One of my faults as a writer is that I am prolix. I almost wrote ‘excessively prolix,’ which would have illustrated the fault in question. Piling ‘excessively’ onto ‘prolix’ would not only have been unnecessary, but would also have suggested that one can be prolix in moderation. But wordiness is a vice, and vices should be extirpated, not moderated.
Some years back, TheWall Street Journal described itself as “the daily diary of the American dream.” A delightful pleonasm: ‘diary’ derives from the Latin dies, day. A daily diary is like one of Al Franken’s lying liars. I learned recently that ‘journal’ also derives from Latin dies even though they have no letters in common. A fact like that excites a guy like me. Dies gave rise to diurnus, which became the Italian giornale and the French journal, passing into English as ‘journal’ circa 1590. (Vide Robert Hendrickson, QPB Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 2nd ed., 2004, p. 400) By the way, this is a fascinating book, and I recommend it.
Here are some other examples of redundant expressions, culled from Joseph M. Williams, Style: Toward Grace and Clarity (Chicago, 1990, p. 116): past memories, basic fundamentals, true facts, important essentials, future plans, personal beliefs, consensus of opinion, sudden crisis, terrible tragedy, end result, final outcome, initial preparation, free gift. No doubt some of these are disputable. Suppose you set aside six months to prepare for a marathon. You begin by running 30 miles per week, gradually working up to 45 mile weeks. It would make sense to say that your initial preparation was less demanding than the later phases of your preparation. There is no redundancy here.
And what about future plans? ‘Plan’ is ambiguous as between the act of planning and its object. No doubt the object of planning is always later than the act of planning, just as the object of remembering is always earlier than the act of remembering. Hence ‘future plan’ is redundant when used to refer to the object of planning. But it is not redundant when used to refer to the act of planning. An act of planning can lie in the future, in the present, or in the past. If every use of ‘future plan’ were redundant, then every use of ‘past plan’ and ‘present plan’ would be oxymoronic. But it is no oxymoron to say, ‘My past plans all went unrealized,’ or ‘My present plan is to sell the vacation house.’
By similar reasoning, one should be able to convince oneself that past memories has non-redundant uses. An old man might complain, ‘My present memories are not as vivid as my past memories.’ This is not redundant because an act of remembering can lie in the past.
One conclusion to be drawn is that good writing is not a mechanical affair: it cannot be reduced to rules and regulations, algorithms and checklists. Did you catch ‘rules and regulations’? That is a redundancy and I used it purposely to test you. ‘Regulation’ is from the Latin regula, meaning rule. There is also the connection to rex, regis, king, ruler. And so on and so forth.
There is something "which may be called the Fallacy of objections, i.e. showing that there are objections against some plan, theory or system, and thence inferring that it should be rejected; when that which ought to have been proved, is, that there are more, or stronger objections against the receiving than the rejecting of it. This is the main, and almost universal Fallacy of infidels, and is that of which men should be first and principally warned." Richard Whately, Logic, 1849, ch. V "On Fallacies," p. 82. See here.
How quaint our concern with the lore of logic while jihadi's cut throats on London Bridge and leftist thugs shout down the sane at universities. Logic books and books in general are of no use against barbarians and thugs. Magazines are much more effective.
Andrew Sullivan is down with a very bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But he hasn't lost his mind entirely. He is hip to the absurdity of leftist talk about cultural appropriation. After wading through yet another load of his anti-Trump hyperventilatory hysteria, I came upon these reasonable words of his:
I love the phrase “long-debunked universalism” by the way. Debunked by whom? Universalism — the idea that human beings can exist as individuals, rather than as members of assigned groups — is far from debunked. It is, in fact, one core premise of liberal society.
Sully is right, but it is not easy to state clearly what is at issue here or what it even means to "exist as individuals rather than as members of assigned groups." A while back I was complaining about tribalism and I was saying things like: we need to get beyond tribal and racial and other particularistic self-identifications; we need to learn to see ourselves and others as individuals and not as tokens of types or members of groups. To my surprise, certain alt-righties disagreed with me, seeming to say that what we need to oppose black tribalism, say, is not a transcendence of tribalism, but an equal but opposite white tribalism.
Now that makes no sense to me, except as a sort of interim or stop-gap defensive measure. If some black dude gets in my face about the how great it is to be black, I will be tempted to get in his face and reply in kind.
But that sort of thing does not comport well with my irenic, philosophical nature. We need to transcend our tribalisms and learn to respect each other as persons with equal rights. We are equal as persons!
