Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left.
They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending. If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'
It is the 'racism' of reduced expectations.
It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.
Law professors Amy Wax and and Larry Alexander have recently come under vicious fire for pointing out the obvious: many of our social problems are rooted in a collapse of middle-class cultural norms. But it is a good bet that the leftist scum who attacked them live by, and owe their success to, those very same 'racist' norms. It is an equally good bet that they impose them on their children.
Now let me see if I understand this. The bourgeois values and norms are 'racist' because blacks are incapable of studying, working hard, deferring gratification, controlling their exuberance, respecting legitimate authority and the like?
But surely blacks are capable of these things. So who are the 'racists' here? The conservatives who want to help blacks by teaching them values that are not specifically white, but universal in their usefulness, or the leftists who think blacks incapable of assimilating such values?
Or is it something like the opposite of 'cultural appropriation'? Is it that whites violate and destroy black 'culture' by imposing on blacks white values that blacks cannot appropriate and turn to use? But of course the values are not 'white' but universally efficacious.
Just as self-control helps keep me alive, self-control would have kept Trayvon Martin alive if had had any. And the same goes for Michael Brown of Ferguson.
Stove’s essay “Racial and Other Antagonisms” is similarly emollient. He begins by noting that some degree of friction is the common if not the inevitable result when “two races of people have been in contact for long.” Only in the twentieth century, however, has such antagonism been described as a form of “prejudice.” Why? Earlier ages had the concept, and the word. Part of the reason, Stove suggests, is that by christening racial animosity “racial prejudice” we transform it into an intellectual fault, i.e., a false or irrational belief that might be cured by education—and this, Stove observes, “is a distinctly cheering thing to imply.” Alas, while it is certainly true that racial antagonism is often accompanied by false or irrational beliefs about the other race, it is by no means clear that it depends upon them. And if it doesn’t, education will be little more than liberal window dressing.
Stove’s essay on race is full of discomfiting observations. He defines “racism”—a neologism so recent, he points out, that it was not in the OED in 1971—as the belief that “some human races are inferior to others in certain respects, and that it is sometimes proper to make such differences the basis of our behaviour towards people.” Although this proposition is constantly declared to be false, Stove says, “everyone knows it is true, just as everyone knows it is true that people differ in age, sex, health, etc., and that it is sometimes proper to make these differences the basis of our behaviour towards them.” For example,
if you are recruiting potential basketball champions, you would be mad not to be more interested in American Negroes than in Vietnamese… . Any rational person, recruiting an army, will be more interested in Germans than in Italians. If what you want in people is aptitude for forming stable family-ties, you will prefer Italians or Chinese to American Negroes. Pronounced mathematical ability is more likely to occur in an Indian or a Hungarian than in an Australian Aboriginal. If you are recruiting workers, and you value docility above every other trait in a worker, you should prefer Chinese to white Americans. And so on.
Stove readily admitted that some of these traits may be culturally rather than genetically determined. But he went on to observe that “they are still traits which are statistically associated with race, well enough, to make race a rational guide in such areas of policy as recruitment or immigration.” As I say, David Stove would not have been made to feel welcome at many American colleges or universities.
……………………………………..
It can't be racist if it's true. Now what Stove says above is true, except when he says that "everyone knows it is true." There are people who sincerely believe it to be false. But surely most of us know that it is true even if we won't admit it publicly. In any case, what Stove says above is true, and it can't be racist if its true, whence it follows that Stove violates ordinary usage when he defines 'racism' as he does. And that is a foolish thing to do. Meaning is tied to use, and only a linguistic Don Quixote tilts against the windmills of prevalent usage. To shift metaphors, some words and phrases are just not candidates for semantic rehabilitation.
Stove needs a different word. Whatever word that is, it won't be 'racism.' 'Racism' is currently used to label an attitude of irrational hatred of members of a race not one's own precisely because they are members of a race not one's own.
It is obvious that one's acceptance of the Stovian truths does not entail that he bears any racial animosity to anyone.
I have just engaged in some clear thinking and truth-telling. But what's the point in a world becoming stupider and crazier by the day?
If a statement about race is true, is one a racist for making it? Is one a racist for reporting the following?
Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population.
