of people who are actually affiliated with a synagogue, say? (These are old proportions; they may have increased.)
3. Even more to the point, the different meanings of "Jew" really do correspond to different ways of seeing oneself and existing in the world. That is true even for a single meaning: a hundred years ago, "culturally Jewish" meant being engaged in Yiddish literature or theatre, say; nowadays, it seems to mean next to nothing, just a "next to nothing" that, however easily learned (a few phrases picked from The Joy of Yiddish, say), only some people, having the right ancestry, can indulge in (but most don't).
I presume that the people who are vilifying Hoover would claim that either she factually was insufficiently careful about verifying she was native American or, like strict liability crimes like sex with a minor, truly justified epistemic error is sufficiently rare and falsely claimed error common enough that it makes sense to punish people simply for being wrong.
I think this approach is wrong and it's implicitly saying: people who look white need to reach a higher level of proof before making these claims but it's at least worth steelmaning.
A world in which Ms Hoover got no advantages from thinking she was native, she'd have decided to 'pass' as white. She had a mirror. She knew she wasn't supposed to be very -much- native, but it was more fun for her to pretend. Meanwhile, I'm 100% western european and have to carefully mouth shibboleths about cultural appropriation in order to speak in public about some of my interests, (which you might call applied anthropology). I was told growing up that I was a very small amount mohawk. My hair and eyes are darker than Ms Hoover's, and for one long moment while applying for college I thought about checking a different box. But I did what I regard as the honorable thing. She took the easy path, and is now paying the price.
A decision theory counterargument: ideally, you want your system of justice to ban people from profiting from doing bad things.
Now, if you accept the narrative that white people robbed the indians of their land and did various bad things to them, then indians aren't just a different group, they're one that was actively victimized by white people, which means white people shouldn't be allowed to benefit from it. Now clearly you can't just kick out all the white people to give indians back their land (whatever fringe leftists may want), but you can have various social status or AA benefits going to native Americans to sorta compensate. Let's assume those make it roughly even.
if the white people who stole the indian's lands knew their great grandkids would have to owe reparations, maybe they wouldn't have taken the land. But in a world where some of their great grandkids just end up claiming to be indians and get those benefits themselves, they don't worry about it.
So the implication here is that it's wrong to claim to be a race (a set of people claiming continuous identity through generations) if the earlier generations wouldn't have claimed you, especially if their ancestral enemies would have.
I think this model of race is consistent and some people go by it. I don't actually think it's a good idea though, since even if you accept the premiselst people just don't think about the effects on their great grandkids when making plans. But that's a general argument for statutes of limitations on cultural grievances.
> “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”
One of the issues I have about the current culture (planet of cops / cancel culture / whatever) is precisely that it *doesn’t* import an important norm of law: the concept of mens rea has been jettisoned.
Arguably, this culture is far less likely to consider intent or extenuating circumstances than the average court.
We could keep the concepts "cultural X" and "ethnic (biological) X" more separate in our minds - there's a lot of overlap between the two, but we don't have to lump them together into some kind of "*really* X".
Adjacent to the specific content in this post, I am frustrated that, years into widespread obsession with race and gender, it seems we still haven't had any constructive discourse on establishing norms for these issues.
I genuinely wish I had a better framework to understand what the appropriate norms should be on meta-questions like treating all people the same vs when to provide specific accommodation; when it's okay or problematic for there to be demographic discrepancies in various environments; when something that is notionally neutral is actually inequitable and warrants intervention etc.
In Russian YouTube, there is an extremely popular public speaker anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky. He often says that race exists, just any studies of it were suppressed worldwide because of the current political climate. If I understand him correctly, race is similar to the term population (as in a community of interbreeding beings), but wider. So, race is something like population of populations.
I am not sure how useful race is scientifically, but when he describes studies of races, it all seems reasonable to me. People, including scientists, love to categorize and group stuff, and it is indeed weird to only demand isolated rigour here, but not in many other areas.
P.S. just to clarify, he is no racist, as far as I can judge, and never expressed any views that one race can be better then other somehow. However, he many times described how terrible some human cultures can be, but I guess we all already know that.
I can't be the only one to find the oversized role of academia in the drama remarkable; almost everyone involved, and in particular everyone attacking Hoover, either works in academia or has academic background (usually not of the STEM variety). Shouldn't a conflict about who does or doesn't belong to a community be played out in the overall community rather than in universities? I can't imagine a group of students at a non-religious college demanding the resignation of a professor who has falsely claimed to be a Jew, or for that matter an American or a Ukrainian.
The article even comes close to noticing this:
> De Master asked Hoover if there had ever been questions about her Native heritage before she arrived at Berkeley, and Hoover emphatically said no. (Hoover denies saying no.)
The version of Nativeness that is at play here seems to be rooted in American universities much more than on any reservation; I don't know of any other ethnoculture that is so academia-centered. The boundaries between tribal and academic work are porous here in a way I haven't seen anywhere else:
> For a long time, Hoover continued to show up to every department meeting, even to parties and retreats where her presence wasn’t mandatory. Some of her former students and faculty friends began to dread running into her. Eventually, the chair of her department announced via e-mail that Hoover would stop attending these events; the department’s administration also quietly tried to make sure that Hoover no longer worked in Native communities, as she had promised in her statement of accountability. (Hoover says she has upheld her promise without any administrative intervention.)
>
> Almost immediately, however, rumors circulated that Hoover was breaking that promise, taking part in cultural burns—the lighting of controlled fires to manage Native land—and posting photos of herself at these events on Facebook. Hoover denies that the burns are part of her scholarly work and says that she had been invited by the tribal chairperson who hosted the burns. (The tribal chairperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Why should her university have any part in deciding what tribal rituals she partakes in? Some heavy "the real Indians are us" energy here.
> One day last fall, the Native grad student who had paused her community work was feeling overwhelmed by the turmoil in her new department and went to a cultural burn up north. She wanted to be around people who weren’t embroiled in the drama surrounding Hoover, she told me. When she got to the burn, which was crowded, Hoover was there. The tribal chairperson acknowledged Hoover, announcing that she had given him a beaded medallion a year or two before. “And then she was at the campfires, laughing really loud, like how Native women usually laugh,” the grad student said. “It’s weird she laughs like that.”
So the tribe doesn't care, perhaps even appreciating someone from the outside keeping the flame going. But academics are not so easily fooled! Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?
I mean, it's a politically negotiated category whose boundaries shift depend on who's talking and how much political clout they have. It seems especially heinous with blacks and Native Americans because they're groups seen as being done badly by (with justification) historically to the white majority and who are still doing badly now.
Conversely, few people would look that hard at your Italian or Irish ancestry if you wanted to open an Italian restaurant or Irish pub. Jewish people will occasionally go after non-Jewish people trying to write about Jewish subjects, but I don't hear about it that much.
Then you get the white girl who decided to wear a Chinese dress to prom, was attacked by a Chinese-American guy for cultural appropriation, and then defended by Chinese people in China who found it flattering. It was a while ago but Avril Lavigne got in trouble for making a stereotypically Japanese video for her Japanese fans--she was big in Japan long after she had ceased to be big in America.
Why can you appropriate Irish culture freely, but not Japanese? Both were discriminated against. And back home, the Japanese have no problem with cultural appropriation; they copied large amounts of Western culture as part of industrialization, and it worked out pretty well for them. Anime shows pretty heavy influences from America's Disney films, samurai movies were influenced by cowboy movies, and so on. They are able to market their culture--revenue from Crunchyroll subscriptions and Square Enix games presumably goes back to Japanese companies that then pay Japanese people. Heck, Japan is actually culturally dominant in some areas at this point when it comes to cartoons--look at all the anime avatars on Twitter. (I think it probably is a way to get unwoke stories--your best chance to get a strong male protagonist on a traditional hero's journey is a shonen anime at this point.)
So it's more about whether the culture in question has a organized pressure group that can go after you.
I completely agree with your claim that "race doesn't exist" is a phrase suited mostly for deliberate confusion and deception. When I read a biologist or anthropologist make this claim, they are usually defining "race" as this straw man in which races share no common traits and have no common ancestor. No educated person comes close to believing something like that.
While I appreciate pointing out these subtle tensions between these various claims about race I think it's really important we make a broadside attack on the claim that "race is socially constructed" as used in conversation. Not only is it wrong I think people don't appreciate how much getting the feeling that the accepted truth is built on bullshit pushes people toward unjustified extremism.
Yes, of course race is socially constructed (as you observe) in the sense that our racial categories aren't mapped to the maximally scientifically explanatory divisions (eg it's not what you get by running a classifier on the genetic/phenotypic data). But the reason it's used is so people who don't have the scientific chops to deal with arguments that the reason black people do worse on Y task is clearly genetic can reject them out of hand.
Obviously this is fallacious reasoning. All that needs to be true for claims about genetics explaining differences in some group phenotype to be true is for those groups to have non-zero correlation with genes affecting said phenotype (and maybe a tad more if you want it to be robust across generations). You don't need to pick the maximally scientifically informative split for the explanation to work. Same way you can say the reason anvils tend to fall faster in air than feathers is anvils tend to have greater weight per cross-sectional area (even if occasional anvils are made out of some super low density substance) even though anvil/feather is hardly a principled division into categories for mechanics based explanations.
I've got advanced degrees so I've got no problem pushing back on this using the right language but I think everyone who is at all skeptical senses they are being played. Indeed, I think it's that sense which helps create the crisis of expert trust in this country -- the feeling you know you are being fed crap (agree or not there are much stronger non-fallacious arguments for the claim that the large majority of variation in things like educational attainment between races isn't genetic...but it's uncomfortable for many people to talk about this in less than totally certain terms).
Thankfully I've seen geneticists like David Reich implicitly call out this reasoning but not everyone goes and reads what the actual scientists say or what their reasoning is. That's why I've also seen people who are smart enough to realize something is bullshit here get dragged into the opposite kind of race essentialism because those are the only people who take their criticisms seriously.
Look, I get it that it's hard rhetorically/emotionally for people on the left to have to treat this issue as even a legitimate topic of scientific debate thar evidence needs to be cited for but you don't have to actually be able to make every argument yourself or even engage in that debate -- but doing so badly just makes everything worse .
I couldn't find the angry commentary tweetstorm that must have happened in this situation, but this letter from Hoover's former friend makes clear that she's angry about Hoover's deliberate lying, not about genuine mistaken identity: https://nativeappropriations.com/2023/05/a-letter-to-elizabeth-hoover.html
She writes:
> The thing that is hard for me is you could have done all of this good work as a white woman. You could have stood in solidarity with Native people, been a true accomplice, a co-conspirator, without having to claim identity. The work needs to be done, and communities need people to do it with them. You could have had the same career and do the same work as a white woman, and folks would have welcomed it. But now you’ve broken all of the trust and called into question all of the work, because you started it with a lie.
1. The "no biological basis" and "genetic affilnity" arguments address two different problems. "No basis" was coined to invalidate the assertions of Black genetic inferiority that cropped up several decades ago. "Genetic affinity" is one means for a group to define its own members. While the two concepts conflict, they coexist in enlightened society.
2. The 1979 Steve Martin movie, "The Jerk," perfectly limns the genetic affinity argument. Steve Martin is adopted as a baby by Black Mississippi sharecroppers. By his teens he has an almost perfect Black cultural repertoire and sees himself as Black; his one deficiency is that he doesn't have rhythm. He goes out into the world and no matter how hard he identifies as Black, he's treated as white. Result: fish out of water. His misery is finally resolved when his adoptive family (which he has adventitiously enriched) takes him back to the farm and to a much improved sharecropper's shack. Miraculously, he gets rhythm. While the happy ending endorses lived experience as the criterion, the bulk of the movie shows that skin color and genetics (no nappy hair!) are the determinants.
> 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'm gonna take a hard-line #1 here. Not only is "cultural appropriation" not something we should worry about, it's not something that *exists.* The proper term for the thing that it is referring to is simply "culture;" cultural appropriation is a made-up nonsense term used by cultural arsonists to try to problematize the way cultural development has always worked since the dawn of time. The first and most fundamental rule of culture has always been, "everyone appropriates from everyone around them."
These days, the steel guitar is commonly associated with country music. But it was originally developed in the late 19th century by Hawaiian musician Joseph Kekuku, for use in traditional Hawaiian music, and it features prominently in the "island style" sound commonly associated with Hawaii. Country artists using steel guitars are a clear-cut case of cultural appropriation then, right?
Not so fast. Kekuku took the guitar — a Spanish instrument which evolved from the lute, an ancient design whose origins are lost to history — and added a playing bar made of steel (a metal unknown to the Hawaiians until Europeans introduced it!) to produce a specific sound quality. Later artists continued to tinker with the design, adding a resonator, then electric pickups, then pedals. (Fun fact: the electric pickup was first invented for the steel guitar, and was later adapted to more standard guitars. Were it not for steel player George Beauchamp tinkering with speakers and magnetic fields to get a louder sound out of his instrument, rock 'n' roll might have never existed!)
At every step along the way, be it Kekuku and his fellow Hawaiian guitarists who developed the distinctive Hawaiian style, those before them, and those after them, people took things that already existed, added something of their own to it, and built something (marginally) new out of it. This is the way culture has always worked. "Appropriation" is the natural process of cultural development, nothing more, and no one has the right to make anyone feel ashamed of it.
I mean, I think the real answer is (4) the consensus, which you described accurately at the start of the post, is messy, with many exceptions that prove the rule.
In this case, the key element that you left out of the summary is that there has been some level of deception. People interviewed in that article told the author that they received obfuscatory answers about her ancestral connections to her tribe for many years; and over that same period she benefited from her Native identity by getting a good academic position. Compare and contrast Elizabeth Warren, who apparently had approximately the same thing happen to her, but pretty much as soon as her ancestry was questioned, discovered the truth and admitted it; nor did she benefit from her Native identity.
This is still messy, because you're right that as a young person, she seems to have had many formative experiences that would normally be associated with being Native; and under any other circumstances that might have been enough for her to count as Native for social purposes. But as you note, any definition of race is in fact a messy superposition of several different things. If you want to make a claim on tribal property, you have to go through certain proofs which are different from just social identity; and if you want to present yourself as Native for professional purposes, the social proofs are different again. And she seems to have deliberately concealed the truth during some of these processes.
Being white is considered low-status among Critical Social Justice advocates and even many progressives. The backlash is used to penalize white people that may seek status or benefits of being a minority by making false claims. The CSJ worldview appears inconsistent because it's not truly egalitarian. CSJ advocates like things that benefit groups they consider historically oppressed, despite rhetoric about equality/equity. I think for your trilemma, you say "vilify intentional deceivers but not those who make a simple mistake" and the worldview is consistent.
I read the article as much more damning of white allies than of Hoover. There are several mentions of her (depending on your interpretation) playing up/embracing her heritage by wearing A LOT of Native beaded goods/beading in meetings. And then there’s this:
“Annette Rodriguez was a graduate fellow at the center toward the end of this period. She told me about a Native scholar who gave a job talk wearing a three-piece suit with a distinctively patterned tie. Someone asked him about the pattern, expecting that the design had come from his tribal community. The scholar said it was from Barneys. “He wasn’t going to fuel the fantasies of the white imagination of what an authentic Native person was,” Rodriguez said. “Liz was very happy to do that.””
A big part of the anger I see in the article from Native people is that there’s more room for Pretendians who flatter the assumptions of white peoples than the full range of actual Native experience.
Cultural appropriation is a fundamentally insane concept that misunderstands how culture works at the most basic level. Race, in the genetic sense, obviously exists and is obviously distinct from (but correlated with) ethnicity in the cultural sense; however, in most cases it's ethnicity that people care about, not race, and race gets used as a proxy for ethnicity.
...But that doesn't actually resolve the issue. People caught between different ethnic identities, or other identities, without fully belonging is a thing. And when you add material incentives (like affirmative action) in, built on an assumption of clean lines that don't exist in reality, things can get ugly.
My impression from the story was that Hoover was the type to cancel others caught in this sort of situation, and so I didn't feel too bad for her being hoist on her own petard. But I don't think that was actually said, so that was uncharitable of me. She definitely thought her voice was more important because of her Native identity, and used that to her advantage, but maybe this always was based in culture rather than blood. I don't know - the specific case doesn't matter that much, but the general problem is not straightforward.
There's definitely also the issue of social-justice types declaring belief in constructivism and fluid borders between identities, but proposing policies and social norms that rely on an underlying assumption of sharp and immutable lines.
In the case of Native Americans, there is another option for deciding if someone is really a member of the group--whether or not they're legally a member of one of the tribes. Each federally recognized Native American tribe has their own rules for who can become a member based on ancestry, residency, and other factors. Whether these rules are reasonable or not, I think most people would agree that its their prerogative to define membership however they want. Universities (which seem to be the main place these controversies happen) probably aren't going to demand genetic tests of potential Native American faculty, but they could just ask whether they're a member of a legally recognized tribe and accept that tribe's decision on whether they're 'really' Native American.
I am really confused about why the section on race in part II was included; the part that includes: "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."
Which is a pretty strong opener...but then you pivot away. If you replace "race" with "genetic ancestry", nothing changes, the essay and arguments still flow identically. The core argument, that genetics/biological race is a morally bad category to draw for group affiliation, does not require biological race. Am I missing a subtle point here? Is it just the 23andMe thing?
That seems like a spicy topic to touch and then drop and argue against almost immediately.
I thought this piece was clear enough about this but based on comments I guess not.
NO pretty much no one on the left is really going to say race has nothing to do with genes (or ancestry which I'll use equivalently since there is sufficient genetic variation to infer ancestry from it). I mean there are always idiots but in general no.
The claim that they tend to make is that race is socially constructed, i.e, that the way we divide up genetic space into races isn't even close to how you would do it if you were picking scientific concepts, e.g, if you tried to break up the genetic space into ancestral groups based on degree of interbreeding and genetic similarity etc it wouldn't come up with a group that tracks, eg, the us cultural concept of black under the one drop rule.
And while one can argue this point on its own it's reasonable enough. People, except the deeply confused, aren't making an argument that's totally stupidly dumb.
The error in this approach is when it's used to try and suggest that therefore you can't possibly explain observed differences in statistical outcomes by race by reference to genetics. Of fucking course you can. Sure, maybe being black under the us cultural definition isn't the ideal scientific concept but it doesn't change the fact that conditional on an American being black there chance of having sickle cell increases drastically.
As I said I thought this was all basically clear from the discussion in the post but apparently some comments seem to think liberals are really suggesting the extreme view that genes have literally nothing to do with it view. And sure I guess you can always find some idiots but despite spending my life in academia I haven't met someone who said that (tho large numbers prob means there are a few).
I believe that these claims that 'races are not at all biological/genetical' comes from the fact that 'race' is a poor word to accurately describe the concept of 'ethnicity', given that the word 'race' originally describes a purely genetic concept. In the human species, the so-called 'races' have a greater genetic diversity among themselves than between themselves. . It is just an exaggerated version of the more correct take 'races make no sense on a pure biological perspective and are a blurry social construct'.
I think that most of these issues would fade away if in English 'ethnicity' was preferred to 'race' in this specific context, as it is the case in many European languages. I think everyone would agree that 'ethinicity' has some biological component to it, as it is clear that groups that recognize themselves as a particular ethnicity partly do so in the basis of ascendance and appearance
When it comes to Elizabeth Hoover, I guess it's fair to not recognize her as Mi'kmaq base on her lack of ascendance (although I couldn't care less), but I find it completely unfair that all these people criticize her while her actions and her lying (even if bad) seem clearly humane and understandable.
I've asked my Chinese students how they define Chineseness.
Is it the ability to read, write, and speak Chinese fluently? Then what about ABCs, adopted Chinese Children, and American Born Chinese who generally lose this ability. And what about foreign children and mixed children who attend local schools in China? Or the small numbers of foreigners who do become extremely proficient? Are they Chinese?
Does one have to "look" Chinese? Then what about Tibetans and Uyghurs and other visible minorities? Koreans and Japanese can blend into China better.
Does one have to "think" like a Chinese person? ABCs and Chinese from the Mainland, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, all "think" differently.
Who is more Chinese? The third generation Chinese-Canadian who doesn't speak a word of Chinese? Or the Ghanaian kid who grew up in China and only speaks Chinese? Half the taxi drivers in China would admit they don't speak "proper Chinese".
What's interesting about China is that you can earn genuine respect in the degree to which you can appropriate Chinese culture and language. And I feel that language and culture are far more significant in shaping who you are than your appearance, though that of course can impact you too. Beautiful people and obese people and white people and black people and Chinese people and so on, will all internalize their experiences differently. But it would be nice to have a way for anyone to deemphasize their embodied experience, in a Chinese kind of way, or a Jewish conversion kind of way.
“there’s a missing step here, something like 1.5: maybe people should stop caring about their cultural identity”
I surprised there’s little validation for this point in the comments as of yet. It’s definitely where I land, at least the modified version of “people should stop caring *so much* about their cultural identity”.
I do understand the emotional and political strength that especially disadvantaged groups can draw from coming together under a shared identity but let us also acknowledge the huge dividends of assuming a more cosmopolitan or even an animalian identity < insert picture of furless ape contemplating a brilliant Milky Way against the deepest darkness >
I feel like I can steelman the idea of "cultural appropriation" as the idea of "profaning things that others find sacred". I remember one time in the US I saw some hipster wearing what appeared to be an Australian Army slouch hat complete with rising sun badge and I did feel a certain amount of personal offence -- that's a sacred object (of a sort) in my culture, and he's just wearing it with no regard to its context. And I understood how people from certain Native American cultures might feel about certain varieties of feathered headdress.
Of course the fact that somebody is offended by something doesn't make it immoral, it makes it impolite. I feel like one of the big effects of the death of ettiquette in the West is that we've taken many things that used to just be "impolite" and labelled them as immoral. But we _need_ that grey area between good behaviour and immorality, that wearing-shorts-to-a-wedding regime of behaviours that (a) can make people think less of you, but (b) nobody needs to get morally outraged about.
Is it a unique Scott feature to decry isolated demands for rigor... then respond will all the rigor demanded and more?
I have a less rigorous take
1. Common sense dictates she gets a pass given it was an honest mistake of family history and she has enough lived experience to cover the gap.
2. The community that denounced her did not do so upon sober consideration of all the facts.
3. Instead they were primed to call out white people in academia claiming to have native ancestry because of prominent cases and general belief where some do so cynically with 0 lived experience
4. She basically got caught in the cross fire
5. Toxic woke environment caused friends to turn on her out of fear of their own careers and reputation who otherwise would have been capable of that sober minded consideration of the facts.
Just an Nteenth warning of the terrible-ness of cancel culture, not *necessarily* proof that our models of race+culture have to be rewritten.
We're 155 comments in so this is going to get buried, but you all are missing it. Elizabeth Hoover is being burned at the stake because NOBODY READ THE ARTICLE.
There isn't a general principle to tease out of the condemnation issuing from all quarters because nobody read the article. There's no innate genetic component to race that can be understood through the lens of her persecution because nobody read the article. There aren't any fundamental, nuanced Native American social dynamics to her being ostracized from that community because nobody read the article.
Until now I had no idea there was a another side to this story because I didn't read the article. I only know about Elizabeth Hoover because I read "Let's Talk About Pretendians" at the Make More Pie substack (https://nancyrommelmann.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-pretendians?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fsaved&utm_medium=reader2) and it never occurred to me to doubt that the source material was anything other than a scathing indictment. I found Nancy Rommelmann's take interesting and thought provoking, but now that I know she was bulshitting I hate her for lying to me.
Then again maybe Scott is lying to me. I wouldn't know, because I still haven't read the article, and I never will because my subscription to the New Yorker expired 25 years ago, I've already used up my free articles for the month, and this issue will be forgotten by April. Jesus.
Wow! There's a lot of material here, and lots of logic branches to follow. Following my Business Writing training, I'll put the Bottom Line Up Front: None of it should matter. In general. For most purposes. Okay, it's not that simple.
I'm tempted to write a book to try to capture all my thoughts on this, but I doubt anyone would want to read it.
I'll summarize: none of this would matter much if there weren't legal rights, privileges, and considerations attached. Elizabeth Hoover says she knew she wasn't eligible for enrolled citizenship in the Mi'kmaq nation, but there'd be no reason I can see to argue about her status except for the US rules that make it important. Scott says she never "officially claimed" affirmative action benefits, but there is no procedure for "claiming" these benefits - they are given by organizations that choose to do so. Both Harvard and Elizabeth Warren loudly claimed that her (disputed) status as a Native American was irrelevant to her hiring at Harvard Law School, but this makes no sense. Before she was hired, Harvard had publicly announced a commitment to hiring more Native American faculty. When she was hired, Harvard proudly claimed her as the first Native American woman on the Law School faculty. So, either Harvard was lying about a commitment to hiring more Native Americans, or it lied when it claimed it didn't consider her status. The same holds with Elizabeth Hoover - she was mentored by people who believed in her Native heritage, and hired because of her Native status.
A personal example: My maternal grandmother spent a fair amount of time and effort establishing her descent from 4 people who sailed on the Mayflower. She had her membership certificate in the Society of Mayflower Descendants hanging on the wall of her living room. I later found that she was approved by the North Carolina chapter, which was not her first attempt. Later, the national organization determined that her lineage could not be used to establish descent for anyone else (including her children) - presumably there were some weak links in her documentation. This situation would matter to relatives who want to be Mayflower descendants, or to the genealogists who guard the purity of the membership rolls, but to no one else. If being a Mayflower descendant conferred legal advantages, it would be a different story.
My college recently used its LinkedIn presence to highlight an "Indigenous" undergraduate student, who was photographed wearing clothes and jewelry from her culture. She grew up in New Jersey, and was indigenous to eastern Algeria, but still counts as "Indigenous". She certainly has every right to study, practice, and take pride in her parents' culture, but there'd be no particular reason for the University to take notice, and highlight her status, except that they earn Lefty Cred by having Indigenous students. Even students whose parents voluntarily emigrated from their homeland to a new country on a new continent.
The concept of Cultural Appropriation should be dropped. This is a process previously referred to by sociologists as "syncretism", where people freely borrow from other societies, and enrich themselves in the process. Of course, it could be done in an offensive way - drag queen nuns, say, or it could be questionable taste - say, boy scouts demonstrating sacred Indian dances. In a pluralistic society, there's really no way to prevent this. Low-key discussion and education could stop the offense by well-meaning people, but provocateurs will provoke, even if they're criticized for it.
Then there's the case of Buffy St. Marie, a very talented artist who identified as Native American but turned out probably wasn't and CBC outed her last year. It seemed that some of her relatives had tried to out her and at one point she threatened them with legal action, which may have caused them to back off. There was an uproar amongst various Native American activist groups, demanding that her awards as a Native American singer be rescinded, apparently on cultural appropriation grounds. But whether or not she had any native blood, she'd been adopted by the chief of the Piapot First Nation. According to Wikipedia, the chief's descendants said the attacks on St. Marie were "hurtful, ignorant, colonial — and racist" They explained ""We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us, that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could."
