Today at Brown

Congratulations to you, the class of 2012. Welcome to Brown!

We are all familiar with what I’ll call the “identity” reflex – we can all hear the call of some tribe or another. We humans are a variegated lot – differing by race, ethnicity, cultural heritage, religion, political or sexual orientation ... This is, of course, as it should be. Diversity is a good thing.

Still, I am here to tell you that there are times when the “call of the tribe” just might be a siren’s call, and when an excessive focus on “identity” just might lead one badly astray. What is more, I firmly believe that this brief sojourn upon which you, the class of 2012, are embarking as you begin your college careers is just such a time.

This, in any event, is the theme I wish to take up here at this Convocation welcoming the Class of 2012, and inaugurating another year of our labors at this great university where you are privileged to study, and where I am blessed to teach.

What is more, as our nation enters the final phase of what by all accounts is a most extraordinary national political campaign, one in which questions of identity have played a huge role, I believe it is important, in a gentle and non-partisan sort of way, to at least raise (if not, in fifteen minutes, to answer!) the question of what role “identity” ought to play in our politics, and in our lives. I want to get us thinking and talking about it. Certainly Rory Stewart’s wonderful book, The Places in Between, which you all read as part of your preparatoin for your first year of study here, got me to thinking about it.

It is altogether fitting that I raise this question before this audience, as you begin your journey of exploration and discovery – because identity politics has become such a commonplace on our nation’s campuses, and in our public life.

Now, I must warn you at the outset. I tend to be somewhat curmudgeonly about these matters. (My son Nehemiah, who is in the audience today, can surely vouch for that.) For instance, I hold to the high-minded view that one comes to the university to learn how to think, to gain an awareness of the central questions with which reflective people have struggled over the centuries, and to develop an appreciation for how elusive the answers to such questions can be. That is to say, the university is not the place to come if one expects to be confirmed in one’s preconceptions, or comforted and reaffirmed in one’s reflexive choices. On the contrary, it is a place to be challenged, to be argued with, and to be confronted with the coherent articulation of ways of looking at the world that are different from one’s own.

So, let me proceed by telling you a story – one that might help to explain how I became such a curmudgeon on this issue.

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and the 1960s. A formative experience for me occurred during one of those earnest political rallies so typical of the period. Woody, who had been my best friend since boyhood, suggested that we attend. The rally was called by the Black Panther Party to galvanize our community’s response to the killing by the Chicago police of party activists Fred Hampton and Mark Clark during an early-morning raid on their apartment in one of the city’s many all-black neighborhoods. I can remember even now how agitated about it we all were. And, judging by his demeanor, Woody was amongst the most zealous.

Despite this zeal, it took real courage for Woody to attend that meeting. For, although he proclaimed his blackness often, and though he had descended from Negro grandparents on either side of his family, he nevertheless looked to the entire world like your typical white guy. Everyone, on first meeting him, assumed as much. I did, too, when we began to play together a decade earlier, just after I had moved into the middle-class neighborhood called Park Manor where Woody’s family had been living for some time. There were a number of white families on our block when we first arrived; within a couple of years they had all been replaced by aspiring black families like our own. Yet, Woody's parents never moved, which puzzled me. Then one day I overheard his mother declare to one of her new neighbors, "We just wouldn't run from our own kind." Somewhat later, while watching the film Imitation of Life on TV, my mother explained how someone could be “black” even though they looked “white.” She told me about people like that in our own family – second cousins who lived in a fashionable suburb and on whom one would never dare simply to drop in because they were “passing for white.” This was my earliest glimpse of the truth that racial identity in America is inherently a social and cultural, not simply a biological construct – that it necessarily involves an irreducible element of choice.

Evidently, Woody’s family had been “passing for white” in pre-integration Park Manor. The neighborhood’s changing racial composition had confronted them with a moment of truth, and had led them to elect to stay, instead of fleeing as nearly all of their previous neighbors had done, and to raise their children among “their own kind.” This was a fateful decision for Woody, who, as he matured, became determined not simply to live among blacks but, perhaps in atonement for what he took to be his parents' sins, unambiguously to become black. The boys in the neighborhood didn’t make this easy. Many delighted in teasing him about being a “white boy,” and most simply refused to credit his insistent, often repeated claim: “I'm a brother, too!”

The fact that some of his relatives were passing made Woody’s racial identity claims more urgent for him, but less compelling to others. He desperately wanted to be black, but his peers in the neighborhood would not let him. Because he had the option to be white – an option he radically rejected at the time – those without the option could not accept his claim to a shared racial experience. I knew Woody well. We became good friends, and I wanted to accept him on his own terms. But even I found myself doubting, from time to time, that he fully grasped the pain, frustration, anger, and self-doubt many of us felt upon encountering the intractability of American racism. However much he sympathized with our plight, he seemed to experience it only vicariously.

So there we were, at this boisterous, angry political rally. A critical moment came when Woody, seized by some idea, enthusiastically raised his voice above the murmur to be heard. He was cut short in mid-sentence by one of the dashiki-clad brothers-in-charge who demanded to know how a “white boy” got the authority to have an opinion on what black people should be doing. A silence fell over the room. “Who can vouch for this ‘white boy,’” asked the “brother,” indignantly. More excruciating silence ensued. Now was my moment of truth; Woody turned plaintively toward me, but I would not meet his eyes. To my eternal shame, I failed to speak up for my friend, and he was forced to leave the meeting without a word having been uttered in his defense.

That was not exactly a profile in courage on my part, I must confess!