But what could that mean? Is it not just empty talk? It sounds like the pious verbiage of a preacher or a politician who doesn't really believe what he is saying but says it because he is paid to do so.
Talk of equal rights and respect for persons is indeed empty if naturalism is true. If we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal, then talk of equality is blather. For we are obviously not equal empirically either as individuals or as groups. The alt-righties and neo-reactionaries hammer on this point and they are correct in so doing. So normative equality cannot be grounded in empirical equality if for no other reason than that there is no empirical equality. On the other hand, normative equality cannot 'float in the air.' It cannot subsist independently of any basis in reality.
What then could possibly ground our normative equality as persons with equal rights to life, liberty, and property, if we are nothing but complex physical systems? If there is no equality in fact, how could there be in norm?
If naturalism is true, what could make it morally wrong always and everywhere and for everyone — not just pragmatically or prudentially inadvisable in particular circumstances — for one group to enslave another? Nothing that I can see. Not the ability to reason since, on naturalism, that is just an empirical feature of human organisms. In any case, the ability is not equally present in human animals. Hoe could a non-normative property, unequally distributed, ground a right to be tretaed with respect and never to be treated as a means only? If you say that all normal humans have the ability to reason to some degree or other, then you are abstracting away from our differences. How could that abstraction, which remains on the non-normative plane, ground a right to be treated equally?
Here is the problem expressed as an aporetic tetrad:
1) Humans are not empirically equal either as individuals or as groups.
2) Talk of the normative equality of persons, that each ought to be treated as an end and never merely as a means (Kant), is empty if it cannot be provided with a basis in concrete non-normative reality.
3) Naturalism is true: concrete reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.
4) Persons are normatively equal.
The limbs of the tetrad are inconsistent; something has to give. (1) is non-negotiably true as a matter of plain fact. (2) is extremely plausible, and we are committed to (4) if, as our moral intuitions instruct us, slavery, sex trafficking, and the like are moral abominations. So I reject (3).
If (3) is false, then it is possible that theism is true. If all finite persons are creatures of one and the same infinite person, then all persons are metaphysically equal. This metaphysical fact is then the non-normative basis that grounds the normative equality of persons.
Question for atheists: If you hold that slavery is morally wrong, what on your view makes it morally wrong?
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?
Quite incredibly, Spencer is still banned from visiting the UK because of what he says in this short (2:07) YouTube video. The letter from the Home Office, then under the auspices of Theresa May, said:
You are reported to have stated the following:
>>It [Islam] is a religion and a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society … because [of] political correctness and because of media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.<<
The Home Secretary considers that should you be allowed to enter the UK you would continue to espouse such views. In doing so. you would be committing listed behaviours and would therefore be behaving in a way that is not conducive to the public good.
You are therefore instructed not to travel to the UK as you will be refused admission on arrival. Although there is no statutory right of appeal against the Home Secretary’s decision, this decision is reviewed every 3 to 5 years.
Astonishing. So it is "not conducive to the public good" to speak the truth because some people (Muslims) will be offended by it and others (ordinary Brits) will be inspired to commit acts of violence against members of a minority? Is that the Home Office reasoning?
Lord have mercy!
The Islamists have learned how to use our values against us. We value toleration and they exploit our tolerance. That ploy is structurally similar to what Communists did and their leftist successors do. Islam is the Communism of the 21st century. Theresa May plays the role of 'useful idiot.'
And then comes the Orwellian twist: when Spencer points out that Islam is incompatible with Western values such as toleration, and speaks up in defence of toleration, he is denounced as intolerant! So you are intolerant if you won't tolerate your own destruction?
There are many deep issues here, and it is very difficult to set them forth clearly in a few sentences. One issue is whether there is truth at all, or only politically correct opinions. Note the obvious: what is politically correct need not be correct in the sense of true.
For the Left truth doesn't matter since it is all about power in the end and those narratives that are conducive to the gaining and maintaining of power. As I have said more than once, a story does not have to be true to be a story.
One of the subterranean links between leftism and Islam concerns the denial of absolute truth. On Islamic voluntarism, truth is subject to Allah's will, which of course implies that truth is not absolute. That's just a hint. More later.
By Kevin Myers. The Sunday Times, 11 June 2017. Via Karl White who provided me with the text and who tells me that "Kevin Myers is one of Ireland's most controversial writers." The 'purple passages' are by your humble correspondent.
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A suicide bomber attacking a concert for little girls is a little earlier in the curve of depravity than I’d expected. But a nurse being cut to pieces as she minded the injured on London Bridge — at this point in the descent into the abyss, perfectly predictable. The Nazis hid their crimes. These people exult in theirs, knowing that the path to a moral nadir is paved with the public glorification of the most revolting violence. It is also paved with passivity, excuses and equivalence from the host communities.