So people are very divided about St. Marie. I for one think her story shows how these concepts of race and "lived experience" are concepts that aren't well defined, so they mean different things to different people. Scott's piece does an excellent job of teasing out this point, but I think his analytic framework is a little limited. This is an area where opposites can easily be true, that is, race can be something that exists or doesn't exist, because it's an ambiguous term. The law of the excluded middle excludes ambiguity, which makes it a very weak foundation for any logic that's supposed to apply to the real world, which is full of ambiguities and uncertain quantities. So, it's possible to believe that lived experience is more important than genetic markers of race, or the other way around, not just be on one side or other of the point, but both at the same time. Because both have some truth in them and some falseness, if you want to look at it on that axis, but maybe a better way to look at it is, both beliefs are useful in addressing situations.
So it seems like St. Marie and Hoover were in a very similar situation with regard to their "lived experience" and genetic status, though St. Marie has refused to take a DNA test, but St. Marie has some very deep and loving support from the First Nation family she was part of. When I read what they said, my feeling was, what's anyone complaining about? Do Native Americans not have the right to adopt someone? I'm also influenced by my appreciation for St. Marie's music and her advocacy of Native American causes. Perhaps the real issue in Hoover's case is that she was an academic rather than an artist? Or that she didn't have similar connections to the Native American community she claimed to be part of? Or are the two situations more similar than I'm perceiving them to be?
At any rate, I don't see why we should need to choose between the various inconsistent views of genetics and lived experience Scott's posting talks about. They aren't completely inconsistent, unless you're of the view that when it comes to race, genetics is everything or nothing, and likewise for lived experience. Both, or either, of these positions seems absurd to me, like arguments by someone who actually believes concepts have to be definite and are not allowed to be ambiguous or even fuzzy. Yet, the amount of argument over these points, and the obsessive insistance that one or other belief about race is "true" or "false" does seem to take up a rather large part of our political and academic discussions about this subject, which for me only goes to show how emotional rather than rational the discussion continues to be.
We must start by acknowledging that the very racial categories we discuss, like "black" and "white," are socially constructed concepts that were actively created and enforced through oppressive colonial policies and violence. As the sources highlighted, there was no monolithic "white race" in early 17th century Virginia - that was a divide purposefully manufactured and inscribed into law to uphold certain power structures.
Barbara J. Fields, author of "Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life," illuminates how "racecraft" was a political process "of ascribing racial meanings to relationships that were indubitably social," rather than reflecting any true biological distinctions.
Perhaps take Theodore W. Allen's work, " The Invention of the White Race," that delves into how the "white race" was invented as a ruling class social control formation to protect agrarian capitalist interests. So when we discuss racial identity today, we must first recognize we are operating within an invented system designed for economic exploitation and domination of certain groups. These categories did not arise organically from genetic data or some natural order.
The Limitations of Genetics
Speaking of genetics, the references you provided rightly cautioned against using it as the prime determinant of racial identity or lived experience. As one source noted, genetic expressions and similarities between populations often simply indicate proximity over time - they do not inherently equate to meaningful categorical racial differences.
Citing genetics as the basis for something like Native American identity or belonging would be particularly fraught given how these were diaspora communities forcibly removed and fragmented from ancestral lands. Using genetics as the gatekeeper risks further dispossessing them from their heritage.
Moreover, the example you provided of "black children raised in black communities" as the representation of a racialized experience was overly reductive. The African diaspora encompasses a vast range of cultures, experiences, and socialization processes that should not be flattened into a singular narrative.
Racialization vs. Genetics
It is the social process of racialization, rather than genetic variants, that plays the primary role in constructing racial experience and identity. As your references highlighted, "black" and "white" were racial constructs enforced through brutality, laws, and ingrained social hierarchies - not natural outcomes.
So in many ways, lived experience and the socialization of racialized experience may be more relevant factors than ancestry or genetics when discussing racial identity. This provides important context as we evaluate controversies like the Elizabeth Hoover case through the lens of oppressed groups reclaiming their sovereignty over identities and belonging.
The Dangers of Appropriation
We need to more directly reckon with the insidious harms of cultural appropriation and dispossession that marginalized groups have faced. Simply focusing the debate on representation and inclusion does not go far enough.
There are legitimate fears that enshrining an individualistic "lived experience" basis for racial identity could open the door to further extraction, decontextualization and erasure of precious cultural elements and narratives. As your reader stated, it is one thing to appreciate and experience aspects of a culture - it is another to arrogate and redefine that culture devoid of its original context and stakeholder community.
This resonates strongly with the colonial histories and persistent traumas that Native American tribes have endured around land dispossession, forced assimilation, and attempted cultural genocide at the hands of settler colonialism. Their staunch defense of belonging and identity boundaries, while perhaps severe in Hoover's case, emanates from a justified desire to protect what has been systemically attacked for centuries.
Belonging vs. Heritage
One distinction that merits further exploration is the difference between belonging and heritage as it relates to racial/ethnic identity. I would invitee you to think about how belonging is more about acceptance and inclusion within a particular group, while heritage refers to provable ancestral connections that can be measured to some degree.
In the case of Elizabeth Hoover and her contested Native identity, it seems the Native American community drew a line suggesting her lived experiences facilitated a sense of belonging, but did not constitute a heritage claim to tribal membership. This points to the complexity of these two interrelated but distinct concepts.
For many Native nations, protecting legal/cultural belonging boundaries is an act of defending sovereignty and preventing further encroachment after centuries of having lands, identities and very existence forcibly undermined. While harsh in Hoover's case, it represents an assertion of self-determination over who gets to be a stakeholder.
At the same time, one could argue that Hoover's individual pursuit of Native cultural enlightenment and embodiment, even if based on inaccurate ancestral beliefs, represented an attempt to cultivate personal heritage connections, regardless of criteria for official tribal belonging.
Exploring where the boundaries around belonging and heritage should be drawn for different communities, and according to what parameters, is an important part of this larger dialogue. It forces us to wrestle with complex questions of identity, continuity and "authenticity" without resorting to rigid policing.
The Journey of Other Colonized Groups
We should all seek to explore the perspective on these nuances of belonging and heritage that may come from other global communities who have been shaped by colonial identity formulations and ethnic supremacy ideologies.
For many across the Indian subcontinent or Iraqi/Iranian plateau for instance, conceptions of ethnic and national identity have had to be reconstructed and reclaimed in the wake of British colonial boundaries and categorizations designed to divide and conquer. Defining belonging vs ancestry becomes highly situational and fraught.
Many immigrants arriving in North America in recent decades have also had to navigate questions of how ancestry, phenotype, lived experience, and outside perceptions interact to shape their racial/ethnic identity and sense of cultural continuity or belonging. Their journeys of self-definition provide relevant touchpoints.
Within various Latinx communities, there arelong-standing debates around indigeneity, mixed ancestry and complex relationships to Spanish colonial heritages and categorizations. Who gets to claim belonging to certain indigenous identities is fraught with generational trauma.
And among the diversity of Black communities, questions of ancestral heritage vs. culturally cultivated forms of ethnic belonging allow for nuanced conversations. Caribbean nationals, mixed-race individuals, and various African diasporic subcultures have had to navigate these identity terrains in complex ways.
So while the Native American example provides a particularly charged case study, we must resist treating it as an isolated experience. Looking across diasporas can reveal common human themes around heritage, belonging, cultural resilience and the lingering impacts of colonial rhetorics - all of which feed into our greater understanding.
Decolonizing Conceptions of Identity
At the core, this examination reveals how modern conceptions and boundaries of racial/ethnic identity are still deeply caged by colonial logics and power structures inherited from past oppressors. Our language, assumptions, and measures of legitimacy remain constrained by the very supremacist ideologies that dehumanized entire communities to begin with.
True decolonization of how we understand identity may require a more radical self-determination - where impacted groups themselves can engage openly in the spiritual, cultural and social labor of defining their own terms for heritage and belonging freed from external impositions.
This is perhaps why discussions of "lived experience" as the key determinant feel so fraught. While potentially democratic in a liberal individualistic sense, they open new vulnerabilities for extraction, misrepresentation and dispossession of what are profound collective identities and liberatory projects.
There are no easy solutions. But continually centering the voices and perspectives of those most impacted by colonial identity formulations is crucial as we explore this territory. Their epistemologies and first-hand embodied experiences must be our primary guides if we are to map a journey towards more holistic, democratic and reparative ways of facilitating identity.
The discourse around racial identity, lived experience, ancestral heritage, and the like is highly complex terrain to navigate, fraught with deep histories and personal resonances. As we reflect on the perspectives and contexts explored here, I would encourage you to critically engage with the following thought-provoking questions:
What assumptions or unexamined narratives around racial categories and ethnic identities have you internalized from dominant culture? How might deconstructing and understanding the manufactured, colonial roots of these concepts shift your viewpoint?
In what ways has your own lived experience of race been shaped by socialization, systems of oppression, and perceived belonging irrespective of genetic ancestry? How do you disentangle the two?
What does authentically cultivating one's heritage and a sense of ethnic/cultural belonging look like, particularly for communities impacted by diaspora, displacement and colonial identity formulations?
How can this be pursued with sensitivity?
How do you navigate the tensions between an individualistic conception of racial identity based on personal narrative, and a more collective sense of ethnic/tribal belonging defined by specific group stakeholders? Where is the balance struck?
Are there problematic assumptions or blind spots in how you may be equating or distinguishing the nuances between race, ethnicity, nationality and other identity markers? How can you better parse those distinctions?
What does it mean to decolonize your own perceptions and languages around racial identity? How can an anti-racist, anti-colonial lens be more fully embodied in these dialogues?
Whose voices and first-hand perspectives have you prioritized in shaping your current understandings of heritage, belonging and racial identity politics? Which perspectives are missing or need greater centering?
How can spaces be created for marginalized groups to engage in the open-ended work of redefining their own identity concepts and belonging-criteria freed from external constraints? What would that liberated process look like?
These are just some of the critical questions we must contend with as we strive to develop a more intersectional, historically-grounded and decolonized understanding of racial identity. The answers will be different for each of us based on our individual contexts.
I encourage you to lean into this exploration with openness, humility and care. Embrace the complexity and nuances rather than looking for convenient resolutions. Be wakeful to blind spots and power dynamics that may constrain your current perspectives. Most importantly, seek out and elevate the first-hand narratives of those most impacted by these issues as primary guides.
Interrogating our assumptions and unlearning internalized patterns around race and identity is crucial inner work. It requires vulnerability, a willingness to make purposeful repairs, and an acceptance that this decolonization process will be an ongoing, iterative journey. But it is a journey well worth embarking on as we seed more holistic ways of recognizing our common humanity beyond imposed categorizations. I wish you clarity and courage as you navigate your own identity evolution.
Here are some books, documentaries and other resources I would highly recommend:
Books:
"Racecraft" by Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields - A seminal work deconstructing how race is a modern idea manufactured through social, political and economic motives.
"The Invention of the White Race" by Theodore W. Allen - Provides a historical materialist analysis of how the "white race" was created as a ruling class social control formation.
"How the Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev - Explores the process of how Irish immigrants to the U.S. were initially racialized as non-white, and the politics of their assimilation into the "white" identity.
"Black Skin, White Masks" by Frantz Fanon - A foundational text examining the psychological dimensions of racism and the politics of decolonizing the mind.
"The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter - Chronicles how the concept of a "white race" developed over time through acts of oppression, immigration and social construction.
Documentaries/Films:
"Race: The Power of An Illusion" (2003) - A powerful PBS documentary series interrogating the social, historical and pseudo-scientific underpinnings of modern racial categories.
"Ethnic Notions" (1987) - Marlon Riggs' essential film deconstructing how racist images and stereotypes about Black people were perpetuated through popular culture.
"Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock" (2017) - Powerful indigenous voices and perspectives from the Standing Rock movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
"Daughters of the Dust" (1991) - A poetic film exploring the Gullah/Geechee culture of the African diaspora and themes of ancestry, belonging and cultural preservation.
"I Am Not Your Negro" (2016) - Brings James Baldwin's works to life, dissecting the persistent realities of racism and struggles for belonging in America.
Other Resources:
Teachings and writings from Indigenous scholars like Vine Deloria Jr., Lee Maracle, Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina and others.
The "Seeing White" podcast series from Scene on Radio examining the social construction of white racial identity.
Works by Black feminist scholars like bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde and others on intersectional identity.
The "All My Relations" podcast exploring the diversity of Native cultures, stories and communities.
Sources from ethnic studies departments, local community-based organizations and museums focused on first-voice cultural narratives.
This is blurring two related concepts. Race is shorthand for shared ancestry. This is crystal clear when dealing with non-humans, and is commonly used with breeding domesticated animals and plants. Ethnicity is shorthand for a persistent (multigenerational) group of humans having certain attributes, some heritable perhaps, some not, like language, religion, traditions, lifestyle, clothing.
I agree with your judgement of Elizabeth Hoover and her erstwhile friends. The right course for her, once she found out her ancestry, was to cease to be a spokesperson or representative for the group in any way, and just live quietly in the background. Her "friends" have contributed to the weakening of social bonds all around.
As to the question of genetic clusters and "biological race," are the clusters "natural kinds?" If not, what is the significance?
An interesting example of lived experience is Barrack Obama, who had no connection to mainland American racial categories as a child and whose native culture is "international," according to his friends from Honolulu, Occidental, and Columbia, but adopted a black cultural identity after moving to Chicago and working as a community organizer on the Far South Side. Is Barrack Obama black?
As usual, I enjoyed reading this article, and agreed with most of what was written. I was initially sympathetic toward the plight of Elizabeth Hoover, until I realized she was a professor of anthropology, and in particular has an interest in critical medical anthropology. A quick survey of her publications suggests that she would probably be in the camp that is opposed to “cultural appropriation“ and believes in much of the nonsense of critical race theory. I wonder if she would be as sympathetic to somebody else in her situation if this hadn’t happened to her. I suppose, live by the sword die by the sword.
All this cancel culture reminds me the Third Reich. I once read a letter which some German officer wrote, which was like this:
"I learnt the terrible, previously unknown fact that half of my relatives on my father's side were Jews. I know that this does not disqualify me from serving in the Wehrmacht, but what about my membership in the NSDAP?"
> if somebody told me that somehow I wasn’t Jewish, I would need to re-evaluate my self-identity at least a little
The difference is that Jewish ethnicity is infinitely more welcoming than native American ethnicity because *anyone can convert*. Sure we don't *evangelize* - you don't *have* to convert. But if you feel like you're really meant to be Jewish, and you convert, then you're Jewish, end of question, no matter your DNA.
There's nothing like that for native Americans. You can live on the reservation and marry a native American and at most, that would make your kids native Americans. But not you. You would always be an outside colonizer.
Do we really need to see proof that she benefited from affirmative action? Native American is hot hot hot, in the oppression Olympics. Also, it’s woke academia. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. She knew what she signed up for.
> 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.
This isn't plausible; without internal awareness of Jewish background, there is essentially zero chance that the families would have continued marrying only each other over the course of multiple centuries. Once they forget that they're Jews, they're going to start marrying Christians.
> 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.
It's not exactly an unusual position. Everyone who wants to project cultural power is aware that this is accomplished by getting other people to adopt your culture, not by getting them not to.
Meanwhile, Buffy Saint-Marie has spent her whole life consciously lying about having Indian heritage. None of her Indian community care, since they already accepted her as being part of their tribe, genetic testing does not overrule that, and they all lived happily ever after.
I think it's important to make it clear that the "consensus" you're referring to in this post is the consensus of Westerners on Twitter. Even the same Westerners are likely to express very different feelings in real life.
Just a very small query: is there some confusion when talking about "real" Jews speaking or not speaking Yiddish? I believe Yiddish is a Hebrew/German mishmash now mostly spoken in Brooklyn and not to be confused with the ancient and revived in modern times Jewish language of Hebrew. (I started to say Ben-Yehuda "resurrected" Hebrew but then thought better of it.)
I'm white, but I've had many social interactions with Tlingit people, so I'll try to think about this from their perspective.
Tlingit society is matrilineal. I've seen Tlingit people claim that the United States government imposing its blood quanta system on them is racist because it's different from their own rules. If someone is 1/128 Tlingit by blood quantum, but they have an unbroken chain of Tlingit matrilineal descent, according to Tlingit tradition, they're obviously Tlingit.
I met a Tlingit guy who married an Athabascan woman. He wanted his children to be Tlingit. He couldn't have his own clan adopt his wife because Tlingit tradition doesn't allow intra-clan marriage, so he had to persuade another clan to adopt her. Their children will belong to the clan that adopted her, not his clan. According to tradition, his children will be obligated to treat members of his clan with special respect.
I've heard Tlingits talk about how proud they are of their Irish ancestors. Apparently, this is the appropriate way for Tlingits to talk about their fathers' clans, whether those clans are Tlingit or not.
Clan membership is a huge part of Tlingit culture. Each clan has its own traditions not found in other clans. In my opinion, it's not possible to be culturally Tlingit or have 'lived experience' as a Tlingit without belonging to a specific clan.
I don't see how an Elizabeth Hoover situation could happen with Tlingits. They pay a lot of attention to which girls/women are born or adopted into the clan. Generally, they should be aware of whether a woman belongs to their clan or not. I suppose there could be weird situations such as babies getting mixed up in a hospital at birth. My guess is that the tribal elders of the clan involved would decide such a case, and the elders of one clan might make a different decision than the elders of another clan.
By the way, in Tlingit culture regards cultural appropriation as an act of violence. If Tlingit Clan A wrongs Tlingit Clan B, Clan B might steal a tradition from Clan A. The Unangans once fought a war against the Sitka Tlingit, so they pirated some Unangan songs, which they still sing to this day to spite the Unangans. In the 19th century, after some white Americans did something wrong to some Tlingits (I think they broke a promise or treaty, I don't remember the details) the Tlingits appropriated some white American culture as an act of vengeance. By now, the Tlingits have figured out this isn't an effective way to retaliate against white Americans.
If someone wants to take a Tlingit tradition without offending them, the process is to get permission from the clan elders. I've talked to young Tlingits who are frustrated about their elders not being willing to share clan traditions more widely with outsiders, since they think it would help preserve their culture. Maybe when they grow old and become clan elders themselves they will be more open to outsiders borrowing their culture.
From what I've experienced myself and heard from others, the groups normally decried as intolerant--such as 4chan's /pol/, toxic gamers, and now white nationalists--are surprisingly tolerant: "I don't care who or what you are, as long as you also bash on ******s."
I’ve always found it funny that the consensus is pro transgenderism but anti transracialism.
But then again, I’m someone who is “racially ambiguous”. People have assumed I’m Moroccan, Yemeni, Brazilian, Indian, etc.
My mom is Jamaican — mostly of African descent but also part “Pakistani” (it wasn’t Pakistan back then, of course) — and my dad is Jewish, his mom was German, and his dad Russian.
My “lived experience” is that race is both biologically informed and socially constructed. For instance, in America I’m “black”, but in Jamaica I’m “coloured”.
The one-drop rule in American culture is a rather interesting thing. On one hand, it mitigates the prevalence of colorism as seen in Latin America and the Caribbean. On the other hand, it limits Americans’ ability to think about race in a grounded, genetically-informed way.
I think it took the transgender movement for society to get more serious about the innate differences between men and women (on average). A decade ago, it was common to hear progressive types deny biological differences in the sexes — among the most consequential and obvious facts of social life.
The feminist movement found talk of biological differences counterproductive, and it took transgenderism to break that hold on the discourse.
Perhaps a transracial movement can break the hold that antiracists have on the discourse; the party line of racial blank-slate-ism is clearly not helping “black and brown communities”. Time to try something else.
If this happened to an Orthodox (and Conservative?) Jew they would just be asked to go through a technical conversion and then they'd go on with their Jewish lives. Interestingly, the way this would be most likely to go wrong is that this hypothetical person, might take offense at the notion that something external to them could define their identity for them and then refuse to convert.
I just want to point out that I don't think it's proper to say "halakhically Jewish according to Reform rabbis" as the Reform movement holds that Halakha is not binding and therefore as far as I'm aware their Rabbis don't make Halakhic rulings. This is not the case for the Conservative movement.
Stop caring so much about heritage, racial and/or cultural.
Just stop it.
I'm not kidding.
It's irrational that Scott cares so much about his family identity that he refuses to seriously embrace 1.5 merely because he enjoys caring about being Jewish.
I think you have reinvented the concept of “ethnicity”, and explained why (at least in Europe) we tend to talk about “ethnicity” rather than “race”. “Race” is usually taken as implying an acceptance of racial theories of how it all works (which are, of course, different in different cultures, but are entirely about the genetically-inherited idea), whereas “ethnicity” is usually taken as working in the complicated multi-dimensional way you describe.
Her friends were strongly incentiviced not to be "white person supporting native american colonial impostor". The transitivity of cancel culture reinforces it by skewing the experience of consensus reality
Conceivably you could have a Native American great-grandparent—or possibly even a grandparent who was Native American—but your genetic markers wouldn't show it.
Think of it this way. Each parent passes half of their DNA to you. This means that there’s half of your mom and dad's DNA that you did *not* inherit. And Inheriting half of your parent’s DNA does *not* mean you're inheriting half of each of your parent's ethnicity marker genes. The DNA you inherit is random. One or both parents may have ethnic marker genes that they didn’t end up passing down to you.
So, say one of your great-grandparents is Mi’kmaq and your other seven great-grandparents are of Western European origin—theoretically, you're 1/8th Mi’kmaq. But your Native American gene markers may have gotten lost in the shuffle. This would be less likely if there were dozens of Native American gene markers, but I suspect that genetic tests like 23andMe only use a few.
Nice post. The only way for the woke SJWs to complain about this case REQUIRES that they subjugate any “lived experience” BELOW genetic reality. I don’t have strong feeling either way about that….but the point is these idiots need to pick a lane. The fact that they have to, is great. The fact that they have done so speaks of a principle that carries over into other parts of their reality. Now…I’m assuming these folks have principles….and can perceive reality…and that may be where I am mistaken.
I've long argued that many of the things we criticize as "cultural appropriation" are in fact bad! But they are bad for reasons aside from "one person taking cultural practices from a culture they aren't a part of".
Examples:
- Dressing up as a native american in costume. This is not bad because you're stealing the idea of a head-dress or whatever. It's bad because it's mockery. It's drawing a portrait of a real set of people as some kind of cartoonish thing, alongside dragons and wizards.
- Selling a spiritual practice you aren't educated in. This is basically lying. A word, like "guru" has specific meaning, and there is perceived, but difficult-to-the-uninitiated-to-identify value.
But when we're talking about artistic themes, styles of cooking, music, dress, whatever, I see it the same way I see remixing music. The original artist might not like it if you take their heartfelt love song and turn it into a techno bop. But in the abstract, I absolutely support your right to do so, and think the world is richer for it. All culture is copied. Just don't lie about the origins, don't try to confuse people, and don't mock people. And we already have words for these things: deception and mockery. There's nothing worse about "cultural appropriation" beyond that, because nobody "owns" culture.
I'm getting a little bit annoyed at Scott talking about "the consensus view" or something similar to mean the popular view among progressives (and/or in San Fransisco). It seems pretty clear that the importance of "lived experience" and of affirmative action is definitely not widely accepted among people generally, and (based on the record of public votes on AA) not even by a majority (almost anywhere). Statements like this just seem to be erasing the existence of conservatives, moderates, and everyone outside your left-wing bubble. I don't think that's the intention, but it seems to be the effect.
It's also arguably even unfair to progressives, a kind of weasel wording that just says "your group believes this" without any clarification on who that actually is, and without being supported by evidence or even being falsifiable. Even when it's clearly true, it seems like bad epistemology to me. There's, shockingly, a *lot* of these "everyone knows" statements around here ("progressives believe", "conservatives believe" even absurd things like "nerds believe") in an otherwise very data-focused and logic-focused community.
I think "the view of the Biden Adninistration", "the view of x% of people according to this poll", or even "the view of most of my Bay Area friends" would work a lot better here.
Separately, I find this post too accepting of this quasi-religious notion of "cultural appropriation". I have no clue what cultural appropriation actually is or why it's harmful. Every definition I've seen seems absurdly vague (unspecified and untestable references to "cultural practices", "power differentials" and God knows what else), and even vaguer about what's supposed to be bad about it. It harms an Indian person to see white people wearing Indian dress (in a non-mocking way) because...? I have no sensible answer to that question.
I'd rather people not give respect to this term, or use it without quotation marks as if it's a coherent thing, without providing or linking to a well-defined definition.
While I generally agree with the sentiment behind this post, I think there is a dimension particular to the native culture that needs to be addressed.
The initial investigation into Hoover’s background seems to have come from a colleague, who wrote her an email about the breach of trust with this snippet:
“This is what I was always told, this is how I was raised, I never thought to question it?
You are a professor of Native studies. You make your entire living and career off of being Native. You have a responsibility to know your own family story. Every Native community I have entered into folks immediately ask who my family is and where I’m from by way of greeting. If it’s true you never questioned your parents, I wonder how you’ve been asked who your family is and where you’re from throughout your whole life and never stopped to wonder who your family actually is. Where they are actually from.
There are also signs that show you did know the story wasn’t true. You’ve slowly erased your tribal affiliation from your bios online through the years, the parenthetical after your name stating Elizabeth Hoover (Mohawk/Mi’kmaq) has disappeared, you didn’t offer any kind of deep positionality in your book”
It seems to me, based on this reading, that the communities she interacts with takes lineage and family names/history very seriously - to the point of using family lineage as part of casual identification.
I can’t help but assign a bit more culpability to Hoover’s situation. If the cultural norms were in fact clear enough that she “knew she fucked up” when she found out and still tried to hide it - I can understand the feeling of betrayal that her colleagues and community may feel as a result.
All the other commentary about race and identity being a hard to define fractal object that falls apart in the toxic space of cancel culture parlance is correct though, and I find it interesting to note that the emailer actually concurs:
“The pretendian hunts of the current moment are a mess. They are harmful to those of us, like me, who are actual Indigenous people who code as white and have grown up disconnected because of settler colonialism. They are harmful to folks with complicated family stories and adoptions and estranged family and force many of us to share things about our families that we shouldn’t have to.”
It is so surreal seeing Scott Alexander mess up and accidentally write a post criticizing a straw man, because he spends the entire time *continuing to ask the right questions at the exact same rate he normally does*
> You can do cluster analysis on a bunch of genomes and circle the nice, legible shapes representing Europeans, Africans, etc.
Yes, but the genetic distance between sub-Saharan African populations such as the Bantu and San is roughly the same as between Europeans and Asians. But we lump Bantu and San together as one race, while we split Asians and Europeans into two races. And if you look at the tree of genetic groupings that Cavelli-Sforza mapped out, there are actually *eight* distinct genetic clusters in modern Homo sapiens: African, Caucasoid, Northeast Asian, Arctic, American, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islanders, and Oceanian. So contemporary racial terms *are* sort of arbitrary. It would be more accurate to define humans into eight races.