I received two intelligent responses one in agreement, the other in disagreement. Here is the first:
[A leftist I am reading] argues, and this touches your point, that propaganda can consist of claims that are true and made sincerely. Such as ‘there are Muslims among us’, which is true, and does not even communicate something false (namely that Muslims are inherently dangerous to others), but rather is misleading. ‘It simply does not follow that the flawed ideological belief that makes some claim effective as propaganda is expressed or communicated in that claim’. I think he would treat the statement you quote in the same way.
Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population.
Is that true? Damned right. Is it made sincerely? Surely so. But it is effective propaganda because misleading, according to him. Bizarrely, he says that the word ‘welfare’ does not appear on any banned list, yet always conveys ‘a problematic social meaning’. Even a word like ‘mother’ is problematic (has a ‘harmful social meaning’) whenever it is used. F–k me.
BV: Leftists subscribe to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Thus they refuse to take what conservatives say at face value as expressing a sincerely held opinion based in empirical fact. If I cite the FBI statistic, I am speaking in a 'code' using 'dog whistles' that other conservatives can hear. So if I say that blacks as a group are more criminally prone than whites, what I am really saying is that blacks have to be kept in their place or hunted down. I am legitimating their alleged unjust 'mass incarceration.' I am condoning the alleged murder of the likes of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown of Ferguson. (The truth, of course, is that these two youths were not murdered but brought about their own deaths by their immoral, illegal, and extremely foolish behavior.) Thus leftists ignore the manifest meaning of what the conservative says and seek out some latent 'ideological' meaning, where ideology has the Marxist sense of a legitimation of existing relations of power and domination.
It has been said, correctly in the main, that for a conservative, leftists are wrong, whereas for a leftist, conservatives are evil. It is because they regard us as evil that they refuse to accord us respect as rational interlocutors with a point of view worth examining. This is why they exclude conservative speakers and shout down those who somehow make it onto campus. This is why they pepper us with purely emotive epithets such as 'fascist' and the 'phobe' constructions which are designed to impugn our sanity.
So when I cite the FBI stat to explain why blacks are 'over-represented' in the prison system I am accused of retailing racist propaganda when I am simply speaking the truth.
I am one of those conservatives who think that leftists (including most contemporary liberals) are not merely wrong but morally defective people. They deny the plain truth and slander their opponents. They don't value free speech. They have no understanding of the values of the university. They enable and apologize for barbarians.
Part of what fuels their destructive worldview is the false empirical belief that every group is equally competent and qualified at everything so that if one group does worse than another the explanation has to be that they have been put upon, held back, oppressed, marginalized, victimized. So women and men are innately just as good at the STEM disciplines — which is false — and if you suggest otherwise as James Damore did, you lose your job at Google. Even more absurd is the belief that men and women as groups are equally competent in all combat roles in the military and that to suggest otherwise is to promote unjust discrimination.
My theory is that the Christian metaphysical belief that we are all equal before God as persons got secularized after the death of God (in Nietzsche's sense) into a false empirical belief that we are all equal in empirical fact, and that indications to the contrary can be explained away in terms of racism, sexism, ageism, etc.
The other response I got in effect points out that truths about race and ethnicity can be asserted with scurrilous intent. Now that of course is true. I've made the point myself more than once.
Suppose I encounter a man in a wheel chair, a man without legs. If I say, "You, sir, have no legs!" I speak the truth, but commit a low-level moral offense. There are truths the enunciation of which is morally contraindicated in certain circumstances.
So of course a racist could cite the FBI statistic in a scurrilous way.
But the issue is precisely this: if you speak the truth about race it does not follow that you are a racist. For your intentions may be good and what you say may be something that needs to be heard.
A short video by Heather MacDonald. Can you spare five and one half minutes?
Question for liberals: If a statement about race is true, is one a racist for making it? Is one a racist for reporting the following?
Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am not now, and never have been, a Southerner, a redneck, a plantation owner, slave holder, apologist for slavery, Civil War re-enactor on the Confederate (or Union) side, racist, or white supremacist.
I condemn slavery as a grave moral evil. I also condemn abortion as a grave moral evil.
Holding that all lives matter, I hold that black lives matter, including unborn black lives.
After actual racist oppression of blacks was eliminated, the Left invented 'structural,' 'systemic,' or 'institutional' racism to keep the race hustle going. It was plain to objective investigators that the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown had nothing to do with race hatred. Those two brought about their own deaths by their own bad behavior. But since they happened to be black, the Left seized on their deaths as examples of the imaginary construct, 'structural racism.'
