Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity
232
Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity
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Overview
Beginning with an examination of the concept of identity as it figures in philosophical and political thought, Gibel Azoulay moves on to consider and compare the politics and traditions of the Black and Jewish experience in America. Her inquiry draws together such diverse subjects as Plessy v. Ferguson, the Leo Frank case, "passing," intermarriage, civil rights, and anti-Semitism. The paradoxical presence of being both Black and Jewish, she argues, leads questions of identity, identity politics, and diversity in a new direction as it challenges distinct notions of whiteness and blackness. Rising above familiar notions of identity crisis and cultural confrontation, she offers new insights into the discourse of race and multiculturalism as she suggests that identity can be a more encompassing concept than is usually thought. Gibel Azoulay adds her own personal history and interviews with eight other Black and Jewish individuals to reveal various ways in which interracial identities are being lived, experienced, and understood in contemporary America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822382300 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/13/1997 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 310 KB |
About the Author
Katya Gibel Azoulay is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Africana Studies Program at Grinnell College
Read an Excerpt
Black, Jewish, and Interracial
It's Not the Color of Your Skin, but the Race of Your Kin & Other Myths of Identity
By Katya Gibel Azoulay
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1997 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8230-0
CHAPTER 1
PERSPECTIVES ON IDENTITY/IES
"(Identity) designates something like a person's understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being" (Taylor 1992, 25).
This chapter represents an intellectual exercise: my intent is to deliberately trouble, in order to transcend, the divide imposed between theory and practice. There are different ways to consider what the signifier "identity" conveys, and the context is critical to such attention. My concern with "identity" here is not the word as an image of thought — a mental construct. Instead, the focus is, on the one hand, on particular people, in a specific historical moment and geographical location and, on the other hand, the actualization of the phenomenon that "identity" connotes: a continuous process of being as becoming. Identity, then, can also refer to a practice originating in and manifested through social interaction.
Before proceeding, it cannot be overemphasized that the centrality of politics is my point of departure and return. I will argue that identity has meaning only in the context of self and other and, in the twentieth century at least, politics are inherently embedded in the encounter between the two entities. A person's self-understanding of who s/he is, is always undergoing refinement and modification. Emphasizing the theory of identity as a continuous process that transcends the dichotomous notion of public/private reveals the profound significance of context — separate and apart from content. Aspects of one's identity can be dormant, intuitively felt, explicitly articulated, or translated into action: each as a process of being as becoming. However, it is the context of social interaction that may infuse content into, but will always make meaningful, an understanding of self that refers to the phenomenon and practice of identity. In other words, I propose a theory of identity that is founded on and which makes possible those multiple standpoint positions from which an individual or a community can begin to reflect. I agree with Nancy Fraser's recommendation to move away from psychoanalytic models and toward an increased attention to identity construction in relation to public discursive arenas (1994, 97n.25).
How to theorize the multiple ways in which individuals come to understand who they are as well as how they internalize and articulate this understanding integrates questions about interpretation, representation, and politics. Specifically, in confronting these areas of inquiry a scholar's description can slip into prescription, producing what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as a "theory effect." His theory of practice and models of pedagogy attempt to address theorizing and the (reproduction of self-evident truths. Bourdieu insists on unveiling processes that produce and naturalize predispositions. He demonstrates how, through schooling and family, one learns and internalizes a particular vision of the world, a way of seeing and thinking.
By taking into account the various ways in which public discourses on BlackJewish relations and on procreation, marriage, and sexual relations across race lines have been constituted, one may address the effect this has on thinking about Black/Jewish identities. Bourdieu's discussion of classes thus corresponds to this comprehensive ethnographic approach:
At the risk of unwittingly assuming responsibility for the acts of constitution of whose logic and necessity they are unaware, the social sciences must take as their object of study the social operations of naming and the rites of institution through which they are accomplished. But on a deeper level, they must examine the part played by words in the construction of social reality and the contribution which the struggle over classifications, a dimension of ail class struggles, makes to the constitution of classes — classes defined in terms of age, sex or social position, but also clans, tribes, ethnic groups or nations. (1991, 105; italics added).
An "interracial" child of a Black parent and a Jewish parent can always and often will be designated as both Black and Jewish. Membership (ascriptive or voluntary) in one or both communities manifests the experiential dimension of race and the complexity of giving Jewishness meaning in a secular world. Considering what happens at the intersection of these two different frames of reference as a "context of being" brings into relief questions of alienation, subjective positions, and social experiences, as well as the place of history and memory as a cornerstone for cohesive identities (as opposed to the fragmentation suggestive of a postmodernist mood).
Identity encompasses and incorporates the cognitive and experiential fact of being and belonging in various subject positions marked by social boundaries. The incentive directing this text favors a focus on the understanding individuals have of themselves as members of different and varying sized communities. This understanding will be referred to as identities. As a methodological strategy, the careful consideration of identities as existential, ideological, and historical modes of self-definition in relation to the world is intended to make visible and clarify procedures and strategies employed in the assemblage and disruptions of identities.