For once, I broadly agree with most of what's said. Except the problems that start from here.
"But I place a decent amount of value on being Jewish..."
Then why did it take only a paragraph before Scott called himself "white"?
Well, I know the reason, it's because neo-liberal bubble heads consider Jewish to be some kind of weird subset of white, the Ur-Schrödinger's-minority. When you want to signal status as a minority, you're Jewish. When you want to signal status as an ally, or deflect blame, you're white. This tendency has been pretty catastrophic for real Jews, of which I count myself. It reads as political and racial subterfuge, and looks to be clear evidence of the "dual loyalty" charge that anti-semites use, along with dual citizenship.
To me, Scott's white. To be Jewish is to believe the things that Jews believe. The law is a consequence of that. To act out Jewishness without the belief would be acceptable, right up until you start following another religion, which I accuse Scott of doing. Then you're being deceitful, and after a while most people won't consider you Jewish regardless. If you do it, and then waver on this identity when it suites you rhetorically, then I think you're actively malicious. To rhetorically act as if your Jewishness is some kind of precursor to your new religion that has literally nothing to do with it, then you're also blasphemous.
But what do I know? I'm just a Karaite, and thus I am so non-Jewish to the normal person as to be unworthy of mention by everyone who ever brings up the question.
This is the type of cases that make non-Americans like me feel that in some sense, the US has gone to a very... weird... place. The claims that Scott builds across the article are extremely intuitive to basically everyone living here (Israel) and were obvious to me the moment I read the summary of the story. Just a sort-of FYI to Americans.
Honestly, as someone watching kind of from afar, not being American, I'm puzzled by the discussion you seem to have over there (which also start to happen more and more where I live). But the more I read about this, the more I get convinced that "cultural appropriation", as a concept, is just thinly veiled racism. It's as if some people would like to be racist, but happened to grow up in a context where racism was frowned upon. And now they finally found a way to live their preference without having to deal with the push back ...
I have yet to hear just one good argument for the "cultural appropriation" concept. Let alone one which isn't inherently racist ...
My impression is that it's still only a small minority who get worked up over cultural appropriation - even among liberals - but it's one of those things where the people who care, CARE A LOT and make a fuss about it while their opponents just shake their damn heads.
I think the cheongsam dress incident was a good example. Even most Chinese people didn't think celebrating Chinese culture was a crime.
At about the same time that happened, I came to England to visit relatives and they took me to a Mexican restaurant where they made us all wear sombreros. It was fun! In America, we would all be afraid that someone, somewhere would get angry even though we all thought it was fine.
I may be off-topic, but I wanted to share a kind-of external point of view. I'm from France, and as an independent observer, the USA has a really weird relationship with "race" (I put this in quotation marks because the french literal translation is incredibly racist). I know it's because of the history of the United States, which is very loaded on this topic to say the least. But it really is weird to see every American obsessing over it, dissecting what it means to be or not to be from a certain group, all the policy and culture around it... Like this post, or a lot of the comments. It feels weird to see a topic that's almost absent (or at least really different) from my point of view take so much importance on your side of the Atlantic.
Of course, France has a huge problem with racism, with the police, employment, access to a good education and equal opportunities, poverty, ... Also, we don't have the same deep ties with slavery but we have a pretty deep history with colonization. But the concept of categorizing people into "race" is really outlandish for most of us, we talk more about country of origin, social class, etc. In no formal interaction with the institutions you will see a question about race. (I think it's even illegal to do so, but I'm not sure).
Anyway, I'm rambling a little, but the main point is : the whole "race" concept as seen from an American doesn't exist in a big part of the world.
(Side-note : as USA is a huge cultural influence, this concept is starting to popping up more and more in France. It has its advantages, as putting a spotlight on racism, but also drawbacks, as the cultural differences between our two countries are really strong on this topic)
I disagree. If you removed the color information in those PCA pictures, what you really would see is two elongated orthogonal blobs that are not even disjoint. In other words, it is a continuum. In panel A it is especially egregious, the switch from AA colored circles to unspecified circles is abrupt and looks like an arbitrary result from availability of labeling, not a legible cluster that the reader would be able to identify without access to the labels. Even with label information, most of the blobs appear to overlap.
Perhaps there is other analysis that would support the point better (am not a geneticist, maybe there are phylogenetic trees), but these analysis would support better an interpretation like, there is variation and structure (that presumably reflects the evolutionary past) but the point where the line is drawn _between groups_ appears arbitrary.
Also worth noting is that native Americans practicex assimilative raiding. Raising white, or other, kids as part of your tribe was 100% a thing. They were accepted as full members.
How many people would you guys say still view "cultural appropriation as a bad thing? I've lived outside of the US since 2008, when the idea was still new, and most people thought it was fine, and I watched as the consensus turned against it. But it seems like I hear about it less often now. What's the current trend?
I cannot find the article, but I read about what happened to one poor young woman in the USA. Part of the story begins when her Black middle class parents went to the adoption agency and picked out a healthy brown baby girl and brought her home and raised her. This is the part of the story that worked out well -- she is the 'apple of their eyes' and they couldn't be prouder or happier with her. And she loves her parents. When the time came, she went to university, and her university gave a certain amount of money to Black students who applied for it for being Black. It was probably dressed up a bit more, but that is what it amounted to. And she applied and got some. One can argue that handing money out to the middle class is not the most effective way to spend the revenue, but that's the way the system works, and nothing she did was underhanded in any way. All was well and good until she got interested in her genetics, and took a test -- I think from 23 and me -- which indicated that her ancestry was most likely from the Dominican Republic with a recent infusion of Spaniard-from-Spain. People from the DR, no matter how dark skinned, mostly insist that they are not Black, but Dominican. She made the mistake of telling some friends about her surprising result, and one of them decided to tell the university, and the university decided that she had defrauded them and needed to return the money. That still didn't satisfy many people who wanted her expelled from the university even though there was no one claiming that there ever was any intent to deceive or defraud. And who would be guilty in such a case of the fraud? Her parents, who also didn't know about her genetic background? The adoption agency, which may not have known much either?
Her conclusion -- besides being really glad that she is majoring in one of the hard sciences -- was that a substantial part of the population really, really, really like being cruel and nasty to other people. They absolutely look for opportunities to be as nasty as they want to be. Some of them only want to be a little cruel. Some of them want to be as cruel as they possibly can -- as long as society supports them in their right to be cruel. And this, she concludes, is the real reason that real racism persists -- they provide socially acceptable people to be cruel to for the cohort that wants permission to be cruel, in such a way that the bullied cannot escape.
She found it interesting that she faced anti-Black sentiment 'just another Black grifter' as well as anti-DR sentiment from Blacks who didn't want to accept her 'fraud! fraud!'. Meanwhile people from the DR said that genetics are not everything -- she's not Dominican. If she had tried to assert that she was Dominican she thinks that the pushback would have reached cruel levels there as well. Because the commonalty is the cruelty. And she thinks that we should do away with the concept of race, to the greatest extent possible, because no matter what other considerations there are, the primary purpose is to provide an outlet for people to be cruel to and scapegoat others.
In the meantime she has transferred to a different university.
It's interesting that you bring up "Planet of Cops", given that Freddie gets very angry and dismissive whenever people point out the extremely hard-to-miss analogies between transracialism and transgenderism.
The Saami people lives in the northern parts of the Scandinavian peninsula (including in parts of Northern Finland and nearby Russia). There is a reasonably close resemblence between Saami and Native American situations so maybe the Swedish legal definitions of who is Saami can be of interest.
To be able to register as a Saami under Swedish law requires two conditions:
1. You need to see yourself as a Saami.
2. You need to speak or have spoken the Saami language in your home. Or be a (legal, adoptions are fine) decendent of the first or second generation of someone who has spoken Saami in their home or is or have been registered as a Saami.
So the legal definition is a combination of a cultural one and a genetic one and as a non-Saami without a Saami genetical relationship you can become a Saami but it is quite burdensome. (And in that respect a bit like converting to judaism, not something done on a whim).
There is a simple explanation as to why the White Nationalists are more tolerant than other groups: There is nothing to be gained by being White. You only give up any chance at getting Affirmative Action benefits as well as the amorphous social benefits that come with being part of a minority. In fact, the more Whites there are, the more the burdens of affirmative action are spread, whereas more minorities means that the benefits of AA are spread more thinly. The incentives to have strong or weak barriers to entry are obvious.
So there is a simple option to solve this whole issue: Stop discriminating against and debasing Whites. Stop giving tangible and intangible benefits to non-Whites. If there is nothing to be gained from being non-White, there is no point in having "hard-and-fast rules" and we can go back to "letting communities make decisions".
Also, a minor point:
"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."
There is a solution to that called Romeo and Juliet laws. They allow some age difference if both parties are close to the cutoff point.
I think this is your best post regarding current cultural mores and the nature of "race". It really did explore with great wit and insight the current ....how shall we put it .... "intricacies" (which are mostly to do with fabricated outrage concerning perceived slights against particular cultural groups which have been granted "special protection against criticism", for the purpose of political and financial leverage) of cultural identity and membership. This site really is a beacon of intellectual exploration. Thankyou.
>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!
Seems weird not to offer the most obvious explanation: white nationalists are losing and can't afford to be picky about allies, various minority groups are winning in the relevant sense and must gatekeep against people who are unambiguously allies but threaten to dilute the spoils of victory.
"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."
This isn't such a problem if people recognize that this is in fact the rule. It was harder to do in the 20th century but these days, hospitals can run a genetic test on every baby delivered, and then like some kind of young adult fiction dystopia, inform the parents what cultural group their child has been assigned to based on its immutable characteristics. No one has to be surprised any more, we can carefully study and record everyone's race, noting it in a database that controls which jobs people are allowed to access, and this will be progressive somehow.
Descent is not especially important to many Native communities, because they have strong traditions of adoption. But personal connections are important. If you read the Hoover story closely you see that people keep asking, who are your Native connections? Who are your kin? Where are your relatives? In this sense tribal identity is not some vague category like "American," but a matter of personally knowing people within the community; in this model, community is not imposed by above via rules, but built up via personal ties between people. Hoover had none and never tried to build any. That is the "lived experience" she is missing.
There is no question that groupings exist on the basis of shared genes that are more likely to be found together within such a group, and given the relative isolation before international travel became easy, this is in no way surprising. We can call those groups races or use some other term. So far we have simply described what is, and that cannot be wrong. The problem comes when you use that knowledge in an unkind way - to denigrate or lessen a particular group. I see those who say races do not exist as being against that kind of usage, and they mean well. But there are circumstances where the facts must be acknowledged eg when a particular group is relatively resistant to the effects of a drug, such as ACE inhibitors in those of recent African ancestry. Life gets a lot trickier when we see differences between the groups, such as the well-documented IQ differences. We must not make assumptions about individuals, who may be outliers within their group, but shall we even mention that the differences are known to exist? I am uncomfortable mentioning it, and some will say I should not do so. But it is hard to pretend that something discovered does not exist, even in a good cause, such as promoting social cohesion and harmony. I have no answer to that.
OK but this post would be stronger if the author acknowledged the overwhelming force of "Who, Whom?" in these discussions: That the motivating forces are almost entirely white guilt and anti-white resentment, and if you take "hatred of white people and whiteness" out of the equation, the whole thing collapses.
"The fact is, we live according to Kendi's formula: Kto–kogo?: will we knock them, the white supremacists, flat and give them (as Kendi expresses it) the final, decisive battle, or will they knock us flat?"
> 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.
Reading this, I came up with an heuristic hot take: if your academic job is restricted to people who are themselves instances of the field it claims to study, it is a bullshit field.
It works quite well:
There are male gynecologists, so gynecology is not bullshit.
Nobody cares if the worlds leading expert on the Neanderthals has herself Neanderthal ancestry, so the study of early hominids is not bullshit.
Biologists would probably not reject an AGI as a professor, so biology is not bullshit.
There are computer scientists which are not cpmputers, CS is fine.
Open minded theology, which is fine with having atheist professors, is fine.
Narrow-minded theology, which rejects atheist professors, is bullshit.
Sport science, which fails couch potato students, is bullshit (at least as an academic subject).
Feminist studies is bullshit to the degree to which it rejects cis-male professors, which I would guess is rather high.
Same for $MINORITY studies.
Medieval English literature does not expect its practitioners to be Englishmen/women living in the Middle Ages, thus it is real.
There are some corner cases: I would expect that there are few deaf students who succeed in studying music theory, and few blind people who care for art history. Either would be more disadvantaged than a history professor specializing in the Roman empire who can't read Latin. I am willing to bite that bullet: studying music safely contained in a sheet, or with an oscilloscope is academic (though it does not sound fun), taking advantage of the fact that you have ears and a brain which can be emotionally moved by music is not academic. The latter would of course also apply to literature.
> 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.
I think we can be more precise here. We have a pretty good understanding of how artificial neural network based classifiers work (beautiful example here: https://playground.tensorflow.org). It seems reasonable that our brains do something similar when it comes to organizing visual inputs in hyper dimensional feature space. This would also remove the need for a platonically ideal Jew.
This also seems like a better metaphor than the tails coming apart for diverging political views. Our parents give us training data by pointing at things and saying "good" or "bad" and we build complicated classifiers to predict this. Most people receive similar training data, but if you extrapolate the classifiers to areas where data is sparse or nonexistent, they diverge.
I haven't read all the comments, but I've seen talk elsewhere about some indigenous Americans disliking the idea that tribe membership is determined by DNA rather than by connection to the community.
"Connection to the community" is vague, but membership by DNA ignores human relations, and the latter might be more important.
I wonder how many of the people who signed that letter were Mi'kmaq Indians.
Both the far-Left and the far-Right are racist and sexist, just towards different groups. Both want to use violent means to achieve their goals and have little respect for the idea of judging each person as an individual. If you're an 'associate professor researching Native American food sovereignty', your social circle consists entirely of the far-Left, so you shouldn't be surprised you're sent to the guillotines at the first opportunity, just like millions of people got sent to the Gulags back in the USSR. Luckily we still have a Constitution and a court system, so Professor Hoover will get to keep her head on her shoulders, but the far-Left will do everything in their power to make her suffer for her non-existent crimes.
While I do have sympathy towards Professor Hoover, I feel like she's the victim of her own choice to associate with people who's ideology is evil and corrupt. I can likewise be sympathetic to the wife of a gangster who gets beaten up as retribution for her husband's misgivings, while at the same time acknowledging that maybe she should've avoided that kind of company in the first place.
"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."
This is very close to the actual story of the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, New Hampshire where a surveying error caused the builders to have the mall extend 6 feet in to the state of Massachusetts thus subjecting the entire building to Massachusetts sales tax negating the advantage of building in tax-free NH. I tweeted about it here: https://twitter.com/corey_lanum/status/1620798517748068352
Instead of demolishing and starting from scratch, they just hired a construction crew to lop off the offending bit of the JC Penney that had crossed state lines.
I suggest you stop using the word race. In Norwegian we don't use it in relation to humans anymore. Though we still use it for dog breeds. At the same time most Norwegians acknowledges that there are average genetic differences between populations. Though we could plausibly redefine the word with the recent advances in genetics, doing so would be challenging. It just has too much baggage
"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!"
Actually ... there are many more groups living the bizarro 'your type doesn't belong.'
You look to see there are White Nationalists, yet fail to see there are Mexican Nationalists ... Mexican Nationalists living in America pining for the restoration of Atzlan, the legendary Aztec homeland in the north. This group in California is called La Raza (The Race), they are Mexican Supremacists. Then there are Black supremacists, French Supremacists, and even Jewish Supremacists.
Think about your thought processes that require you to have a racial enemy that you can look down your nose and wag your finger at.
When there's a nebulous category boundary and we want to know which side a data point lies, the question is: what is the disguised query? If we want to know if something is really a blegg [1], why do we want to know that?
ACX readers and Freddie deBoer readers are also categories with a strong overlap, so I think this take [2] isn't news to some of us: Henry George once said (as far as I remember) "if ten men are chasing every nine jobs, the result is misery". Academia relies on ten people chasing every one tenure-track post, so that the other nine can be turned into adjuncts. Claiming to be more Native than you really are gets you an unfair advantage in that race - quite apart from the fact that no self-respecting college these days would hire a white person as a professor of native studies in the first place.
No-one seems to stop and ask whether the whole adjunct system is a dumpster fire (except people like Brett Deveraux [3]). After all, it keeps the money flowing. So I'm definitely on "at least 95% point 2." in section IV - point 1. is valid elsewhere, but as far as the struggle for limited tenure-track posts goes, point 2. all the way. Most things about academia in the anglohypersphere these days, and all things relating to wokeness in academia, are downstream from economic incentives.
However, for the bit at the ende of section III, I would like to offer an alternative 4th explanation. Woke is many things, but one of them is a Kegan stage 3 affair through and through - at least the way that Chapman [4] uses the stages. It's there in the text: "'who I am' is 'how people feel about me'". You are native if the native community feels that you belong there (which also suggests there's an implicit path to conversion - if enough people feel you're in, then you're in).
And from Chapman's footnote 11: "[stage 3] mostly doesn't even notice logical contradictions, and isn't bothered by them when it does". Pointing out the contradiction, as this article does, is at least stage 4 thinking!
Chapman's post contains a few more quotes that, to me, perfectly describe the problem space here - "Living up to what other members expect from you is good by definition", or "Fulfilling the role consists largely in having the correct feelings." or "In practice, you choose on the basis of whose feelings you feel most strongly at the moment you are forced to decide. This is often whoever happens to be there at the time, or whoever is best at displaying intense feelings. "
Hoover went from the native community feeling she belonged, to feeling she didn't. Genetics and lived experience only matter insofar as they might or might not sway the community's feelings. There's no need for logic anywhere in this process.
Jews (at least Zionists) are colonizers. Native Americans are colonized. The comparison doesn’t fit. One part of colonization is some portion of the colonizers appropriate colonized identities for their own personal benefit. It’s a deep topic that isn’t addressed in this post.
If there were no affirmative action, there would be a lot less incentives for people to fake their ethnicity. Why does a country has quotas for people? Look where it got Lebanon.
I think there's two issues I see with this post and the conclusions that follow.
I don't think it's clear at all that people did/would have no problem with someone of ⅛ indigenous ancestry claiming to be indigenous, benefiting from that claim, doing academic work speaking for indigenous people, and wearing traditional clothing. Especially when it had no influence on the conditions of her upbringing other than being brought to some cultural events etc. I think this controversy would have probably happened in a pretty similar way eventually either way, and the fact that she lied about it probably just added to it.
The other issue I would take with the reasoning of this post is that it equivocates being exposed to some indigenous culture/friends with what is typically fully meant by the idea of "lived experience". Lived experience would typically emphasize things like being treated in a bigoted way by others due to how she's perceived, potentially being subjected to intergenerational traumas and economic hardships due to treatment of indigenous peoples. There's no exact criteria but I don't think her experience would typically qualify In the ways that typically matter to people making those distinctions.
You use as an example, "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." I find this hilarious because I've always lived in states where the age of consent is 16, and so I've been vaguely aware that because the age of consent is 18 in New York and California, *lots* of writers assume that it is 18 "everywhere". A sort of cultural myopia of the most urban areas.
Racists may say ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.', but having grown up in Iowa, where Jews look white, I'm emotionally incapable of considering Jews to be non-white. Indeed, US Jews who emotionally distinguish themselves from other Americans, or at least other US whites, cause me to smile and nod to humor their delusion. (This is ignorance of the full complexity of ethnic distinctions on my part, but it also makes me incapable of being a true anti-Semite, so I'm careful to not try to straighten it out.)
> 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.
I feel like, if a completely random white person decides they want to "connect to native american roots" and goes and attends some Pow-wow's, that's fine actually. Making friends with people from different cultures, and sharing that culture, is absolutely ok.
Now if someone comes along to oggle at the quaint and curious customs of the natives like they are some sort of zoo, that is bad and impolite.
But ultimately, it's the decision of individual natives for who they want to be friends with.
Even if she was being blatantly condescending and imperialist, it's not your place to tell the tribe not to interact with her. I would predict that the tribe wouldn't want to interact with her. But if they do, it's not a problem.
If Alice and Bob want to be friends, the situations where anyone else should intervene to stop them are rare and special. And "Cultural appropriation" isn't a good reason.
Libertarianism. You are welcome to appropriate any culture you feel like.
Scott rightly points out the incoherence of Hoover’s detractors and ex-friends. The whole conversation is much more driven by vibe than anything else and rests upon a foundation of shifting sands.
I’m a racial elimintavist, not because it’s impossible to rigorously defend a genetic concept of race, but because the baggage and brand saturation of the *word* “race” is unsalvageable on any timescale worth talking about. And attempting to cleanse it of its cancerous associations would be so much wasted effort, because most people use the word in a totally ad hoc way: they say “race” and then immediately change the subject to culture, ethnicity, class, region, nationality (etc.) to suit their argumentative needs, without realizing they are doing it. Hence the incoherence.
I also like that Scott invokes Yudkowsky’s “cluster structure of thingspace,” which reminds me of “Race As A Bundle Of Sticks,” a framework and methodology for designing studies of race proposed by Maya Sen and Omar Wasow in 2016. Instead of a set of “immutable characteristics,” it explodes the bundle (thingspace-cluster) into a disaggregated list that includes traditional things like genes, region of ancestry, skin color, and social status/power relations; but also less common ones such as dialect, wealth, neighborhood, religion, diet, class, and [social] norms. The fact that a little monosyllable even CAN house all of that inside of it is exactly the problem, and it’s why I think people should just be as specific as they can when they talk about this stuff, even genetically—e.g. hundreds of haplogroups vs. 5-to-7 big out-of-Africa clusters.
I understand—though don’t often feel—the desire to police the borders of social categories based on a shared “something.” Especially for instrumental purposes. Spivak coined her term “strategic essentialism" to describe intentionally brushing aside differences and diversity within a group for the purpose of promoting shared goals via a shared identity. That makes sense to me pragmatically as a political technique. I can see it as a useful way of forming political coalitions, which don’t need overall conceptual coherence to achieve specific material goals. But I wish, very naively, that people would just get off the ride there and return to normal civic life once the coalition has had its tractable demands met.
I think the "Jewish hypersphere" (which already sounds like its own conspiracy theory) idea is a good way to think about this sort of thing, but an additional factor was just touched on: in a lot of fields you can gain status by taking someone else down.
Wow, what a horrible story. Honestly I would find it hard to blame her for lying either, considering what happened to her once the truth came out. Why is this so high-stakes?
W/r/t to the main topic, I find myself feeling a little bad for the professor, having their identity and culture ripped away from them. She's actually giving away things that brought her joy and meant a lot to her because she feels she has no right to keep them, and that's just crazy. I'd like to say you should define yourself by what you do and not the group characteristics of people who do it, but in cases like this the activities are meaningful in large part because of the group that performs them, so there's no easy answer here. In a hypothetical world where only Irishmen were rugby coaches, and you made coaching rugby your life, then found out you weren't really Irish, it would seem crazy to be expected to hang up your whistle and give up the thing that drove your entire life -- but in the world where that was true, there almost certainly would be historical reasons that only Irishmen did that, a different character to the fraternity of coaching, uniquely Irish rituals around the sport linked to their shared history etc..
On a later topic, I want to note my disagreement with your assessment that "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." You rightly point out that juries and judges are supposed to act as the common sense bulwark against strict rule enforcement, but in 20 years of crimlaw practice as an attorney I can tell you that prosecutors and cops have to make a dozen judgment calls every day that are no different. Sheriffs and prosecutors are elected, and have to reflect community social norms when they enforce the law, and I wouldn't have it any other way. People complain about prosecutorial discretion, but that discretion is the reason the 18.001 y/o having consensual sex on a date with the 17.364 y/o isn't getting charged with stat rape when somehow a cop finds out (although another reason is that under your hypo you gave him an affirmative defense of mistake of age, that would be applicable usually for victims over the age of 14 or 15.) None of the people who claim to want totally unbiased mechanical application of the law by the government's cops and prosecutors would actually like the world that results from that, even assuming that judges and juries still apply local norms and common sense at the end of the process.
I think what's missing from this discussion is that a large part of modern Native American identity is opposing or contrasting White identity in some way, although it may be implicit in most circumstances. That's why most people see an entirely racially White person claiming to be Native as inauthentic. There are Native American tribes in some parts of the US whose members have intermarried over the years with Black descendants of slaves, and as a result appear very similar to Blacks. What would the reaction be if a person believed themselves to be a member of one of these tribes, under similar circumstances to those described above, but was later revealed to be 100% Black, with no Native ancestry? I suspect the reaction would be different, as Black and Native identities are not seen as so opposed.
Nice thanks. Re: footnote 2, one could make the argument, that the white supremacists are coming closer to Dr. Kings dictum, 'of judging a person by the content of their character, and not the coding in their genes.'
While there are many white people who think they are some low fraction native, there are few who also have Hoovers level of childhood involvement. Yet out this very select group, a prominent activist arose. The same happened with Rachel Dolezal and the even smaller group of wtb-"transracial" people. This level of success is strong evidence that the universe considers them white; who are we to disagree?
It's orthogonal to the points you are making, but "lived experience" also does not do (IMHO) what its proponents want it to do...
Let's switch to a different case, one with which almost all of us are familiar, namely gender, romance, and the confusions of teen (and post-teen) years.
So I go to a party and meet Alice who, as is her way, holds forth about how much men suck and how, for example, "none of them want to date her because her boobs aren't big enough". I hold my tongue, even as I am thinking "I've only known you ten minutes and already I hate you; maybe the issue here is not your boobs?"
So we have here a situation where
- no male wants to date Alice because she is a whiny complainer,
but
- she has built up this story in her mind that it's all because of shallow men who care only about boob-size.
She is impervious to logic on this point – we can point out that plenty of other women with small boobs (but decent personalities) get married; we can point out that plenty of women with large boobs (but awful personalities) remain single.
But, apparently, Alice prefers the claim that it's all about boob size, ?presumably? because this doesn't require any work whatsoever on her part.
Now repeat this story in various other contexts: Leroy who didn't make the Glee Club, Andrea who didn't make Science Club, etc etc.
It's extremely easy to claim that you didn't achieve X because of <ism>, especially when you're egged on by family and friends to this interpretation.
Is this a *lived experience* of <ism>?
It's a lived experience of treating <ism> as the reason for all your problems, sure, but is it actually evidence of <ism>?
And of course this is going to become a self-reinforcing cycle. The people who insist on <ism> as the sole cause of their issues are going to gravitate to complaining about <ism> rather than working on becoming a better singer, or learning more physics, or asking people what said people find most grating about their personality and trying to fix that. And are going to, as a result, find more and more rejection as they advance in life because they never work as hard (or at all) on the actual issue of whatever it is they care about, compared to people who don't gravitate to an easy excuse.
It's easy to live in a prison of your own construction – god knows I have family members who are doing this right now.