This brings me to Bob Dylan who was recently awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Now I've been a Dylan fan from the early '60s. In the '60s I was more than a fan; I was a fanatic who would brook no criticism of his hero. And I still maintain that in the annals of American popular music no one surpasses him as a songwriter.
But the Nobel Prize for Literature? That's a bit much, and an ominous foreshadowing of the death of the book and of quiet reading in this hyperkinetic age of tweets and soundbites.
I might have added that Dylan is important in the way Kerouac is. But is Kerouac a great novelist? Obviously not. I have enough literary sense to realize that my own love of Kerouac is largely determined by my own quirks and generational affiliation.
Ron Radosh, whom I respect highly, thinks that Dylan deserved the prize. But David P. Goldman, 'Spengler,' whom I also respect, takes a harsh line:
And so it is with Bob Dylan, parodist, satirist, scammer and snake-oil salesman par excellence. He never hid from us what he had in mind: he's been playing with our heads since high school, finding the lever that loosened our tears, and our wallets. He caught a wave in the early 1960s with the folk revival movement, itself a hoax. We Americans are not a "folk," not in the sense that Johann Gottfried Herder used the term. We do not have the deep memory of autochthonous roots that characterizes European cultures, the hand-me-downs of long-lost pagan experience. We are a people self-created by religious and political impulse.
[. . .]
Of course, it was all a put-on. Woody Guthrie was a middle-class lawyer's son. Pete Seeger was the privileged child of classical musicians who decamped to Greenwich Village. The authenticity of the folk movement stank of greasepaint. But a generation of middle-class kids who, like Holden Caulfield, thought their parents "phony" gravitated to the folk movement. In 1957, Seeger was drunk and playing for pittances at Communist Party gatherings; that's where I first met him, red nose and all. By the early 1960s he was a star again.
To Dylan's credit, he knew it was a scam, and spent the first part of his career playing with our heads. He could do a credible imitation of the camp-meeting come-to-Jesus song ("When the Ship Comes In") and meld pseudo-folk imagery with social-protest sensibility ("A Hard Rain's a' Gonna Fall"). But he knew it was all play with pop culture ("Lone Ranger and Tonto/Riding down the line/Fixin' everybody's troubles/Everybody's 'cept mine"). When he went electric at the Newport Festival to the hisses of the folk purists, he knew it was another kind of joke.
Only someone who was not moved by the music of that period could write something so extreme. No doubt there was and is an opportunistic side to Dylan. He started out an unlikely rock-and roller in high school aping Little Richard, but sensed that the folk scene was where he could make his mark. And so for a time he played the son of Ramblin' Jack Elliot and the grandson of Woody Guthrie.
In his recent Nobel Prize lecture, Dylan mentions early influences. Let's dig up some of the tunes that inspired him.
I think it was a day or two after that that his [Holly's] plane went down. And somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.
It was on a label I’d never heard of with a booklet inside with advertisements for other artists on the label: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the New Lost City Ramblers, Jean Ritchie, string bands. I’d never heard of any of them. But I reckoned if they were on this label with Leadbelly, they had to be good, so I needed to hear them. I wanted to know all about it and play that kind of music. I still had a feeling for the music I’d grown up with, but for right now, I forgot about it. Didn’t even think about it. For the time being, it was long gone.
Sonnie Terry and Brownie McGhee, Key to the Highway. Just to vex London Ed who hates Eric 'Crapton' as he calls him, here is his Derek and the Dominoes version with Duane Allman. Sound good to me, Ed!
By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.
You know what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You know that Washington is a bourgeois town and you’ve heard the deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator and you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild Irish rover and the wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the fifes that played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white linen.
I had all the vernacular down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.
This is an important distinction explained with great clarity by Robert Spencer. London Ed summarizes:
He [Spencer] believes that there are moderate Muslims but there is no moderate Islam, giving the example (3:25) of the Catholic Church's official teaching on contraception: "Contraception is wrong, contraception is immoral, don’t contracept." Yet
"Surveys show that 70-80-90 percent of Catholics use contraception. Now, we would be absolutely wrong, incorrect, to say ‘oh that means the Church doesn’t really teach that contraception is wrong’ . . . it’s just that most Catholics don’t pay attention. Islam really teaches warfare against unbelievers. A lot of Muslims don’t pay attention. That’s just great. The problem is that they have no theological leg to stand on in Islam, and therefore when they are challenged by the jihadis, and even when their children are recruited by the jihadis, they don’t have any answer."