How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”— her version of The Band’s sympathetic ode to the tragedy of a defeated Confederacy, written over a century after the Civil War. (“Back with my wife in Tennessee / When one day she called to me / Said, “Virgil, quick, come see / There goes the Robert E. Lee!”) If a monument is to be wiped away, then surely a popular song must go, too.
[. . .]
The logical trajectory of tearing down the statue of a Confederate soldier will soon lead to the renaming of Yale, the erasing of Washington and Jefferson from our currency, and the de-Trotskyization of every mention of Planned Parenthood’s iconic Margaret Singer, the eugenicist whose racist views on abortion anticipated those of current liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Ginsburg said, “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)
[. . .]
The strangest paradox in the current epidemic of abolitio memoriae is that our moral censors believe in ethical absolutism and claim enough superior virtue to apply it clumsily across the ages — without a clue that they fall short of their own moral pretensions, and that one day their own icons are as likely be stoned as the icons of others are now apt to be torn down by black-mask-wearing avengers.
A final paradox about killing the dead: Two millennia after Roman autocrats’ destruction of statues, and armed with the creepy 20th-century model of Fascists and Communists destroying the past, we, of a supposedly enlightened democracy, cannot even rewrite history by democratic means — local, state, and federal commission recommendations, referenda, or majority votes of elected representatives. More often, as moral cowards, we either rely on the mob or some sort of executive order enforced only in the dead of night.
Your piece on Dreher and Buchanan accepts Dreher's overall reading (or misreading, as I see it) of Buchanan's argument — you seem to accept that Buchanan actually means to somehow call into doubt the metaphysical doctrine of the equality of men. This seems clearly wrong to me.
But before coming to that point, I want to check with you about another thing, namely, Dreher's accusation that Buchanan is openly endorsing white supremacy in his essay. Things you've said elsewhere about the failure to define terms such as "white supremacy" make me hesitant to actually ascribe to you the belief that Buchanan is a white supremacist, but if that's right–if you aren't accepting the white supremacy charge–at any rate nothing in Sunday's piece makes that explicit. And when you end your piece by talking about Buchanan "apparently repudiating" the doctrine of equality, there is at least a hint that you're willing to accept the charge.
BV: Thank you for these fine comments, Patrick. As a philosopher you understand the importance of defining terms. And yet you haven't offered us a definition of 'white supremacist.' Absent a definition, we cannot reasonably discuss whether or not Pitchfork Pat is a white supremacist, and whether the white supremacy charge is clearly bunk as you claim it is.
We could mean different things by the phrase 'white supremacist' and cognates. I hope you will agree with me, however, that the phrase is actually used by most people emotively as a sort of semantic bludgeon or verbal cudgel for purely polemical purposes in much the same way that 'racist,' 'Islamophobe,' 'fascist,' and other emotive epithets are used. On this usage, no morally decent and well-informed person could be a white supremacist. The implication is that a white supremacist is a bigot, i.e., an unreasonably intolerant person who hates others just because they are different. It is a term of very serious disapprobation.
I would guess that you understand 'white supremacist' in something very close to this sense — which is why you take umbrage at Dreher's claim that Buchanan is a white supremacist. Bear in mind that that is Dreher's claim. I don't make it. My point of agreement with Dreher is solely on the question of the meaning of "All men are created equal." It is spectacularly clear that, in the piece in question, Buchanan shows a lack of understanding of the meaning of the sentence. Buchanan reads it as an empirical claim subject to falsification by experience. It is not, as I explain in my parent post. Here again is what he wrote:
“All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?
I was really surprised when I read that. It occurred to me that it might just be a slip occasioned by old age, anger at recent developments, or too much Irish whisky.
Now consider the following candidate definition of 'white supremacist.'
D1. A white supremacist is one who holds that the culture and civilization produced by whites is, on balance, superior to the cultures and civilizations produced by all other racial groups.
One could be a white supremacist in this sense and hold all of the following: (a) Slavery is a grave moral evil; (b) All men are created equal in the sense I explained; (c) No citizen should be excluded from the franchise because of race; (d) No citizen should be excluded from holding public office because of race; (e) All citizens regardless of race are equal before the law.