I don't know what we do about this, once we have pointed out to these people the inconsistencies and self-serving biases in how they analyze the world and their interactions with it. But I no longer consider especially strong evidence about "the world" as opposed to evidence about the person.
I’m pleasantly surprised that Scott is able and willing to articulate the batshit insane, incoherent, cruel racial doctrine of woke religious ideology. Will he be able or willing to bring the same clear-sighted analysis to bear on the cult’s even more insane, incoherent and cruel doctrine of “gender identity” and the non-existence of biological sex categories? Only time will tell.
As for Dr. Hoover: judging from the titles of the publications on her c.v., she sounds pretty woke. Which is to say: all of the papers appear to be premised on the mystical nature of “racial” (in this case, “native”) identity and its magical ability to cause oppression even in the absence of any demonstrable disadvantage experienced by those who hold the identity. Thus, Dr. Hoover appears to be a member of the elite who used her position to actively advance the mystical religious doctrine that those who hold the “native” identity (including, she would have us believe, herself) are oppressed simply by virtue of holding this identity. And that those who do not hold this identity (including, as it turns out, herself) are, perforce, oppressors. One can’t help but recall the words of another religious mystic about what happens to those who live by the sword.
Associating yourself with anything related to cultural identity is like walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers, that's why the people who do it are considered great performers.
I feel like edge cases are a lot more common than people think. For example, one time I met an East Asian-looking guy who was from Réunion and a native French speaker. Depending on which criteria you look at, he could be considered "French", "African", or "Asian". (Or "American", I guess, since he moved to the US).
Another time I met someone who identified as "mixed race" due to being half Jewish, half Iranian, even though both halves are classified as "white" in the American racial system. Then again, they're also both non-central examples of "white", and he presumably had a different cultural upbringing than the modal "white" person.
I think the most salient aspect of this series of events is the semantic attempt to differentiate “lived experience” from just plain “experience”.
LIVED experience?
As opposed to what? UN-LIVED experience?
The use of redundant superlatives like this betrays inauthenticity, & is - almost without exception - a hallmark of the unvirtuous.
Woke reliance on buzzwords - or virtue-signalling phrases such as “lived experience” - tells you all you need to know about the sincerity of those wielding them.
I think your naturalist/materialist/individualist philosophy is causing you to conflate 'genetics' and 'parentage' in a way the people involved may not.
For example, consider the situation from the perspective of the great grandmother ("She's dead and has no perspective" is not how everyone thinks about such things). In one case there is some specific definitely-a-native woman who would be/is proud of her great grand-daughter and wanting her to be accepted in the group, and in the other case there isn't. This isn't genes, it's something much closer to 'lived experience'... just not Hoover's experience.
Or, consider a couple who for some reason want to and are legally allowed to genetically engineer their foetus, changing just enough genes to match those of members of some other race such that the child looks like that race and would be called that race by 23andme etc.
There was a chief in Canada who was, biologically, white (and looked it). He'd been adopted by the previous chief. As he put it when asked these questions, 'I used to get beat up at school for being Native.'
This is one of those things where there's not really a clear answer, and the major problem is probably the acting like there is.
People have a choice (in theory, at least) of being generous of spirit or precious and exclusionary.
Those who feel at peace and who do not live in fear tend to extend generosity. Those who feel threatened and see the world as a zero-sum experience tend to draw lines.
In a society rife with white biases and systemic racism, there should be many examples of people doing the opposite - pretending that they are white while genetically being not white. Presumably, some of these people would do it sloppily and would be outed and shamed at some point. I cannot remember any stories of this kind in the last 20 years. If there were not any such cases, something must be missing from your explanations, as all of them try to apply race permutation invariant reasoning to a situation which is clearly not permutation invariant.
Most categorical descriptors regarding sociological and biological distinctions of humanity involve arbitrary boundaries at some point. Mixing DNA percentages with genealogies often complicates nice clean delineations. Fashion loves to meld widely disparate textiles, designs, and stylings, yet narrowly "ethnic" patterns worn by non-members is seen as cultural appropriation. Picasso definitely "appropriated" African masks and sculpture, while denying he'd done so, purely to elevate his creative reputation.
An interesting life that might be culturally appropriated, is found here:
Despite his dubious genetic heritage, the mystery man lived a long life, profiting off Native creations, yet also building a significant historical collection that was passed on to CSU after his death, and it may be his good fortune, to have died before the culture police could have paid him a visit.
Scott here writes about the «patrolling the (group) border» complex/problematique. If you study this as a social scientist, it is fruitful to separate out these four sub-questions:
(1) Who are the border guards?
Do everyone both within and outside the group agree on who the border guards are, or not?
And: Do the border guards agree among themselves, or not?
Plus: How are eventual disagreements concerning who should be the border guards, resolved? Including: by whom? By some sort of mutual adjustment (how?)
Or are the issues related to who are the border guards, decided by some authority that everyone involved accepts/respects?
If so: How was that authority established, and how is its authority maintained?
And: To which extent is all the above stuff in constant flux or not?
(2) What criteria do the border guards use?
Are the criteria for who is inside and outside the group clear to all the border guards, or do they disagree?
Are the criteria the same across time, or do they shift?
If they shift over time: How do they shift?
(3) What sanctions do the border guards use toward those who are deemed to unduly have gained access (or unduly have avoided being included – see below under (4))
Social sanctions (naming and shaming), economic sanctions, legal sanctions, others?
How are the sanctions carried out? And by whom?
(4) What are the benefits, or the bad stuff, awarded those who are deemed to be inside the group?
a) If good stuff, what kind of good stuff? Social recognition and status, economic rewards, privileged access to desirable positions, other?
b) If bad stuff: Social ostracism? Social stigma? Economic and other discrimination? Increased risk of being unprovokedly attacked? Killed?
Finally, for anyone interested in these increasingly important border patrol – issues, I warmly recommend the 1984 German move Die Wannseekonferenz (free on YouTube, with English subtitles). There is a quite advanced discussion early in the movie about the relative weight of genetic and cultural Judaism. Also notice the debate about the Mischlingefrage (half-breed question), concerning if German half-Jews should also be sent to the ovens since the German blood has been soiled, or if “the German blood is strongest”, implying that they should be let off the hook:
…Prepare for these discussions, as tribalism & identity politics fastens its ideological grip. Hopefully mostly related to the distribution of good stuff rather than bad stuff, but who knows.
There are different forms of cultural appropriation, and it's annoying to group it into one category
1. There's stuff like fusion food which is completely inoffensive to all but the extremists
2. There's the intentionally offensive which some are against, and others are for because they are bigots who like the comedy, and others who are not bigots but still enjoy comedy
3. There's unintentionally inoffensive. If someone goes to a Halloween party in a "Jew costume" which consists of writing the tetragram on their forehead, it is offensive regardless of whether it was intended to be offensive.
And of course a whole host of other varieties. I get annoyed when people group all of these things together because some are good, some are reasonable, and some are bad. But I also am sympathetic because categories are made for for man. Diverse things group together even if they don't form a true category.
This is the same how I feel about race. Yes, genetics correlate in ways that allow you to find factors. But factors are real in a statistical sense, not in an essentialist sense. So yes it makes sense to talk about a "black race," but also it really doesn't given that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than there is between Africa and Europe. So is race genetically real? Kind of?
Community is more than just about you: it can include family. If someone's grandma knew yours, and went through the same problems and was part of the same group, you can be adopted into a community on that alone. If that grandma didn't exist then of course that community might feel betrayed. Ideas like genes and race don't need to come into it at all.
Based on earlier posts, I feel like Scott understands enough of the human condition to understand this, which is why this post feels like an unsympathetic attempt to dunk on how 'irrational' identity politics are.
I think this article misunderstands the definition of cultural appropriation. Usually it's defined as, specifically, perpetuating harmful stereotypes about a culture you don't belong to. This is contrasted with the "cultural appreciation", which essentially means what it sounds like. This article treats a superset as if it was its subset.
Imagine if I (I'm asian btw, but pretend I'm not for this analogy) started an article by saying "asians are inferior" but continued it with "asians are statistically shorter, and I think short people are awesome!". How would an asian feel?
These issues just seem like the inevitable consequences of cultivating a group identity. Now, maybe this is a hot take, but my instinct here is to question the necessity of group identity in the first place. Sure, it was very useful for societies that wanted to win at Imperialism, but aren't we trying to move past that?
[there's a logical leap here where I'm suddenly trying to explain what the world might look like if we had a healthier model for building an identity in the first place, probably because I'm anticipating that my take will strike people as somewhat nebulous?]
I'm imagining a world where there's a clear distinction between what you do and who you are. You're a person who practices medicine professionally, you're not a doctor. You're a person who does illustrations for a living, you're not an artist. So that when people ask what you do, you won't be tempted to respond with "I'm a fireman!" Instead, you'll say that you're employed as a fireman. That way you're not automatically associating/identifying yourself with firemen 'as a group'.
This seems like a weird distinction that I've failed to properly articulate, and it will probably strike people as me advocating for the deconstruction of identity as a concept, but I think - maybe - I'm really only targeting extrinsically substantiated/derived forms of identity.
I think, for me, cultural appropriation is analogous to copyright. I'd like to protect artists, but copyright seems like a suboptimal way to do so, so I want a different mechanism. However, that doesn't mean I want people to violate copyright (especially groups with vastly more power, like big companies) before we collectively switch, because it does protect the (largely poor) artists.
I want to protect cultural minorities, but cultural appropriation seems like a suboptimal way to do so, so I want a different mechanism. However, that doesn't mean I want people to start appropriating culture (especially groups with vastly more power, like big companies) before we collectively switch, because it does protect (largely poor) cultural minorities.
In situations where the power dynamics are flipped,I become much more lenient, because I don't see them as a moral imperative but as an imperfect coordination mechanism.
I haven’t seen anyone else linking this, but it’s as clean a case study as you can ask for: two men — one of Ukrainian descent, one of Native descent — who were switched at birth and didn’t learn what happened until they were in their 60s. Their reactions are notable — memorably, the one who learned he was genetically Native but had grown up in an affluent white home began to pursue tribal benefits for his kids.
> it seems kind of bad if your whole life can be retroactively invalidated by getting the wrong results from a 23andMe test
LS: "No... No... That's not true... That's IMPOSSIBLE! My lived experience is as the son of a navigator on a spice freighter!"
DV: "Search your feelings, especially that throbbing pain where your hand used to be. I can create NEW lived experiences so vivid that they INVALIDATE your previous life."
I do think the appropriation argument is a slightly separate one.
I wouldn't actually say appropriation is awesome. It depends on the size of the culture and the cultural heft of its practitioners.
Imagine being, say, a Gnome in a city that mostly speaks Common and Elvish. An elf claims that they know Gnomish and teach elves and humans, but they're completely wrong. Unfortunately, there's only like 4 Gnomes and like 30000 elves and humans, and the Gnomes can't educate people faster than the fake Gnomish Speaking elf can teach fake Gnomish (especially since they simplified fake Gnomish to be easier for elves and humans to learn). By the end of the year, everyone "knows Gnomish" and they're correcting the Gnomes on grammar and pronunciation.
This is a non-issue if there's a whole country of Gnomes somewhere and humans speaking fake-Gnomish get there and instantly realise that their Gnomish is fake and illegible to true Gnomish speakers.
So this is the difference between, say, Noongar (Western Australian Aboriginal language) vs Cantonese. Cantonese is in no danger of being mis-taught by white people, but Noongar is. And this is significant because you'll lose specific knowledge encoded in the language. Back to the Gnomes, if there are 8 specific varieties of gems that Gnomish makes distinctions for, but Elvish only understands 3, the complexity of gemstones understood by gnomes will be lost if true Gnomish gets replaced by fake, elf-generated Gnomish.
This is an argument for having strong norms against appropriation of small cultures, especially cultures with a history of forced assimilation. For this woman, this doesn't apply - I don't doubt that she was taught genuine customs when she thought she was Native. I also don't think this should have happened to her.
But yeah, something weird does happen to people who are part of small cultures. I'm Chinese, and not particularly invested in it, but I can afford to not invest in my background - there's approximately 1 billion of us and millions of people speak my languages, so it's not my sole responsibility to pass down the torch. If I stop speaking Cantonese or Hakka, the language is not going to go extinct.
This is not true of someone who knows a language with very few living speakers, like a lot of the Aboriginal Australian languages, or Maori in the 50s, then it's quite a lot of pressure!
I don't have to take up the many performance, art, food and ritual activities in my culture or personally know about them. There's enough people for someone else to get really invested in it and bring it to the next generation. I can take my pick of what I like (food) and learn it to whatever level. But if my culture only has 80 people alive, or 12? That's a lot of pressure.
Like, imagine being the last person alive who can make a macaron, or speak German. Imagine being the last ballet troupe that still exists. That's the state of a lot of smaller endangered customs are in (and it makes them vulnerable to bad actors to capitalise on the rarity - if I claim a butter cookie is a macaron, and people don't know any better, I can charge macaron prices for them. People will try my "macarons" then go, what's the point of preserving that? They're just butter cookies! So that's an issue in native art and craft)
I don't know the story, but have trouble feeling much empathy for her given what was explained, because, while I consider it unjust, it also have a very strong vibe of "punished by what they preached" (Not sure how the saying goes in English, but I am quite confident such a saying exists), which is maybe the most common cause for being happy about the misfortunes of others. At least it is for me...
Had she another career, even one where she benefited from native american status (Casino owner for example), I would sympathize.
But here, she made her academic career in native american studies, basically being a gatekeeper and shaper of the (toxic) consensus that is now her downfall....kind of a mild version of Torquemada burning at the stake. It depend a little bit on the branch she was in academically, did she push for more strict consensus or a a more universalist approach?
I think "there is a biological component to races" is the equivalent of "your waifu is not real and you will die alone" in my circles: it's true, everybody knows it's true, it's just considered a very rude thing to say. This is linked to a second taboo against the idea that intelligence is connected to genes.
See, there's no real thing as superior or inferior races in nature, if you live and breed you're good enough for the evolution fairy. Problem is that we're not nature, so we pesky apes went and decided what makes a race superior. Unfortunately, it's intelligence. And unfortunately, that's also linked to genetics.
(Thought experiment: Consider race A that is substantially smarter, and race B that is substantially taller, stronger, faster, happier, more beautiful, longer-lived, and able to shoot psychic lasers out of their brains. You'd want to live as B, but you'd know there's a certain je ne sais quoi that makes A "better". As an aside, this is the backstory of Warhammer 40k).
So, despite both being true, we ended up cornering ourselves into never being able to say "races are partially genetic" and "intelligence is partially genetic" at the same time, without going down a slippery slope that ends with "...and that's why we should bring back human zoos".
People who dedicate themselves to truth, naturally, say both parts out loud and are surprised when others ask "wait, you're into human zoos?" They aren't, they just live in a kinder world where your mind has no bearing on your value as a person.
(I mean, no matter how you look at it, Henry Cavill beats me in height, talent, wits, sex appeal, and number of Warhammer minis. This doesn't mean I'm inferior as a person compared to him, or deserve less rights than him. If you used my genes to create a Walliserops-strand of humanity, they wouldn't deserve any less rights compared to the Cavillborn Primarchs, either.)
Still, the truth tribe's views don't reflect society's unspoken rule that smart ape = good ape, and it's much easier to make a couple bits of info taboo instead of changing our entire collective mindset, so here we are. The "no links between ethnicity and genetics" standpoint becomes more sensible when you evaluate it as a kludge: It's not intended to be true, it's to account for a minor conflict between "all races are equal" and "some genetic traits are better than others".
Accordingly, Native Americans get to consider biological factors when deciding on racial belonging, because they aren't hostile to this compromise, while anyone else gets the full Sleeping Tiger treatment. To its credit, I think the kludge works more or less as intended, and it reminds me of how Kuhn's paradigms accumulate edge cases until a new, more consistent paradigm comes knocking. Maybe we won't need to keep the lie once we shift to a kinder society.
The first, re: defining race - I think race is socially constructed in its entirety, and I think one of the mechanisms for "constructing" it can be "genetics", and one can be lived experience, and one can be tendency to wear specific types of clothing, etc.
My position on race is very much informed by the fact that I am "white" in some places and "not white" in others. Race is not some trait I have that other people observe or fail to. It seems instead to be some trait people choose to give me (or not) in a given interaction. If I can change regions and suddenly I become a member of a different race, that makes the genetic component of this seem pretty irrelevant to understanding the situation.
The nonsense surrounding identification / lived experience / etc. strikes me as one where you can replace [minority membership] with [experience of oppression], which is why certain minorities "get" to do this and certain other minorities "don't get to do this".
There is an interesting BBC documentary about black Americans moving to Ghana, no longer being othered on a daily basis, and saying things like "I'm not a black woman in Ghana, I am a woman in Ghana". This makes sense to me. Their genome didn't change. Their "membership" did. It stopped getting renewed on a daily basis by racists.
On the grounds of "cultural appropriation", my position on it is that it's people trying to apply copyright law logic to culture. I broadly oppose copyright law as it is typically enforced, and think that it's pretty shitty. I mean, if you think about Disney being theoretically able to sue a Hawaiian kid for writing and then trying to sell her Moana fanfiction... It seems very straight-forwardly fucked up to me. And there are many instances of this kind of thing, where copyright law systematically helps the powerful fuck over those with less power, such that the maintenance of dying myths from people whose livelihoods are being destroyed is not really compensated and legally protected, but the "reading of it, bastardizing it to sound cooler to foreigners, and then selling it to a big company" of those myths is compensated and legally protected.
But the answer to that is abolish modern copyright regimes and replace them with something saner (if nothing else, bring back the 28 year term), not "pretend literally every cultural anything is vaguely governed by the warped echo of copyright law in the Zeitgeist.
I'm all for abandoning the idea of 'cultural appropriation'. It seems totally incoherent and the cases of cultural appropriation seem to be rarely exposed by the 'appropriatees'. It seems to me that minority cultures are usually totally unbothered by outgroup use of their food and clothing and cultural ideas. Rather, it just functions as a way for progressive white people to guilt and criticize and limit the behaviors and expressions of other white people in order to demonstrate virtue. It's perhaps the dumbest idea ever generated by the modern Left... and that is surely saying something.
The situation is worse than it seems: Ethnic origin and culture are pretty much orthogonal to each other (though some of the ethnonationalist twitterati seem to disagree). So, as soon as you have people who left their place of genetic origin to move to another culture, your correlations break down. Then again, this describes America, where a lot of people celebrate a cultural heritage they derive purely from ethnic heritage which under different circumstances ("race") they would deny exists. Somehwere in America there is probably a bunch of liberals who simultaneously claim that race doesn't exist, while celebrating their Ukrainian heritage that they only know from books written in English.
If further family history analysis showed that two completely unrelated great-great-grandparents of hers were native would that make everything better?
I am not sympathetic to her, and you miss one of the most important issues here: there's a long history of white people pretending to be Native American for reallllyyy nefarious purposes: stealing reservation land and rations, weird Confederacy dead enders dressed up in Cherokee cosplay because the Confederacy and the Cherokees both fought the feds.... It's not cultural appropriation in the benign sense of "oh cringe white ppl think Indians are cool and accidentally disrespect their culture in the process"; it's intentional theft from Indians. Someone who is as immersed in Native culture as she became would know about this and should have questioned their ancestry from the start given the mysterious circumstances.
I think this article fails to differentiate between the different kinds of lived experiences. If one of this woman’s parents had been raised in a native home and it turned out she wasn’t genetically native it would seem different to me. But her lived experience was that of an outsider connecting with her roots, not that of a person living her culture.
My dad is Mexican American and my mom is white. I think most people can tell I have that heritage. But I’m not close with my dad’s family and even I feel like my lived experience with the culture is often more akin to that of an outsider. Someone who doesn’t even have that is not living her own culture. She’s just not. I don’t actually think that she necessarily did anything wrong here and I don’t take issue with a lot of the conclusions. But I find it disingenuous to pretend that she meets the bar for lived experience when that isn’t what lived experience means.
I think a fourth option is that, in the native american case specfically, part of the reason being native american is important is that it's a marker of having been disadvantaged by the polices the US government has adopted towards native americans historically, and someone who didn't actually have native acenstry wouldn't have suffered from those disadvantages (perhaps hence why they could become a proffessor.)
Another reason that being native american by blood could matter, is that the rules for group membership require an induviudal to be a child of another group member - but this is compatable with genetics not being the defining characteristics because adoption is also an acceptable way of gaining group membership.
Maybe a final reason is that being a native american means having access to an inheritance which has to be passed down to children (although again not neccarsily biological children.)
You may be interested in Charles Mills' "But What Are You Really?"
I’m definitely on team cultural appropriation is awesome, at least in most circumstances (the primary exception being if you are behaving disrespectfully, eg black face).
I go for (2) on the second trilemma, with some (1). Many things seen as cultural appropriation aren't wrong, and the things that are are **cultural** appropriation, not **racial** appropriation, so (2) definitely applies.
I had a similar reaction reading the article, but I think there's an additional dimension here. One of the things the article talks about is how she was always beading and wearing stereotypically native jewelry and dress. She's contrasted with a candidate for the Native American studies position she eventually got (which, BTW, is maybe not officially affirmative action, but I think it's likely she wouldn't have gotten that job if she were known to be white) who interviewed in a three piece suit, and was asked if his tie was a native pattern (it wasn't). There's an idea that the department preferred a white person who acted overtly native, and in particular, satisfied their stereotypes of what it means to be native, to an actual native who didn't. This arguably selects for people whose native identity is more tenuous; if you're undeniably native, you might not feel the need to overtly demonstrate it.
But of course, this is ultimately a critique not of Elizabeth Hoover, but of the people who hired her, which I think is fair.
She is also getting lumped in by association with purposeful fakers like Rachel Dolezal by people who don’t actually read the story.
One element is that yes, it is cool and sometimes useful to take these labels today, but it isn’t cool to *say* that these labels are useful- after all, Native Americans are a repressed minority.
Another element here has to do with trans stuff- trilemma #1 comes dangerously close to acknowledging that people can in fact be valid “transracial”, which conservatives will pounce on for the absurdity and which transgender people don’t want to be analogized to.
I have two things to say.
First, this paper which makes a similar argument to this blog post: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-032015-010015
Second, I think that one could also say that (the genetic part of) race has the same relationship to population genetics that color has to wavelengths of light. In both cases we draw some boundaries on some continuous thing. Population genetics and wavelengths of lights are continuous.
What I thought was meant by "race is a social construct" is that there's some genetic reality to ethnicity, but that the way we categorize ethnic groups as belonging to various "races" is more arbitrary. So at various times Italians, Irish, and Ashkenazi Jews have been categorized as non-white, but now they're generally considered to be white.
Ethnicity still gets fuzzy around the edges, especially when trying to deal with a blood quantum, but there are clear clusters who mostly marry within the cluster and who have obvious phenotypic differences from other clusters.
Ugh. This sucks for her. Nothing else to add.
“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)”
I take this (and the inverted/parallel case of the “white” guy raised on the reservation) more as meaning you don’t like telling people they can’t be part of something they want to be a part of, and likewise object to others doing that. This preference cuts across rationales, hence the apparent inconsistency of saying (in the case of the guy) “lived experience trumps genetics” and (in the case of the girl) “genetics (kind of sort of) trumps lived experience.” In both cases the real trump card seems more to be something like “Who am I (or the tribal elders or whoever) to call for this person to be expelled?”
I can’t believe you go through this whole piece without linking to the classic Dave Chappelle Clayton Bigsby sketch: https://youtu.be/BLNDqxrUUwQ?si=2K2_0vnTspnHAK3r
My comment here is sort of tangential, and is mostly on the idea/value of "race" as a concept. On the one hand, race is certainly just as "real" as dozens of other concepts that no one questions the validity of, but I think I have been convinced that it isn't (or maybe shouldn't be, I'm not denying reality, but rather make an aspirational statement) be _important_. This stems mostly from my views on individualism. You can say lots of things about groups of people, but almost every single thing you can say about those groups is a thing that, in any specific instance, am not going to care about the group trait and instead am going to care about the specific individual in question.
About the only reason why these kinds of group/colelctive traits might matter is that there are (or at least could be), policies whose goal is either greatly obstructed or maybe even made entirely impossible by group realities (since the policy is targeting those groups). This is true, but I'm almost always against those policies for reasons completely unrelated to their efficacy or lack thereof.
TO make a more direct comment on the article: when it comes to this particular situation, I personally think that genetic doors to cultural groups are generally a bad idea. I understand the reasons (which you point out) that they get implemented, but they are, in my opinion, bad reasons, or at least reasons that aren't justified by the harms caused.
Take your specific example about native americans being swamped by the hordes of white people who would want to adopt their culture. It seems to me like this is a non-problem. White people can do what they want, try to join the culture, and they will either do so well enough that existing members of the culture will accept them as assimilated or not. In other words, the principle of free-associate renders this concern moot. If there is some big group of "fake" native americans, the "real" ones don't have to associate with them. And the culture will only actually get diluted to whatever extent it's members don't care enough about preserving to it maintain it, at which point the problem is not the "fakes" but rather the lack of caring of the "real" members. And that problem doesn't seem impacted by the existence of poor-imitators.
> The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist".
Open offer to any expert believe`n gamblers out there; we test if races exist by finding 1000 claiming to be Russians from born in Russia, who are as white as snow; and we test if they have sickle cell if none of them have sickle cell you give me a million dollars, if there is sickle cell at 1/10th the global rate ill give you 10$, and I'll tell all my racist family, racist friends, and racist community that race doesn't exist
Once in a life time opportunity; you can fight racism today.
The consensus says "biological race doesn't exist" but why isn’t Elizabeth Warren Native? - It’s easier to degrade people if you give them an opportunity to save face and pretend that’s not what’s happening. Most people are actually perfectly willing to be degraded provided there’s some theoretical limit to how far they think it’ll go.
If race doesn’t literally exist, the victim thinks then maybe someday the social construct will fade away, and they’ll stop demanding I atone. Maybe one day I will suffer enough degradation to atone and they’ll stop telling me that I’m terrible.
Surprise, surprise! They actually do just hate you. It’ll never end. And you deserve what you tolerate.
It's possible that *everyone* resents the affirmative action, but it is suppressed when a person fits into the category.
When that person is revealed not to be in the category, the suppressed resentment is released and boils to the surface, causing reaction that is surprisingly large.
This is magnified when there is significant amounts of money at stake.
Culture is meant for sharing, that’s one of the best things about it. 90% of the time, complaints about cultural appropriation are just veiled hatred of the majority group, using weaponized vocabulary to gain status and play power games.
People shouldn’t be limited to making art, food, clothing, or events from only their race, however race is defined. It’s absolutely silly and needs to be mocked as a concept.
I read posts like this and laugh, thinking with half of my brain that it must be satire. "Surely Scott understands perfectly well what's going on. Surely he isn't actually puzzled and asking these questions sincerely." Then the other half of my brain kicks in.