This seems to me to be correct. It follows that I was mistakenwhen I wrote, on many occasions, of radical Islam. For that phrase suggests that there is a difference between Islam and radical Islam and that 'true' Islam the 'religion of peace' has been radicalized by radicals and militants. The truth is that Islam just is radical Islam. It is a radical and extreme view right out of the box.
There can be moderate Muslims, but there is no such thing as moderate Islam. Spencer mentions Zuhdi Jasser as one of the few moderate Muslims in the world. Dr. Jasser is a moderate Muslim in that he diverges from Islam by, among other things, advocating separation of mosque and state.
Here is an entry from my first weblog. It first saw the light on 23 June 2004. Don't say it is dated. The distinctions and truths it contains are timeless. The bit about courage is important and not widely understood.
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One night on Hannity and Colmes, Sean Hannity interviewed Al Sharpton. Sharpton had recently visited Fidel Castro in his island paradise. Hannity was quite shocked to hear all the fine things Sharpton had to say about the Cuban dictator. I had the impression that Hannity would not allow even one good thing to be said about Fidel. Fidel is an evil dictator, so there cannot be anything good about him!
That seemed to be Hannity’s (specious) reasoning. Here we encounter the phenomenon of demonizing one’s opponents, a phenomenon found on both the Right and the Left. Although Fidel is an evil dictator, it does not follow that he has no good attributes. The same goes for Adolf Hitler, who practically everyone cites as the personification of evil. But it is obvious to any clear-thinking person free of political correctness that Hitler had many excellent attributes. He was disciplined, idealistic, courageous, resolute, a great orator, etc. No doubt Hitler had the wrong ideals, but having the wrong ideals is not the same as lacking ideals. No doubt Lenin used his courage for the wrong ends, but using one’s courage for the wrong ends is not the same as lacking courage. It took courage to break all those eggs especially when there was no guarantee of an omelet. A bad man can have (some) good attributes, just as a good man can have (some) bad attributes.
Democrat party operatives thought they could smear Arnold Schwarzenegger by claiming that he had once praised Hitler. Suppose he had. That by itself does nothing to cast aspersions on Schwarzenegger. Qua instance of courage, discipline, etc., Hitler is surely praiseworthy. That is not to say that Hitler was a good man. To repeat, a bad man can instantiate (some) good attributes.
But people are so blinded by political correctness, so befuddled by uncritically imbibed speech codes, that they cannot wrap their minds around such simple points as I am making. People say that liberals don’t think, they emote. I would add that when liberals do try to think, they rarely do more than associate. “Hitler bad man! Schwarzenegger mention Hitler! Schwarzenegger bad man!” Another tactic used against Schwarzenegger was to claim that his father had been a Nazi. Suppose he had been. What does that have to do with our man? Do these lefties in their imbecilic group-think mean to suggest that the guilt of the father is inherited by the son?
Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor once got into a silly argument with Bill Maher. Maher had praised the 9/11/01 hijackers for their courage, which elicited howls of protest from O’Reilly, who called them cowards. Now surely my man O’Reilly, right as he is about so much, is in the wrong here. Muhammad Atta and the boys displayed great courage in the successful execution of their nihilistic acts. No doubt the acts in question were unspeakably evil; but courage and cowardice are (dispositional) properties of agents, not of their acts.
A courageous person is one who is typically able to master his fear and perform the difficult act that he envisages. It doesn’t matter whether the act is morally good or evil. So although courage is a virtue, hence something good, it does not follow that every act of a courageous person will be morally good. Equivalently, the performance of an evil act does not show that its agent is a coward. A cowardly person is one who is typically unable to master his fear, and is instead mastered by it, with the result that he cannot perform the act he envisages. It is clear that Atta and his crew were the exact opposite of cowards.
At the root of O’Reilly’s confusion was his demonization of the opponent. He could not allow that Atta and his gang had any virtues, so he could not allow that they were courageous, courage being a good thing.
When we procreate we cause not only the existence of more animals, but also of more points of view, with each new subject the center of its own world. Whether this is good or bad, it is certainly amazing! Copulation as world-making.
When you won’t build a wall around your country, you must build walls around everything inside your country.
Along the same lines, is it not insane for Western countries to expend blood and treasure battling ISIS and other Islamist terror groups in their lands while allowing Muslims to enter our lands largely unvetted?
If they are, they have not been proven to be by the Conceptual Penis as Social Construct 'Son of Sokal' Hoax. If you care to 'bone up' on this, this Reason article has the links for you.
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.
