The Knot of Exclusion

A subculture of which I am tangentially involved is currently embroiled in an argument regarding “exclusion from below.”

The situation is this: a large herbalism conference recently saw the introduction of several “safe spaces” for subgroups at the conference, including a queer-only dance party and a session for “BIPOC” people. In both of these spaces, it was made clear people not part of the subgroup were barred from entry: no straights at the dance, no “whites” in the BIPOC session.

Rather than getting lost in the details of that particular situation,¹ it’s better to point out that this is part of a much larger trend within the United States in both institutional and subcultural events. Many universities have begun creating places for subgroups, usually at the request or demand of those groups themselves. Conferences and retreats have also begun to do the same thing, including conferences I was previously involved in.

Citing the need to “have their own spaces” in order to be free of the “oppressive presence” of others, these places are designated as exclusive, open only to those who identify with (and whose identity is accepted as valid by) the subgroup in question.

One recent example which made national news was the “Day of Absence” at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Day of Absence was a tradition, based on a theatre piece, started by black students to highlight their importance to the life of the college by disappearing for the day. That year, however, they demanded the reverse: rather than their voluntary protest act of withdrawing from the life of the campus for a day, they demanded all white people leave instead.

When a professor of biology with white skin decided to go anyway, asserting that excluding a people of one race was a reproduction of racial segregation, the campus turned to riot.

I had been aware of these events because of friends who were then attending Evergreen, and it had passed through my social media feed during the time, but I hadn’t really given much attention to the matter. Those I knew who were there—leftists all of them, a few of them with dark skin—hadn’t participated in any of the riots and said they thought they were baseless. But the narrative on social media was that the professor was a “white supremacist,” and as this was occuring at the same time many antifascist actions were happening in the United States, I unconsciously assumed the actions against the professor had justification.

Looking back into it all now, I understand why my friends hadn’t participated. Here is a statement from the professor, Bret Weinstein, on his reasons for not disappearing that day:

There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles (the theme of the Douglas Turner Ward play Day of Absence, as well as the recent Women's Day walkout), and a group encouraging another group to go away . The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself..

What particularly interests me in situations like this is how the demands for exclusion often come from the same subcultures that have protested against exclusion by other groups. Groups of people who have been historically excluded from larger society and who fought to be included then soon find themselves also excluding.

A case in point is the gay subcultural group Radical Faeries, whose Wolf Creek Sanctuary gatherings were exclusive spaces for gay men (which included “trannies,” the older self-identification of crossdressers, drag queens, and also transsexuals)² This exclusion became seen as oppressive by others, who demanded women, bisexuals, and even straight people be allowed in these spaces. Having carved out a specific “safe space” for their identity conception away from the “oppressive presence” of others, they then found themselves in the same position as those who had excluded them.

The creation of “safe spaces” has been particularly messy for “women-only” spaces as well, especially where the definiton of women is seen as too narrow to include trans women. A now-defunct Pagan conference (defunct for several reasons, including these arguments about inclusion and exclusion) hosted an event that was for “biological women” related to “uterine” or “menstrual mysteries.” A protest inevitably occurred outside the event to compel the inclusion of trans women in such spaces in the future.

So we can see immediately that the question of exclusion is an ideological knot, one of those frequent places where it becomes clear that the consequences of certain beliefs and actions have not fully been explored.

Who has the right to exclude?

Obviously, Americans in particular have reason to oppose exclusion based on race, sexuality, and gender. Women were excluded from the ability to vote and from some university programs and jobs, gays and lesbians were excluded from the ability to marry and adopt children, trans people were excluded from the military, and of course racial segregation was the norm in the United States (with “whites only” and “coloured only” water fountains, lunch counters, and schools) until a little over 50 years ago.

The general trend of justice movements has been one of demanding more and more inclusion, rather than arguing for a right to exclude. Yet more recently, the trend has moved again towards exclusionary spaces for the people previously excluded from participation in society. Spaces set aside for the exclusive presence of women, or trans people, or people with darker skin, or other ideological categories have all become much more commonplace.

Under all this is appears to be a contradictory belief about exclusion itself, that exclusion is both a societal wrong and also a vital right. It is wrong for a group to exclude others based on their skin color (for instance, groups open only to white people, or segregationist governmental policies) but also vital to exclude people based on their skin color (“BIPOC safe spaces,” etc.). It is wrong to exclude people based on their sex or gender (male-exclusive groups, women only groups that do not include trans women) but also vital to exclude people based on their sex or gender (trans-inclusive women’s only spaces, trans only spaces). It is wrong to exclude people based on their sexuality (the military, businesses that refuse to provide services for gay weddings) but also vital to do so (lesbian or gay only spaces, asexual spaces).

