I'm done with race - listen to this

[QuentinSummers]

Brilliant radio programme about identity politics. It is one of the most powerful things i have ever listened to and really resonated with me as a white woman too.
They talk about who benefits by arbitrarily categorizing people based on a descriptor (whether that's skin colour, biological sex or anything else).
Would love to hear more from these guys but in the meantime I'm identifying as human every time I get asked what I identify with.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09sn7ym

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09sn7ym

Oops

It's only 15 mins long too

I heard this and agree it is worth a listen. I thought it was very thoughtful and I am definitely a human. Just a human. Who’d have thought?

Bump

It's a tricky one. Without a doubt racial distinctions are "made up" - that is, people are all the same really; it's society and culture that puts immense significance upon minuscule differences between people, and it's completely arbitrary whether that significance is attributed to one thing (like skin colour) rather than another (like height). But that doesn't mean that the divisions in society that that process causes aren't real. In that sense, race does exist, and if you tried to pretend that it doesn't - if you stopped monitoring it or forbade any discussion of it - you wouldn't be solving racism, you'd just be going la la la can't hear you, of course nobody is ever racist round here, don't know what race means, anyway.
The process of "othering" that makes people racist is pretty similar to the process that makes people sexist. The difference is that sex IS an objective distinction between one half of the population and the other, so there are objective reasons why women don't get their just deserts (body size, having children, perhaps being less aggressive) as well as the culturally-determined ones (like people thinking women can't do sums, etc.)
We probably all ought to focus on the similarities rather than the differences between people and consider ourselves to be "just human" as much as possible, but it's probably a bad idea to say we ought to pretend divisions and distinctions don't exist at all.

Once we have complete and total equality, we can stop acknowledging any distinctions such as race and sex and age. At present, we know that people are hideously mistreated solely because they are black, because they are a woman etc. Therefore, we have to acknowledge that these differences exist, because otherwise we could not recognise why some people are treated more advantageously than others.

I think the point they were trying to make in the programme was they are both black men but they don't "identify" as black they just are. And the act of suggesting a shared identity is part of racial oppression

Yes, I do agree with that. Saying that black people are more likely to behave in a particular way is wrong. And the 'gender identity' has been used to oppress women throughout history, with the argument that we are too delicate or emotional to do anything other than rear children and work in the home. So I am with them on that.

I think we need to accept that there are physical differences between people but absolutely crack down on people who suggest that those physical differences translate to mental differences or particular propensities. This includes the trans movement, which reinforces harmful gender stereotypes. However, we must maintain protection for those people who are oppressed due to their biology.

I will listen to it later.

morningrunner said exactly what I was about to say. I think it is important to recognise race in terms of racism. Someone can't defeat racism by identifying out of it, it is structural oppression. Same as sex.

Quentin - I think the point they were trying to make in the programme was they are both black men but they don't "identify" as black they just are. And the act of suggesting a shared identity is part of racial oppression
I like that argument and idea. Its a bit like when the only black person gets asked a question as if they are answering for all black people. It happened to me in terms of sex, as if I was speaking for women kind rather than as an individual. Its the same process of dehumanisation.

Maybe denying individual personality denies personhood? God, I sound like a TRA!!!! This is such a multi-layered tricky question you have posed, its brilliant.

In some ways I think it is like the "what makes you happy about being a woman?" thread and the majority of responses being related to pregnancy and breastfeeding - which are things that very clearly differentiate women from men - but really the rest of it is what makes you happy about being you. I listened to that program when it was on but haven't listened to it since but seem to remember one of the men saying that he went through a stage of strongly identifying as black - as in black was the key part of his identity, then perhaps man, British etc. etc. and that is was liberating to step out of that completely in terms of how he viewed himself and his subsequent refusal to enable people in their desire to categorise him when asking "where are you from?"

I thought this was an interesting response to Munroe Bergadorf's racial statements:

inews.co.uk/opinion/munroe-bergdorf-race-wrong-tory/

I will listen to this tomorrow

Ive never understood why race is a thing

I get very annoyed when people ask "where are you from" based on skin colour. Especially when it escalates to "where are you really from"

I think it's part of the reason "identify as" came into use, because although I just am a born and bred English woman, there are many people of all skin colours who don't like me saying that....because of my skin colour. It's so weird.

