The Metaphysics of Woke Identity

Transracialism, Transgenderism, and the dialectic of the soul

Note: I’m currently in the final stages of my manuscript on Woke Ideology. This has involved writing for many hours a day, which means it’s been a bit difficult to also write essays here (I may be verbose, but there are only so many words I can write in a day…).

So, I’m posting this short excerpt of a section of the manuscript which deals with Woke “Anti-Racism” (as an ideological formation, not just being against racism—in other words, Anti-Racism™) and the brilliant critiques the black Marxist writer Dr. Adolph Reed, Jr has already made of it. For those who do not already know, Reed was famously deplatformed/canceled by a black caucus of the DSA for being a “class reductionist” and “reactionary” because he refuses to believe all social ills can be explained by racism.

The section I am posting below starts with some final notes regarding his ideas (many previous pages in the manuscript are devoted to them). I included these because the next section, which deals with the matter of transracialism and transgenderism, rely heavily on his observations and would make less sense without them.

Also, while my open manuscript notes series is usually for paid supporters only, because I’ve not written something for everyone in the last few days I’m making this one available to everyone. Please feel free to share this, and if you would like to read the previous installments of this series, please consider becoming a paid supporter.

Love to you all!

—Rhyd

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A final and crucial point Adolph Reed makes throughout his critiques of Anti-Racism is that race and racism both take on a kind of mystical or esoteric quality disconnected from material reality or practical discourse. Such a mysticism can be seen clearly in Ta-Nahisi Coates’ description of whiteness as a “bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them,” or in the repeated claims on sites such as Everyday Feminism that all white people have inherent privilege regardless of their actions or material conditions, paralleling the Catholic idea of Original Sin.

Reed likewise notices the religious language in multiple essays:

Racism and white supremacy don’t really explain how anything happens. They’re at best shorthand characterizations of more complex, or at least discrete, actions taken by people in social contexts; at worst, and, alas, more often in our political moment, they’re invoked as alternatives to explanation. In that sense they function, like the Nation of Islam’s Yacub story, as a devil theory: racism and white supremacy are represented as capable of making things happen in the world independently, i.e. magically. This is the fantasy expressed in formulations like racism is America’s “national disease” or “Original Sin”—which, incidentally, are elements of the liberal race relations ideology that took shape in postwar American political discourse precisely as articulations of a notion of racial equality that was separated from political economy and anchored in psychology and individualist notions of prejudice and intolerance.¹

And also:

Those quotidian realities put pressure on the reductionist premise that racial subordination remains the dominant ideological or material framework generating and sustaining systemically reproduced inequalities and class power. This tension underlies a source the appeal of ontological views of racism as an animate force that transcends time and context. Because it is an evanescent Evil that is disconnected from specific human purposes and patterns of social relations, racism, again like “terrorism,” can exist anywhere at any time under any manifest conditions and is a cause that needs no causes or explanation.²

Bloody Heirlooms and the Woke Soul

Adolph Reed’s analysis of the esoteric or mystical nature of race and racism within the neoliberal Anti-Racist framework helps elucidate specific contradictions we often encounter within Woke Ideology. For instance, Woke Ideology generally concedes that race has no biological or physical basis and is instead a social construct. However, race is posited as something that cannot be transcended or switched because race is something nevertheless inherent (and inherited) in individuals.

This contradiction is seen best in the matter of Rachel Dolezal, a self-identified transracial woman who was outed by her parents as being white in 2015. During that time, Dolezal was the chapter president of the Spokane, Washington National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and had been living as a black woman for many years.

Outrage over Dolezal took several forms, including accusations that she culturally appropriated blackness and that by being in her role of chapter president of a black organization she had stolen the job from a deserving black person.³ As the revelations about her occurred at roughly the same time that several celebrities publicly identified as trans women (most notably Caitlyn Jenner), Dolezal’s claim to be transracial initiated a significant popular and academic debate about transgenderism and transracialism.

It’s also worth noting that these debates occurred at a particularly contentious political moment in the United States, a time when social justice, intersectional feminism, police killings of black people, and the alt-right were constant discussion topics on social media. That moment saw the sudden popularity of sites like Everyday Feminism, relentless media attention to Alt-Right figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer, and violent Antifa protests against them. Black Lives Matter protests had also just begun the year before, and 2015 later became dominated by the extreme rhetoric of the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.

Rachel Dolezal’s claim to transracialism during such a time should be seen as a politically important moment, because transracialism represented a doctrinal threat to the foundations of the newly-forming Woke Ideological formation, especially to the early unification of anti-racist politics with the new conceptions of gender and identity.

The doctrinal threat can be summarised quite simply, as it was the common response by many to the matter: “if a person can change their gender, why can they not change their race?” The corrolary to that question was also asked, “if you cannot change your race, doesn’t that mean you cannot change your gender?”

What was really at stake was the matter of identity and especially of declarative identity. From the logic of declarative gender, not only can individuals define for themselves their gender identity, society is then obligated to accept and acknowledge their declarations. In other words, if a person was born a man, has male and even very masculine features, yet says he is a woman, then he therefore is and it is bigoted and oppressive (specifically transphobic) to act or think otherwise. By this same logic, however, if a woman who was born to white parents and lived most of her life appearing as a white woman then claims to be a black woman, she would also need to be accepted as such.

Of course, the really severe backlash against Dolezal’s claim to transracialism revealed that most people were quite unwilling to accept this. Black activists and media figures were particularly vociferous in their attacks on her and on transracialism in general. Several noted in particular that transracialism could not easily occur in both directions: that is, though it might be possible for a white person to “pass” successfully as a black person, a black person with particularly dark skin would not be so successful.