The chief driver of race discourse in the U.S. is the social and political advantage of particular groups (tendentiously called "disadvantaged.") There is little interest in descriptive accuracy or logical consistency in that discourse, because such would not serve said advantage. Simple as.
One can talk about genetic factors or whatever, but that only irritates people because it impedes the purpose of the exercise.
I find myself reminded strongly of an argument Coleman Hughes made in "The End of Race Politics." Hughes claims that most people who say they believe that race is a social construct are lying or self-deceived. If they really believed that race was a social construct then they would take it less seriously, not more. Most "woke" types treat race with deadly seriousness, which indicates that they are actually extreme racial essentialists. (I've heard a similar argument made about TERFs, they claim to believe that gender is a social construct, but they act like extreme gender essentialists who believe that men have evil essences).
This also has given me a new perspective on a conversation I've had before with other people about the race of various alien characters. Under the "lived experience" view, Superman would be white, even though he is a space alien, because he has grown up raised by white people and is perceived as white by most people he knows. The Martian Manhunter, a shapeshifting superhero who has taken various human forms over the years, would vary based on continuity. In the "Supergirl" TV series he has spent many years in a civilian identity in the form of an African American man, Hank Henshaw, so you could argue that he is black in that continuity. In the Post Crisis DC comic universe by contrast, he has created the identity of a white private detective named John Jones, so I suppose he might be considered white after living on Earth for a long time. In the "Justice League" cartoon, where he has no secret identity, he is not any human race at all (although he might eventually be considered Asian since he assumes the identity of a Chinese man near the end of the series).
It looks like she's receiving harsh treatment not because of an innocent mistake about ancestry, but because she was found to have concealed the truth for some time, and in doing so misrepresented herself in a fashion she ought to have known would engender outrage among that community. I think you might be underrating how much that perceived breach of trust, as a social matter, transforms her story from what might have been dealt with as good faith mistake, into a story of bad faith deception, rendering her untrustworthy, and anathema based on the violation of taboo.
Clearly the people in favor of shunning her are choosing to take an uncharitable view of the circumstances, but that may be the appropriate stance if their priority is to avoid weaking the taboo.
This is a brave post, given that it seems bound to attract both scorn from the Hoover-vilifying crowd *and* uncomfortable snide comments from people who care entirely too much about race science. You deserve credit for writing it honestly and earnestly.
Using Jews as the "good" example here (for several meanings of "good") is a bit insane.
1. Exposing other people (who observe some form of Judaism or consider themselves culturally Jewish - whatever that means by now - or have close family members who suffered from antisemitism, or have suffered from it themselves in some fashion) as fake Jews because of their lack of maternal Jewish ancestry is, at least, *a* Jewish national sport, to about the same extent that football (aka soccer) is the national sport of Mexico. It's probably more popular than an earnest belief in God; you don't need to believe in God deep down to believe that He set down the true rule on who is a Jew (or that he gave the land of Israel to the Jews, etc.).
This actually shows that AA or land rights are something of a distraction; people will engage in this sort of behavior even if the reward in keeping others from the group because of who their parents were is purely psychological.
2. There has been a growing divergence between different "Jewish clouds" since at least the end of the 19th century. The number of people that would be at least somewhat Jewish according to hard-core antisemites (or if they got a Nobel Prize) is probably about thrice the number that are counted as part of the "core population" of Jews in population surveys. In the US, isn't that core population again about twice the number of people who are actually affiliated with a synagogue, say? (These are old proportions; they may have increased.)
3. Even more to the point, the different meanings of "Jew" really do correspond to different ways of seeing oneself and existing in the world. That is true even for a single meaning: a hundred years ago, "culturally Jewish" meant being engaged in Yiddish literature or theatre, say; nowadays, it seems to mean next to nothing, just a "next to nothing" that, however easily learned (a few phrases picked from The Joy of Yiddish, say), only some people, having the right ancestry, can indulge in (but most don't).
I presume that the people who are vilifying Hoover would claim that either she factually was insufficiently careful about verifying she was native American or, like strict liability crimes like sex with a minor, truly justified epistemic error is sufficiently rare and falsely claimed error common enough that it makes sense to punish people simply for being wrong.
I think this approach is wrong and it's implicitly saying: people who look white need to reach a higher level of proof before making these claims but it's at least worth steelmaning.
A world in which Ms Hoover got no advantages from thinking she was native, she'd have decided to 'pass' as white. She had a mirror. She knew she wasn't supposed to be very -much- native, but it was more fun for her to pretend. Meanwhile, I'm 100% western european and have to carefully mouth shibboleths about cultural appropriation in order to speak in public about some of my interests, (which you might call applied anthropology). I was told growing up that I was a very small amount mohawk. My hair and eyes are darker than Ms Hoover's, and for one long moment while applying for college I thought about checking a different box. But I did what I regard as the honorable thing. She took the easy path, and is now paying the price.
A decision theory counterargument: ideally, you want your system of justice to ban people from profiting from doing bad things.
Now, if you accept the narrative that white people robbed the indians of their land and did various bad things to them, then indians aren't just a different group, they're one that was actively victimized by white people, which means white people shouldn't be allowed to benefit from it. Now clearly you can't just kick out all the white people to give indians back their land (whatever fringe leftists may want), but you can have various social status or AA benefits going to native Americans to sorta compensate. Let's assume those make it roughly even.
if the white people who stole the indian's lands knew their great grandkids would have to owe reparations, maybe they wouldn't have taken the land. But in a world where some of their great grandkids just end up claiming to be indians and get those benefits themselves, they don't worry about it.
So the implication here is that it's wrong to claim to be a race (a set of people claiming continuous identity through generations) if the earlier generations wouldn't have claimed you, especially if their ancestral enemies would have.
I think this model of race is consistent and some people go by it. I don't actually think it's a good idea though, since even if you accept the premiselst people just don't think about the effects on their great grandkids when making plans. But that's a general argument for statutes of limitations on cultural grievances.
> “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”
One of the issues I have about the current culture (planet of cops / cancel culture / whatever) is precisely that it *doesn’t* import an important norm of law: the concept of mens rea has been jettisoned.
Arguably, this culture is far less likely to consider intent or extenuating circumstances than the average court.
We could keep the concepts "cultural X" and "ethnic (biological) X" more separate in our minds - there's a lot of overlap between the two, but we don't have to lump them together into some kind of "*really* X".
Maybe “identity” is not that useful of a concept.
Adjacent to the specific content in this post, I am frustrated that, years into widespread obsession with race and gender, it seems we still haven't had any constructive discourse on establishing norms for these issues.
I genuinely wish I had a better framework to understand what the appropriate norms should be on meta-questions like treating all people the same vs when to provide specific accommodation; when it's okay or problematic for there to be demographic discrepancies in various environments; when something that is notionally neutral is actually inequitable and warrants intervention etc.
At the very least we ought to get rid of "cultural appropriation" as a pejorative.
If academia cared more about what people do as opposed to who they are, none of this would be an issue.
Re: the surprising inclusivity of White identitarians, there's a great meme that goes "General @WhiteRaceSavior, you are browner than I expected."
In Russian YouTube, there is an extremely popular public speaker anthropologist Stanislav Drobyshevsky. He often says that race exists, just any studies of it were suppressed worldwide because of the current political climate. If I understand him correctly, race is similar to the term population (as in a community of interbreeding beings), but wider. So, race is something like population of populations.
I am not sure how useful race is scientifically, but when he describes studies of races, it all seems reasonable to me. People, including scientists, love to categorize and group stuff, and it is indeed weird to only demand isolated rigour here, but not in many other areas.
P.S. just to clarify, he is no racist, as far as I can judge, and never expressed any views that one race can be better then other somehow. However, he many times described how terrible some human cultures can be, but I guess we all already know that.
I can't be the only one to find the oversized role of academia in the drama remarkable; almost everyone involved, and in particular everyone attacking Hoover, either works in academia or has academic background (usually not of the STEM variety). Shouldn't a conflict about who does or doesn't belong to a community be played out in the overall community rather than in universities? I can't imagine a group of students at a non-religious college demanding the resignation of a professor who has falsely claimed to be a Jew, or for that matter an American or a Ukrainian.
The article even comes close to noticing this:
> De Master asked Hoover if there had ever been questions about her Native heritage before she arrived at Berkeley, and Hoover emphatically said no. (Hoover denies saying no.)
The version of Nativeness that is at play here seems to be rooted in American universities much more than on any reservation; I don't know of any other ethnoculture that is so academia-centered. The boundaries between tribal and academic work are porous here in a way I haven't seen anywhere else:
> For a long time, Hoover continued to show up to every department meeting, even to parties and retreats where her presence wasn’t mandatory. Some of her former students and faculty friends began to dread running into her. Eventually, the chair of her department announced via e-mail that Hoover would stop attending these events; the department’s administration also quietly tried to make sure that Hoover no longer worked in Native communities, as she had promised in her statement of accountability. (Hoover says she has upheld her promise without any administrative intervention.)
>
> Almost immediately, however, rumors circulated that Hoover was breaking that promise, taking part in cultural burns—the lighting of controlled fires to manage Native land—and posting photos of herself at these events on Facebook. Hoover denies that the burns are part of her scholarly work and says that she had been invited by the tribal chairperson who hosted the burns. (The tribal chairperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Why should her university have any part in deciding what tribal rituals she partakes in? Some heavy "the real Indians are us" energy here.
> One day last fall, the Native grad student who had paused her community work was feeling overwhelmed by the turmoil in her new department and went to a cultural burn up north. She wanted to be around people who weren’t embroiled in the drama surrounding Hoover, she told me. When she got to the burn, which was crowded, Hoover was there. The tribal chairperson acknowledged Hoover, announcing that she had given him a beaded medallion a year or two before. “And then she was at the campfires, laughing really loud, like how Native women usually laugh,” the grad student said. “It’s weird she laughs like that.”
So the tribe doesn't care, perhaps even appreciating someone from the outside keeping the flame going. But academics are not so easily fooled! Isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?
I mean, it's a politically negotiated category whose boundaries shift depend on who's talking and how much political clout they have. It seems especially heinous with blacks and Native Americans because they're groups seen as being done badly by (with justification) historically to the white majority and who are still doing badly now.
Conversely, few people would look that hard at your Italian or Irish ancestry if you wanted to open an Italian restaurant or Irish pub. Jewish people will occasionally go after non-Jewish people trying to write about Jewish subjects, but I don't hear about it that much.
Then you get the white girl who decided to wear a Chinese dress to prom, was attacked by a Chinese-American guy for cultural appropriation, and then defended by Chinese people in China who found it flattering. It was a while ago but Avril Lavigne got in trouble for making a stereotypically Japanese video for her Japanese fans--she was big in Japan long after she had ceased to be big in America.
Why can you appropriate Irish culture freely, but not Japanese? Both were discriminated against. And back home, the Japanese have no problem with cultural appropriation; they copied large amounts of Western culture as part of industrialization, and it worked out pretty well for them. Anime shows pretty heavy influences from America's Disney films, samurai movies were influenced by cowboy movies, and so on. They are able to market their culture--revenue from Crunchyroll subscriptions and Square Enix games presumably goes back to Japanese companies that then pay Japanese people. Heck, Japan is actually culturally dominant in some areas at this point when it comes to cartoons--look at all the anime avatars on Twitter. (I think it probably is a way to get unwoke stories--your best chance to get a strong male protagonist on a traditional hero's journey is a shonen anime at this point.)
So it's more about whether the culture in question has a organized pressure group that can go after you.
I completely agree with your claim that "race doesn't exist" is a phrase suited mostly for deliberate confusion and deception. When I read a biologist or anthropologist make this claim, they are usually defining "race" as this straw man in which races share no common traits and have no common ancestor. No educated person comes close to believing something like that.
While I appreciate pointing out these subtle tensions between these various claims about race I think it's really important we make a broadside attack on the claim that "race is socially constructed" as used in conversation. Not only is it wrong I think people don't appreciate how much getting the feeling that the accepted truth is built on bullshit pushes people toward unjustified extremism.
Yes, of course race is socially constructed (as you observe) in the sense that our racial categories aren't mapped to the maximally scientifically explanatory divisions (eg it's not what you get by running a classifier on the genetic/phenotypic data). But the reason it's used is so people who don't have the scientific chops to deal with arguments that the reason black people do worse on Y task is clearly genetic can reject them out of hand.
Obviously this is fallacious reasoning. All that needs to be true for claims about genetics explaining differences in some group phenotype to be true is for those groups to have non-zero correlation with genes affecting said phenotype (and maybe a tad more if you want it to be robust across generations). You don't need to pick the maximally scientifically informative split for the explanation to work. Same way you can say the reason anvils tend to fall faster in air than feathers is anvils tend to have greater weight per cross-sectional area (even if occasional anvils are made out of some super low density substance) even though anvil/feather is hardly a principled division into categories for mechanics based explanations.
I've got advanced degrees so I've got no problem pushing back on this using the right language but I think everyone who is at all skeptical senses they are being played. Indeed, I think it's that sense which helps create the crisis of expert trust in this country -- the feeling you know you are being fed crap (agree or not there are much stronger non-fallacious arguments for the claim that the large majority of variation in things like educational attainment between races isn't genetic...but it's uncomfortable for many people to talk about this in less than totally certain terms).
Thankfully I've seen geneticists like David Reich implicitly call out this reasoning but not everyone goes and reads what the actual scientists say or what their reasoning is. That's why I've also seen people who are smart enough to realize something is bullshit here get dragged into the opposite kind of race essentialism because those are the only people who take their criticisms seriously.
Look, I get it that it's hard rhetorically/emotionally for people on the left to have to treat this issue as even a legitimate topic of scientific debate thar evidence needs to be cited for but you don't have to actually be able to make every argument yourself or even engage in that debate -- but doing so badly just makes everything worse .
I couldn't find the angry commentary tweetstorm that must have happened in this situation, but this letter from Hoover's former friend makes clear that she's angry about Hoover's deliberate lying, not about genuine mistaken identity: https://nativeappropriations.com/2023/05/a-letter-to-elizabeth-hoover.html
She writes:
> The thing that is hard for me is you could have done all of this good work as a white woman. You could have stood in solidarity with Native people, been a true accomplice, a co-conspirator, without having to claim identity. The work needs to be done, and communities need people to do it with them. You could have had the same career and do the same work as a white woman, and folks would have welcomed it. But now you’ve broken all of the trust and called into question all of the work, because you started it with a lie.
1. The "no biological basis" and "genetic affilnity" arguments address two different problems. "No basis" was coined to invalidate the assertions of Black genetic inferiority that cropped up several decades ago. "Genetic affinity" is one means for a group to define its own members. While the two concepts conflict, they coexist in enlightened society.
2. The 1979 Steve Martin movie, "The Jerk," perfectly limns the genetic affinity argument. Steve Martin is adopted as a baby by Black Mississippi sharecroppers. By his teens he has an almost perfect Black cultural repertoire and sees himself as Black; his one deficiency is that he doesn't have rhythm. He goes out into the world and no matter how hard he identifies as Black, he's treated as white. Result: fish out of water. His misery is finally resolved when his adoptive family (which he has adventitiously enriched) takes him back to the farm and to a much improved sharecropper's shack. Miraculously, he gets rhythm. While the happy ending endorses lived experience as the criterion, the bulk of the movie shows that skin color and genetics (no nappy hair!) are the determinants.
Cultural appropriation is a complement to the culture appropriated.
Land or labor appropriation is another matter.
> 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'm gonna take a hard-line #1 here. Not only is "cultural appropriation" not something we should worry about, it's not something that *exists.* The proper term for the thing that it is referring to is simply "culture;" cultural appropriation is a made-up nonsense term used by cultural arsonists to try to problematize the way cultural development has always worked since the dawn of time. The first and most fundamental rule of culture has always been, "everyone appropriates from everyone around them."
These days, the steel guitar is commonly associated with country music. But it was originally developed in the late 19th century by Hawaiian musician Joseph Kekuku, for use in traditional Hawaiian music, and it features prominently in the "island style" sound commonly associated with Hawaii. Country artists using steel guitars are a clear-cut case of cultural appropriation then, right?
Not so fast. Kekuku took the guitar — a Spanish instrument which evolved from the lute, an ancient design whose origins are lost to history — and added a playing bar made of steel (a metal unknown to the Hawaiians until Europeans introduced it!) to produce a specific sound quality. Later artists continued to tinker with the design, adding a resonator, then electric pickups, then pedals. (Fun fact: the electric pickup was first invented for the steel guitar, and was later adapted to more standard guitars. Were it not for steel player George Beauchamp tinkering with speakers and magnetic fields to get a louder sound out of his instrument, rock 'n' roll might have never existed!)
At every step along the way, be it Kekuku and his fellow Hawaiian guitarists who developed the distinctive Hawaiian style, those before them, and those after them, people took things that already existed, added something of their own to it, and built something (marginally) new out of it. This is the way culture has always worked. "Appropriation" is the natural process of cultural development, nothing more, and no one has the right to make anyone feel ashamed of it.
I mean, I think the real answer is (4) the consensus, which you described accurately at the start of the post, is messy, with many exceptions that prove the rule.
In this case, the key element that you left out of the summary is that there has been some level of deception. People interviewed in that article told the author that they received obfuscatory answers about her ancestral connections to her tribe for many years; and over that same period she benefited from her Native identity by getting a good academic position. Compare and contrast Elizabeth Warren, who apparently had approximately the same thing happen to her, but pretty much as soon as her ancestry was questioned, discovered the truth and admitted it; nor did she benefit from her Native identity.
This is still messy, because you're right that as a young person, she seems to have had many formative experiences that would normally be associated with being Native; and under any other circumstances that might have been enough for her to count as Native for social purposes. But as you note, any definition of race is in fact a messy superposition of several different things. If you want to make a claim on tribal property, you have to go through certain proofs which are different from just social identity; and if you want to present yourself as Native for professional purposes, the social proofs are different again. And she seems to have deliberately concealed the truth during some of these processes.
Being white is considered low-status among Critical Social Justice advocates and even many progressives. The backlash is used to penalize white people that may seek status or benefits of being a minority by making false claims. The CSJ worldview appears inconsistent because it's not truly egalitarian. CSJ advocates like things that benefit groups they consider historically oppressed, despite rhetoric about equality/equity. I think for your trilemma, you say "vilify intentional deceivers but not those who make a simple mistake" and the worldview is consistent.
I read the article as much more damning of white allies than of Hoover. There are several mentions of her (depending on your interpretation) playing up/embracing her heritage by wearing A LOT of Native beaded goods/beading in meetings. And then there’s this:
“Annette Rodriguez was a graduate fellow at the center toward the end of this period. She told me about a Native scholar who gave a job talk wearing a three-piece suit with a distinctively patterned tie. Someone asked him about the pattern, expecting that the design had come from his tribal community. The scholar said it was from Barneys. “He wasn’t going to fuel the fantasies of the white imagination of what an authentic Native person was,” Rodriguez said. “Liz was very happy to do that.””
A big part of the anger I see in the article from Native people is that there’s more room for Pretendians who flatter the assumptions of white peoples than the full range of actual Native experience.
Cultural appropriation is a fundamentally insane concept that misunderstands how culture works at the most basic level. Race, in the genetic sense, obviously exists and is obviously distinct from (but correlated with) ethnicity in the cultural sense; however, in most cases it's ethnicity that people care about, not race, and race gets used as a proxy for ethnicity.
...But that doesn't actually resolve the issue. People caught between different ethnic identities, or other identities, without fully belonging is a thing. And when you add material incentives (like affirmative action) in, built on an assumption of clean lines that don't exist in reality, things can get ugly.
My impression from the story was that Hoover was the type to cancel others caught in this sort of situation, and so I didn't feel too bad for her being hoist on her own petard. But I don't think that was actually said, so that was uncharitable of me. She definitely thought her voice was more important because of her Native identity, and used that to her advantage, but maybe this always was based in culture rather than blood. I don't know - the specific case doesn't matter that much, but the general problem is not straightforward.
There's definitely also the issue of social-justice types declaring belief in constructivism and fluid borders between identities, but proposing policies and social norms that rely on an underlying assumption of sharp and immutable lines.
Read THERE, THERE, which wrestles with this.
In the case of Native Americans, there is another option for deciding if someone is really a member of the group--whether or not they're legally a member of one of the tribes. Each federally recognized Native American tribe has their own rules for who can become a member based on ancestry, residency, and other factors. Whether these rules are reasonable or not, I think most people would agree that its their prerogative to define membership however they want. Universities (which seem to be the main place these controversies happen) probably aren't going to demand genetic tests of potential Native American faculty, but they could just ask whether they're a member of a legally recognized tribe and accept that tribe's decision on whether they're 'really' Native American.
I am really confused about why the section on race in part II was included; the part that includes: "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."
Which is a pretty strong opener...but then you pivot away. If you replace "race" with "genetic ancestry", nothing changes, the essay and arguments still flow identically. The core argument, that genetics/biological race is a morally bad category to draw for group affiliation, does not require biological race. Am I missing a subtle point here? Is it just the 23andMe thing?
That seems like a spicy topic to touch and then drop and argue against almost immediately.
I thought this piece was clear enough about this but based on comments I guess not.
NO pretty much no one on the left is really going to say race has nothing to do with genes (or ancestry which I'll use equivalently since there is sufficient genetic variation to infer ancestry from it). I mean there are always idiots but in general no.
The claim that they tend to make is that race is socially constructed, i.e, that the way we divide up genetic space into races isn't even close to how you would do it if you were picking scientific concepts, e.g, if you tried to break up the genetic space into ancestral groups based on degree of interbreeding and genetic similarity etc it wouldn't come up with a group that tracks, eg, the us cultural concept of black under the one drop rule.
And while one can argue this point on its own it's reasonable enough. People, except the deeply confused, aren't making an argument that's totally stupidly dumb.
The error in this approach is when it's used to try and suggest that therefore you can't possibly explain observed differences in statistical outcomes by race by reference to genetics. Of fucking course you can. Sure, maybe being black under the us cultural definition isn't the ideal scientific concept but it doesn't change the fact that conditional on an American being black there chance of having sickle cell increases drastically.
As I said I thought this was all basically clear from the discussion in the post but apparently some comments seem to think liberals are really suggesting the extreme view that genes have literally nothing to do with it view. And sure I guess you can always find some idiots but despite spending my life in academia I haven't met someone who said that (tho large numbers prob means there are a few).
Highly recommend Kim TallBear's extensive work on this, including her Substack: https://kimtallbear.substack.com/p/self-indigenization-genocide-and
And book, "Native American DNA". This issue, especially for Native Americans and indigenous folks more broadly, has a lot more going on than mere individuals. I think the problem here isn't that Hoover is a one-off, but an example of a very common issue that folks are dealing with all over the place, from Elizabeth Warren to state-level politics, like in Vermont: https://vtdigger.org/2023/11/14/a-false-narrative-abenaki-leaders-dispute-the-legitimacy-of-vermonts-state-recognized-tribes/
I believe that these claims that 'races are not at all biological/genetical' comes from the fact that 'race' is a poor word to accurately describe the concept of 'ethnicity', given that the word 'race' originally describes a purely genetic concept. In the human species, the so-called 'races' have a greater genetic diversity among themselves than between themselves. . It is just an exaggerated version of the more correct take 'races make no sense on a pure biological perspective and are a blurry social construct'.
I think that most of these issues would fade away if in English 'ethnicity' was preferred to 'race' in this specific context, as it is the case in many European languages. I think everyone would agree that 'ethinicity' has some biological component to it, as it is clear that groups that recognize themselves as a particular ethnicity partly do so in the basis of ascendance and appearance
When it comes to Elizabeth Hoover, I guess it's fair to not recognize her as Mi'kmaq base on her lack of ascendance (although I couldn't care less), but I find it completely unfair that all these people criticize her while her actions and her lying (even if bad) seem clearly humane and understandable.
I've asked my Chinese students how they define Chineseness.
Is it the ability to read, write, and speak Chinese fluently? Then what about ABCs, adopted Chinese Children, and American Born Chinese who generally lose this ability. And what about foreign children and mixed children who attend local schools in China? Or the small numbers of foreigners who do become extremely proficient? Are they Chinese?
Does one have to "look" Chinese? Then what about Tibetans and Uyghurs and other visible minorities? Koreans and Japanese can blend into China better.
Does one have to "think" like a Chinese person? ABCs and Chinese from the Mainland, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, all "think" differently.
Who is more Chinese? The third generation Chinese-Canadian who doesn't speak a word of Chinese? Or the Ghanaian kid who grew up in China and only speaks Chinese? Half the taxi drivers in China would admit they don't speak "proper Chinese".
What's interesting about China is that you can earn genuine respect in the degree to which you can appropriate Chinese culture and language. And I feel that language and culture are far more significant in shaping who you are than your appearance, though that of course can impact you too. Beautiful people and obese people and white people and black people and Chinese people and so on, will all internalize their experiences differently. But it would be nice to have a way for anyone to deemphasize their embodied experience, in a Chinese kind of way, or a Jewish conversion kind of way.
Correction: Genetic affinity is one means for a group to define its own members or for non-members to do so (invidiously, usually).
“there’s a missing step here, something like 1.5: maybe people should stop caring about their cultural identity”
I surprised there’s little validation for this point in the comments as of yet. It’s definitely where I land, at least the modified version of “people should stop caring *so much* about their cultural identity”.
I do understand the emotional and political strength that especially disadvantaged groups can draw from coming together under a shared identity but let us also acknowledge the huge dividends of assuming a more cosmopolitan or even an animalian identity < insert picture of furless ape contemplating a brilliant Milky Way against the deepest darkness >
I feel like I can steelman the idea of "cultural appropriation" as the idea of "profaning things that others find sacred". I remember one time in the US I saw some hipster wearing what appeared to be an Australian Army slouch hat complete with rising sun badge and I did feel a certain amount of personal offence -- that's a sacred object (of a sort) in my culture, and he's just wearing it with no regard to its context. And I understood how people from certain Native American cultures might feel about certain varieties of feathered headdress.
Of course the fact that somebody is offended by something doesn't make it immoral, it makes it impolite. I feel like one of the big effects of the death of ettiquette in the West is that we've taken many things that used to just be "impolite" and labelled them as immoral. But we _need_ that grey area between good behaviour and immorality, that wearing-shorts-to-a-wedding regime of behaviours that (a) can make people think less of you, but (b) nobody needs to get morally outraged about.
Is it a unique Scott feature to decry isolated demands for rigor... then respond will all the rigor demanded and more?
I have a less rigorous take
1. Common sense dictates she gets a pass given it was an honest mistake of family history and she has enough lived experience to cover the gap.
2. The community that denounced her did not do so upon sober consideration of all the facts.
3. Instead they were primed to call out white people in academia claiming to have native ancestry because of prominent cases and general belief where some do so cynically with 0 lived experience
4. She basically got caught in the cross fire
5. Toxic woke environment caused friends to turn on her out of fear of their own careers and reputation who otherwise would have been capable of that sober minded consideration of the facts.