This incident of some forty years ago is etched indelibly in my mind, serving as a kind of private metaphor for me, underscoring just how difficult it can be to live in good faith, and how vitally important it is to try. That moment of truth, in that South Side church basement and my failure in the face of it helped me become aware of the depth of my need for the approval of others – particularly co-racialists. The fact is that I willingly betrayed someone whom I loved and who loved me, in order to lessen the risk of being rejected by strangers. In a way, at that moment and often again later in my life, I was “passing” too – that is, hoping to be mistaken for something I was not. I had feared that to proclaim before the radicals in the audience that this supposed “white boy” at my side was in fact our “brother” would have compromised my own chance of being received among them as a genuine colleague. The indignant “brother” who challenged Woody's right to speak was not merely imposing a racial test (only blacks are welcome here), he was mainly applying a loyalty test (you are either with us or against us), and this was a test which anyone present could fail through a lack of conformity with the collectively enforced political norm. I now know that denying one's genuine convictions for the sake of social acceptance is a price which society often demands of the individual, and all too often this is a price that we are willing to pay.

I recall this story about Woody because I think his dilemma (and mine) conveys an important truth about “race” and “identity” in American society – a truth which has wide application outside the bounds of my personal experience. What made Woody’s situation so difficult is the fact that, given the expectations and stereotypes held by others, there seemed to be no way for him to avoid living fraudulently – either as a “black” person who was passing for “white,” or as a “white” person trying (too hard) to be “black.” Actually, it now seems clear to me, he was neither. Woody, like me and like all of us, was a human being trying to make his way in the world, struggling to find himself and seeking recognition on his own terms. As his close friend and frequent companion I had become familiar with, and occasionally shared in, the pitfalls of his situation. People would assume when seeing us together both that he was a white guy and that I was “the kind of Negro who hangs-out with white guys.” I resented that assumption.

Since then, as an intellectual of African descent, making my living as a teacher and writer during a period of great transformation in our society, I have often experienced this dissonance between my self-concept and the socially imputed definition of who I am supposed to be. Many of you, I dare say most, will in one way or another have to confront a similar dilemma. I have had to face the problem of balancing my desire not to disappoint the expectations of others with a conviction that one must strive to live authentically. This does not make me a heroic figure; I eschew the libertarian ideologue's rhetoric about some glorious individual who, though put-upon by society, nevertheless blazes his own path. I acknowledge that this opposition I am positing between individual and society is ambiguous, in view of the fact that the self is inevitably shaped by the objective world, and by other selves. I know that what one is being faithful to when resisting the temptation to conform to others’ expectations by “living authentically” is necessarily a socially determined, if subjectively experienced, version of the self.

In his justly famous essay, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill offers a radical, passionate defense of the norm of unencumbered public discussion. I urge you, if you have not done so already, to acquaint yourselves with Mill’s argument, which holds that individual persons must be allowed to express themselves freely no matter what consequences for society may ensue. Quoting Mill:

Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough. We need protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.

Growing into intellectual maturity has been, for me, largely a process of becoming free of the need to have my choices validated by "the brothers." After many years I have come to understand that until I became willing to risk the derision of the crowd, I had no chance to discover the most important truths about myself or about life – to know my “calling,” to perceive my deepest value commitments and to recognize the goals which I think are most worth striving toward. In a perverse extension of the lesson from Imitation of Life, I have learned that one does not have to live surreptitiously as a Negro passing for white in order to deny one’s genuine self for the sake of social acceptance. You members of the class of 2012 must not let this happen to you.

The most important challenges and opportunities which confront us derive not from our cultural or sexual identities, not from our ethnic or racial conditions, but rather from our human condition. Speaking for myself, I am a husband, a father, a son, a teacher, an intellectual, a citizen. In none of these roles is my race irrelevant, but neither can “identity” alone provide much guidance for my quest to adequately discharge these responsibilities. The particular features of one’s social condition, the external givens, merely set the stage of one’s life. They do not provide a script. That script must be internally generated; it must be a product of a reflective deliberation about the meaning of this existence for which no political or ethnic program could ever substitute. That is what you have come to the University to learn how to do.

Or, to shift the metaphor slightly, the socially contingent features of one’s situation – one’s racial heritage, family background, or sexual orientation, for instance – and the prevailing views and attitudes about such identity tropes of other people in society – these things are the building blocks, the raw materials, out of which an individual must yet construct the edifice of a life. The authentic expression of a person’s individuality is to be found in the blueprint that he or she employs to guide that project of self-authorship. And, the problem of devising such a plan for one’s life is a universal problem which confronts all people, whatever their race, class, ethnicity, or other identifying category. By facing and solving this problem we grow as human beings, and we give meaning and substance to our lives. In my view, a personal program wholly dependent on the contingency of identity falls tragically short of its potential, because it embraces too parochial a conception of what is possible and of what is desirable.

This is an especially important consideration for those of us who belong to a historically oppressed and stigmatized group. Ironically, to the extent that we blacks see ourselves primarily through a racial lens, we may end up sacrificing possibilities for the kind of personal development that would ultimately further our collective racial interests. We cannot be truly free men and women while laboring under a definition of self derived from the perceptual view of our oppressor and confined to the contingent facts of our oppression. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce says this about Irish nationalism:

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by these nets....Do you know what Ireland is? ...Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Wearing one’s racial identity too heavily can work similarly to hold back young souls from flight into the open skies of American society – ot so, at least, it seems to me. Of course there is the constraint of racism that also holds us back. But the trick, as Joyce knew, is to turn such “nets” into wings, and thus to fly by them. One cannot do that if one refuses to see that ultimately it is neither external constraint nor external opportunity, but rather an in-dwelling spirit, which renders such flight possible.

Thank you, and best wishes to the Class of 2012.