UCSD Week 6 The Politics of Ethnic Authenticity & Cultural Appropriation HW Focus on weeks 6, 7, and 9 lectures, on Nagel’s “The Politics of Ethnic Authent
UCSD Week 6 The Politics of Ethnic Authenticity & Cultural Appropriation HW Focus on weeks 6, 7, and 9 lectures, on Nagel’s “The Politics of Ethnic Authenticity:
Building Native American Identities and Communities,” on Rodriquez’s “Color-Blind
Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop,” on “What Does ‘Cultural
Appropriation” Actually Mean?”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/cultural-appropriation/521634/,
and on the videos “What is cultural appropriation” and “Cultural appropriation –
ContraPoints” (see modules in Canvas). Provide an analysis linking color-blind ideology,
identity politics, politics of identity, and cultural appropriation. How color-blind ideology
facilitates identity politics and cultural appropriation? How can politics of identity fight
color-blind ideology and cultural appropriation? How would you resolve this problem? IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
■ Authors in this lecture:
■ Charles Tilly
■ Liah Greenfeld
■ Richard Jenkins
■ Judith Howard
■ Iris Young
■ Vicki Ruiz
■ Frederick Barth
■ Identity is tied to nationalism and political issues. It highlights ties and boundaries. As
such, identities “center on boundaries separating us from them.” (Tilly, Identity,
Boundaries and Social Ties, p7).
■ To have a great mass of people to comply and agree with a few people’s decision on the
directions the community should take, one has to create a tie to the people, be of the
people, or have some significant connection to the people.
■ It answer the questions:
– Who am I?
– Who are you?
– Who are we?
– Who are they?
■ Tilly identified several dimensions of identity (pp 8-9):
■ Identities reside in relation with others: you-me and us-them
■ Strictly speaking, every individual, group, or social site has as many identities as it has
relations with other individuals, groups, or social ties
■ The same individuals, groups, and social sites shift from identity to identity as they shift
relations
■ Every political process includes assertions of identity, including definitions of relevant
us-them boundaries
■ Such assertions almost always involve claims about inequality – our superiority, our
subordination, their unjust advantages, and so on
■ Tilly, continued
■ Nevertheless, profound social processes affect which identities become salient, which
ones remain subordinate, and how frequently different identities come into play
■ Political institutions incorporate certain identities (for example, ‘citizen’ or ‘woman) and
reinforce the relation on which those identities build
■ Struggles over and within political identities have public standing, who has rights or
obligations to assert those identities, and what rights or obligations attach to any
particular identity
■ Of course, all such processes have phenomenological components and effects, but give
and take among individuals, groups, and social ties – including political contention –
create the regularities in identity expression that prevail in any particular population
■ How do we create identity? How do we identify ourselves? Why are we ascribed and
achieve characteristics thus creating and changing our identities?
The Social Construction of Identity
Identity demands us to critically examine
Essentialist ideas
and mythologies surrounding individual choice
■ Essentialism
■ Sees identity as an essence, an inherent quality or characteristic of the individual
■ Sees identity as unchanging, fixed, given, primordial
■ Sees identity as independent of context, and outside of history
■ Essentialism
■ Sometimes mapped onto biological or observable physical features, “naturalizing” or
“biologizing”
■ Related concept ‘determinism,’ or the notion that physical facts of nature or biology
cause human behavior; i.e. Africans (in race), women and GLBTQ (in gender).
■ The limits of choice
Individuals choose within a larger context:
That context includes cultural notions of what is normal and desirable or valued –
As well as what is abnormal, stigmatized, undesirable
■ Rhetoric of choice
Renders a group invisible
People’s unequal access to all kinds of resources, is taking into account
Who has and who lacks the Power to define “normal”
■ concepts
■ Michel Foucault’s concepts of ‘discipline’ and ‘power’
■ Embodiment
■ Inscription
■ Relational
■ The social construction of identity
■ Sees identity not as something inside the individual but as a social relationship – this is
the relational aspect of identity
■ Fredrik Barth defined ethnicity as “the social organization of cultural difference.”