Buchanan might well be a white supremacist in the (D1)-sense. Here is a bit of evidence: "Was not the British Empire, one of the great civilizing forces in human history, a manifestation of British racial superiority?" Buchanan is not saying that the Brits merely thought themselves to be racially superior but that they really were.
I think the white supremacy charge is clearly bunk–or at any rate, I'll say this: nothing in that particular column of Buchanan's can reasonably support a charge of white supremacy. And I don't say that on the basis that "white supremacy" hasn't been adequately defined, or any other such technicality. I just mean it should be clear that Buchanan's point is not to endorse white supremacy, but simply to point out that if that charge applies to Lee and co, then it applies to Washington and Jefferson and co, and indeed then we need to throw out the whole western culture that gave us the metaphysical doctrine of equality.
BV: Again, unless you tell us what you mean by 'white supremacy,' there is no way to evaluate what you are saying. The matter of definition is not a mere technicality; it is crucial. I sketched two senses of 'white supremacist,' the 'semantic bludgeon' sense and (D1). Now I agree that Buchanan is not a white supremacist in the first sense, but it looks like he is in the second. So I totally reject your claim that "nothing in that particular column of Buchanan's can reasonably support a charge of white supremacy."
You are also failing to appreciate that, just like an alt-righty, he shows no understanding of "All men are created equal." He is clearly giving it an empirical sense. That's blindingly obvious. Now I am going just on this one column. Perhaps in other works he says something intelligent on this point. This is why Dreher is right against Buchanan despite the former's over-the-top rhetoric.
And then on to the next point: having thrown out the grounding upon which that doctrine stands, upon what shall we build our egalitarian utopia? We can't re-establish the equality doctrine on some universally-acceptable empirical ground! Buchanan doesn't doubt the equality doctrine: he points out that the iconoclasts seeking to build their new world on it, have no basis upon which to rationally accept it. It's not a new or brilliant claim–it's pretty standard and obvious, I'd have thought.
BV: I am not quite sure what you are driving at here, but a tripartite distinction may help:
a) The Declaration sentence is empirical but false.
b) The Declaration sentence is empirical and true.
c) The Declaration sentence is metaphysical, and thus non-empirical.
The alt-righties accept (a). The loons on the Left accept (b). You and I accept (c). You and I agree that the equality doctrine cannot be built on empirical ground. I would guess that you and I also agree that if the Declaration sentence is making an empirical claim, then that claim is false.
I wrote this up yesterday in a little blog post, and I'm encouraged a bit in my reading (not that, in truth, I doubted it before!) by finding this column (not by Buchanan) posted today on Buchanan's website.
Generally, I try to follow the advice of Thoreau, "read not the Times, read the eternities," and so I ignore such issues. But I do read your blog faithfully, and for some reason–maybe just a lingering respect for Buchanan, who has always struck me as a decent man–you prompted me to read a bit of political ephemera to try to sort it out. :)
I hope you're doing well!
BV: Thank you, sir. I think we agree on the main issues, except that I really think it is important to define 'white supremacist' and not bandy it about unclarified.
I too love the Thoreau aphorism (and I'll bet you found it on my site; if not, forgive me my presumption) but I would add that in dangerous times one has to attend to the Times lest our enemies win and make it impossible for us to read the Eternities. Boethius was able to do philosophy in a prison cell, but most of us lesser mortal are not Boethian in this regard.
Keep your powder dry! (May the loons of the Left vex themselves over whether this is some sort of 'dog whistle.' It does have a Pitchfork Pat, "locked and loaded" ring to it.)
I left the house at 5:15 this morning, hiked 45 minutes over the local hills to arrive at 6:00 sharp at Gecko Espresso where I met up with Lowell S. a local chess aficionado. We played under the influence of caffeine for a solid two hours, one game, recorded, to be analyzed when next we meet. I checkmated the old man.
Chess is a delightful game, especially when you win. An oasis of sanity in an insane world. But we must admit that it is a deeply racist game and that all who play it are racists. The following excerpt from a cognate post explains why.
Another proof that chess is racist and oppressive and ought to be banned is that blacks are woefully under-represented among its players. This evil can have only one explanation: racist suppression of black players. For everyone knows that blacks as a group are the equals of whites as a group in respect of intelligence, interest in chess, and the sorts of virtues needed to play the undemocratic and reactionary 'Royal Game.' Among these are the ability to study hard, defer gratification, and keep calm in trying situations.
