Transracialism, Part 1: When Controversy is Punished, the Community Doles All

In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal, the former head of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, was discovered to be white. For six years prior, Dolezal had concealed her racial ancestry and modified her appearance in order to be publicly perceived as African American.

Dolezal is the most publicized case in recent years of a phenomenon known in academic contexts as transracialism. While the term can also refer to the adoption of children across racial boundaries, the usage here denotes an individual’s identification with a different race and ancestry than they were assigned at birth.

Significantly, Dolezal was discovered to be transracial in the very same month that Caitlyn Jenner, former Olympic gold medalist, announced her identity as a transgender woman. While Dolezal received overwhelming backlash, ranging from accusations of “blackface” to death threats, Jenner was widely praised for her courage to openly transition. The situation seemed to invite juxtaposition from scholars in philosophy, gender, race, and feminist theory to attempt to understand a complex question—what makes a transgender identity permissible, but a transracial one not?

It is this flurry of scholarly attention, not Dolezal herself, that I’ll attend to in this article. Two years after the Dolezal affair, the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia published an article by Rhodes College assistant professor Rebecca Tuvel entitled “In Defense of Transracialism.” Drawing on the comparison between public responses to Jenner and Dolezal, Tuvel argued that the same considerations that support transgender identities could rule out objections to transracialism.

Outrage ensued. Within four days, an open letter requesting Hypatia’s retraction of the article was created. Two days later, it had 130 signatures. The next afternoon, it hit 830. Signatories included prominent philosophers from colleges across the country, two of whom were former members of Tuvel’s dissertation committee.

The dissent from the nation was echoed by the associate editors of Hypatia itself, who— without editorial authorization—were quick to post a Facebook apology for accepting the article under their peer review process. In the world of scholarly journals, this is unheard of. Barring instances of fraud, the choice of an editing body to publicly admonish or call for the retraction of one of its own articles, especially in the social sciences, is “egregious” (to use the words of the University of Chicago’s Brian Leiter, author of the world’s most popular philosophy blog). The ordeal ended with the voluntary resignation of Hypatia’s editor and online editor, who stood by the article’s publication, and the forced resignation of eight of the associate editors who authored the apology.

And so, ultimately sourcing from the Dolezal controversy, the careers of ten prominent feminist philosophers, one tenure-track associate professor, and the NAACP president herself were (in some capacity) ended. The rapid nature of the backlash indicates the rise of cancel culture as an undeniable culprit in this fiasco. Even so, such a response is baffling.

The discipline of philosophy is defined by its ability to foster open theoretical discourse. Provocation is often a marker of success. Though Tuvel’s article clearly had some missteps (one of which, the use of Caitlyn Jenner’s “deadname,” was later corrected by Tuvel herself), the piece itself is hardly incendiary. This fact is proven by the open letter, which calls for its retraction on largely shaky grounds, such as her use of the term “transgenderism,” which, at the time, was a cautioned-against term for which no synonym existed, and her inadequate citing of women of color scholars. Thus, though the letter identified Tuvel’s piece as perpetuating “harm to the communities who might expect better from Hypatia,” the specific infractions she committed, without which the article assumedly could be published without hitches, were not clear. I, along with other critics, feel that it is abundantly obvious that this is because Tuvel could have never hoped to publish her work free of extreme backlash. It was her opinion itself that was perceived as harmful.

W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Moving into the 21st century, the problem undoubtedly continues. But as the list of recognized identities grows, so too does the availability for discrimination on axes of race and gender, among many others. Perhaps the visibility of these particular axes is what affords them special attention.

However, in considering them under the influence of identity politics, we must recognize our blind spots. There is a clear difference between analyzing an issue on the basis of a community’s shared experience (what identity politics promotes) as opposed to its shared philosophy or ideals. When we engage with identity politics, we greatly prioritize the perspectives of the (often innate) “insiders” of a community, thus we necessarily separate the “outsiders.” We create and enforce a boundary.

In deferring almost exclusively to the insiders, we risk an echo chamber. In the case of the Dolezal-Tuvel-Hypatia affair, we experienced one, allowing for insiders in gender and race theory to conflate their indignation with real, actualized harm. In the public reception of Tuvel, and Hypatia, and arguably Dolezal, we witness the repercussions of this symptom—the attempt to silence, rather than engage with, provocative ideas. And at the expense of seemingly everyone directly involved, this tension with the controversial, which had been building for years prior, was finally released. I can only hope that it has died down since.