Anthropologist Ivan Karp has prudently commented, "all attempts to understand life in its wholeness are philosophical." In that context, this chapter draws on and integrates insights from philosophy that elucidate particularly compelling theoretical propositions. Specifically, the following discussion is engaged primarily, though not only, with the ideas of Hannah Arendt, Jean Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Frantz Fanon. It seems to me that these thinkers, writing against the horror of racism and anti-Semitism, emphasize the power of the public sphere on the construction and reproduction of identities.
Chapters 2 and 3 take up more empirical discussions of interracial, Jewish, and Black identities. I will suggest that the experience and articulation of racial identities manifest an ongoing dialectical relationship between dimensions of the private self (which acquire meaning only in relation to others) and a public sphere where the variable of "race" — as a social fact — changes the texture and contour of relations between human beings as individuals and as members of social groups precisely because it is in this public space that race acquires its rhetorical, conceptual, and legal salience. This chapter, leaning toward a discussion of the public self, begins with the issue of self and identity from philosophical perspectives.
The anxiety that propels and suspends any conclusive resolution to philosophical discourse reveals the predicament of any discussion on identity. And I intentionally use the word "anxiety," for it seems to me that the philosophical quest for an understanding of the meaning of beingness arises from an original uncertainty about humankind: our relation to the external world and to each other. Existential questions that inform moral and ethical issues are fundamentally linked to the delicate problem of identity. This can be illustrated by two questions that subtly underline a reflection on identity: who am H and what am I?
Hannah Arendt refers to Augustine, who introduced these anthropological questions into philosophy. One poses the question to one's self and answers that who is a concrete material presence in the world. It expresses an assertion of particularity and uniqueness — one is a named identifiable physical presence distinguished from someone else or, as Sartre put it in Being and Nothingness, "The other is the one who is not me and the one I am not" (1966, 312).
The question of time and evolving identities is not always addressed by individuals. In our everyday lives, we usually do not think of ourselves as unfinished projects. In general, when faced with the question "Who are you?" one's basic tendency is to reduce and temporalize one's self with regard to others: instead of self-representation as a being in the process of becoming, a series of facts from the past are (re)cited. These are intended to establish the individual as different than, or set apart from, another individual.
Sartre critiques this response as one governed by a process of selective information, which, in turn, evidences the failure to apprehend the self as a totality. As he demonstrates in Being and Nothingness, one cannot simultaneously be the subject and object of reflection. The reflecting I does not correspond to the I reflected upon and, therefore, all our efforts to present ourselves in terms of time are futile. The present and past do not meet, and the complexity and unfolding dimension of selves, always in the process of creation, is occluded.
The question "What am I" addresses a very different inquiry. It orients both the question of one's qualities and of ontological status: What does beingness signify? How does beingness acquire meaning? However, this too is often inadequately answered by presenting a series of facts concerning one's material presence or one's socially confirmed status: I am a woman, I am an American, I am an educator, and so on. Hannah Arendt, concerned with the nature of the human condition at the level of concrete intersubjective relations, leaves the question "What am I?" to theological exegesis, in which the issue of human nature is inextricably linked to questions about the nature of God (1989, 11). She notes that
[i]n acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of their voice. (1989, 179)
Similar to Sartre, Arendt contends that the projected "who" is concealed from the individual him/herself and only partially accessible to others,
The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him. (1989, 181)
The specificity of an individual's uniqueness cannot be grasped in language, yet individuals are linked through action and speech. It is this inter-est (Arendt 1989,182) that is subjective and intangible and which Arendt calls "the 'web' of human relationships, indicating by the metaphor its somewhat intangible quality" (1989, 183).
It is through action and speech that individuals reveal themselves always and foremost as "subjects, as distinct and unique persons." Although the philosophical question of and approach to Being intersects uncomfortably with theology, the philosophical endeavor highlights important issues that anticipate and evidence the limitations any theory of identity can advance when the focus is on the isolated self. The "I" may be thought as analogous to a blank canvas that is filled only at death. Both Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas adopt this view of the individual as an incomplete project whose essence "can come into being only when life departs leaving behind nothing but a story" (Arendt 1989, 193).
Identity is always, and can only be, defined in front of others (regardless of their physical presence). Without falling in a mistaken diagnosis of schizophrenia, the self can be conceptualized as both stable and under continual reformulations. Or, as Levinas articulates it, "the Other as Other is not only an alter ego: the Other is what I myself am not" (1992, 48). As will be shown, Levinas is not presenting self-definition as a negation in the conflictual mode found in Cartesian perspectives, but rather self defined contextually — with others.
