Maybe. Or perhaps, as usual, people still use "white" as a sort of signifier for "middle class." Now that's irony.

Joyner cops to being white—though not on all stereotypical fronts—and Sandra Tsing Loh referred to herself recently in The Atlantic as "whitish." (The phrase appears in her review of Letters to a Young Teacher, by Jonathan Kozol—it isn't online yet; "Tales Out of School, page 91. Her auto-libel is on page 98.) That one worried me. Isn't she actually equally "Asianish"? Or are we getting into Tiger Woods country, here?

Paging Jeff Goldstein . . .

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:25 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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And as polysyllabic as ever. Today's subject: is race real? Not very, of course.

To many contemporary social scientists and race theorists, the idea that “race” is something essential — that “blood” differences determine racial identity — is too close to the kind of thinking that has historically justified (and legally codified) separatism and, its civic offshoot, race-based social policy, bigotry, and racism. Which is why many theorists have worked so diligently to disarticulate race from blood, and reconstitute it as a product of human conception — a social construct — a maneuver that they believe allows them to rescue the category of race while simultaneously cleansing it of its least desirable attribute: the idea that it is somehow fixed and, by extension, determinative.

For my part, I’ve argued that the social construction argument for race — based as it is on dubious claims to history, memory, and heritage that collapse under the weight of logical analysis — is, at its heart, no different from the blood argument for race, in that both rely on an identical first cause, namely, an a priori belief in what one is.

That's the problem.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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