“Our identities are tied to our lived experiences,
and lived experiences will inform and influence
how a person goes about
interpreting information.”
Your use of semantic ambiguity with phrases like “tied to” and “inform and influence” make this statement nearly impossible to discuss. Changing verb tenses from the future conditional to the present in “will inform” and “goes” also makes this a semantic landmine. Even the change of subject and object references from the implied [our lived experiences] to [a person] makes it so ambiguous semantically that any statement I make about your intent or implication can be countered with an alternative that better suits your argument in context.
I am going to have faith that you will not employ tactics like this in what I hope is an honest conversation.
Identity Renders Your Analysis Equally Biased and in Need of More Sifting
It appears that you mean to say that our identities are built on our experiences and that these experiences, therefore, determine how we analyze information. In short, any analysis made by any person is based on their identity and therefore their lived experiences. You seem to believe that either the entire compendium of historical human knowledge must be re-analyzed using modern views of identity as it pertains to historical figures and their associated works or just the juicy parts that support your agenda in dismantling power structures.
If we, for the sake of discussion, believe that you honestly believe that the “good” parts of the research done by “problematic” historical academics must be sifted from the “bad” parts and that it is only through this lens of identity or what the person “brings to the table” that you can do this virtuous work, you end up creating an eternal self-referencing loop.
If you don’t hear how opportunistic and selective this is, you should reconsider whether you are any different from the original men who sought to condition society based on public media/propaganda.
I mean, I have no doubt they sifted through the news they received and chose the good parts, discarded the bad parts, and promoted their new version as the truth much like you are doing. The difference is that they knew their intent and they were explicit about their goals. Can you say the same or do you honestly think you are coming from a place of academic virtue and innocence?
And using your own logic, any analysis that you offer has to be filtered through the lens of your identity which you wear on your sleeve. Your characterization of the straw man in your example shows implicit bias on numerous fronts. It would, by your own logic, be in every academic’s best interest to take your bias and identity into consideration when listening to anything you present. As well I have.
And if not me, have no doubt that the next generation will invalidate your content by nitpicking the “good parts” and discarding the problematic sentiment just like you do. The next generation, following your virtuous lead, will be just as stuck trying to invalidate the past as you are.
And where do we end this stroll backward through history picking the parts we agree with based on how racist we think the authors were? Back to Lincoln, Washington, Plato, Socrates, dare we even apply this logic to the sacred word of God himself, because I assure you that the inspired word of God in the Christian faith is the most virtuous a Christian can get. It might be valuable to pick out the good parts only….oh wait. We’ve already done that, I forget.
Complexity of Analysis
Let’s skip the obvious efforts to propagandize a literal rewriting of history while signaling virtue, what about the complexity of identity in a historical context? How do we reconcile the fact that Thomas Jefferson, a founding father, tried several times to prevent slavery in our constitution and failed every time? Should we sift through his good intentions and only keep the bad ones because they fit the modern narrative characterizing our founding fathers as racist white supremacists whose only goals were to subjugate black people?
Who gets to determine the identity that Jefferson brings to the table in founding our nation? Because if you let the current narrative speak, you can discount just about everything he wrote in much the same way that modern activists discount the constitution.
The bias associated with trying to evaluate perspective from 400 years ago is more telling about modern victimhood than it is about identity at the time. That is to say that you have no way of isolating the identity of historic academics individually.
This is further compounded by the shared beliefs of other countries at the time. To take into account the entirety of social contexts and personal ideas, and then use that to cherry-pick historical texts for “good” and “bad” parts is indistinguishable from blatant propaganda.
You then cite an example of a research paper written by an”old rich white guy from a previous generation that had really bigoted thoughts about people of color.” You are quick to indicate that this alone does not invalidate his work, just that you have to consider his perspective when reviewing his findings.
And why is that? It must be because people are unable or unwilling to record factual data that conflicts with their identity, right? We should ask Roland Fryer or Glenn Loury about that.
Identity vs. Integrity
Next, you claim that “problematic people” often produce “good work” that you can use, you just have to re-analyze it, sift the good from the bad, and make some use out of it.
There is no doubt that our identities are tied to our lived experiences. However, to claim that our identities are created entirely based on our lived experiences is not defensible. In every bit as much as our identities are influenced (not defined) by our lived experience, our lived experience is also influenced by our identity.