Such an argument, however, became a challenge to the logic of trans identity, since “passing” as the opposite gender is not considered a prerequisite to actually being trans. In fact, the idea that a trans person should successfully appear as their declared gender is considered to be transphobic and a bigoted enforcement of patriarchal gender norms.

What arose from these contradictions can be seen as a dialectical conclusion which, like most such conclusions, created a new contradiction. Importantly, that conclusion resulted in a rather metaphysical and esoteric conception of identity closely resembling the idea of a soul. This can be seen best in the most definitive response to conflict between transgenderism and transracialism, an explanation by two academics published in the Boston Review several years later:

...being Black isn’t simply a matter of internal identification; it is also a matter of how your community and ancestors have been treated by other people, institutions, and governments. Given this, we think that race classification should (continue to) track—as accurately as possible—intergenerationally inherited inequalities.

...Notice that this argument does not apply in the case of gender and gender inequality. Gender inequality, unlike racial inequality, does not primarily accumulate intergenerationally, if only for the obvious reason that the vast majority of households are multi-gendered. While parents often are responsible for ingraining patriarchal ideas and rigid gender norms in their children (it is extremely difficult to avoid!), this is not a “passing down” of socioeconomic inequality itself but, rather, of a socialization that perpetuates gender inequality.

We think that the reasons in favor of trans-inclusive gender classification outweigh the reasons against it, and that the reasons against transracial-inclusive race classification outweigh the reasons for it.

This is not to say that gender inequality is ahistorical. To the contrary, gender inequality is rooted in historical and continuing manifestations of sexism and misogyny, from policies that economically exploit women and undermine their reproductive autonomy to social practices like sexual harassment and rape culture. Young girls inherit the same sexism and misogyny that their mothers faced as young girls, regardless of whether they are transgender or cisgender. But importantly, all women inherit the historical accumulation of societal sexism. This marks a central difference between transgender-inclusive classification in the category “woman” and transracial-inclusive classification in the category “Black.” While transracial individuals like Krug and Diallo eschew much of the weight of anti-Black oppression and white supremacy, trans women and cis women alike are burdened by the legacy of patriarchy.

...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.⁴

In other words, though there may be no genetic or biological traits that form the basis of race, racial inequality is nevertheless an inherited trait, something that “accrues intergenerationally.” A black person inherits racial inequality, while a trans person does not inherit gender inequality. Racial inequality, then, is something transmitted or inherited, something a person is born with or into, and thus it cannot be transcended.

Adolph Reed’s observation that anti-racism poses racism and white privilege as a kind of animate force or Original Sin is instructive here. Teasing out the consequences of “intergenerationally-inherited” inequality, we see that it mirrors the Woke Ideological belief that a white person is born into privilege and also cannot transcend their whiteness. Thus, race can be posited as an essential or inherent feature that bears with it inviolable traits without actually being related to the physical body of the person (race as an essential or biological trait) at all.

To sound a bit like a medieval theologian for a moment, where then do these inherited traits actually reside if not in the body? The answer appears to be within a non-physical body both external and internal to the individual, occupying a social space through its intangible yet really-existing social reality. In other words, a soul.

A white person therefore cannot become a black person because they bear the indelible mark of whiteness (privilege that always operates and benefits them), just as a black person bears the indelible mark of blackness (inequality they inherit intergenerationally that will always disfavor them in social, economic, and political relations). But because race has no basis in physical reality (again, it is a constructed/made-up category created during the Enlightenment and the birth of capitalism), it is located outside physical reality just as the soul is seen to be in Christian theology.

The soul plays out also in the Woke Ideological framework of gender, but in a slightly different way. Gender, like race, is seen as an indelible and inviolable part of a person irrespective of physical reality (sex), and described as an internal sense:

Gender identity refers to one’s internal sense of feeling masculine, feminine, both, somewhere in between, or neither. Like many things that people experience internally, there is also a desire to express that outwardly, which is why gender identity can influence gender expression…

…Similar to sexual orientation, gender identity is generally viewed by therapists as something that people are born with, and not something they “choose”.

Thus, a trans person was born trans but mistakenly “assigned” the wrong gender or sex at birth. One doesn’t become trans, then, but rather brings their outward gender expression (and optionally, through hormones or surgery, their body) in line with their actual gender identity. That identity, as with race, is located somewhere outside of the physical characteristics of the person or “inside,” just as the eternal soul was described as both external to yet internally animating the physical flesh.

Thus, Woke Ideology—probably without ever realising it had done so—has re-created the metaphysical category of a soul in order to allow for transgenderism but exclude transracialism. That soul is both raced and gendered, but derives its race from generational inheritance (original sin) while deriving its gender from something fully transcendent to and independent of the flesh.

This leads to the fragile contradictions between the “sins” of white privilege and male privilege, another dialectical conflict awaiting resolution. Rachel Dolezal cannot be allowed to claim transracial identity because she cannot be allowed to escape her white privilege. On the other hand, a male immediately loses his male privilege when recognised as trans, because, as in the evangelical conversion moment, he becomes always-already trans woman, retroactively forgiven of all sins through transfiguration of the body into the qualities and nature of the true, eternal soul.

1. https://nonsite.org/how-racial-disparity-does-not-help-make-sense-of-patterns-of-police-violence-2/

2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10624-017-9476-3

3. After her outing, the national body of the NAACP wrote in support of Dolezal, and she was noted by others as having revitalized the otherwise moribund Spokane chapter. Spokane’s black population at the time of Dolezal’s tenure was 3%, translating to about 6,000 people.

4. https://bostonreview.net/articles/robin-dembroff-dee-payton-breaking-analogy-between-race-and-gender/