■ Ethnicity places individuals within a group based on shared cultural practices, language,
and often national origin; the shared ethnicity creates a fictitious tie between people of
the same ethnicity that will be recalled at a moment when the group is challenged
based on their ethnicity.
■ “Mental reality … [is] the meaning people assign to their actions” (Liah Greenfeld,
quoted Tilly, p3).
■ “Nationalism, for Greenfeld, exists when people subject to a common political authority
share consciousness of belonging to a distinctive sovereign community” (Tilly, p4).
■ National identification leads to “a shared sense of dignity, efficacy, and relative equality
among the nation’s members, hence a new willingness to undertake economic beliefs”
(Tilly, p4).
■ Inclusion and belonging
■ Imply exclusion
■ Us/them
■ We define ourselves in relation to the Other
■ Cultural, linguistic, religious, etc. differences are often mapped onto or mobilized in
relation to inequality, conflict over resources, etc.
■ Conflict and identity
■ Notions of “tribal warfare” and “ethnic violence” imply that difference naturally gives
rise to conflict
■ Yet what we find in many situations where conflict has erupted is that under many
circumstances people intermarried, traded with each other, lived side by side, etc.
■ Difference does not produce conflict
■ Differences may themselves be produced by conflict
■ Polarization of us/them, either/or relationships can replace more fluid ambiguous and
cross-cutting ties or multiple memberships and
■ Concept
■ Marked and unmarked categories
■ Those who define what normal is- are unremarkable, define the other
■ What makes identity interesting
■ Tensions between individual and larger communities
■ Tensions between individual agency/”choice” and social context
■ Identity is neither innate within us, nor something totally imposed from outside, its is a
dynamic interaction between internal and external influences on a particular context.
■ Boundaries and borders
■ Immigrants in the US highlight the many boundaries, both physical and psychological,
that the immigrant must cross in order to participate in the American society
■ This focus on seeing boundaries as expressed in the many obstacles within US soil.
■ This is what Vicki Ruiz calls of “internal migration,” which refers to the process of
“creating, accommodating, resisting, and transforming the physical and psychological
environs of their new lives in the US” (From Out of the Shadows, 1998, xv)
■ This is an ongoing process of psychological, social, and cultural accommodation
undertaken by immigrants and their children
■ Internal migration and border crossing
■ Crossing physical borders provides differential access to transportation, jobs, services,
and housing.
■ Crossing psychological borders implies leaving the home country with a set of cultural
values and norms, and with a specific understanding of self and nation. The immigrant
brings within an identity developed within these cultural contexts.
■ In the process of adapting to the new country, the immigrant engage in an
accommodation process and they will slowly (or rapidly in case of children) that they
belong to a small group, to the minority, that is bounded by a larger group, or white
dominated majority.
■ “Racism and xenophobia shape both the meaning and social value attributed to [their]
ethnic identities and to their lived experience of national belonging in the contemporary
US society,” (Suzanne Oboler, “It must be a fake! Racial ideologies, identities, and the
question of rights” in Hispanics/Latinos in the United States: Ethnicity, race, and rights,
2000, pg.127)
■ For Latinos the adaptation process is complicated by US’s long history of discrimination
against and exclusion of their community.
■ The word Latino tends to group together a diverse cultural group. It is an artificially
constructed group and the term itself implies an erasure of this diversity, and
homogenizes creating an illusion of unity, common history, language, ideologies, and
practices. It implies that Latinos are a social group that originated in Latin America.
■ Iris Young defines social groups as “a collective of persons differentiated from others by
cultural forms, practices, special needs or capacities, structure of power, or privilege…
[This is] less some set of attributes its members share than the relation in which they
stand to others,” (“Structure, difference and Hispanic/Latino claims of justice,” in
Hispanics/Latinos in the United States, 2000, pg. 153)
How a group member identify themselves affects the ways in which they relate to larger
collectivities, such as their racial group in the US.
Identity then, as Judith Howard defines pertains to “a group [that] is constituted not only when
all members share the same characteristics with one another, but also when the members
stand in a particular relationship to nonmember,” (“Social Psychology of Identities” in Annual
Review of Sociology 26 (2000) 367-93).
This is a relational understanding of identity that attempts to bridge the individual level and
contextual aspects of identity formation.