Just an Nteenth warning of the terrible-ness of cancel culture, not *necessarily* proof that our models of race+culture have to be rewritten.
We're 155 comments in so this is going to get buried, but you all are missing it. Elizabeth Hoover is being burned at the stake because NOBODY READ THE ARTICLE.
There isn't a general principle to tease out of the condemnation issuing from all quarters because nobody read the article. There's no innate genetic component to race that can be understood through the lens of her persecution because nobody read the article. There aren't any fundamental, nuanced Native American social dynamics to her being ostracized from that community because nobody read the article.
Until now I had no idea there was a another side to this story because I didn't read the article. I only know about Elizabeth Hoover because I read "Let's Talk About Pretendians" at the Make More Pie substack (https://nancyrommelmann.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-pretendians?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fsaved&utm_medium=reader2) and it never occurred to me to doubt that the source material was anything other than a scathing indictment. I found Nancy Rommelmann's take interesting and thought provoking, but now that I know she was bulshitting I hate her for lying to me.
Then again maybe Scott is lying to me. I wouldn't know, because I still haven't read the article, and I never will because my subscription to the New Yorker expired 25 years ago, I've already used up my free articles for the month, and this issue will be forgotten by April. Jesus.
Wow! There's a lot of material here, and lots of logic branches to follow. Following my Business Writing training, I'll put the Bottom Line Up Front: None of it should matter. In general. For most purposes. Okay, it's not that simple.
I'm tempted to write a book to try to capture all my thoughts on this, but I doubt anyone would want to read it.
I'll summarize: none of this would matter much if there weren't legal rights, privileges, and considerations attached. Elizabeth Hoover says she knew she wasn't eligible for enrolled citizenship in the Mi'kmaq nation, but there'd be no reason I can see to argue about her status except for the US rules that make it important. Scott says she never "officially claimed" affirmative action benefits, but there is no procedure for "claiming" these benefits - they are given by organizations that choose to do so. Both Harvard and Elizabeth Warren loudly claimed that her (disputed) status as a Native American was irrelevant to her hiring at Harvard Law School, but this makes no sense. Before she was hired, Harvard had publicly announced a commitment to hiring more Native American faculty. When she was hired, Harvard proudly claimed her as the first Native American woman on the Law School faculty. So, either Harvard was lying about a commitment to hiring more Native Americans, or it lied when it claimed it didn't consider her status. The same holds with Elizabeth Hoover - she was mentored by people who believed in her Native heritage, and hired because of her Native status.
A personal example: My maternal grandmother spent a fair amount of time and effort establishing her descent from 4 people who sailed on the Mayflower. She had her membership certificate in the Society of Mayflower Descendants hanging on the wall of her living room. I later found that she was approved by the North Carolina chapter, which was not her first attempt. Later, the national organization determined that her lineage could not be used to establish descent for anyone else (including her children) - presumably there were some weak links in her documentation. This situation would matter to relatives who want to be Mayflower descendants, or to the genealogists who guard the purity of the membership rolls, but to no one else. If being a Mayflower descendant conferred legal advantages, it would be a different story.
My college recently used its LinkedIn presence to highlight an "Indigenous" undergraduate student, who was photographed wearing clothes and jewelry from her culture. She grew up in New Jersey, and was indigenous to eastern Algeria, but still counts as "Indigenous". She certainly has every right to study, practice, and take pride in her parents' culture, but there'd be no particular reason for the University to take notice, and highlight her status, except that they earn Lefty Cred by having Indigenous students. Even students whose parents voluntarily emigrated from their homeland to a new country on a new continent.
The concept of Cultural Appropriation should be dropped. This is a process previously referred to by sociologists as "syncretism", where people freely borrow from other societies, and enrich themselves in the process. Of course, it could be done in an offensive way - drag queen nuns, say, or it could be questionable taste - say, boy scouts demonstrating sacred Indian dances. In a pluralistic society, there's really no way to prevent this. Low-key discussion and education could stop the offense by well-meaning people, but provocateurs will provoke, even if they're criticized for it.
Then there's the case of Buffy St. Marie, a very talented artist who identified as Native American but turned out probably wasn't and CBC outed her last year. It seemed that some of her relatives had tried to out her and at one point she threatened them with legal action, which may have caused them to back off. There was an uproar amongst various Native American activist groups, demanding that her awards as a Native American singer be rescinded, apparently on cultural appropriation grounds. But whether or not she had any native blood, she'd been adopted by the chief of the Piapot First Nation. According to Wikipedia, the chief's descendants said the attacks on St. Marie were "hurtful, ignorant, colonial — and racist" They explained ""We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us, that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could."
So people are very divided about St. Marie. I for one think her story shows how these concepts of race and "lived experience" are concepts that aren't well defined, so they mean different things to different people. Scott's piece does an excellent job of teasing out this point, but I think his analytic framework is a little limited. This is an area where opposites can easily be true, that is, race can be something that exists or doesn't exist, because it's an ambiguous term. The law of the excluded middle excludes ambiguity, which makes it a very weak foundation for any logic that's supposed to apply to the real world, which is full of ambiguities and uncertain quantities. So, it's possible to believe that lived experience is more important than genetic markers of race, or the other way around, not just be on one side or other of the point, but both at the same time. Because both have some truth in them and some falseness, if you want to look at it on that axis, but maybe a better way to look at it is, both beliefs are useful in addressing situations.
So it seems like St. Marie and Hoover were in a very similar situation with regard to their "lived experience" and genetic status, though St. Marie has refused to take a DNA test, but St. Marie has some very deep and loving support from the First Nation family she was part of. When I read what they said, my feeling was, what's anyone complaining about? Do Native Americans not have the right to adopt someone? I'm also influenced by my appreciation for St. Marie's music and her advocacy of Native American causes. Perhaps the real issue in Hoover's case is that she was an academic rather than an artist? Or that she didn't have similar connections to the Native American community she claimed to be part of? Or are the two situations more similar than I'm perceiving them to be?
At any rate, I don't see why we should need to choose between the various inconsistent views of genetics and lived experience Scott's posting talks about. They aren't completely inconsistent, unless you're of the view that when it comes to race, genetics is everything or nothing, and likewise for lived experience. Both, or either, of these positions seems absurd to me, like arguments by someone who actually believes concepts have to be definite and are not allowed to be ambiguous or even fuzzy. Yet, the amount of argument over these points, and the obsessive insistance that one or other belief about race is "true" or "false" does seem to take up a rather large part of our political and academic discussions about this subject, which for me only goes to show how emotional rather than rational the discussion continues to be.
Dear Author,
The Constructed Nature of Race
We must start by acknowledging that the very racial categories we discuss, like "black" and "white," are socially constructed concepts that were actively created and enforced through oppressive colonial policies and violence. As the sources highlighted, there was no monolithic "white race" in early 17th century Virginia - that was a divide purposefully manufactured and inscribed into law to uphold certain power structures.
Barbara J. Fields, author of "Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life," illuminates how "racecraft" was a political process "of ascribing racial meanings to relationships that were indubitably social," rather than reflecting any true biological distinctions.
Perhaps take Theodore W. Allen's work, " The Invention of the White Race," that delves into how the "white race" was invented as a ruling class social control formation to protect agrarian capitalist interests. So when we discuss racial identity today, we must first recognize we are operating within an invented system designed for economic exploitation and domination of certain groups. These categories did not arise organically from genetic data or some natural order.
The Limitations of Genetics
Speaking of genetics, the references you provided rightly cautioned against using it as the prime determinant of racial identity or lived experience. As one source noted, genetic expressions and similarities between populations often simply indicate proximity over time - they do not inherently equate to meaningful categorical racial differences.
Citing genetics as the basis for something like Native American identity or belonging would be particularly fraught given how these were diaspora communities forcibly removed and fragmented from ancestral lands. Using genetics as the gatekeeper risks further dispossessing them from their heritage.
Moreover, the example you provided of "black children raised in black communities" as the representation of a racialized experience was overly reductive. The African diaspora encompasses a vast range of cultures, experiences, and socialization processes that should not be flattened into a singular narrative.
Racialization vs. Genetics
It is the social process of racialization, rather than genetic variants, that plays the primary role in constructing racial experience and identity. As your references highlighted, "black" and "white" were racial constructs enforced through brutality, laws, and ingrained social hierarchies - not natural outcomes.
So in many ways, lived experience and the socialization of racialized experience may be more relevant factors than ancestry or genetics when discussing racial identity. This provides important context as we evaluate controversies like the Elizabeth Hoover case through the lens of oppressed groups reclaiming their sovereignty over identities and belonging.
The Dangers of Appropriation
We need to more directly reckon with the insidious harms of cultural appropriation and dispossession that marginalized groups have faced. Simply focusing the debate on representation and inclusion does not go far enough.
There are legitimate fears that enshrining an individualistic "lived experience" basis for racial identity could open the door to further extraction, decontextualization and erasure of precious cultural elements and narratives. As your reader stated, it is one thing to appreciate and experience aspects of a culture - it is another to arrogate and redefine that culture devoid of its original context and stakeholder community.
This resonates strongly with the colonial histories and persistent traumas that Native American tribes have endured around land dispossession, forced assimilation, and attempted cultural genocide at the hands of settler colonialism. Their staunch defense of belonging and identity boundaries, while perhaps severe in Hoover's case, emanates from a justified desire to protect what has been systemically attacked for centuries.
Belonging vs. Heritage
One distinction that merits further exploration is the difference between belonging and heritage as it relates to racial/ethnic identity. I would invitee you to think about how belonging is more about acceptance and inclusion within a particular group, while heritage refers to provable ancestral connections that can be measured to some degree.
In the case of Elizabeth Hoover and her contested Native identity, it seems the Native American community drew a line suggesting her lived experiences facilitated a sense of belonging, but did not constitute a heritage claim to tribal membership. This points to the complexity of these two interrelated but distinct concepts.
For many Native nations, protecting legal/cultural belonging boundaries is an act of defending sovereignty and preventing further encroachment after centuries of having lands, identities and very existence forcibly undermined. While harsh in Hoover's case, it represents an assertion of self-determination over who gets to be a stakeholder.
At the same time, one could argue that Hoover's individual pursuit of Native cultural enlightenment and embodiment, even if based on inaccurate ancestral beliefs, represented an attempt to cultivate personal heritage connections, regardless of criteria for official tribal belonging.
Exploring where the boundaries around belonging and heritage should be drawn for different communities, and according to what parameters, is an important part of this larger dialogue. It forces us to wrestle with complex questions of identity, continuity and "authenticity" without resorting to rigid policing.
The Journey of Other Colonized Groups
We should all seek to explore the perspective on these nuances of belonging and heritage that may come from other global communities who have been shaped by colonial identity formulations and ethnic supremacy ideologies.
For many across the Indian subcontinent or Iraqi/Iranian plateau for instance, conceptions of ethnic and national identity have had to be reconstructed and reclaimed in the wake of British colonial boundaries and categorizations designed to divide and conquer. Defining belonging vs ancestry becomes highly situational and fraught.
Many immigrants arriving in North America in recent decades have also had to navigate questions of how ancestry, phenotype, lived experience, and outside perceptions interact to shape their racial/ethnic identity and sense of cultural continuity or belonging. Their journeys of self-definition provide relevant touchpoints.
Within various Latinx communities, there arelong-standing debates around indigeneity, mixed ancestry and complex relationships to Spanish colonial heritages and categorizations. Who gets to claim belonging to certain indigenous identities is fraught with generational trauma.
And among the diversity of Black communities, questions of ancestral heritage vs. culturally cultivated forms of ethnic belonging allow for nuanced conversations. Caribbean nationals, mixed-race individuals, and various African diasporic subcultures have had to navigate these identity terrains in complex ways.
So while the Native American example provides a particularly charged case study, we must resist treating it as an isolated experience. Looking across diasporas can reveal common human themes around heritage, belonging, cultural resilience and the lingering impacts of colonial rhetorics - all of which feed into our greater understanding.
Decolonizing Conceptions of Identity
At the core, this examination reveals how modern conceptions and boundaries of racial/ethnic identity are still deeply caged by colonial logics and power structures inherited from past oppressors. Our language, assumptions, and measures of legitimacy remain constrained by the very supremacist ideologies that dehumanized entire communities to begin with.
True decolonization of how we understand identity may require a more radical self-determination - where impacted groups themselves can engage openly in the spiritual, cultural and social labor of defining their own terms for heritage and belonging freed from external impositions.
This is perhaps why discussions of "lived experience" as the key determinant feel so fraught. While potentially democratic in a liberal individualistic sense, they open new vulnerabilities for extraction, misrepresentation and dispossession of what are profound collective identities and liberatory projects.
There are no easy solutions. But continually centering the voices and perspectives of those most impacted by colonial identity formulations is crucial as we explore this territory. Their epistemologies and first-hand embodied experiences must be our primary guides if we are to map a journey towards more holistic, democratic and reparative ways of facilitating identity.
Some other concluding thoughts...
The discourse around racial identity, lived experience, ancestral heritage, and the like is highly complex terrain to navigate, fraught with deep histories and personal resonances. As we reflect on the perspectives and contexts explored here, I would encourage you to critically engage with the following thought-provoking questions:
What assumptions or unexamined narratives around racial categories and ethnic identities have you internalized from dominant culture? How might deconstructing and understanding the manufactured, colonial roots of these concepts shift your viewpoint?
In what ways has your own lived experience of race been shaped by socialization, systems of oppression, and perceived belonging irrespective of genetic ancestry? How do you disentangle the two?
What does authentically cultivating one's heritage and a sense of ethnic/cultural belonging look like, particularly for communities impacted by diaspora, displacement and colonial identity formulations?
How can this be pursued with sensitivity?
How do you navigate the tensions between an individualistic conception of racial identity based on personal narrative, and a more collective sense of ethnic/tribal belonging defined by specific group stakeholders? Where is the balance struck?
Are there problematic assumptions or blind spots in how you may be equating or distinguishing the nuances between race, ethnicity, nationality and other identity markers? How can you better parse those distinctions?
What does it mean to decolonize your own perceptions and languages around racial identity? How can an anti-racist, anti-colonial lens be more fully embodied in these dialogues?
Whose voices and first-hand perspectives have you prioritized in shaping your current understandings of heritage, belonging and racial identity politics? Which perspectives are missing or need greater centering?
How can spaces be created for marginalized groups to engage in the open-ended work of redefining their own identity concepts and belonging-criteria freed from external constraints? What would that liberated process look like?
These are just some of the critical questions we must contend with as we strive to develop a more intersectional, historically-grounded and decolonized understanding of racial identity. The answers will be different for each of us based on our individual contexts.
I encourage you to lean into this exploration with openness, humility and care. Embrace the complexity and nuances rather than looking for convenient resolutions. Be wakeful to blind spots and power dynamics that may constrain your current perspectives. Most importantly, seek out and elevate the first-hand narratives of those most impacted by these issues as primary guides.
Interrogating our assumptions and unlearning internalized patterns around race and identity is crucial inner work. It requires vulnerability, a willingness to make purposeful repairs, and an acceptance that this decolonization process will be an ongoing, iterative journey. But it is a journey well worth embarking on as we seed more holistic ways of recognizing our common humanity beyond imposed categorizations. I wish you clarity and courage as you navigate your own identity evolution.
Here are some books, documentaries and other resources I would highly recommend:
Books:
"Racecraft" by Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields - A seminal work deconstructing how race is a modern idea manufactured through social, political and economic motives.
"The Invention of the White Race" by Theodore W. Allen - Provides a historical materialist analysis of how the "white race" was created as a ruling class social control formation.
"How the Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev - Explores the process of how Irish immigrants to the U.S. were initially racialized as non-white, and the politics of their assimilation into the "white" identity.
"Black Skin, White Masks" by Frantz Fanon - A foundational text examining the psychological dimensions of racism and the politics of decolonizing the mind.
"The History of White People" by Nell Irvin Painter - Chronicles how the concept of a "white race" developed over time through acts of oppression, immigration and social construction.
Documentaries/Films:
"Race: The Power of An Illusion" (2003) - A powerful PBS documentary series interrogating the social, historical and pseudo-scientific underpinnings of modern racial categories.
"Ethnic Notions" (1987) - Marlon Riggs' essential film deconstructing how racist images and stereotypes about Black people were perpetuated through popular culture.
"Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock" (2017) - Powerful indigenous voices and perspectives from the Standing Rock movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
"Daughters of the Dust" (1991) - A poetic film exploring the Gullah/Geechee culture of the African diaspora and themes of ancestry, belonging and cultural preservation.
"I Am Not Your Negro" (2016) - Brings James Baldwin's works to life, dissecting the persistent realities of racism and struggles for belonging in America.
Other Resources:
Teachings and writings from Indigenous scholars like Vine Deloria Jr., Lee Maracle, Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina and others.
The "Seeing White" podcast series from Scene on Radio examining the social construction of white racial identity.
Works by Black feminist scholars like bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde and others on intersectional identity.
The "All My Relations" podcast exploring the diversity of Native cultures, stories and communities.
Sources from ethnic studies departments, local community-based organizations and museums focused on first-voice cultural narratives.
This is blurring two related concepts. Race is shorthand for shared ancestry. This is crystal clear when dealing with non-humans, and is commonly used with breeding domesticated animals and plants. Ethnicity is shorthand for a persistent (multigenerational) group of humans having certain attributes, some heritable perhaps, some not, like language, religion, traditions, lifestyle, clothing.
I agree with your judgement of Elizabeth Hoover and her erstwhile friends. The right course for her, once she found out her ancestry, was to cease to be a spokesperson or representative for the group in any way, and just live quietly in the background. Her "friends" have contributed to the weakening of social bonds all around.
As to the question of genetic clusters and "biological race," are the clusters "natural kinds?" If not, what is the significance?
An interesting example of lived experience is Barrack Obama, who had no connection to mainland American racial categories as a child and whose native culture is "international," according to his friends from Honolulu, Occidental, and Columbia, but adopted a black cultural identity after moving to Chicago and working as a community organizer on the Far South Side. Is Barrack Obama black?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama
"Consider for example the Jews."
I just ask if they make annual substantial donations to Federation?
As usual, I enjoyed reading this article, and agreed with most of what was written. I was initially sympathetic toward the plight of Elizabeth Hoover, until I realized she was a professor of anthropology, and in particular has an interest in critical medical anthropology. A quick survey of her publications suggests that she would probably be in the camp that is opposed to “cultural appropriation“ and believes in much of the nonsense of critical race theory. I wonder if she would be as sympathetic to somebody else in her situation if this hadn’t happened to her. I suppose, live by the sword die by the sword.
All this cancel culture reminds me the Third Reich. I once read a letter which some German officer wrote, which was like this:
"I learnt the terrible, previously unknown fact that half of my relatives on my father's side were Jews. I know that this does not disqualify me from serving in the Wehrmacht, but what about my membership in the NSDAP?"
> if somebody told me that somehow I wasn’t Jewish, I would need to re-evaluate my self-identity at least a little
The difference is that Jewish ethnicity is infinitely more welcoming than native American ethnicity because *anyone can convert*. Sure we don't *evangelize* - you don't *have* to convert. But if you feel like you're really meant to be Jewish, and you convert, then you're Jewish, end of question, no matter your DNA.
There's nothing like that for native Americans. You can live on the reservation and marry a native American and at most, that would make your kids native Americans. But not you. You would always be an outside colonizer.
Do we really need to see proof that she benefited from affirmative action? Native American is hot hot hot, in the oppression Olympics. Also, it’s woke academia. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. She knew what she signed up for.
> 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.
This isn't plausible; without internal awareness of Jewish background, there is essentially zero chance that the families would have continued marrying only each other over the course of multiple centuries. Once they forget that they're Jews, they're going to start marrying Christians.
I think I ought to mention a short story that won both a Hugo and Nebula award:
"Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™" by Rebecca Roanhorse
https://apex-magazine.com/short-fiction/welcome-to-your-authentic-indian-experience/
Audio version, read by Levar Burton: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/revisited-welcome-to-your-authentic-indian-experience/id1244649384?i=1000539015806
> 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.
It's not exactly an unusual position. Everyone who wants to project cultural power is aware that this is accomplished by getting other people to adopt your culture, not by getting them not to.
全世界都在学中国话
孔夫子的话越来越国际化
全世界都在讲中国话
我们说的话让世界都认真听话
Well, when first stated, it doesn't sound bad, but when you have seen it in operation, (and thought about the gringo taco truck :)) that's different.
There's a principle of Natural Law which says standpoint theory can go pound sand.
Meanwhile, Buffy Saint-Marie has spent her whole life consciously lying about having Indian heritage. None of her Indian community care, since they already accepted her as being part of their tribe, genetic testing does not overrule that, and they all lived happily ever after.
I think it's important to make it clear that the "consensus" you're referring to in this post is the consensus of Westerners on Twitter. Even the same Westerners are likely to express very different feelings in real life.
required comment pointing to zack m. davis disputing the "categories were made for man" post, https://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions
Just a very small query: is there some confusion when talking about "real" Jews speaking or not speaking Yiddish? I believe Yiddish is a Hebrew/German mishmash now mostly spoken in Brooklyn and not to be confused with the ancient and revived in modern times Jewish language of Hebrew. (I started to say Ben-Yehuda "resurrected" Hebrew but then thought better of it.)
I'm white, but I've had many social interactions with Tlingit people, so I'll try to think about this from their perspective.
Tlingit society is matrilineal. I've seen Tlingit people claim that the United States government imposing its blood quanta system on them is racist because it's different from their own rules. If someone is 1/128 Tlingit by blood quantum, but they have an unbroken chain of Tlingit matrilineal descent, according to Tlingit tradition, they're obviously Tlingit.
I met a Tlingit guy who married an Athabascan woman. He wanted his children to be Tlingit. He couldn't have his own clan adopt his wife because Tlingit tradition doesn't allow intra-clan marriage, so he had to persuade another clan to adopt her. Their children will belong to the clan that adopted her, not his clan. According to tradition, his children will be obligated to treat members of his clan with special respect.
I've heard Tlingits talk about how proud they are of their Irish ancestors. Apparently, this is the appropriate way for Tlingits to talk about their fathers' clans, whether those clans are Tlingit or not.
Clan membership is a huge part of Tlingit culture. Each clan has its own traditions not found in other clans. In my opinion, it's not possible to be culturally Tlingit or have 'lived experience' as a Tlingit without belonging to a specific clan.
I don't see how an Elizabeth Hoover situation could happen with Tlingits. They pay a lot of attention to which girls/women are born or adopted into the clan. Generally, they should be aware of whether a woman belongs to their clan or not. I suppose there could be weird situations such as babies getting mixed up in a hospital at birth. My guess is that the tribal elders of the clan involved would decide such a case, and the elders of one clan might make a different decision than the elders of another clan.
By the way, in Tlingit culture regards cultural appropriation as an act of violence. If Tlingit Clan A wrongs Tlingit Clan B, Clan B might steal a tradition from Clan A. The Unangans once fought a war against the Sitka Tlingit, so they pirated some Unangan songs, which they still sing to this day to spite the Unangans. In the 19th century, after some white Americans did something wrong to some Tlingits (I think they broke a promise or treaty, I don't remember the details) the Tlingits appropriated some white American culture as an act of vengeance. By now, the Tlingits have figured out this isn't an effective way to retaliate against white Americans.
If someone wants to take a Tlingit tradition without offending them, the process is to get permission from the clan elders. I've talked to young Tlingits who are frustrated about their elders not being willing to share clan traditions more widely with outsiders, since they think it would help preserve their culture. Maybe when they grow old and become clan elders themselves they will be more open to outsiders borrowing their culture.
From what I've experienced myself and heard from others, the groups normally decried as intolerant--such as 4chan's /pol/, toxic gamers, and now white nationalists--are surprisingly tolerant: "I don't care who or what you are, as long as you also bash on ******s."
I’ve always found it funny that the consensus is pro transgenderism but anti transracialism.
But then again, I’m someone who is “racially ambiguous”. People have assumed I’m Moroccan, Yemeni, Brazilian, Indian, etc.
My mom is Jamaican — mostly of African descent but also part “Pakistani” (it wasn’t Pakistan back then, of course) — and my dad is Jewish, his mom was German, and his dad Russian.
My “lived experience” is that race is both biologically informed and socially constructed. For instance, in America I’m “black”, but in Jamaica I’m “coloured”.
The one-drop rule in American culture is a rather interesting thing. On one hand, it mitigates the prevalence of colorism as seen in Latin America and the Caribbean. On the other hand, it limits Americans’ ability to think about race in a grounded, genetically-informed way.
I think it took the transgender movement for society to get more serious about the innate differences between men and women (on average). A decade ago, it was common to hear progressive types deny biological differences in the sexes — among the most consequential and obvious facts of social life.
The feminist movement found talk of biological differences counterproductive, and it took transgenderism to break that hold on the discourse.
Perhaps a transracial movement can break the hold that antiracists have on the discourse; the party line of racial blank-slate-ism is clearly not helping “black and brown communities”. Time to try something else.
If this happened to an Orthodox (and Conservative?) Jew they would just be asked to go through a technical conversion and then they'd go on with their Jewish lives. Interestingly, the way this would be most likely to go wrong is that this hypothetical person, might take offense at the notion that something external to them could define their identity for them and then refuse to convert.
I just want to point out that I don't think it's proper to say "halakhically Jewish according to Reform rabbis" as the Reform movement holds that Halakha is not binding and therefore as far as I'm aware their Rabbis don't make Halakhic rulings. This is not the case for the Conservative movement.
The answer to this question actually is 1.5.
Stop caring so much about heritage, racial and/or cultural.
Just stop it.
I'm not kidding.
It's irrational that Scott cares so much about his family identity that he refuses to seriously embrace 1.5 merely because he enjoys caring about being Jewish.
I think you have reinvented the concept of “ethnicity”, and explained why (at least in Europe) we tend to talk about “ethnicity” rather than “race”. “Race” is usually taken as implying an acceptance of racial theories of how it all works (which are, of course, different in different cultures, but are entirely about the genetically-inherited idea), whereas “ethnicity” is usually taken as working in the complicated multi-dimensional way you describe.
Her friends were strongly incentiviced not to be "white person supporting native american colonial impostor". The transitivity of cancel culture reinforces it by skewing the experience of consensus reality
Conceivably you could have a Native American great-grandparent—or possibly even a grandparent who was Native American—but your genetic markers wouldn't show it.
Think of it this way. Each parent passes half of their DNA to you. This means that there’s half of your mom and dad's DNA that you did *not* inherit. And Inheriting half of your parent’s DNA does *not* mean you're inheriting half of each of your parent's ethnicity marker genes. The DNA you inherit is random. One or both parents may have ethnic marker genes that they didn’t end up passing down to you.
So, say one of your great-grandparents is Mi’kmaq and your other seven great-grandparents are of Western European origin—theoretically, you're 1/8th Mi’kmaq. But your Native American gene markers may have gotten lost in the shuffle. This would be less likely if there were dozens of Native American gene markers, but I suspect that genetic tests like 23andMe only use a few.