For these and many other reasons, we must DEMAND that chess be banned.
We must manifest solidarity with our oppressed Taliban brothers who have maintained, truly, that chess is an evil game of chance.
Hatred has fundamentally very little to do with White Supremacy. White Supremacy is a policy of domination and economic superiority of Whites in a multi-racial society. African-Americans are not worried about whether White people want to be friends. Most of the African-Americans I know have quite enough friends, thank you very much. African-Americans demand legal, economic, and political equality. And that terrifies many Whites, who do not want to give up the superior legal, political, and economic position in American society that they acquired through being born White.
Perhaps Malcolm Pollack will comment on this definition over at his place. He tilts in the alt-right direction; I reject the alt-right.
Here are some preliminary thoughts/questions of my own.
1) If White Supremacy is a policy, who is implementing it? The government? Is the government insuring the economic superiority of Whites? How? By what programs?
2) Blacks have every right to demand legal and political equality, but they cannot reasonably demand economic equality. That is something they have to work for.
3) Whites are in an economically superior position to blacks, no doubt, but one cannot validly infer from this that Blacks have been unjustly discriminated against.
4) It is false that Whites enjoy by birth legal and political privileges denied to Blacks. If you think they do, name the privileges.
5) Suppose a white Southerner considers slavery a grave moral evil and is glad the Union was preserved. He opposes, however, the Left's iconoclasm re: statues of Robert E. Lee, et al. Is this person a White supremacist?
6) If 'white supremacist' is not to be just another smear word like 'racist,' then it has to be defined. How ought it be defined?
7) Suppose Whites as a group are superior to Blacks as a group in some respect R, and suppose Jones points this out. Is Jones a white supremacist with respect to R? This raises the question: How can White Supremacism with respect to R be a bad thing, which it is supposed to be, if it is true?
8) Wolff's decoupling of White Supremacy from hatred suggests that he is thinking of it as something 'institutional' or 'systemic.' Are our institutions white supremacist? What might that even mean given that our institutions allowed for the elimination of slavery and Jim Crow?
Addendum (8/18)
Malcolm Pollack responds, and I agree (red emphasis mine, italics his):
Consider: a generation of identitarian politics across the West has deliberately cultivated tribal resentments among non-whites. For decades white people have been blamed in media and academia for all the world’s ills, while aggressive immigration policies have openly sought to make them minorities in every one of their homelands (a prospect that is widely celebrated in our mainstream institutions). In colleges and universities, white applicants are disfavored for admission, while curricula feature pugnacious courses on eliminating “whiteness”. At the Academy Awards, a black actor says of his latest film “I get to kill all the white people! How great is that?”, and the audience laughs and cheers.
Is it any wonder, then, that in this toxic climate, many white people are developing a sense of identitarianism themselves? This is not “supremacy”; it is nothing more than an perfectly natural (and, therefore, easily predictable) sense of unity and belonging, in an explicitly and increasingly hostile environment. Express this readily understandable sentiment in public, however, and you are now a “white supremacist” — and your sense of identity is not mere attachment, but can only be “hate”.
“White supremacist”, then, is nothing more than a cudgel, to be used without mercy against anyone who says, however reluctantly, that: yes, we are white, and we are not ashamed of it, and if you are determined to divide all of society into competing racial groups, then our people will have to play the game too. It is a truly awful state of affairs, and it will all get much, much worse before it gets any better. “Diversity is our strength”? Rubbish. As we are already learning to our sorrow, it is anything but: it is the death of peace and order and comity, and, at last, of nations and cultures.
Having come to expect lunacy from lefties, I was not dismayed, but entertained, by the absurd bigotry that seeps out of the following passage from thisChronicle of Higher Education piece:
Now the couple weighed a new option. A producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight, a prime-time show on Fox News, had asked if Mr. Weinstein wanted to make his case to the conservative commentator and his millions of viewers.
It was a nauseating thought, says Ms. Heying. Theirs was an NPR family. Back in college, Mr. Weinstein had stood up to fraternities at the University of Pennsylvania over sexist and racist behavior at their parties. In an ideal world, says Ms. Heying, they would have talked to The New York Times or The Washington Post. But that’s not who had come calling.
"He was horrified, I was horrified," Ms. Heying told The Chronicle. "Tucker Carlson is someone he mocks in his classes."
