This is going to be a long essay, likely published in multiple parts. Making the argument I am making will entail, as my English friend Tony would say, “going ‘round the houses.” So, please be patient; I promise a significant intellectual payoff by the end.
The moment I began to fully understand the collective unhinging of progressives over the unruly protest that occupied Ottawa through much of February this year was when I read a seemingly unrelated and, I initially thought, laughable editorial on National Public Radio.
Until I read the piece, I had been blissfully unaware that, since 2014, the emojis available on social media and messaging platforms have been available in an increasingly large number of possible skin tones, that the thumb in a “thumbs up” could be in a range of colours if I just scrolled down more.
NPR’s piece argued that we can better challenge “white privilege” by being more conscious of each other’s skin colours in online communication and that communication that does not foreground the race of each interlocutor is somehow problematic. The thinking seemed to be that not reminding one’s interlocutor of one’s race at every opportunity would somehow recapitulate racial oppression through online communication.
Leaving aside the intellectual legitimacy of the argument, what the piece and the various responses it touched-off in other media made clear is that people we might call leftists or progressives today (labels I have personally renounced, as a socialist and materialist) are deeply concerned by what I will term “racial transparency.”
When we talk about progressive Identiarianism, we often, myself included, focus on its novel beliefs about sex and gender i.e. that gender and sex are highly mutable characteristics driven by personal choice and individual consciousness. Furthermore, sex and gender are understood to be things about which one cannot trust one’s eyes, ears or nose, that a person with a deep voice, full body beard and a penis has an equal chance of being a man or a woman.
But, coupled with this belief in the flexibility of gender is an increasing belief in the immutability and visibility of race. Unlike sex and gender, race cannot be changed through cosmetic surgery, changes in costume, etc. because it lives in the blood and is tattooed unambiguously on the body. Acts of racial passing have gone from a virtual irrelevance in the late twentieth century to issues of global importance for the Woke. Half a decade later, everyone still knows the name of the Spokane NAACP president who got a perm and spent some time in a tanning bed to appear black, when, in fact, she was from a white family. Rachel Dolezal remains a notorious and despised person around the globe for impersonating a black person in order to hold a volunteer position in a third-tier industrial city in Eastern Washington.
In the world of the Woke, there is a clear system of incentives and disincentives instructing one on how to be a racialized person. The more one’s speech, costume and behaviour telegraph one’s non-whiteness, the more one accentuates one’s racialized status, the better-received one is. On the other hand, the more one focuses on non-racial aspects of one’s identity and minimizes differences in appearance, costume and behaviour, the more one is viewed with suspicion.
In other words, progressive Identitarians have come to see the effacement of racial difference and practices of passing as increasingly transgressive.
American progressives love black people of faith, as long as they are members of the Black Church, special religious denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church that only serve black congregants. Black Catholics, black Mormons, not so much, especially because black Mormons and Catholics often assert that their Mormonism or Catholicism is more important and relevant to them than their blackness. Similarly, Canadian progressives love and celebrate and patronize Indigenous people who are members of neo-traditionalist movements that seek to re-create pre-colonial religions like the Sundance movement and Handsome Lake Church. But those same progressives will lecture you on how it is offensive to even speak to Indigenous people about mainline Christian churches, even though far more of them are members of churches like the Catholics, Anglicans and United Church of Canada. Indeed, white progressives will sometimes depict the Christian majority of Indigenous Canadians as traitors to their own people but, more commonly, they will describe them as victims of something called “cultural genocide.”
While we now understand that efforts to coercively strip Indigenous people of their culture through institutions like the Canadian residential school system were wrong and did incalculable damage whose consequences still ravage Indigenous communities up to the present day, framing this as genocide has its own set of problems.
First, there is a problem with conflating the actual murder of people with efforts to make them change their views and values through pressure or force. Both things are clearly bad. But are they really appropriately conflated? Is changing or challenging who someone believes themselves to be really the same as killing them? That viewpoint is certainly popular these days. Saying “you are not who you say you are” is understood by progressive Identitarians as an act of genocide or attempted murder when employed to keep natal males our of women’s changing rooms.
Second, there is the problem of the many Indigenous societies that have adopted Christianity who now see it as part of their identity. The Zapatista movements of the 1920s, 1990s and present understand the Mayan people as a proudly Catholic people, who see their Catholicism as part of their culture and part of what they seek to preserve and restore, like their language and land. This should surprise exactly no one, given that every society that understands itself to be Christian has gone through this process, from the third-century Ethiopians to the fourth-century Greeks, to the ninth-century Saxons to the fourteenth-century Poles.
One of the moronic truisms of progressive thought is that cultural assimilation never works. That is because people who successfully assimilate become invisible and the only people one can find to ask about assimilation are those for whom it has failed.
But the most important problem is this: it suggests that the personhood of individual Indigenous Christians is incomplete. First, white people who choose to be Christians today are understood to be fully agentive in this choice; the choice to be baptized is wholly their own and their choice, if not respected, is at least understood to be their own choice. On the other hand, progressive Identitarians see the decision of Indigenous people to be baptized as Pentecostals or Catholics or whatever as resulting from without; they would never choose that themselves; their baptism must be a result of colonialism, capitalism or some other monstrous force that is making the choice for them. They could not possibly have chosen Christianity of their own free will.
Second, the Indigenous Christian majority are understood to be partly dead. They are the walking dead victims of the cultural genocide, people whose adoption of Christianity has killed all or a part of their spirit(s). Or maybe they are dead entirely.
Religion is not the only thing that Identitarian progressives believe renders Indigenous people dead or partly dead. White people, they believe, are uniquely “logocentric,” that the Enlightenment legacy is not a global one of which we all partake but rather a part of white supremacy. Indigenous people who reject the supernatural and champion science and classical philosophy, like BCIT’s Michael Bourke, are also victims of the genocide. So too are the Indigenous people who congregate at the Canada Day free concert at the Pacific National Exhibition to eat burgers and wave a flag or two are not so much Canadian citizens as genocide victims. Eschewing traditional dress for a business suit, moving off the reserve or out of the Indigenous ghettos in Winnipeg, Saskatoon or Vancouver into a white neighbourhood, all of these things are signs of damaged, incomplete personhood.
And that is because these Indigenous people are committing the sin of Rachel Dolezal: they are making a lie of the progressive belief in the heritability, immutability and visibility of race; they are not being racially transparent. The neo-Ottoman social order of twenty-first century progressive North America, with its aesthetically curated diversity, and its contemporary resurrection of the “a place for everyone and everyone in their place” ethos cannot be sustained in the face of widespread racial passing.
In the mind of the Identitarian progressive, there is one kind of bad non-white person: one who cannot be visually detected and consequently cannot be publicly aestheticized or tokenized.
In this context, the very worst sort of Indigenous person is the sort who refuses to construct their identity in racial terms at all, as epitomized by the husband of US vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, Todd Palin. More about Todd in part two.