Nice post. The only way for the woke SJWs to complain about this case REQUIRES that they subjugate any “lived experience” BELOW genetic reality. I don’t have strong feeling either way about that….but the point is these idiots need to pick a lane. The fact that they have to, is great. The fact that they have done so speaks of a principle that carries over into other parts of their reality. Now…I’m assuming these folks have principles….and can perceive reality…and that may be where I am mistaken.
I've long argued that many of the things we criticize as "cultural appropriation" are in fact bad! But they are bad for reasons aside from "one person taking cultural practices from a culture they aren't a part of".
Examples:
- Dressing up as a native american in costume. This is not bad because you're stealing the idea of a head-dress or whatever. It's bad because it's mockery. It's drawing a portrait of a real set of people as some kind of cartoonish thing, alongside dragons and wizards.
- Selling a spiritual practice you aren't educated in. This is basically lying. A word, like "guru" has specific meaning, and there is perceived, but difficult-to-the-uninitiated-to-identify value.
But when we're talking about artistic themes, styles of cooking, music, dress, whatever, I see it the same way I see remixing music. The original artist might not like it if you take their heartfelt love song and turn it into a techno bop. But in the abstract, I absolutely support your right to do so, and think the world is richer for it. All culture is copied. Just don't lie about the origins, don't try to confuse people, and don't mock people. And we already have words for these things: deception and mockery. There's nothing worse about "cultural appropriation" beyond that, because nobody "owns" culture.
I'm getting a little bit annoyed at Scott talking about "the consensus view" or something similar to mean the popular view among progressives (and/or in San Fransisco). It seems pretty clear that the importance of "lived experience" and of affirmative action is definitely not widely accepted among people generally, and (based on the record of public votes on AA) not even by a majority (almost anywhere). Statements like this just seem to be erasing the existence of conservatives, moderates, and everyone outside your left-wing bubble. I don't think that's the intention, but it seems to be the effect.
It's also arguably even unfair to progressives, a kind of weasel wording that just says "your group believes this" without any clarification on who that actually is, and without being supported by evidence or even being falsifiable. Even when it's clearly true, it seems like bad epistemology to me. There's, shockingly, a *lot* of these "everyone knows" statements around here ("progressives believe", "conservatives believe" even absurd things like "nerds believe") in an otherwise very data-focused and logic-focused community.
I think "the view of the Biden Adninistration", "the view of x% of people according to this poll", or even "the view of most of my Bay Area friends" would work a lot better here.
Separately, I find this post too accepting of this quasi-religious notion of "cultural appropriation". I have no clue what cultural appropriation actually is or why it's harmful. Every definition I've seen seems absurdly vague (unspecified and untestable references to "cultural practices", "power differentials" and God knows what else), and even vaguer about what's supposed to be bad about it. It harms an Indian person to see white people wearing Indian dress (in a non-mocking way) because...? I have no sensible answer to that question.
I'd rather people not give respect to this term, or use it without quotation marks as if it's a coherent thing, without providing or linking to a well-defined definition.
Other than those things, great article!
While I generally agree with the sentiment behind this post, I think there is a dimension particular to the native culture that needs to be addressed.
The initial investigation into Hoover’s background seems to have come from a colleague, who wrote her an email about the breach of trust with this snippet:
“This is what I was always told, this is how I was raised, I never thought to question it?
You are a professor of Native studies. You make your entire living and career off of being Native. You have a responsibility to know your own family story. Every Native community I have entered into folks immediately ask who my family is and where I’m from by way of greeting. If it’s true you never questioned your parents, I wonder how you’ve been asked who your family is and where you’re from throughout your whole life and never stopped to wonder who your family actually is. Where they are actually from.
There are also signs that show you did know the story wasn’t true. You’ve slowly erased your tribal affiliation from your bios online through the years, the parenthetical after your name stating Elizabeth Hoover (Mohawk/Mi’kmaq) has disappeared, you didn’t offer any kind of deep positionality in your book”
It seems to me, based on this reading, that the communities she interacts with takes lineage and family names/history very seriously - to the point of using family lineage as part of casual identification.
I can’t help but assign a bit more culpability to Hoover’s situation. If the cultural norms were in fact clear enough that she “knew she fucked up” when she found out and still tried to hide it - I can understand the feeling of betrayal that her colleagues and community may feel as a result.
All the other commentary about race and identity being a hard to define fractal object that falls apart in the toxic space of cancel culture parlance is correct though, and I find it interesting to note that the emailer actually concurs:
“The pretendian hunts of the current moment are a mess. They are harmful to those of us, like me, who are actual Indigenous people who code as white and have grown up disconnected because of settler colonialism. They are harmful to folks with complicated family stories and adoptions and estranged family and force many of us to share things about our families that we shouldn’t have to.”
Link to the email here : https://nativeappropriations.com/2023/05/a-letter-to-elizabeth-hoover.html
It is so surreal seeing Scott Alexander mess up and accidentally write a post criticizing a straw man, because he spends the entire time *continuing to ask the right questions at the exact same rate he normally does*
Scott wrote:
> You can do cluster analysis on a bunch of genomes and circle the nice, legible shapes representing Europeans, Africans, etc.
Yes, but the genetic distance between sub-Saharan African populations such as the Bantu and San is roughly the same as between Europeans and Asians. But we lump Bantu and San together as one race, while we split Asians and Europeans into two races. And if you look at the tree of genetic groupings that Cavelli-Sforza mapped out, there are actually *eight* distinct genetic clusters in modern Homo sapiens: African, Caucasoid, Northeast Asian, Arctic, American, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islanders, and Oceanian. So contemporary racial terms *are* sort of arbitrary. It would be more accurate to define humans into eight races.
For once, I broadly agree with most of what's said. Except the problems that start from here.
"But I place a decent amount of value on being Jewish..."
Then why did it take only a paragraph before Scott called himself "white"?
Well, I know the reason, it's because neo-liberal bubble heads consider Jewish to be some kind of weird subset of white, the Ur-Schrödinger's-minority. When you want to signal status as a minority, you're Jewish. When you want to signal status as an ally, or deflect blame, you're white. This tendency has been pretty catastrophic for real Jews, of which I count myself. It reads as political and racial subterfuge, and looks to be clear evidence of the "dual loyalty" charge that anti-semites use, along with dual citizenship.
To me, Scott's white. To be Jewish is to believe the things that Jews believe. The law is a consequence of that. To act out Jewishness without the belief would be acceptable, right up until you start following another religion, which I accuse Scott of doing. Then you're being deceitful, and after a while most people won't consider you Jewish regardless. If you do it, and then waver on this identity when it suites you rhetorically, then I think you're actively malicious. To rhetorically act as if your Jewishness is some kind of precursor to your new religion that has literally nothing to do with it, then you're also blasphemous.
But what do I know? I'm just a Karaite, and thus I am so non-Jewish to the normal person as to be unworthy of mention by everyone who ever brings up the question.
This is the type of cases that make non-Americans like me feel that in some sense, the US has gone to a very... weird... place. The claims that Scott builds across the article are extremely intuitive to basically everyone living here (Israel) and were obvious to me the moment I read the summary of the story. Just a sort-of FYI to Americans.
Honestly, as someone watching kind of from afar, not being American, I'm puzzled by the discussion you seem to have over there (which also start to happen more and more where I live). But the more I read about this, the more I get convinced that "cultural appropriation", as a concept, is just thinly veiled racism. It's as if some people would like to be racist, but happened to grow up in a context where racism was frowned upon. And now they finally found a way to live their preference without having to deal with the push back ...
I have yet to hear just one good argument for the "cultural appropriation" concept. Let alone one which isn't inherently racist ...
My impression is that it's still only a small minority who get worked up over cultural appropriation - even among liberals - but it's one of those things where the people who care, CARE A LOT and make a fuss about it while their opponents just shake their damn heads.
I think the cheongsam dress incident was a good example. Even most Chinese people didn't think celebrating Chinese culture was a crime.
At about the same time that happened, I came to England to visit relatives and they took me to a Mexican restaurant where they made us all wear sombreros. It was fun! In America, we would all be afraid that someone, somewhere would get angry even though we all thought it was fine.
I may be off-topic, but I wanted to share a kind-of external point of view. I'm from France, and as an independent observer, the USA has a really weird relationship with "race" (I put this in quotation marks because the french literal translation is incredibly racist). I know it's because of the history of the United States, which is very loaded on this topic to say the least. But it really is weird to see every American obsessing over it, dissecting what it means to be or not to be from a certain group, all the policy and culture around it... Like this post, or a lot of the comments. It feels weird to see a topic that's almost absent (or at least really different) from my point of view take so much importance on your side of the Atlantic.
Of course, France has a huge problem with racism, with the police, employment, access to a good education and equal opportunities, poverty, ... Also, we don't have the same deep ties with slavery but we have a pretty deep history with colonization. But the concept of categorizing people into "race" is really outlandish for most of us, we talk more about country of origin, social class, etc. In no formal interaction with the institutions you will see a question about race. (I think it's even illegal to do so, but I'm not sure).
Anyway, I'm rambling a little, but the main point is : the whole "race" concept as seen from an American doesn't exist in a big part of the world.
(Side-note : as USA is a huge cultural influence, this concept is starting to popping up more and more in France. It has its advantages, as putting a spotlight on racism, but also drawbacks, as the cultural differences between our two countries are really strong on this topic)
"nice, legible shapes"
I disagree. If you removed the color information in those PCA pictures, what you really would see is two elongated orthogonal blobs that are not even disjoint. In other words, it is a continuum. In panel A it is especially egregious, the switch from AA colored circles to unspecified circles is abrupt and looks like an arbitrary result from availability of labeling, not a legible cluster that the reader would be able to identify without access to the labels. Even with label information, most of the blobs appear to overlap.
Perhaps there is other analysis that would support the point better (am not a geneticist, maybe there are phylogenetic trees), but these analysis would support better an interpretation like, there is variation and structure (that presumably reflects the evolutionary past) but the point where the line is drawn _between groups_ appears arbitrary.
Also worth noting is that native Americans practicex assimilative raiding. Raising white, or other, kids as part of your tribe was 100% a thing. They were accepted as full members.
This look into the pretendarian phenomenon by Ed West is fantastic
https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-being
How many people would you guys say still view "cultural appropriation as a bad thing? I've lived outside of the US since 2008, when the idea was still new, and most people thought it was fine, and I watched as the consensus turned against it. But it seems like I hear about it less often now. What's the current trend?
I cannot find the article, but I read about what happened to one poor young woman in the USA. Part of the story begins when her Black middle class parents went to the adoption agency and picked out a healthy brown baby girl and brought her home and raised her. This is the part of the story that worked out well -- she is the 'apple of their eyes' and they couldn't be prouder or happier with her. And she loves her parents. When the time came, she went to university, and her university gave a certain amount of money to Black students who applied for it for being Black. It was probably dressed up a bit more, but that is what it amounted to. And she applied and got some. One can argue that handing money out to the middle class is not the most effective way to spend the revenue, but that's the way the system works, and nothing she did was underhanded in any way. All was well and good until she got interested in her genetics, and took a test -- I think from 23 and me -- which indicated that her ancestry was most likely from the Dominican Republic with a recent infusion of Spaniard-from-Spain. People from the DR, no matter how dark skinned, mostly insist that they are not Black, but Dominican. She made the mistake of telling some friends about her surprising result, and one of them decided to tell the university, and the university decided that she had defrauded them and needed to return the money. That still didn't satisfy many people who wanted her expelled from the university even though there was no one claiming that there ever was any intent to deceive or defraud. And who would be guilty in such a case of the fraud? Her parents, who also didn't know about her genetic background? The adoption agency, which may not have known much either?
Her conclusion -- besides being really glad that she is majoring in one of the hard sciences -- was that a substantial part of the population really, really, really like being cruel and nasty to other people. They absolutely look for opportunities to be as nasty as they want to be. Some of them only want to be a little cruel. Some of them want to be as cruel as they possibly can -- as long as society supports them in their right to be cruel. And this, she concludes, is the real reason that real racism persists -- they provide socially acceptable people to be cruel to for the cohort that wants permission to be cruel, in such a way that the bullied cannot escape.
She found it interesting that she faced anti-Black sentiment 'just another Black grifter' as well as anti-DR sentiment from Blacks who didn't want to accept her 'fraud! fraud!'. Meanwhile people from the DR said that genetics are not everything -- she's not Dominican. If she had tried to assert that she was Dominican she thinks that the pushback would have reached cruel levels there as well. Because the commonalty is the cruelty. And she thinks that we should do away with the concept of race, to the greatest extent possible, because no matter what other considerations there are, the primary purpose is to provide an outlet for people to be cruel to and scapegoat others.
In the meantime she has transferred to a different university.
It's interesting that you bring up "Planet of Cops", given that Freddie gets very angry and dismissive whenever people point out the extremely hard-to-miss analogies between transracialism and transgenderism.
The Saami people lives in the northern parts of the Scandinavian peninsula (including in parts of Northern Finland and nearby Russia). There is a reasonably close resemblence between Saami and Native American situations so maybe the Swedish legal definitions of who is Saami can be of interest.
To be able to register as a Saami under Swedish law requires two conditions:
1. You need to see yourself as a Saami.
2. You need to speak or have spoken the Saami language in your home. Or be a (legal, adoptions are fine) decendent of the first or second generation of someone who has spoken Saami in their home or is or have been registered as a Saami.
So the legal definition is a combination of a cultural one and a genetic one and as a non-Saami without a Saami genetical relationship you can become a Saami but it is quite burdensome. (And in that respect a bit like converting to judaism, not something done on a whim).
There is a simple explanation as to why the White Nationalists are more tolerant than other groups: There is nothing to be gained by being White. You only give up any chance at getting Affirmative Action benefits as well as the amorphous social benefits that come with being part of a minority. In fact, the more Whites there are, the more the burdens of affirmative action are spread, whereas more minorities means that the benefits of AA are spread more thinly. The incentives to have strong or weak barriers to entry are obvious.
So there is a simple option to solve this whole issue: Stop discriminating against and debasing Whites. Stop giving tangible and intangible benefits to non-Whites. If there is nothing to be gained from being non-White, there is no point in having "hard-and-fast rules" and we can go back to "letting communities make decisions".
Also, a minor point:
"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."
There is a solution to that called Romeo and Juliet laws. They allow some age difference if both parties are close to the cutoff point.
I think this is your best post regarding current cultural mores and the nature of "race". It really did explore with great wit and insight the current ....how shall we put it .... "intricacies" (which are mostly to do with fabricated outrage concerning perceived slights against particular cultural groups which have been granted "special protection against criticism", for the purpose of political and financial leverage) of cultural identity and membership. This site really is a beacon of intellectual exploration. Thankyou.
>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!
Seems weird not to offer the most obvious explanation: white nationalists are losing and can't afford to be picky about allies, various minority groups are winning in the relevant sense and must gatekeep against people who are unambiguously allies but threaten to dilute the spoils of victory.
"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."
This isn't such a problem if people recognize that this is in fact the rule. It was harder to do in the 20th century but these days, hospitals can run a genetic test on every baby delivered, and then like some kind of young adult fiction dystopia, inform the parents what cultural group their child has been assigned to based on its immutable characteristics. No one has to be surprised any more, we can carefully study and record everyone's race, noting it in a database that controls which jobs people are allowed to access, and this will be progressive somehow.
Descent is not especially important to many Native communities, because they have strong traditions of adoption. But personal connections are important. If you read the Hoover story closely you see that people keep asking, who are your Native connections? Who are your kin? Where are your relatives? In this sense tribal identity is not some vague category like "American," but a matter of personally knowing people within the community; in this model, community is not imposed by above via rules, but built up via personal ties between people. Hoover had none and never tried to build any. That is the "lived experience" she is missing.
There is no question that groupings exist on the basis of shared genes that are more likely to be found together within such a group, and given the relative isolation before international travel became easy, this is in no way surprising. We can call those groups races or use some other term. So far we have simply described what is, and that cannot be wrong. The problem comes when you use that knowledge in an unkind way - to denigrate or lessen a particular group. I see those who say races do not exist as being against that kind of usage, and they mean well. But there are circumstances where the facts must be acknowledged eg when a particular group is relatively resistant to the effects of a drug, such as ACE inhibitors in those of recent African ancestry. Life gets a lot trickier when we see differences between the groups, such as the well-documented IQ differences. We must not make assumptions about individuals, who may be outliers within their group, but shall we even mention that the differences are known to exist? I am uncomfortable mentioning it, and some will say I should not do so. But it is hard to pretend that something discovered does not exist, even in a good cause, such as promoting social cohesion and harmony. I have no answer to that.
OK but this post would be stronger if the author acknowledged the overwhelming force of "Who, Whom?" in these discussions: That the motivating forces are almost entirely white guilt and anti-white resentment, and if you take "hatred of white people and whiteness" out of the equation, the whole thing collapses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who,_whom%3F
"The fact is, we live according to Kendi's formula: Kto–kogo?: will we knock them, the white supremacists, flat and give them (as Kendi expresses it) the final, decisive battle, or will they knock us flat?"
> 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.
Reading this, I came up with an heuristic hot take: if your academic job is restricted to people who are themselves instances of the field it claims to study, it is a bullshit field.
It works quite well:
There are male gynecologists, so gynecology is not bullshit.
Nobody cares if the worlds leading expert on the Neanderthals has herself Neanderthal ancestry, so the study of early hominids is not bullshit.
Biologists would probably not reject an AGI as a professor, so biology is not bullshit.
There are computer scientists which are not cpmputers, CS is fine.
Open minded theology, which is fine with having atheist professors, is fine.
Narrow-minded theology, which rejects atheist professors, is bullshit.
Sport science, which fails couch potato students, is bullshit (at least as an academic subject).
Feminist studies is bullshit to the degree to which it rejects cis-male professors, which I would guess is rather high.
Same for $MINORITY studies.
Medieval English literature does not expect its practitioners to be Englishmen/women living in the Middle Ages, thus it is real.
There are some corner cases: I would expect that there are few deaf students who succeed in studying music theory, and few blind people who care for art history. Either would be more disadvantaged than a history professor specializing in the Roman empire who can't read Latin. I am willing to bite that bullet: studying music safely contained in a sheet, or with an oscilloscope is academic (though it does not sound fun), taking advantage of the fact that you have ears and a brain which can be emotionally moved by music is not academic. The latter would of course also apply to literature.
> 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.
I think we can be more precise here. We have a pretty good understanding of how artificial neural network based classifiers work (beautiful example here: https://playground.tensorflow.org). It seems reasonable that our brains do something similar when it comes to organizing visual inputs in hyper dimensional feature space. This would also remove the need for a platonically ideal Jew.
This also seems like a better metaphor than the tails coming apart for diverging political views. Our parents give us training data by pointing at things and saying "good" or "bad" and we build complicated classifiers to predict this. Most people receive similar training data, but if you extrapolate the classifiers to areas where data is sparse or nonexistent, they diverge.
I haven't read all the comments, but I've seen talk elsewhere about some indigenous Americans disliking the idea that tribe membership is determined by DNA rather than by connection to the community.
"Connection to the community" is vague, but membership by DNA ignores human relations, and the latter might be more important.
I wonder how many of the people who signed that letter were Mi'kmaq Indians.
Isn't the explanation much simpler?
Both the far-Left and the far-Right are racist and sexist, just towards different groups. Both want to use violent means to achieve their goals and have little respect for the idea of judging each person as an individual. If you're an 'associate professor researching Native American food sovereignty', your social circle consists entirely of the far-Left, so you shouldn't be surprised you're sent to the guillotines at the first opportunity, just like millions of people got sent to the Gulags back in the USSR. Luckily we still have a Constitution and a court system, so Professor Hoover will get to keep her head on her shoulders, but the far-Left will do everything in their power to make her suffer for her non-existent crimes.
While I do have sympathy towards Professor Hoover, I feel like she's the victim of her own choice to associate with people who's ideology is evil and corrupt. I can likewise be sympathetic to the wife of a gangster who gets beaten up as retribution for her husband's misgivings, while at the same time acknowledging that maybe she should've avoided that kind of company in the first place.
"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."
This is very close to the actual story of the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, New Hampshire where a surveying error caused the builders to have the mall extend 6 feet in to the state of Massachusetts thus subjecting the entire building to Massachusetts sales tax negating the advantage of building in tax-free NH. I tweeted about it here: https://twitter.com/corey_lanum/status/1620798517748068352
Instead of demolishing and starting from scratch, they just hired a construction crew to lop off the offending bit of the JC Penney that had crossed state lines.
I suggest you stop using the word race. In Norwegian we don't use it in relation to humans anymore. Though we still use it for dog breeds. At the same time most Norwegians acknowledges that there are average genetic differences between populations. Though we could plausibly redefine the word with the recent advances in genetics, doing so would be challenging. It just has too much baggage
"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!"
Actually ... there are many more groups living the bizarro 'your type doesn't belong.'
You look to see there are White Nationalists, yet fail to see there are Mexican Nationalists ... Mexican Nationalists living in America pining for the restoration of Atzlan, the legendary Aztec homeland in the north. This group in California is called La Raza (The Race), they are Mexican Supremacists. Then there are Black supremacists, French Supremacists, and even Jewish Supremacists.
Think about your thought processes that require you to have a racial enemy that you can look down your nose and wag your finger at.
When there's a nebulous category boundary and we want to know which side a data point lies, the question is: what is the disguised query? If we want to know if something is really a blegg [1], why do we want to know that?
ACX readers and Freddie deBoer readers are also categories with a strong overlap, so I think this take [2] isn't news to some of us: Henry George once said (as far as I remember) "if ten men are chasing every nine jobs, the result is misery". Academia relies on ten people chasing every one tenure-track post, so that the other nine can be turned into adjuncts. Claiming to be more Native than you really are gets you an unfair advantage in that race - quite apart from the fact that no self-respecting college these days would hire a white person as a professor of native studies in the first place.
No-one seems to stop and ask whether the whole adjunct system is a dumpster fire (except people like Brett Deveraux [3]). After all, it keeps the money flowing. So I'm definitely on "at least 95% point 2." in section IV - point 1. is valid elsewhere, but as far as the struggle for limited tenure-track posts goes, point 2. all the way. Most things about academia in the anglohypersphere these days, and all things relating to wokeness in academia, are downstream from economic incentives.
However, for the bit at the ende of section III, I would like to offer an alternative 4th explanation. Woke is many things, but one of them is a Kegan stage 3 affair through and through - at least the way that Chapman [4] uses the stages. It's there in the text: "'who I am' is 'how people feel about me'". You are native if the native community feels that you belong there (which also suggests there's an implicit path to conversion - if enough people feel you're in, then you're in).
And from Chapman's footnote 11: "[stage 3] mostly doesn't even notice logical contradictions, and isn't bothered by them when it does". Pointing out the contradiction, as this article does, is at least stage 4 thinking!
Chapman's post contains a few more quotes that, to me, perfectly describe the problem space here - "Living up to what other members expect from you is good by definition", or "Fulfilling the role consists largely in having the correct feelings." or "In practice, you choose on the basis of whose feelings you feel most strongly at the moment you are forced to decide. This is often whoever happens to be there at the time, or whoever is best at displaying intense feelings. "
Hoover went from the native community feeling she belonged, to feeling she didn't. Genetics and lived experience only matter insofar as they might or might not sway the community's feelings. There's no need for logic anywhere in this process.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries
[2] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/academias-pretendian-problem-stems
[3] https://acoup.blog/2023/04/28/collections-academic-ranks-explained-or-what-on-earth-is-an-adjunct/
[4] https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence
Jews (at least Zionists) are colonizers. Native Americans are colonized. The comparison doesn’t fit. One part of colonization is some portion of the colonizers appropriate colonized identities for their own personal benefit. It’s a deep topic that isn’t addressed in this post.
If there were no affirmative action, there would be a lot less incentives for people to fake their ethnicity. Why does a country has quotas for people? Look where it got Lebanon.
I think there's two issues I see with this post and the conclusions that follow.
I don't think it's clear at all that people did/would have no problem with someone of ⅛ indigenous ancestry claiming to be indigenous, benefiting from that claim, doing academic work speaking for indigenous people, and wearing traditional clothing. Especially when it had no influence on the conditions of her upbringing other than being brought to some cultural events etc. I think this controversy would have probably happened in a pretty similar way eventually either way, and the fact that she lied about it probably just added to it.
The other issue I would take with the reasoning of this post is that it equivocates being exposed to some indigenous culture/friends with what is typically fully meant by the idea of "lived experience". Lived experience would typically emphasize things like being treated in a bigoted way by others due to how she's perceived, potentially being subjected to intergenerational traumas and economic hardships due to treatment of indigenous peoples. There's no exact criteria but I don't think her experience would typically qualify In the ways that typically matter to people making those distinctions.
You use as an example, "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." I find this hilarious because I've always lived in states where the age of consent is 16, and so I've been vaguely aware that because the age of consent is 18 in New York and California, *lots* of writers assume that it is 18 "everywhere". A sort of cultural myopia of the most urban areas.
Racists may say ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.', but having grown up in Iowa, where Jews look white, I'm emotionally incapable of considering Jews to be non-white. Indeed, US Jews who emotionally distinguish themselves from other Americans, or at least other US whites, cause me to smile and nod to humor their delusion. (This is ignorance of the full complexity of ethnic distinctions on my part, but it also makes me incapable of being a true anti-Semite, so I'm careful to not try to straighten it out.)
> 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.
I feel like, if a completely random white person decides they want to "connect to native american roots" and goes and attends some Pow-wow's, that's fine actually. Making friends with people from different cultures, and sharing that culture, is absolutely ok.
Now if someone comes along to oggle at the quaint and curious customs of the natives like they are some sort of zoo, that is bad and impolite.
But ultimately, it's the decision of individual natives for who they want to be friends with.
Even if she was being blatantly condescending and imperialist, it's not your place to tell the tribe not to interact with her. I would predict that the tribe wouldn't want to interact with her. But if they do, it's not a problem.
If Alice and Bob want to be friends, the situations where anyone else should intervene to stop them are rare and special. And "Cultural appropriation" isn't a good reason.
Libertarianism. You are welcome to appropriate any culture you feel like.
Scott rightly points out the incoherence of Hoover’s detractors and ex-friends. The whole conversation is much more driven by vibe than anything else and rests upon a foundation of shifting sands.
I’m a racial elimintavist, not because it’s impossible to rigorously defend a genetic concept of race, but because the baggage and brand saturation of the *word* “race” is unsalvageable on any timescale worth talking about. And attempting to cleanse it of its cancerous associations would be so much wasted effort, because most people use the word in a totally ad hoc way: they say “race” and then immediately change the subject to culture, ethnicity, class, region, nationality (etc.) to suit their argumentative needs, without realizing they are doing it. Hence the incoherence.