The foundational belief here is that some people are valid targets of exclusion while other people have a right to exclude. In the reverse hierarchy of social justice power relations, those with the most perceived power (whether or not they actually have material power) can and should be excluded, while those with the least amount of perceived power (power as conceived by the social justice framework) have both the right to exclude and the right not to be excluded.

The knot here is that exclusion and inclusion cannot be seen as moral or immoral within this framework, because it sees some exclusion as good and some as bad. What matters in this framework is who is doing the exclusion and who is being excluded, not the exclusion itself. A person with pale skin or a gender identical to their birth sex (“cis”) can be excluded and has no right to exclude. A person with darker skin, or trans, or otherwise seen as oppressed must be allowed to exclude and must never be excluded.

There is another knot here, though, which is the matter of identification itself. Who belongs to the group of people who have the right to exclude and the right not to be be excluded) is self-defined, and often shifts without external reference point. In the case of trans-excluding “women’s only” groups, the women in the group attempted to define who belonged to the category of “Woman.”³ Others outside saw this identification incorrect because they also claimed the category of “Woman.” Here, “Woman” on the ideological level meant not just an identity to both the exclusionists and the inclusionists, but a category that would allow them access to the ability to exclude others. That is, none of the trans women who wanted to be part of the group were arguing for full inclusion (that is, allowing “cis” men in to a women’s only group), only that they themselves were part of the exclusionary category of “Woman.”

Here we can point to the really messy problem of “trans-racialism,” as seen particularly in the figure of Rachel Dolezal. Dolezal claimed inclusion in the category of “Black” despite being born with pale skin. She lived as a black woman and even became head of the NAACP chapter of Spokane, Washington before being outed as “actually a white woman.”

The general consensus is that Rachel Dolezal should be excluded from the category of “Black,” and that this is not the same as excluding trans women from the category of “Woman” because the rules for inclusion in each of those categories are different. According to one of the only in-depth discussions of this ideological problem I’ve found:

Someone cannot make themself more likely to experience the intergenerational health and economic impact of systemic racism simply by identifying as Black (much less, as philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah observes, simply by refusing the word “white”). This intergenerational inequality is inherited independently of what persons might hope, believe, or desire about themselves, or even how they present themselves. Given the severity of this inequality, we need conceptual and linguistic tools that illuminate populations that inherit this inequality, and are thereby entitled to reparations. We believe the importance of preserving these tools vastly outweighs the good of respecting Diallo’s or Krug’s racial self-identification. Moreover, this logic cannot be wielded against transgender-inclusive gender classification for the simple reason that gender inequality is not accrued intergenerationally and that it affects both transgender and cisgender women. Put simply, then, we think that transracial-inclusive race classification would undermine our ability to track racial inequality, and for reasons that are irrelevant in the case of transgender-inclusive gender classification.

That is, being part of “Woman” requires only self-identification⁴, but being part of “Black” requires showing that you suffer the oppression and inequality of that category.

There is an unaddressed problem in this framework, however, which is that some people in the “Black” category (for instance, recent immigrants from Africa or people with ancestors who were not slaves in the United States) cannot necessarily be said to have suffered the same ancestral and historical oppression as others in that category.⁵ One thinks immediately here of Barack Obama (whose father was Kenyan) versus the average black man in Detroit (whose father was likely the descendent of African slaves).

There have also been recent moves to formulate an internal division of “Black” according to this problem, leading to some people being de-classified as actually “Black.” For instance, a Nigerian-born Marxist comrade of mine has been repeatedly told she is not really “Black” and cannot therefore speak about “Blackness” because her ancestors were not kidnapped and sold into slavery in the colonies. That is, she is excluded from the category of “Black” or is a completely different kind of “Black” because her ancestors’ experience (rather than her skin color or own experience) disqualifies her from inclusion.

The same knot occurs in “Gay” as a classification as well. I am part of this “Gay” category, but so also are people whose experiences and material conditions are completely different from mine. For instance, I have no sense of shared suffering or oppression with wealthy gay men with conservative or mainstream liberal politics, yet we supposedly belong to the same ideologically-formed oppression category of “Gay.” I’ve seen many trans people report a similar lack of connection to people like Caitlin Jenner (a conservative and wealthy trans woman, net worth $100 million), just as many black people have said they feel that billionaires Oprah Winfrey ($2.6 billion) or Robert F. Smith of Vista Equity ($7.2 billion) are not really the same sort of “Black” that they are.

Here we can see this current knot of exclusion is really a knot of identity. Who belongs to a certain category is defined by nebulous and often unstated emotional positions, and these shifting categories are defined just as much from outside the group as they are from within. This is because they are based on perceived ideological power relations without reference to material conditions, only to signs.

