Paper on racial identity sparks ‘witch hunt’

Feminist journal issues apology

The editors of an influential feminist philosophy journal have apologized for an academic research paper that argues racial identity can be just as fluid as gender, castigating its Canadian author for causing “harm” and ignoring “violence upon actual persons.”

Curiously, these editors run the journal that published the paper.

The “profound” and grovelling apology from associate editors of the journal Hypatia stops short of formal retraction. But it indicates the editors are appalled that Hypatia peerreviewed, edited, and published the article, titled In Defense of Transracialism.

In it, Rebecca Tuvel, a Toronto-born, McGill-educated assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., makes an argument by comparing two cultural phenomena: the ridicule and scorn directed at Rachel Dolezal for assuming a black racial identity despite being born white, and the praise and admiration directed at Caitlyn Jenner for assuming a female gender identity despite being born male. Tuvel is also writing a book on this theme, that society might be obliged to accept transracial identity because of its philosophical “parity” with transgender identity.

After evaluating several possible philosophical arguments as to why this comparison is misguided, Tuvel concludes that “society should accept such an individual’s decision to change race the same way it should accept an individual’s decision to change sex.”

The immediate response was a classic Twitter outrage party, with ironically gendered digs at Tuvel for being a stereotypically clueless “Becky,” memes about obliviously privileged white people, and claims that her paper amounted to “epistemic violence.” One major objection was her use of the term “transgenderism,” which carries negative connotations.

There was also an open letter of protest shaming the journal for sending the message “that white cis scholars may engage in speculative discussion of these themes without broad and sustained engagement with those theorists whose lives are most directly affected by transphobia and racism.”

Cis means those whose sense of identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex.

It might have blown over, had Hypatia’s editors not issued this week’s 1,000-word apology, which also promised a wholesale editorial policy review. In the apology, they lamented Tuvel’s foundational comparison of Dolezal to Jenner, which perpetuated “harmful assumptions.” They criticized her for ignoring scholarship by transgender philosophers, for “deadnaming” Caitlyn Jenner (by using her previous name, Bruce), and for showing “insufficient engagement with the field of critical race theory.”

“We recognize and mourn that these harms will disproportionately fall upon those members of our community who continue to experience marginalization and discrimination due to racism and cisnormativity,” reads the apology, signed anonymously by a “majority” of the editorial board. “Clearly, the article should not have been published, and we believe that the fault for this lies in the review process.”

They also apologized for the journal’s Facebook posting about the affair, which characterized the controversy as “sparking” a new “dialogue.”

Requests for comment to members of the board were not acknowledged on Tuesday, including one to a Canadian board member, Cressida Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Alberta.

Tuvel also declined to comment, but issued a statement. “I wrote this piece from a place of support for those with non-normative identities, and frustration about the ways individuals who inhabit them are so often excoriated, bodyshamed, and silenced,” she wrote.

She described receiving hate mail and anonymous expressions of disgust, largely from people who had not read her paper.

In it, she acknowledges that Dolezal’s claims of transracial identity strike her as “decidedly odd,” but seeming odd is not the same as being false. She rejects the idea that there is some constant, universal experience of gender that can exclude people who do not share it. Feminists, for example “have long attempted to show how reductive and problematic it is to assume that all women share some core, let alone some biologically based, kernel of experience,” she wrote.

Her thesis is that the same might be true for race, given that the folk races — black, white, native, etc. — do not have a basis in genetics. One common illustration of this point, for example, is that there is more genetic diversity within Africa than without.

Her conclusions are notably grand and sweeping for a paper that is only 15 pages long, such as her claim that “someone who genuinely identifies with blackness could perhaps be viewed as affirming blackness instead of insulting it, insofar as this suggests it is desirable to be black. In a world where the worth and value of blackness is routinely denied, perhaps Dolezal’s transition could therefore be viewed in a positive light.”

Brian Leiter, philosopher of law at the University of Chicago, who runs a popular blog, wrote about the “atmosphere of reckless attack” in modern philosophy, and said Tuvel has a case for defamation.

“This is a witch hunt,” wrote Jesse Singal in a long explanation for New York Magazine. “Because the right has seized on Rachel Dolezal as a target of gleeful ridicule, and as a means of making opportunistic arguments against the reality of the trans identity, a bunch of academics who really should know better are attributing to Tuvel arguments she never made, simply because she connected those two subjects in an academic article.”

I WROTE THIS PIECE FROM A PLACE OF SUPPORT FOR THOSE WITH NONNORMATIVE IDENTITIES.

Rebecca Tuvel