Weinstein teaches biology and he wastes class time on political commentary and mockery of talk show hosts?
One thing I do like about lefties, though, is that they eat their own with a hunger and ferocity unlike anything on the Right. The 'progressive' Weinstein, who is now a 'racist,' is learning this the hard way. May he come to his senses. May he come to appreciate that conservatives are the new liberals, and liberals the new fascists.
"If the product is so superior, why does it have to live on the tit of the State?" (Charles Krauthammer)
One answer is that the booboisie of these United States is too backward and benighted to appreciate the high level of NPR programming. The rubes of fly-over country are too much enamored of wrestling, tractor pulls, and reality shows, and, to be blunt, too stupid and lazy to take in superior product.
Being something of an elitist myself, I am sympathetic to this answer. The problem for me is twofold. NPR is run by lefties for lefties. That in itself is not a problem. But it is a most serious problem when part of the funding comes from the taxpayer. But lefties, blind to their own bias, don't see the problem. Very simply, it is wrong to take money by force from people and then use it to promote causes that those people find offensive or worse when the causes have nothing to do with the legitimate functions of government. Planned Parenthood and abortion. NEA and "Piss Christ." Get it?
I raise the title question in the context of my recent study of Rebecca Tuvel's controversial article, "In Defense of Transracialism" (Hypatia, vol. 32., no. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 263-278). It raises a number of fascinating and important questions. I will argue that even if one can change one's sex, by having one's body altered by surgery and hormonal 'therapy,' one cannot change one's race, and to think otherwise is to equivocate on 'identity.'
The Question and One of its Presuppositions
Can one change one's race? Suppose your parents are both white. Can you do anything, or have anything done to you, to become black, say? Common sense says: of course not! But common sense is subject to philosophical scrutiny.
Note first that our question rests on a presupposition, namely, that race has some sort of reality. It presupposes the existence of at least two different races, the racial terminus a quo and the racial terminus ad quem. In plain English, the presupposition is that there is the race one is and the different race one wants to become. So race has to be real. For if race had no reality whatsoever, there could be no real change from one race to the other. It is clear, then, that one cannot be an eliminativist about race and racial differences while holding that one can change one's race. There would be nothing one was changing from and nothing one was changing to.
Race and Money
But from the fact that race is real it does not follow that race is not to some extent socially constructed or construed. For money is surely real without prejudice to its being a social construct. That money is intersubjectively real is shown by the fact that there is a real and important difference between losing and not losing a thousand dollars. That money is a social construct is shown by the fact that without homo oeconomicus there would be no money. Gold ore is not money, nor are gold coins in a human-free world. And the same goes for counterfeit and non-counterfeit Confederate dollars. They are not legal tender because there is no social system now in existence that accepts them as such. As interesting artifacts of the Confederacy, Confederate notes of course have considerable monetary value. But they themselves are not money. You can't use Confederate notes to buy Confederate notes. (Buying is essentially different from bartering and trading.) You would have to use 'real' money such as U. S. dollars or Euros or Bitcoin. What makes a bit of metal or a piece of paper real money is its acceptance and use by humans as a means of exchange.
So it is only within a system of social relations that money is money. It follows that it is not the intrinsic properties of coins and notes and cognate instruments such as their size, shape, mass, and color that make these instruments money.
Money is real; money is a social construct; ergo, some real things are social constructs. So it might be that race is real despite being a social construct. But we need to dig deeper.
Money doesn't grow on trees. It doesn't occur in nature like leaves on trees. Human animals do occur in nature and grow from other human animals, their parents. A human animal does not have to be accepted as human by other humans to be a human animal. Think of a baby human adopted and cared for by wolves. The biology of that individual is not a social construct. It is no more a social construct than the gold ore of which gold coins are made. The coin is money in virtue of socio-economic relations; the gold as metal is independent of the socio-economic nexus. The same goes for human organisms. They cannot be socialized apart from society, but they can be the biological individuals they are apart from society.
Now sex and race are grounded in biology; race therefore cannot be a social construct in the way money is if it is a social construct at all. Granted, racial theories and classifications are social constructs. But what they theorize about and classify cannot be plausibly viewed as a social construct. Otherwise there couldn't be false theories or mis-classifications. Here, then, are some datanic starting points to be presumed epistemically innocent until proven guilty.
Race has to have some sort of reality if there is to be racial change.