It acknowledges the cognitive aspects of identity while also situating identity processes in their
social context in order to see people as a whole, and in the process recognizing that our
everyday lives and experiences within a particular culture in which we operate shape our
senses of who we are and what we can become.
■ For Latinos the sense of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we could become’ is profoundly
influenced by the experiences of crossing, and not being able to cross, multiple borders,
and we must situate our specific experiences at the intersection of power, collective
identities, place, and history.
■ We must focus on structure, agency, and power to understand that the process of
accommodation occurs in a stigmatized context, and how the exercise of power is a key
aspect of stigma.
■ Stigma is imposed on the individual and differentiates from discrimination in the forms
they are experienced:
■ Discrimination refers to denial of benefits, concrete negative experiences
■ Stigma refers to imposed characterizations, based on real or imagined attributes that
convey a social identity and which is devalued in a particular social context. Stigmas are
often based on essentialist ideas of behavior.
■ Power is key in stigmatization.
■ “Stigmatization is entirely contingent on access to social, economic and political power
that allows the identification of differentness, the construction of stereotypes, the
separation of labeled persons into distinct categories, and the full execution of
disapproval, rejection, exclusion, and discrimination,” (Link and Phelan, “Conceptualizing
Stigma” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001), pg. 367).
■ Identity Politics and the Politics of Identity
From: “Identity Politics and the Politics of Identities,” by Jonathan D. Hill and Thomas M.
Wilson, editors, in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, volume 10, number 1,
January-March 2003
■ Identity politics refers to “how culture and identity, variously perceived to be
traditional, modern, radical , local, regional, religious, gender, class, and ethnic, are
articulated, constructed, invented and commodified as the means to achieve political
ends” (2).
■ “…Discourse and action within public arenas of political and civil society, wherein
culture is used to subvert, support, protect, and attack, adn where identity cannot be
understood without some recourse to wider theorizing and comparisons of the
institutions, practices, and ideologies of national states, governments, political parties,
transnational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and international and
supranational organizations like the United Nations and the European Union” (2).
■ Identity Politics “refers mainly to the top-down processes whereby various political,
economic, and other social entities attempt to mold collective identities based on
ethnicity, race, language, and place into relatively fixed and ‘naturalized’ frames for
understanding political action and the body politic” (2)
■ Politics of identity refers to “issues of personal and group power, found within and
across all social and political institutions and collectivities, where people sometimes
choose, and sometimes are forced, to interact to each other in part on the basis of their
shared, or divergent, notions of their identities” (2).
■ “…Can take place in any social setting, and are often best and first recognized in
domains of the private, subaltern, the subversive, where culture may be the best way or
means to express one’s loss or triumph, whereas identity politics, depend on a great
deal on institutions and applicaiton of economic and political power, within and
sometimes across generally accepted administrative boundaries” (2).
■ Politics of identity speaks of “bottom up process through which local people challenge,
subvert, or negotiate culture and identity and contest structures of power and wealth
that constrain their social lives” (2).
■ Identity politics: “formal, structural, and public politics, practiced by governments,
parties, and corporate institutions, in the political arenas of cities, regions, and states”
(2).
■ Politics of identity: “political practices and values that are based on subscription or
ascription to various and often overlapping social and political identities” (3).
■ Latino, Hispanic, Spanish
■ Unifying or erasing identity?
■ Spanish refers to a language brought by the Spaniards, those born in Spain and first
colonizers of this land. It is unifying in terms of colonial and European roots and identity,
but the variants that came from the European arrival and encounter with the natives,
generating terms such as Criollo, Ladino, Mestizo to signify a specific lineage (whether
you are linked to Europe, and economic privilege and access, or not).
■ These markers classified each group according to their past histories vertically. The
hybrid individual carries within themselves a marker, the stigma that subjugated an
entire group qualifying and quantifying in terms of a few practices, starting with
language.
■ Spanish restaurants, television, radio, music, language, people… these are identifiers, or
identity markers in the larger US cultural context and ascribed to the entire group of
people who originated in Latin American and US Southwest.
5
Copyright © 2016. Lynne Rienner Publishers. All rights reserved.