I also like that Scott invokes Yudkowsky’s “cluster structure of thingspace,” which reminds me of “Race As A Bundle Of Sticks,” a framework and methodology for designing studies of race proposed by Maya Sen and Omar Wasow in 2016. Instead of a set of “immutable characteristics,” it explodes the bundle (thingspace-cluster) into a disaggregated list that includes traditional things like genes, region of ancestry, skin color, and social status/power relations; but also less common ones such as dialect, wealth, neighborhood, religion, diet, class, and [social] norms. The fact that a little monosyllable even CAN house all of that inside of it is exactly the problem, and it’s why I think people should just be as specific as they can when they talk about this stuff, even genetically—e.g. hundreds of haplogroups vs. 5-to-7 big out-of-Africa clusters.
I understand—though don’t often feel—the desire to police the borders of social categories based on a shared “something.” Especially for instrumental purposes. Spivak coined her term “strategic essentialism" to describe intentionally brushing aside differences and diversity within a group for the purpose of promoting shared goals via a shared identity. That makes sense to me pragmatically as a political technique. I can see it as a useful way of forming political coalitions, which don’t need overall conceptual coherence to achieve specific material goals. But I wish, very naively, that people would just get off the ride there and return to normal civic life once the coalition has had its tractable demands met.
Alas..
I think the "Jewish hypersphere" (which already sounds like its own conspiracy theory) idea is a good way to think about this sort of thing, but an additional factor was just touched on: in a lot of fields you can gain status by taking someone else down.
Wow, what a horrible story. Honestly I would find it hard to blame her for lying either, considering what happened to her once the truth came out. Why is this so high-stakes?
W/r/t to the main topic, I find myself feeling a little bad for the professor, having their identity and culture ripped away from them. She's actually giving away things that brought her joy and meant a lot to her because she feels she has no right to keep them, and that's just crazy. I'd like to say you should define yourself by what you do and not the group characteristics of people who do it, but in cases like this the activities are meaningful in large part because of the group that performs them, so there's no easy answer here. In a hypothetical world where only Irishmen were rugby coaches, and you made coaching rugby your life, then found out you weren't really Irish, it would seem crazy to be expected to hang up your whistle and give up the thing that drove your entire life -- but in the world where that was true, there almost certainly would be historical reasons that only Irishmen did that, a different character to the fraternity of coaching, uniquely Irish rituals around the sport linked to their shared history etc..
On a later topic, I want to note my disagreement with your assessment that "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." You rightly point out that juries and judges are supposed to act as the common sense bulwark against strict rule enforcement, but in 20 years of crimlaw practice as an attorney I can tell you that prosecutors and cops have to make a dozen judgment calls every day that are no different. Sheriffs and prosecutors are elected, and have to reflect community social norms when they enforce the law, and I wouldn't have it any other way. People complain about prosecutorial discretion, but that discretion is the reason the 18.001 y/o having consensual sex on a date with the 17.364 y/o isn't getting charged with stat rape when somehow a cop finds out (although another reason is that under your hypo you gave him an affirmative defense of mistake of age, that would be applicable usually for victims over the age of 14 or 15.) None of the people who claim to want totally unbiased mechanical application of the law by the government's cops and prosecutors would actually like the world that results from that, even assuming that judges and juries still apply local norms and common sense at the end of the process.
I think what's missing from this discussion is that a large part of modern Native American identity is opposing or contrasting White identity in some way, although it may be implicit in most circumstances. That's why most people see an entirely racially White person claiming to be Native as inauthentic. There are Native American tribes in some parts of the US whose members have intermarried over the years with Black descendants of slaves, and as a result appear very similar to Blacks. What would the reaction be if a person believed themselves to be a member of one of these tribes, under similar circumstances to those described above, but was later revealed to be 100% Black, with no Native ancestry? I suspect the reaction would be different, as Black and Native identities are not seen as so opposed.
Nice thanks. Re: footnote 2, one could make the argument, that the white supremacists are coming closer to Dr. Kings dictum, 'of judging a person by the content of their character, and not the coding in their genes.'
While there are many white people who think they are some low fraction native, there are few who also have Hoovers level of childhood involvement. Yet out this very select group, a prominent activist arose. The same happened with Rachel Dolezal and the even smaller group of wtb-"transracial" people. This level of success is strong evidence that the universe considers them white; who are we to disagree?
It's orthogonal to the points you are making, but "lived experience" also does not do (IMHO) what its proponents want it to do...
Let's switch to a different case, one with which almost all of us are familiar, namely gender, romance, and the confusions of teen (and post-teen) years.
So I go to a party and meet Alice who, as is her way, holds forth about how much men suck and how, for example, "none of them want to date her because her boobs aren't big enough". I hold my tongue, even as I am thinking "I've only known you ten minutes and already I hate you; maybe the issue here is not your boobs?"
So we have here a situation where
- no male wants to date Alice because she is a whiny complainer,
but
- she has built up this story in her mind that it's all because of shallow men who care only about boob-size.
She is impervious to logic on this point – we can point out that plenty of other women with small boobs (but decent personalities) get married; we can point out that plenty of women with large boobs (but awful personalities) remain single.
But, apparently, Alice prefers the claim that it's all about boob size, ?presumably? because this doesn't require any work whatsoever on her part.
Now repeat this story in various other contexts: Leroy who didn't make the Glee Club, Andrea who didn't make Science Club, etc etc.
It's extremely easy to claim that you didn't achieve X because of <ism>, especially when you're egged on by family and friends to this interpretation.
Is this a *lived experience* of <ism>?
It's a lived experience of treating <ism> as the reason for all your problems, sure, but is it actually evidence of <ism>?
And of course this is going to become a self-reinforcing cycle. The people who insist on <ism> as the sole cause of their issues are going to gravitate to complaining about <ism> rather than working on becoming a better singer, or learning more physics, or asking people what said people find most grating about their personality and trying to fix that. And are going to, as a result, find more and more rejection as they advance in life because they never work as hard (or at all) on the actual issue of whatever it is they care about, compared to people who don't gravitate to an easy excuse.
It's easy to live in a prison of your own construction – god knows I have family members who are doing this right now.
I don't know what we do about this, once we have pointed out to these people the inconsistencies and self-serving biases in how they analyze the world and their interactions with it. But I no longer consider especially strong evidence about "the world" as opposed to evidence about the person.
I’m pleasantly surprised that Scott is able and willing to articulate the batshit insane, incoherent, cruel racial doctrine of woke religious ideology. Will he be able or willing to bring the same clear-sighted analysis to bear on the cult’s even more insane, incoherent and cruel doctrine of “gender identity” and the non-existence of biological sex categories? Only time will tell.
As for Dr. Hoover: judging from the titles of the publications on her c.v., she sounds pretty woke. Which is to say: all of the papers appear to be premised on the mystical nature of “racial” (in this case, “native”) identity and its magical ability to cause oppression even in the absence of any demonstrable disadvantage experienced by those who hold the identity. Thus, Dr. Hoover appears to be a member of the elite who used her position to actively advance the mystical religious doctrine that those who hold the “native” identity (including, she would have us believe, herself) are oppressed simply by virtue of holding this identity. And that those who do not hold this identity (including, as it turns out, herself) are, perforce, oppressors. One can’t help but recall the words of another religious mystic about what happens to those who live by the sword.
Associating yourself with anything related to cultural identity is like walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers, that's why the people who do it are considered great performers.
I wonder if Hoover has a record of pitchforking others for her “crime”…
I feel like edge cases are a lot more common than people think. For example, one time I met an East Asian-looking guy who was from Réunion and a native French speaker. Depending on which criteria you look at, he could be considered "French", "African", or "Asian". (Or "American", I guess, since he moved to the US).
Another time I met someone who identified as "mixed race" due to being half Jewish, half Iranian, even though both halves are classified as "white" in the American racial system. Then again, they're also both non-central examples of "white", and he presumably had a different cultural upbringing than the modal "white" person.
I think the most salient aspect of this series of events is the semantic attempt to differentiate “lived experience” from just plain “experience”.
LIVED experience?
As opposed to what? UN-LIVED experience?
The use of redundant superlatives like this betrays inauthenticity, & is - almost without exception - a hallmark of the unvirtuous.
Woke reliance on buzzwords - or virtue-signalling phrases such as “lived experience” - tells you all you need to know about the sincerity of those wielding them.
I think your naturalist/materialist/individualist philosophy is causing you to conflate 'genetics' and 'parentage' in a way the people involved may not.
For example, consider the situation from the perspective of the great grandmother ("She's dead and has no perspective" is not how everyone thinks about such things). In one case there is some specific definitely-a-native woman who would be/is proud of her great grand-daughter and wanting her to be accepted in the group, and in the other case there isn't. This isn't genes, it's something much closer to 'lived experience'... just not Hoover's experience.
Or, consider a couple who for some reason want to and are legally allowed to genetically engineer their foetus, changing just enough genes to match those of members of some other race such that the child looks like that race and would be called that race by 23andme etc.
Great article but the chart makes no sense to me.
There was a chief in Canada who was, biologically, white (and looked it). He'd been adopted by the previous chief. As he put it when asked these questions, 'I used to get beat up at school for being Native.'
This is one of those things where there's not really a clear answer, and the major problem is probably the acting like there is.
I co-sign your conclusion.
People have a choice (in theory, at least) of being generous of spirit or precious and exclusionary.
Those who feel at peace and who do not live in fear tend to extend generosity. Those who feel threatened and see the world as a zero-sum experience tend to draw lines.
In a society rife with white biases and systemic racism, there should be many examples of people doing the opposite - pretending that they are white while genetically being not white. Presumably, some of these people would do it sloppily and would be outed and shamed at some point. I cannot remember any stories of this kind in the last 20 years. If there were not any such cases, something must be missing from your explanations, as all of them try to apply race permutation invariant reasoning to a situation which is clearly not permutation invariant.
Most categorical descriptors regarding sociological and biological distinctions of humanity involve arbitrary boundaries at some point. Mixing DNA percentages with genealogies often complicates nice clean delineations. Fashion loves to meld widely disparate textiles, designs, and stylings, yet narrowly "ethnic" patterns worn by non-members is seen as cultural appropriation. Picasso definitely "appropriated" African masks and sculpture, while denying he'd done so, purely to elevate his creative reputation.
An interesting life that might be culturally appropriated, is found here:
https://sweetfootjourneys.com/the-created-life-of-charles-eagle-plume/
Despite his dubious genetic heritage, the mystery man lived a long life, profiting off Native creations, yet also building a significant historical collection that was passed on to CSU after his death, and it may be his good fortune, to have died before the culture police could have paid him a visit.
Scott here writes about the «patrolling the (group) border» complex/problematique. If you study this as a social scientist, it is fruitful to separate out these four sub-questions:
(1) Who are the border guards?
Do everyone both within and outside the group agree on who the border guards are, or not?
And: Do the border guards agree among themselves, or not?
Plus: How are eventual disagreements concerning who should be the border guards, resolved? Including: by whom? By some sort of mutual adjustment (how?)
Or are the issues related to who are the border guards, decided by some authority that everyone involved accepts/respects?
If so: How was that authority established, and how is its authority maintained?
And: To which extent is all the above stuff in constant flux or not?
(2) What criteria do the border guards use?
Are the criteria for who is inside and outside the group clear to all the border guards, or do they disagree?
Are the criteria the same across time, or do they shift?
If they shift over time: How do they shift?
(3) What sanctions do the border guards use toward those who are deemed to unduly have gained access (or unduly have avoided being included – see below under (4))
Social sanctions (naming and shaming), economic sanctions, legal sanctions, others?
How are the sanctions carried out? And by whom?
(4) What are the benefits, or the bad stuff, awarded those who are deemed to be inside the group?
a) If good stuff, what kind of good stuff? Social recognition and status, economic rewards, privileged access to desirable positions, other?
b) If bad stuff: Social ostracism? Social stigma? Economic and other discrimination? Increased risk of being unprovokedly attacked? Killed?
Finally, for anyone interested in these increasingly important border patrol – issues, I warmly recommend the 1984 German move Die Wannseekonferenz (free on YouTube, with English subtitles). There is a quite advanced discussion early in the movie about the relative weight of genetic and cultural Judaism. Also notice the debate about the Mischlingefrage (half-breed question), concerning if German half-Jews should also be sent to the ovens since the German blood has been soiled, or if “the German blood is strongest”, implying that they should be let off the hook:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Ug_MXToEE
…Prepare for these discussions, as tribalism & identity politics fastens its ideological grip. Hopefully mostly related to the distribution of good stuff rather than bad stuff, but who knows.
There are different forms of cultural appropriation, and it's annoying to group it into one category
1. There's stuff like fusion food which is completely inoffensive to all but the extremists
2. There's the intentionally offensive which some are against, and others are for because they are bigots who like the comedy, and others who are not bigots but still enjoy comedy
3. There's unintentionally inoffensive. If someone goes to a Halloween party in a "Jew costume" which consists of writing the tetragram on their forehead, it is offensive regardless of whether it was intended to be offensive.
And of course a whole host of other varieties. I get annoyed when people group all of these things together because some are good, some are reasonable, and some are bad. But I also am sympathetic because categories are made for for man. Diverse things group together even if they don't form a true category.
This is the same how I feel about race. Yes, genetics correlate in ways that allow you to find factors. But factors are real in a statistical sense, not in an essentialist sense. So yes it makes sense to talk about a "black race," but also it really doesn't given that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than there is between Africa and Europe. So is race genetically real? Kind of?
Community is more than just about you: it can include family. If someone's grandma knew yours, and went through the same problems and was part of the same group, you can be adopted into a community on that alone. If that grandma didn't exist then of course that community might feel betrayed. Ideas like genes and race don't need to come into it at all.
Based on earlier posts, I feel like Scott understands enough of the human condition to understand this, which is why this post feels like an unsympathetic attempt to dunk on how 'irrational' identity politics are.
I think this article misunderstands the definition of cultural appropriation. Usually it's defined as, specifically, perpetuating harmful stereotypes about a culture you don't belong to. This is contrasted with the "cultural appreciation", which essentially means what it sounds like. This article treats a superset as if it was its subset.
Imagine if I (I'm asian btw, but pretend I'm not for this analogy) started an article by saying "asians are inferior" but continued it with "asians are statistically shorter, and I think short people are awesome!". How would an asian feel?
These issues just seem like the inevitable consequences of cultivating a group identity. Now, maybe this is a hot take, but my instinct here is to question the necessity of group identity in the first place. Sure, it was very useful for societies that wanted to win at Imperialism, but aren't we trying to move past that?
[there's a logical leap here where I'm suddenly trying to explain what the world might look like if we had a healthier model for building an identity in the first place, probably because I'm anticipating that my take will strike people as somewhat nebulous?]
I'm imagining a world where there's a clear distinction between what you do and who you are. You're a person who practices medicine professionally, you're not a doctor. You're a person who does illustrations for a living, you're not an artist. So that when people ask what you do, you won't be tempted to respond with "I'm a fireman!" Instead, you'll say that you're employed as a fireman. That way you're not automatically associating/identifying yourself with firemen 'as a group'.
This seems like a weird distinction that I've failed to properly articulate, and it will probably strike people as me advocating for the deconstruction of identity as a concept, but I think - maybe - I'm really only targeting extrinsically substantiated/derived forms of identity.
I think, for me, cultural appropriation is analogous to copyright. I'd like to protect artists, but copyright seems like a suboptimal way to do so, so I want a different mechanism. However, that doesn't mean I want people to violate copyright (especially groups with vastly more power, like big companies) before we collectively switch, because it does protect the (largely poor) artists.
I want to protect cultural minorities, but cultural appropriation seems like a suboptimal way to do so, so I want a different mechanism. However, that doesn't mean I want people to start appropriating culture (especially groups with vastly more power, like big companies) before we collectively switch, because it does protect (largely poor) cultural minorities.
In situations where the power dynamics are flipped,I become much more lenient, because I don't see them as a moral imperative but as an imperfect coordination mechanism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/world/canada/canada-men-switched-at-birth.html
I haven’t seen anyone else linking this, but it’s as clean a case study as you can ask for: two men — one of Ukrainian descent, one of Native descent — who were switched at birth and didn’t learn what happened until they were in their 60s. Their reactions are notable — memorably, the one who learned he was genetically Native but had grown up in an affluent white home began to pursue tribal benefits for his kids.
I think the intuition that Filipinos have no racial category is interesting and true and has deeper valances
> it seems kind of bad if your whole life can be retroactively invalidated by getting the wrong results from a 23andMe test
LS: "No... No... That's not true... That's IMPOSSIBLE! My lived experience is as the son of a navigator on a spice freighter!"
DV: "Search your feelings, especially that throbbing pain where your hand used to be. I can create NEW lived experiences so vivid that they INVALIDATE your previous life."
LS: **falls from a great height**
I do think the appropriation argument is a slightly separate one.
I wouldn't actually say appropriation is awesome. It depends on the size of the culture and the cultural heft of its practitioners.
Imagine being, say, a Gnome in a city that mostly speaks Common and Elvish. An elf claims that they know Gnomish and teach elves and humans, but they're completely wrong. Unfortunately, there's only like 4 Gnomes and like 30000 elves and humans, and the Gnomes can't educate people faster than the fake Gnomish Speaking elf can teach fake Gnomish (especially since they simplified fake Gnomish to be easier for elves and humans to learn). By the end of the year, everyone "knows Gnomish" and they're correcting the Gnomes on grammar and pronunciation.
This is a non-issue if there's a whole country of Gnomes somewhere and humans speaking fake-Gnomish get there and instantly realise that their Gnomish is fake and illegible to true Gnomish speakers.
So this is the difference between, say, Noongar (Western Australian Aboriginal language) vs Cantonese. Cantonese is in no danger of being mis-taught by white people, but Noongar is. And this is significant because you'll lose specific knowledge encoded in the language. Back to the Gnomes, if there are 8 specific varieties of gems that Gnomish makes distinctions for, but Elvish only understands 3, the complexity of gemstones understood by gnomes will be lost if true Gnomish gets replaced by fake, elf-generated Gnomish.
This is an argument for having strong norms against appropriation of small cultures, especially cultures with a history of forced assimilation. For this woman, this doesn't apply - I don't doubt that she was taught genuine customs when she thought she was Native. I also don't think this should have happened to her.
But yeah, something weird does happen to people who are part of small cultures. I'm Chinese, and not particularly invested in it, but I can afford to not invest in my background - there's approximately 1 billion of us and millions of people speak my languages, so it's not my sole responsibility to pass down the torch. If I stop speaking Cantonese or Hakka, the language is not going to go extinct.
This is not true of someone who knows a language with very few living speakers, like a lot of the Aboriginal Australian languages, or Maori in the 50s, then it's quite a lot of pressure!
I don't have to take up the many performance, art, food and ritual activities in my culture or personally know about them. There's enough people for someone else to get really invested in it and bring it to the next generation. I can take my pick of what I like (food) and learn it to whatever level. But if my culture only has 80 people alive, or 12? That's a lot of pressure.
Like, imagine being the last person alive who can make a macaron, or speak German. Imagine being the last ballet troupe that still exists. That's the state of a lot of smaller endangered customs are in (and it makes them vulnerable to bad actors to capitalise on the rarity - if I claim a butter cookie is a macaron, and people don't know any better, I can charge macaron prices for them. People will try my "macarons" then go, what's the point of preserving that? They're just butter cookies! So that's an issue in native art and craft)
I don't know the story, but have trouble feeling much empathy for her given what was explained, because, while I consider it unjust, it also have a very strong vibe of "punished by what they preached" (Not sure how the saying goes in English, but I am quite confident such a saying exists), which is maybe the most common cause for being happy about the misfortunes of others. At least it is for me...
Had she another career, even one where she benefited from native american status (Casino owner for example), I would sympathize.
But here, she made her academic career in native american studies, basically being a gatekeeper and shaper of the (toxic) consensus that is now her downfall....kind of a mild version of Torquemada burning at the stake. It depend a little bit on the branch she was in academically, did she push for more strict consensus or a a more universalist approach?
I think "there is a biological component to races" is the equivalent of "your waifu is not real and you will die alone" in my circles: it's true, everybody knows it's true, it's just considered a very rude thing to say. This is linked to a second taboo against the idea that intelligence is connected to genes.
See, there's no real thing as superior or inferior races in nature, if you live and breed you're good enough for the evolution fairy. Problem is that we're not nature, so we pesky apes went and decided what makes a race superior. Unfortunately, it's intelligence. And unfortunately, that's also linked to genetics.
(Thought experiment: Consider race A that is substantially smarter, and race B that is substantially taller, stronger, faster, happier, more beautiful, longer-lived, and able to shoot psychic lasers out of their brains. You'd want to live as B, but you'd know there's a certain je ne sais quoi that makes A "better". As an aside, this is the backstory of Warhammer 40k).
So, despite both being true, we ended up cornering ourselves into never being able to say "races are partially genetic" and "intelligence is partially genetic" at the same time, without going down a slippery slope that ends with "...and that's why we should bring back human zoos".
People who dedicate themselves to truth, naturally, say both parts out loud and are surprised when others ask "wait, you're into human zoos?" They aren't, they just live in a kinder world where your mind has no bearing on your value as a person.
(I mean, no matter how you look at it, Henry Cavill beats me in height, talent, wits, sex appeal, and number of Warhammer minis. This doesn't mean I'm inferior as a person compared to him, or deserve less rights than him. If you used my genes to create a Walliserops-strand of humanity, they wouldn't deserve any less rights compared to the Cavillborn Primarchs, either.)
Still, the truth tribe's views don't reflect society's unspoken rule that smart ape = good ape, and it's much easier to make a couple bits of info taboo instead of changing our entire collective mindset, so here we are. The "no links between ethnicity and genetics" standpoint becomes more sensible when you evaluate it as a kludge: It's not intended to be true, it's to account for a minor conflict between "all races are equal" and "some genetic traits are better than others".
Accordingly, Native Americans get to consider biological factors when deciding on racial belonging, because they aren't hostile to this compromise, while anyone else gets the full Sleeping Tiger treatment. To its credit, I think the kludge works more or less as intended, and it reminds me of how Kuhn's paradigms accumulate edge cases until a new, more consistent paradigm comes knocking. Maybe we won't need to keep the lie once we shift to a kinder society.
I have two points in response to this.
The first, re: defining race - I think race is socially constructed in its entirety, and I think one of the mechanisms for "constructing" it can be "genetics", and one can be lived experience, and one can be tendency to wear specific types of clothing, etc.
My position on race is very much informed by the fact that I am "white" in some places and "not white" in others. Race is not some trait I have that other people observe or fail to. It seems instead to be some trait people choose to give me (or not) in a given interaction. If I can change regions and suddenly I become a member of a different race, that makes the genetic component of this seem pretty irrelevant to understanding the situation.
The nonsense surrounding identification / lived experience / etc. strikes me as one where you can replace [minority membership] with [experience of oppression], which is why certain minorities "get" to do this and certain other minorities "don't get to do this".
There is an interesting BBC documentary about black Americans moving to Ghana, no longer being othered on a daily basis, and saying things like "I'm not a black woman in Ghana, I am a woman in Ghana". This makes sense to me. Their genome didn't change. Their "membership" did. It stopped getting renewed on a daily basis by racists.
On the grounds of "cultural appropriation", my position on it is that it's people trying to apply copyright law logic to culture. I broadly oppose copyright law as it is typically enforced, and think that it's pretty shitty. I mean, if you think about Disney being theoretically able to sue a Hawaiian kid for writing and then trying to sell her Moana fanfiction... It seems very straight-forwardly fucked up to me. And there are many instances of this kind of thing, where copyright law systematically helps the powerful fuck over those with less power, such that the maintenance of dying myths from people whose livelihoods are being destroyed is not really compensated and legally protected, but the "reading of it, bastardizing it to sound cooler to foreigners, and then selling it to a big company" of those myths is compensated and legally protected.
But the answer to that is abolish modern copyright regimes and replace them with something saner (if nothing else, bring back the 28 year term), not "pretend literally every cultural anything is vaguely governed by the warped echo of copyright law in the Zeitgeist.
I'm all for abandoning the idea of 'cultural appropriation'. It seems totally incoherent and the cases of cultural appropriation seem to be rarely exposed by the 'appropriatees'. It seems to me that minority cultures are usually totally unbothered by outgroup use of their food and clothing and cultural ideas. Rather, it just functions as a way for progressive white people to guilt and criticize and limit the behaviors and expressions of other white people in order to demonstrate virtue. It's perhaps the dumbest idea ever generated by the modern Left... and that is surely saying something.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/
The situation is worse than it seems: Ethnic origin and culture are pretty much orthogonal to each other (though some of the ethnonationalist twitterati seem to disagree). So, as soon as you have people who left their place of genetic origin to move to another culture, your correlations break down. Then again, this describes America, where a lot of people celebrate a cultural heritage they derive purely from ethnic heritage which under different circumstances ("race") they would deny exists. Somehwere in America there is probably a bunch of liberals who simultaneously claim that race doesn't exist, while celebrating their Ukrainian heritage that they only know from books written in English.
If further family history analysis showed that two completely unrelated great-great-grandparents of hers were native would that make everything better?
I am not sympathetic to her, and you miss one of the most important issues here: there's a long history of white people pretending to be Native American for reallllyyy nefarious purposes: stealing reservation land and rations, weird Confederacy dead enders dressed up in Cherokee cosplay because the Confederacy and the Cherokees both fought the feds.... It's not cultural appropriation in the benign sense of "oh cringe white ppl think Indians are cool and accidentally disrespect their culture in the process"; it's intentional theft from Indians. Someone who is as immersed in Native culture as she became would know about this and should have questioned their ancestry from the start given the mysterious circumstances.
To paraphrase a wise man, "I count as White anyone who looks White, acts White, and fights White."
It could be said that this model can apply to gender too.
I think this article fails to differentiate between the different kinds of lived experiences. If one of this woman’s parents had been raised in a native home and it turned out she wasn’t genetically native it would seem different to me. But her lived experience was that of an outsider connecting with her roots, not that of a person living her culture.
My dad is Mexican American and my mom is white. I think most people can tell I have that heritage. But I’m not close with my dad’s family and even I feel like my lived experience with the culture is often more akin to that of an outsider. Someone who doesn’t even have that is not living her own culture. She’s just not. I don’t actually think that she necessarily did anything wrong here and I don’t take issue with a lot of the conclusions. But I find it disingenuous to pretend that she meets the bar for lived experience when that isn’t what lived experience means.
usually, if some genetic data can cluster so clearly, authors had filtered some famous anomaly.
I think a fourth option is that, in the native american case specfically, part of the reason being native american is important is that it's a marker of having been disadvantaged by the polices the US government has adopted towards native americans historically, and someone who didn't actually have native acenstry wouldn't have suffered from those disadvantages (perhaps hence why they could become a proffessor.)
Another reason that being native american by blood could matter, is that the rules for group membership require an induviudal to be a child of another group member - but this is compatable with genetics not being the defining characteristics because adoption is also an acceptable way of gaining group membership.
Maybe a final reason is that being a native american means having access to an inheritance which has to be passed down to children (although again not neccarsily biological children.)