The primary sign for power in American society is skin color, thus making it possible to say that a penniless homeless man with pale skin is part of the same category of “White” as Donald Trump ($2.4 billion⁶). The second sign for power is maleness, or specifically “cis” maleness: thus, that same homeless man with pale skin is seen as having more power (or privilege, or is more oppressive) than Alice Walton ($62.3 billion) or Hillary Clinton ($120 million).

The next symbol is sexuality and gender identification, meaning that, if the pale skinned homeless man is a straight “cis” man, he still has more perceived power than lesbian Megan Ellison ($1.5 billion), trans women Jennifer Pritzker ($1.8 billion) and black trans woman Laverne Cox ($2 million).

I quote the net worth of these figures in order to underline that there is another possible configuration here that does not rely on ideological identity categories at all. This is my Marxism showing, perhaps, but the knot of identity could potentially be unraveled more easily if we tried also pulling on the threads of wealth and material conditions. But of course, doing so would then require an entirely different conception of identity and exclusion based on material circumstances rather than symbolic conceptions of power.

The problem with these symbolic conceptions of power and identity is that they are are incoherent (internally inconsistent and contradictory: literally, “not sticking together”). They are ultimately based on individual feelings and perceptions about which other groups have more power and which ones have less; with no reference to material circumstances, only to competing identity categories.

That is how a group of gay men such as the Radical Faeries could justify to themselves excluding women and heterosexuals, because they saw those others as having more symbolic power than they do. Similarly, those who create exclusive “safe spaces” for trans people sees cis people having more power than they do, but conversely, a group of women who excludes trans women sees trans women as having more symbolic power. Also, “BIPOC” groups see “White” people as having more power and thus exclude them, but in some conceptions “White” includes Asians, pale-skinned Jews, and even some African-born people⁷ because they see those people as not BIPOC.⁸

If this feels exhausting, it’s useful to remember that there was once a coherent reason for these discussions around identity. These classifications were once rooted in the material question about wealth, not symbolic power.

Identity discourse was first proposed as a way of understanding how the descendants of African slaves were continuously barred from access to wealth and the very means of survival, just as feminism’s original query was why women were relegated to unpaid domestic servitude and barred from the political processes by which they could change their economic status.

But this feels like ancient history now, and the matter of material conditions has been long forgotten, replaced instead by social power and identity discourse. And it’s all completely knotted up in itself, which is why I suspect this sudden trend towards increasing exclusion has arisen.

We should remember the reason why racial segregation is oppressive: it sorts access to wealth and the means to production according to skin color and the false ideological construction of race. Being “colored” meant you could not participate in parts of the economy: you could not get certain jobs, could not live in certain places, could only receive substandard education, could not receive loans, could not even go into certain stores or restaurants or open up certain businesses. This same process occurred to women (especially in the matter of equal pay, university participation, the right to vote or make legal decisions for yourself), and for homosexuals (the right to transfer or co-own property through marriage and inheritance).

Removing these exclusions was the core focus of justice movements for the last 150 years, but such work has been set aside in order to fight more esoteric and non-material injustices on the undefinable terrain of social interactions. Because they have no reference to the material, they have no clear goals or end points. Like wars on other abstract things (The War on Drugs, The War on Terror), the “enemy” is always unclear and the battle lines constantly shifting, as well as the core logic of the fight itself. And eventually this drift opens up new ideological problems and erodes its own foundation.

Exclusion versus Radical Inclusion

Here it is worth asking: is there such a thing as a right to exclude?

Exclusion does appear to be a natural and very human tendency. The moment you define a group you have also defined who is not in that group. “My family” is a group inclusive of all people who are part of my family and exclusive of everyone in the world who is not, just as “Black People” is a group inclusive of all those defined as “Black” and exclusive of all people who are not defined that way.

Similarly, when I invite a group of friends over for dinner, I have excluded everyone in the world from that dinner except those people. I don’t exclude them because I am an asshole: I exclude them because I cannot fit 7 billion people in my home and definitely cannot afford to make them all dinner.

Also, there are times when I just want to invite just my gay friends for dinner, or just my female friends. This is exclusion, but it harms no one, because I am not making a statement about the nature of the people I did not invite to dinner that night, nor am I causing them to go hungry. And in these cases, the invitation is based first on a positive relational premise: they are friends first.

That’s where the basic nature of exclusion differs from ideological exclusion. A group of people who want to gather together for relational reasons isn’t causing harm to anyone by doing so, and we would look askance at anyone who insists on inclusion in that group when they are not invited. I’ve no interest in crashing someone’s wedding or dinner party or funeral, nor of forcing my way into a meeting of Jehovah’s Witnesses, or a women’s discussion on menstruation, or a trans support group’s weekly coffee gathering, or a straight sex party.