For your premise to be reasonable, I would not be capable of acting in conflict with who I identified as. My identity as a gay male does not prohibit me from having sex with a woman, for example. In fact, having had a significant amount of sex with women in my youth, distilling my analysis of the sexual appeal of a naked woman to my identity as a gay male would be startlingly inaccurate.
Your belief that we have to consider a person’s identity when reviewing their work is dishonest and inaccurate. Often, people in academia publish their analyses that conflict with their identity.
Dr. Roland Fryer grew up in a household where several members of his family dealt drugs. When the recent media focus changed to present stories of black men being killed by police, Fryer set out to express his identity as a proud black man who came from an underprivileged life and succeeded as an award-winning economist to analyze the data on police killings using his skills of analysis. When his findings showed, without a doubt, that the media was exaggerating the killings of black men by police and under-exaggerating other forms of injustice and abuse, he was distressed. He published his findings in direct conflict with his identity and his preconceived notions about the situation.
But let’s see how other academics went about similar analysis. When self-proclaimed racial justice advocates analyzed the data without taking into consideration the details of the situation, they chose an intentionally dishonest base of comparison. They created a false narrative based on per capita analysis because it was appealing, not because it was accurate.
That is to say that if you were to analyze the mortality rate of women during childbirth to the US population, it would be a useless comparison but it might sound good. Even if you refined the comparison to just women, it would still be a useless comparison. Why? Because not all women can get pregnant, for one. But even the further refinement to just women capable of getting pregnant is nonsense because not every woman capable of getting pregnant had the possibility of dying during childbirth. The only responsible analysis would be to compare the part/whole. The number of pregnant women who died during childbirth to the total number of women who entered into childbirth. THIS paints a much different picture than the one where men were included in the comparison.
The same is true for killings by cops in the line of duty. Using the entire population when a lot of people never even interact with a cop or have never seen a cop paints the same false picture as the one in which men are included in the mortality during birth analysis.
So if we then look at just the people who have the opportunity to get killed by a cop, that is they have to have been stopped, walked past a cop, interacted with a cop in some way, suddenly the analysis is much different. WHY? Because cops have historically focused a majority of their policing efforts where the majority of crime is being committed. Cops have historically interacted with more black people every year than white people. This is true regardless of whether you take into consideration police bias or not. If more black people interact with cops every year, more black people are at risk of being killed. In its most simple form, if 51% of cop interactions (where someone could possibly get killed) are black and only 24% of all people killed by cops are black…there’s a much different comparison that is significant digits more accurate.
But like with women and pregnancy, we can be more accurate in our comparison:
What if we just compared stops by police where the person being stopped had a history of criminal activity or violent criminal activity. When we do this, suddenly it becomes entirely clear that cops are not killing black people more than white people. They aren’t killing them with racial animosity. They are routinely subjected to significantly more cases of black subjects that are violent and confrontational and refuse to cooperate. This is the analysis that Fryer did that makes his study more accurate. But it conflicts with the social justice warrior identity.
To Filter or Not to Filter?
So I ask you, based on the fact that one man’s identity would have preferred to present research that supported the public narrative of extrajudicial cop killings and yet, despite his lived experience, despite his desire, he found data that empirically conflicted with his view of the world and he published it.
But then you have others who half-assed their analysis and focused a cloudy lens on the subject just long enough to create more conflict in our society because it felt good and jived with their lived experience or at least matched their promoted narrative.
As a critical analyst, how do you reconcile these completely different cases where identity and history fail to account for the analysis.
But before you answer that, let me give you a similar straw man like the one you gave us about the old racist white dude (an obvious construction from your own identity.)
Anecdotal Analysis
Enter Darrell, he is a young black student who was raised by his grandparents who were alive during the failed Civil Rights Movement. His father was put in jail when he was five and Darrell got to watch his mother struggle with three jobs at a time when violence was really bad in their community. Still, he studied hard and went on to college to become an attorney where he was introduced to an idea that provided a novel defense for black defendants. It was highly effective and wasn’t exactly lying. Being a lawyer, he understood that you only have to present one side of the argument and it could be hypothetical–that didn’t make it dishonest.