Internalizing Racial Identities
Some people with racially mixed parentage or heritage experience great
difficulty asserting their preferred racial identities, especially when
others continue to police these preferences and choices. How is it that, at
a time of increased freedom of choice, individuals with mixed race
parentage and heritage sometimes reject this opportunity to choose all
races that apply? Why do some invest in the racial hierarchy that divides
yet feel forced to choose “one and only one” race rather than claim the
sum of their parts? Why do some multiracial people buy into the false
notions of racial realness, thereby effectively disqualifying themselves
or believing that they are not “really” the races that they claim? Why do
some multiracial people internalize the racial identities affirmed by
others rather than the ones that they themselves prefer (if and when
differences exist between the two)? When will be the time for
multiracial people to freely choose their preferred racial identities
without contestation? Why do multiracial people border patrol
themselves?
That multiracial individuals support and uphold racial hierarchies
and categories based in part on their own racial ideologies and actions
means they are not immune from developing problematic, prejudicial
ways of thinking and participating in discriminatory action. It may seem
counterintuitive that many multiracial people police racial borders,
including their own. Their borders stand in contrast to the border
blending suggested by statements about multiracial people having “the
best of both worlds.”
One need only look at the ways that multiracial people encounter
borderism from strangers, family members, and/or friends to understand
auto-borderism, or a self-policing, border patrolling. Direct and indirect
lines can be drawn socially between the border patrolling people
encounter in society and their own perpetuation of that practice as
directed toward themselves and others.
161
Mills, Melinda. The Borders of Race : Patrolling “Multiracial” Identities, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360.
Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.
162
The Borders of Race
An observable pattern begins to emerge in which multiracial people
experience resistance or opposition to claiming their preferred identities,
thereby limiting their own choices (and those of others). In this chapter,
I discuss the process expressed by some of my respondents who policed
their own racial identities. I provide some explanations for multiracial
people choosing to patrol, rather than blend, racial borders.
Copyright © 2016. Lynne Rienner Publishers. All rights reserved.
When Multiracial People Border Patrol Their Own Identities
In 1967, the Loving v. Virginia decision removed the ban on interracial
marriages in the U.S. (see Alonso 2000; Noble Maillard and Cuison
Villazor 2012). Ostensibly, the increase in interracial marriages and in
the multiracial population can be attributed directly to this decision, as
well as shifting social norms that accommodates interracial intimacy and
families. What these effects of the Loving decision have revealed, and
concealed at the same time, are the complexity and varied levels of
mixture in interracial marriages and in individuals. That is, that historic
moment, coupled with another (the Multiracial Movement of the late
1990s and early 2000s), amplified attention to the existence of racial
mixture at individual and familial levels (see Dalmage 2004a). This
legislation and the subsequent collective social action of the 90s made
much of the previously “hidden” racial mixtures appear. This
appearance seemed sudden, rather than a historical residue or a pattern
that had been centuries in the making.
While multiracial identities are more easily accommodated in
general, some of the research respondents noted the difficulty in
expressing and having their preferred identities validated. Instead of
being “racial border blenders,” many respondents primarily opted for the
ostensibly easier option: singular racial identities. Based on their
accounts of borders, they felt unable to assert their preferred racial
identities. Instead, they often chose to dissolve their complex, racial
realities into tidy, racial categories. As the earlier chapters (3 and 4)
reveal, asserting a singular racial identity publicly did not always prove
a simple matter. Sometimes, it actually intensified the border patrolling
these multiracial individuals faced.
Due to a lack of information about familial histories and racial
genealogies; encountering invalidation or opposition from others; or,
wanting to evade racial surveillance from others, respondents who
border patrolled themselves seemed to internalize and perpetuate the
policing of strangers and significant others. I acknowledge these
connections between border patrolling from the outside-in, outsiders-
Mills, Melinda. The Borders of Race : Patrolling “Multiracial” Identities, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2016. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucsd/detail.action?docID=4786360.
Created from ucsd on 2019-10-10 15:48:51.
Internalizing Racial Identities
163
within, and inside-out, focusing here on the last method of border
patrolling—inside-out.
As discussed in previous chapters, I found that individuals managed
their multi…
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