JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 17, Number 2, 1997 Page: 163
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Race and the Public Intellectual 163
who respect them; and for purposes of recognition, to be acknowledged, to
feel as if one actually belongs to a group over time and space, we have to be
very specific about what the credible options are for them at any given
moment." De Alva later says that "All identities are up for grabs. But black
intellectuals in the United States, unlike Latino intellectuals in the United
States, have an enormous media space within which to shape the politics of
naming and to affect the symbols and meanings associated with certain terms.
Thus, practically overnight, they convinced the media that they were an
ethnic group and shifted over to the model of African-American, hyphenated
American, as opposed to being named by color. Knowing what we know
about the negative aspects of naming, it would be better for all of us, regardless
of color, if those who consider themselves, and are seen as, black intellectuals
were to stop participating in the insidious one-drop-rule game of identifying
themselves as black." You've written quite a bit about identity politics. How
do you respond to this exchange between West and De Alva?
A: West is absolutely right in terms of protection, association, and recognition,
especially as those three modes of response to the formation of identity have
played themselves out within historically constituted Black communities. It
is an implicit reproval of and rebuttal against Paul Gilroy's notion that any
notion of ethnic solidarity is itself to buy into a backwards view of Black
identity. Gilroy has been especially critical of Black American intellectuals
for what he considers to be their essentialist identities. Interestingly enough,
those very Black intellectuals in America have written powerfully about
hybridity and about identity and about the need to talk about the transgressive
potentials of Black identity, of pulling into view what Stuart Hall calls postmodern
identity. It's a very complex navigation of a variety of possibilities and subject
positions within a narrative of recognition. So West's notion that it's protective,
associative, and recognition is about rooting it in a very specific context of how
African-Americans have contested the erosion of their identities, the attack of
their identities, and how identity politics at a certain level is a response to narrow,
vicious stereotypes imposed on us from the outside.
Jorge's response about seeing Black Americans in the public considering
themselves Black as a kind of surrender to this "one drop rule" misses the point
of history and the context of culture. History suggests that these are objective
criteria-objective in the sense that they were socially constructed as the
norm by which Black people were judged. So even if Black identity is up for
grabs, it has alimit. It certainly is up for grabs as I've argued in my work about
the fluidity of these boundaries of Black identity, but it has real historical and
cultural and racial limitations. Jorge is expressing the bitter edge and a misled
conception of this postmodern vision of Black identity. Saying Black identity
is much more fluid, it has much more movable boundaries, that Black identity
is a moveable feast of self reinvention is not to say that there are no bottom
lines. As Elizabeth Alexander says, "Listen, I believe in de-essentialized,
racialized politics. But there's got to be a bottom line." And the bottom line
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 17, Number 2, 1997, periodical, 1997; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28619/m1/25/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .