Your racial identity should not be your moral guidance system

The Religion Of Identity.

“By the way, what you all know but most people don't know, unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things."  - Joe Biden 

There is a difference between being ethnically black and politically black, said Nicole Hannah-Jones.  

"You know, the fate of us negro students is a little like that of a courier: at the moment of leaving home we do not know if we shall ever return,”

"And what does that return depend on?” asked Pierre. 

"It is maybe that we are captured at the end of our itinerary, vanquished by our adventure itself. It suddenly occurs to us that, all along our road, we have not ceased to metamorphose ourselves, and we see ourselves as other than what we were. Sometimes, the metamorphosis is not even finished. We have turned ourselves into hybrids, and there we are left.  Then we hide ourselves, full of shame."

Ambiguous Adventure, part 2 chapter 1, by Sheikh Hamidou Kane 

In the race discourse today, a lot is made about identity and its meaning.  What does it mean to be black, or a woman, and what, as a consequence, does it entail for the people who have these identities? 

For me, being black is not a substantial part of who I am. It is merely the color of my skin. However, to some, identity is playing the role that religions once did, offering ‘dos’ and ‘don'ts’ and the instruction manual for how to move in the world.

For black identity in particular, The Religion is incredibly strict. Think about it: whenever you hear that something is white, replace the word white, with ‘haram’. Within the Islamic faith and culture, these are things that are deemed forbidden. Once you do that, you understand the predicament that we are in. If Marxism was the religion of the 20th century, identity is certainly the religion of the 21st.

The Nicole Hannah-Jones quote is illustrative of this. How can someone be politically black? Unless you are thinking of blackness not as a color but as a package of memes. So in theory, one can be ethnically Irish but politically white, and someone can be ethnically Russian but politically Chinese. Does this make sense? No, it does not. But this is not something rational; this is a faith. An austere faith that has a severe impact on the secular world. When something is declared white, it has become othered and off-limits to those who are not white.

This is a phenomenon that has been written about before; however, I do not believe that a complete understanding of the problem has been articulated. The notion of what blackness is to some is not a race; it is an ideology. This is how people can come up with terms like ‘multiracial whiteness’, as there is a conception of blackness and whiteness that goes beyond skin and into the realm of ideas. This is how people with dark skin can be told by people of lighter skin that they are blacker because they think differently to them. If we believe that race is fiction, then we must not affix values, characteristics, and ideals to it. 

Perhaps you are thinking that this does not make sense. After all, isn’t America a multiethnic country whose history and narrative were shaped by many different races? And as a consequence, shouldn’t American history not be seen as white but as an example of a grand multiethnic achievement? I would agree; however, the identity I am describing sees itself as different and separate, and sees mainstream American culture as white. To those who think of being black as comparable to having a belief system, associating yourself with non-black things is contrary to who they are. But to call something black is to deem it opposite to white, which means if studying is white, then not studying is black. And if meritocracy is white, then what is its opposite? Cronyism? The harmfulness of this thinking should be obvious.

These memes are not inclusive, they are extremely separatist, and go against what America is. To be an American is to be part white, part black, part Cherokee, and part Hispanic. We are polyethnic and are becoming more polyethnic as we speak.  We cannot continue to use the binary of black and white to describe American culture because without one, you could never have the other. Continuing to treat race like an ideology does not advance diversity, but actually negates its very existence.

We must teach people that the amount of melanin in their skin is of no consequence to how they should act as people. They are the heirs of the complete and total richness of culture the world has to offer. They can learn Mandarin, Urdu, and Arabic if they want, and these decisions can be made because these cultures are as much theirs as they are everyone else’s. This is the beauty and advantage of living in the 21st century. Take full advantage of this. Many people sacrificed things that were important to them to make this a reality. We can now continue to think of race as nothing more than the fiction it is because we have way more commonalities than differences. And the only thing that gives the fiction of race power is belief in it.

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Original publication - https://www.theequianoproject.com/articles/identity-as-a-moral-guidance-system-worthie-springer