But you do get some people who were born and raised here and want to "identify as" being from somewhere their ancestors came from.

Isn't there a line in the James song, "just like Fred Astaire" - we can cross the race divide, bridge the gap that wasn't really there...

Interesting point from a pp that if you can't see race, you can't see racism. I don't really agree with that. I think you can find race irrelevant in your own immediate life but still know when someone shouts a racist remark at you.

PS a friend's son recently turned 18 and started work...you know how that whole situation generates a bunch of form filling for everything imaginable....he was really shocked by the fact that everything has a race question on it, and he said he feels "othered" by those questions. His parents have explained all the theory behind it but I just said "yup" and I feel sad because it seems to be more of a problem to be accepted as English now than it was 20 years ago.

I understand that all kinds if things factor in here but if we just saw each other as fellow human beings it would be so much nicer!

it seems to be more of a problem to be accepted as English now than it was 20 years ago.

I think it’s almost impossible to be accepted as English now, because the idea of ‘(an) Englishness’ isn’t something people believe in any longer. There are as many ways to be English as there are people who want to consider themselves English. We all self-ID now

It’s nice.

@hipsterfun
I don't like having to self ID as a woman because I am a woman

I don't like have to self ID as English because I am English. Born here, raised here, history here, never known the ways of any other nation or spoken any other language. If that isn't English I don't know what is.

But now we are in countries rather than race. Another topic for another day. Sorry for going off piste, the term "self ID" bugs me generally.

@Quentin

Things are never as simple as they may seem and just because some people are capable of walking a certain path it doesn't mean that path is not fraught. Do listen to the previous edition of the same series as well.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09rxsbj

At some point when my son (who passes as white) was about 9 he started nudging me towards not attending school dos. I talked to his teachers and found that no, they had detected no problems, he was (as he still is) a bright boy and they were pleased with his progress in spite of his mild Asperger's traits, no behaviour problems beyond cheekiness, loving the sound of his voice and a tendency to distraction and distracting others and those were easily corrected with a few words.
A lot of talking and gentle prodding and I found out the answer to a question I sometimes wish I never went in search of - he felt he lost his kudos with the other kids every time after I had been in the same room with them. Not the ones who came to the house regularly or the ones in the neighbourhood (plenty of them at the school, none in his class). Most of his class lived too far for my son to see regularly beyond school times.

No amount of my seeing myself as human prevented this but children emulate too much of what the adults around them are like. Thankfully, it's now in the past but had I decided to forget race just like that it would have been harder to deal with it.

This is not a story of the generation out of the Empire Windrush, or the one after and it's not something out of an US southern state. My son is only 16, I live in Surrey and this still feels as raw to me as if it had happened yesterday.

Race may not be a scientific concept but it is a social one... and people like me carry the burden of being reminded of it, of having to swim against it and of having to constantly overcome it.

You don’t need to self-ID as a woman if you’re an adult human female.

But nobody else decides what or who is and isn’t English, other than the individual.

This is the inclusivity we’ve been working towards, but I see the problem if you’d prefer people to assume it about you.

But you do get some people who were born and raised here and want to "identify as" being from somewhere their ancestors came from.

I have a friend who would say he’s Jamaican, if asked (he’s of mixed heritage, born and raised in the UK) but to me, as a southerner, he’s both a midlander and a Londoner, and very English. (I don’t feel too bad about it though, as he made some assumptions about my background that were way off and he struggled to shift )

That was to Riverside, obvs.

@hipsterfun

"You don’t need to self-ID as a woman if you’re an adult human female"

Have you filled in any forms recently? The ones I have have asked me what "gender" I "identify" as.

mocha that sounds heart breaking. Your poor son.

I will listen to the previous episode too.

Forgive me if I've got this completely wrong, but I thought that there were some physiological differences between black and white people (leg muscles, bone density)? Which is why I am slightly confused by "race is a social construct"

I should have said - I'll listen to the programme this weekend

And for Mocha

Biologically-speaking there is no way to to separate humans into distinct races. We are all one big genetic hodge-podge. Indeed Africa has a much higher genetic diversity then the rest of the world put together, but Africans would be historically lumped together as part of a single "black" race.

Quentin I'm curious about something
And asking in a non judgey way

What's in the programme that's made you think differently, and how and why did you see race as a thing before?