A change in race cannot be a mere relational change but must be an intrinsic change.
The reality of race is consistent with aspects of it being socially constructed. Racial classifications and theories, for example, are social constructs.
Race cannot be a purely social construct.
A 'Temporal' Argument Against Race Change
Can I change my race? No. I can no more change my race than I can change the fact that I was born in California. I might have been born elsewhere, of course, but as a matter of contingent fact, I am a native Californian. Despite the logical contingency of my California birth, there was nothing I or anyone, including God, could have done to change or annul that fact about my place of birth. A change of birth place was thereafter impossible.
The same goes for race. My race is determined by my biological ancestors. Since both were white, I am white. To change my race I would have to change a past fact, namely, that I am the product of the copulation of two white parents. But that fact, being past, cannot now be changed or annulled. The argument, then, is this:
1) If I can change my race from white to black, say, then I can change some fact in the distant past, namely, the fact that I am the offspring of two white parents;
2) But it is not the case that I can change any past fact including the fact that I am the offspring of two white parents;
Ergo
3) It is not the case that I can change my race.
The argument assumes that it is nomologically necessary that parents of the same race have offpsring of the same race, that, e.g., white parents have white offspring. The assumption is obviously true.
A 'Modal' Argument Against Race Change
Although I was born in California to parents both of whom are white, I might have been born elsewhere to the same parents. But might I have been born to different parents? Is there a possible world in which I have parents other than my actual parents? If my actual parents are P1 and P2, might I have have had a different pair of parents, say, P1 and P3, or P4 and P5? Not if we accept Saul Kripke's thesis of the Essentiality of Origin. I share the intuition: I wouldn't be me if I had had different parents: my very identity as a biological individual rides on having precisely those parents. I now argue as follows:
4) It is metaphysically impossible that I have different parents than the ones I have;
5) My actual parents are both white;
6) White parents have white offspring; ergo,
7) It is metaphysical impossible that I be non-white; ergo,
8) It is metaphysically impossible that I change my race.
A Response to These Arguments
The point, then, is that it is impossible to change one's race even if it is possible to change one's sex. Tuvel has a response to something like these arguments. Tuvel couches the objection in these terms:
. . . race is a matter of one's biological ancestry, and this is not changeable. If cogent, then changing race would be unlike changing sex. To change sex, we can change hormones, genitalia, and other bodily features. But to change race, we would have to change features external to one's body, such as the fact of genetic ancestry. As a biological reality not restricted to to the body, but dependent on one's genetic heritage, changing race is thus impossible. (266-267)
This is a very powerful argument. To turn it aside one needs a make a drastic move, which is what Tuvel does. She maintains that one's "race is a matter of social definition." (267) It is a social construct and as such, "race is malleable." (267, emphasis in original) It follows that "there is no fact of the matter about her [Rachel Dolezal's] 'actual' race' from a genetic standpoint. . . ." (267, emphasis in original) There is no "truth" about a person's "real" race. (267)
The point, I take it, is not that race and racial differences are devoid of reality entirely, but that they have the reality of social constructs without a biological basis. Society assigns you your race. Thus the difference between white and black is not grounded in any biological difference. To be white/black/Hispanic, etc. is to be deemed such within a given society. If so, "it is at least theoretically possible to change races." (267) " . . . whether is is practically possible will depend on a society's willingness to adjust its rules for racial categorization to better accommodate individual self-identification." (267)
The idea, then, is that if a person identifies as black, say, and society recognizes and accepts this "felt sense of identity," then one is black. (264)
Surely this is preposterous.
Changing the Subject and Playing Fast and Loose with Identity
The question was whether one can change one's race. The answer from Tuvel is yes, one can change one's racial identity by (i) changing one's racial self-identification and (ii) getting society to accept one's new self-identification. But this amounts not to changing one's race but to changing the subject. No doubt one can change one's race in her sense. But race in her sense floats free of the undeniable biological reality of race. One's racial identity is no more malleable than one's species identity. As a biological individual, I am an instance of h. sapiens and and there is nothing I or anyone can do to change that. Not even the Cat Man, Dennis Avner, could change his species identity (He died a suicide recently in Tonopah, Nevada.) Similarly with my race. It is bound up with my biological identity.
On top of that, Tuvel conflates the identity of a biological individual with its self-construal or self-identification as this or that.