So Darrell learns this effective way to get a majority white jury to view his client as the real victim in a case. He was compelled to this life of crime because the system made him that way. Darrell would raise his voice with the fury of a Baptist preacher as he reached the peak of his closing swinging towards the jury to make the claim that “You all compelled this man to commit these crimes… you should be the ones on trial, not him.” The gavel rings out and the DA yells objection, but the seed was planted and all it took was one white person to accept the story that their whiteness and complicity in systems of injustice were more to blame than the defendant and the man gets acquitted.
When Darrell realizes how effective this measure is, he hooks up with a group of legal students who suddenly realize that this same idea could be applied to more than just the courtroom. Why not expand this idea to promote the notion that black people, in general, are incapable of being successful because white people hold them back as an expression of white supremacy. But rather than go full speed ahead, they keep their ideas centered in higher education so that the next generation can take up the charge. In fact, if they can push this concept into high school by modifying the context slightly, they will get younger, more vibrant activists already informed of this plan when they get to college.
Before long, all of the works of every scholar past must be re-analyzed to support this idea. Surely anything that conflicts with this idea will be labeled as “problematic” and during this great sifting process from history, only those sufficiently subordinate white folks like Peggy McIntosh and Robyn D’Angelo will be exempt from this application of identity politics to their writing because they were “good” or useful to the cause.
Never mind that Peggy McIntosh was from one of the richest white families in Brooklyn and had never spent a moment in the ghetto when God inspired her to list out her privileges that black people didn’t have. Things like having her hair did by anyone in her neighborhood, being sure they would understand how to cut her hair. Had she come to my neighborhood in Atlanta, she would have quickly scrapped that nonsense lest she walk out bald. My point is that had anyone applied the critical analysis of identity like you claim that you do to the foundational work of white privilege, they would have clearly seen that the privileges of which she was confessing were not shared by all white people as she claimed, but rather by the rich white aristocracy from which she alone came.
Never mind that Robin D’Angelo’s book on white fragility chronicles cases of white people getting angry when feeling pressured to be polite to black people who felt no such pressure. Her entirely self-referential fragility could be easily discounted when you consider her position and her identity. She owns 4 mansions in San Francisco where she charges outrageous amounts of money to peddle white guilt and self-deprecation as a testimony to white supremacy. No self-respecting academic could read her work without laughing and yet here we are.
My point in relaying this story is, of course, to use Derek Bell’s preferred method of supporting his arguments–the anecdote. Hopefully, you can see how someone could easily be indoctrinated into a cult-like mentality that has but one goal: to bring about the destruction of our democracy because they believe, as Derek Bell does, that no society built on racism is redeemable and that the only way forward is to tear it all down and start from scratch.
And you want us to take Darrell’s analysis of past research based on his own biased identity as though it has more academic goodness than the original article? Surely you see that it is equally as biased and that the future analysts will then be responsible for going back to correct for your political identity in your analysis of bias in previous papers….it’s ridiculous and it’s exactly what you are proselytizing.
Summary
In summary, let me say that I have written and rewritten this about 20 times since I saw your post (included). I do not believe that you have any conscious malice or that you are aware of how your identity leaves you with only the past to draw comfort when you discard the parts you don’t like.
I hope you can see that you have no mystical insight into the minds of the past by which your analysis can be any less biased or expressive of current social norms.
I hope you can see that even if you did have God-given skills at analyzing the identity of historical writers, you would still have to account for the social identity of the region where the paper was written. You would have to know the social moires of the time and you would have to be able to suspend your own personal beliefs based on modern logic when sifting through history.
And if nothing else, I hope you can see that cherry-picking the good and bad parts from history based on writers that you see as problematic is nothing more than propaganda.
Please reconsider that you have no particular insight into history that isn’t formed from your own Identity and therefore you are claiming that your point of view is more accurate, more virtuous than others and history has shown that it is not. We are all subject to interpretation and we are all fodder for propaganda.
PS. Please know that I mean no disrespect and that my writing style is more an expression of my passion and my affinity for the spectrum. When obviously good-hearted and well-meaning people like yourself are rewriting history while ignoring the real-time results of this sentiment, we are rapidly approaching the most violent time in our history (certainly the last 25 years) and the more we fight amongst ourselves, the more we become easy targets. Surely you have seen other representative democracies go down this path as liberals create racial or sociopolitical unrest and a weary, broken democracy welcomes an authoritarian that can deliver peace. Surely as a student of power structures, you see the potential we are headed for.