Also, when a group is one I feel I should be included in but have been excluded from it regardless, my own reaction is usually “okay, well fuck you too then” rather than forcing my way in. I’ve been forbidden entry into several gay clubs because I didn’t look or act “gay” enough, and not invited to friends’ parties because of other people who would be there, or not notified of certain meetings because my input wasn’t welcome. Rejection and being excluded is a part of life, and at least in my case it has usually led me to host my own events or gatherings instead.

Exclusion is harmless when it has no ideological or material consequences, and so some of the moral panic about the creation of “safe spaces” is likely overblown.

On the other hand, when people are excluded from access to wealth or information based on ideological categories, we usually recognize these situations immediately (again, racial segregation, barring women from positions of power, etc) and work to stop that exclusion.

However, in cases where an exclusion is defined by an ideological category rather than a relational one, there will probably always be inevitable strife. Thus, we should probably wonder about the long-term effects and consequences of ideological exclusions in public or semi-public events and spaces, especially because they reproduce these ideological categories as a valid means of classifying people. How people choose to associate privately isn’t really worth anyone’s attention, but setting up segregated spaces in the public sphere or at public events starts to look a lot more like the situation justice movements were fighting to abolish only a few decades ago.

Here we can look to the fight for public accommodations and accessibility for people with disabilities as a better guide to this. The ultimate goal of such accomodations is not to give one group a sense of separation, but to remove barriers that bodily prevent them from participating in public spaces.

In some cases, such accomodations have required separate entrances or dedicated elevators, or special rooms equipped with hearing aids, or special areas set aside for people who need to view a sign language translator. And of course there are the exclusive parking spaces, and bathrooms set aside for people with mobility issues.

The logic of accomodation is of radical inclusion, making sure everyone can participate. It is grounded in the bodies of the people being accomodated—their specific material conditions and needs—rather than an ideological classification. Also, there is an end point and an ultimate goal to the logic of accomodation: the creation of situations in where no one is unnecessarily excluded.

It is possible that the current push for more exclusion through “safe spaces” is a mere temporary step or an accomodation towards radical inclusion. If so, it should absolutely be fully supported. But I’ve seen little evidence that this is the goal, or that it has an end point, or even has any reference to the material conditions of the people doing the exclusion. Instead, it so far appears only to reinforce separatist identity categories and to tighten the knot of exclusion, positing one group as bad (or oppressive, etc) and another group as good (i.e.; oppressed).

There may be no other way forward, however, especially in increasingly fractured societies like the United States. The trend seem to be leading towards increased separatism based on identity categories, a new “separate but equal.” That bodes poorly for any long term justice work or hope for class consciousness, which should make us ask who ultimately benefits from such divisions.

1. And there is a larger issue at play here regarding claims that “Western” herbalism is appropriative, that the use of certain herbs is “closed” to those of European descent, and also that there is no historic tradition of herbalism in Europe. To these points one can simply sigh, or mention the many ancient Greek texts regarding the uses of herbs, up through the medieval herbals of Hildegard von Bingen, as well as the historic fact that the use of herbs was one of the crimes related to European witchcraft.

2. Some older transsexuals still identify this way on the West Coast and hold tightly to this name. I once witnessed a really explosive argument between two older trans women and a just-out-of-Evergreen trans man. The latter had told them they were oppressing other trans people by calling themselves “trannies.” They told the younger one that they “earned that name” and will never give it up.

3. When referring to identities as abstract and contested ideological categories in this essay I will put them in quotation marks.

4. This essay, again commendable for being one of the few to actually look at the ideological problems of this situation rather than falling back on dogma or faith statements, unfortunately falls short elsewhere. It asserts that while there are no historical/material conditions that can be used to define women, the same is not true for racial categories. That is, race is a category with “more” material basis (though they argue against essentialism) than sex or gender, despite race being a much newer historical and politically-created category.

5. The ideological formation “global anti-blackness” was proposed at least in part to help solve the problem of these differing ancestral and historical situations.

6. I had to read that number several times. I thought he was richer, or at least richer than Oprah Winfrey.

7. This is called “Multiracial Whiteness,” and yes people take this concept seriously.

8. As mentioned in my essay A Plague of Gods: Cultural Appropriation and the Resurgent Left Sacred, BIPOC has two functional and somewhat contradictory meanings. The first is Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color, meaning all people of color with an emphasis on Black and Indigenous people. The second, used especially in some campuses, on Twitter and Tumblr, and in the Pacific Northwest, is People of Color who are Black or Indigenous. This latter definition asserts that Black and Indigenous people have a common experience of oppression that is not shared with Asian immigrants or “white-passing” Jewish people; therefore those people can be excluded from such events and from discourse.