The Cartesian cogito reassures a sense of (inner) self through inference— thinking is a necessary but insufficient condition to bridging a distinction between one's actual presence in the world and the essence of one's being. Descartes's method of deduction, in which he can only be certain that the capacity to doubt is unequivocal evidence that one is doubting, is ultimately unsatisfying and potentially threatening for it tends toward a solipsistic perspective.
The Cartesian cogito, according to Paul Ricoeur, represents a "truth as vain as it is invincible" and is also false consciousness (Ricoeur 1974, 17-18). He maintains that it is through the mediation of the exterior world that the subject of the cogito acquires significance. Existence is translated into a sense of self that acquired meaning only through the network of relationships established within the material world and with other human beings (Ricoeur 1974, 22). Descartes's concern, in contrast, is solely with the existence of consciousness as a privileged and original point of certainty, separate from, but analogous to, the spatial world of external objects (Levinas 1992, 18).
Charles Taylor, a political scientist, philosopher, and leading proponent of hermeneutics, notes that the fundamentally dialogical character of human life is "rendered almost invisible by the overwhelmingly monological bent of mainstream modern philosophy" (1992, 32). He centers his attention on the dialectic of identity (which is socially derived) and the modern quest for recognition. In this regard, Taylor comments on identity at two levels. He argues that in the intimate sphere, "We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us" (1992, 34). In the public sphere, according to Taylor, "the modern notion of identity" has brought the politics of difference and the politics of universalism into conflict while both principles found the discourse of recognition (1992).
The roots of a political problem originate from this philosophical observation at the moment when the self is constituted as a community of selves distinct from another community. In his essay "History and the Dialectic," Claude Lévi-Strauss reproaches Sartre's historical analysis of the "we" of Western culture, demonstrating that Western philosophy is a sociologization of the Cartesian cogito, which poses the consciousness of the I as the only certain mode of existence.
By recognizing the Other as merely a being because I can make an analogy from observation, the "we" that Sartre moves to is a sociologization — the I thus positing They as absolute Others that we imagine: I is to the Other as the We is to the They. In drawing attention to the consequences of extending this philosophical analogy to the political realm, Levi-Strauss critiques the ethnocentricity underlying Sartre's notions of subjectivity. These, he argues, negate the reality of anthropology, which undertakes to understand society on its own rationality and which should begin with a dissolution of that European category, "man" (Lévi-Strauss 1966; 1991, 117–18).
A different approach to the question of self, identity, and the relation that this question has to other(s) can be elicited from the Judaic injunction, articulated by Hillel. This approach also offers an excellent illustration of how to envision identity/ies in the public world: "If I am not for me, who will be, but if I am only for myself, what am I." It complements another Talmudic prescription: "it is not incumbent for thee to complete the task, but thou must not therefore desist from it." This is the essence of a commitment to working for social justice. Both statements are political and invoke an imperative stipulation that individuals are part of a world in which there are other human beings to whom they are accountable and for whom they are responsible.
The existential predicament is not the nature of being or the certainty of consciousness but the manner in which, as human beings who are endowed with consciousness, they are to act in relationship with others. Hillel's injunction refuses solipsism, insists on the self as part of the material world in which others are always present, and thus brackets the absolute recourse to a divine revelation from which Augustine cannot escape. Finally, it does not rest on a relativism that harbors in its shadows an incipient hierarchical value system.
If, as I am suggesting, reflections on identity necessarily invoke the issue of the nature of being, and if, in turn, these reflections render a sense of self that is at the foundation of identity, then it is essential to appreciate the dilemma provoked by questions of "who" and "what" one is, culminating finally in two irreconcilable positions that demand very different methodological strategies. One position, from Descartes to Sartre — despite the fact that the latter attempts to overcome the inconsistencies inherent in a self-centered theory —is anchored by a conception of a transcendental self that distinguishes subjectivity from consciousness, bracketing that which is exterior. Subjectivity and consciousness intersect at the moment when an identity is thinkable. To be the subject of one's consciousness is to project some sense of self. Thus even Sartre allows for, at least, a partial —an incomplete — definition of who one is through the encounter with others.
In other words, it is through a process of scissiparity, in which the failure to apprehend oneself as a totality but rather as a being-forothers, that one is aware of and produces a plurality of invented selves to accommodate any given or specific situation. As a being-for-others, one has a sense of being incomplete and therefore partially out of control. We can always be terrorized by this fundamental inability to see ourselves as others perceive us. Consequently, how we project ourselves is, above all, a response to what we assume are the social expectations demanded of us. And this supposition need not be conscious — quite to the contrary.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black, Jewish, and Interracial by Katya Gibel Azoulay. Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
CONTENTSAcknowledgments
Prelude: Identities and the Logic of Coupling
1. Perspectives on Identity/ies
2. Contexts, Social Categories, and Conditions of Possibility
3. Black, Jewish, and Interracial (I)
4. Black, Jewish, and Interracial (II)
Coda
References
Index