I have been told I should elevate one of my earlier comments to the Dutchman to Post Level, so I am. The context is that the Dutchman felt that since I am an American I do not speak actual English, only a variant of it, so that “my” understanding of the term “Black” was probably a regional variant and not a universal of the language. I fired off the following most cholerically. What the Dutchman responded was that this was a helpful mail, but that he was curious as to what I meant by saying he spoke virtually native English … was I being complimentary, or not?
Anyway, this was the mail:
The African diaspora is broad and varied, as is the English language (historically a pidgin language, as I am sure you know). Yes, I speak American English but I am an educated person and read books by English speakers from many countries; I have cousins in London and Nairobi, native English speakers all; many people are Indian and they speak native English; English is spoken on several Caribbean islands and it is so different that it is hard for me to understand but it is English and it is native English. Until recently I was seeing a man from the UK who enjoyed claiming that only he actually spoke English. This chauvinism was amusing in a pathetic way because his was not entirely the King’s English. My Anglophile father pointed out that his cousin, a lecturer at Cambridge University, would have split a gut laughing at this fellow’s pretensions.
I would say that you also speak virtually native English but that you project a number of superficial European stereotypes into the broad world of the Americas, understanding “the Americas” in the Hemispheric sense (which includes dozens of countries). From the perspective of these varied continents, Europe is provincial. Yes, HENRY JAMES’ New England characters were country bumpkins in France, but I am speaking of the America of James’ contemporary JOSE MARTI which is much broader.
“Race” is not a scientific but a cultural term and racial meanings are embedded in historical, cultural and political discourses (the bibliography on this matter is enormous). In Britain, for instance, the informal term “black” includes Indians and Pakistanis, who are “Asian” (but not “East Asian”) in current U.S. discourse. In the United States Black connotes cultural pride and “mulatto” is an outmoded and generally racist term. In Brazil the same term is less negative but people tend to describe themselves in terms of colors and not percentages of racial mixture. Conservative whites in Brazil prefer that Afro-Brazilians not call themselves Black because it is a term of political and cultural resistance to the still dominant discourse of “whitening.”
In Louisiana there is the term “mixed Creole” which designates a racial mixture but also a culture that speaks French. Most mixed Creoles also identify as Black or African-American and consider themselves to be part of the broader diaspora as well as part of the local French-based culture. Some mixed Creoles (like my youngest brother) like to say they are not Black and this has to do, among other things, with not wanting to be associated with the poor, but most importantly, with resistance to the dominant English-speaking culture. Others do identify as Black (as well as Creole) in part because they have been oppressed as such and therefore resist as such. I repeat: in all of these contexts, Blackness is a cultural and political identification, not a specific color.
It is fine for people in Japan or anywhere to notice that Obama, or anyone, is not of 100% African descent. It’s a fine game to try to come up with an English term which would at least theoretically parallel a Japanese one. But to know a language also means to know what its words mean in the cultural history of the places in which it is spoken. You may speak English any way you want to, but to dream up your own private history of the African diaspora, which is what I perceive you and your students to be doing, is pure solipsism. And to impose one’s own cultural categories elsewhere is colonialist as well as unscientific, and it is terribly provincial. At the university we fail people who do this because they are not intellectually serious.
Students of English who intend to speak the language with people from English speaking countries deserve to know that we would not say “negroid” commonly here. We would not stand up and declare that Barack Obama was not Black or African-American, but “negroid.” We would not do so because of the racism and racist history that inheres in the term. If your students do it they may find that their business deals go cold. You are not being responsible to them if you do not let them know that.
It’s fine to notice that “races” are named differently in different places, and to notice the particular irrationality of the systems of classification that have developed historically in the United States or anywhere, but not to realize how irrational all of these systems are is NOT SCIENCE. And to try to teach languages without cultural and historical contexts is also NOT SCIENCE.
Any geneticist can explain to you that while Mendel’s theories may work for plants, Mendelian pseudoscience was used decades ago to create theories of “whitening” and to justify segregation. These theories have been discredited and abandoned for some time now. And having biracial children does not make anyone an authority on race. Thomas Jefferson had biracial children, for Heaven’s sake.
Some of my ancestors owned Frederick Douglass until he escaped, and he was biracial. He was biracial but he was also a Black revolutionary. He worked tirelessly to free his people and they were of many shades. My ancestors, who were irritated when he got away from them, called him “mulatto” but I am glad he got away from them and grateful for the work he undertook to improve the country, work from which we all benefit today. I choose not to impose terminology I might dream up as “accurate” on him, or his, or anyone. That is a political choice but it is also an ethical one. It is, in addition, a choice in favor of intellectual integrity over dilettantism.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
This was the post I thought was too mean but as I say, I like the text although I was mad when I wrote it.
Dutchman is now mad though, says I overreact and am seeing things that “are not there” in what he says.
What I would say: that’s my point. He does not see what there is in what he says. He does not see that what he says is racist and chauvinistic – so, according to him, it is not. This is that bone chilling “you just imagined it, dear” paradigm and I am not amused.
Meanwhile, I still think the most interesting insight to come out of all of this is that the fascination with mixture is a product of the binary racialist world system. This solves a lot.
More of the exchange. (Way below pasted in is one of the messages I am responding to. I found it massively insulting and although the ‘smart’ thing to do, according to some, would be to just ignore it
I find it all to be so signal that I think it is worth figuring out … the rhetorical strategies, and the assumptions, and all, are just so typical. H. also comes from an interesting position because his home country speaks a small language and he speaks a minority language within that, and he is teaching English to students who have a hard time with it and have to learn it because of the hegemony of English in business).
Me below the line – and then following is ONE of the messages I am responding to.
—
The thing about world English, H, is that it really is world English. It isn’t Japanese translated word by word into “English.” It exists, for example, in Trinidad (as a native language I don’t really understand), and in Mexico and Brazil (as a second language spoken fluently, but to which people bring local sensiblities otherwise expressed in Spanish and Portuguese), and also where I am (where many people are essentially translating from French).
That means that while speaking English with an Afro-Venezuelan, you and your students would be wise not to call them names they will recognize as racist.
ONCE AGAIN: It is not a question of “English” it is a question of race, racism, colonialism, and chauvinism. “Black” and “white” are themselves artificial categories, historically constructed and culturally embedded, and the fascination with mixture and with taxonomies for different mixtures is the product of a binary racialist world system. It is just not wise to go around unconsciously labeling people with terms which, in their localities, in whatever language, may have been used historically to oppress them.
On “imagining things” – I didn’t imagine you to cite Mendel, you actually cited him. Consciousness raising, in any case, is not about “imagining things” but about learning to see what is in fact present. Citing Mendel approvingly in the 21st century will raise red flags in ANY language. Saying you speak “world English” is not a good justification for classifying members of the worldwide African diaspora in what have been and are, concretely and historically, racist terms in several continents.
Or in other words: just because you want to speak English in your way, does not justify negating someone’s identity. This is my main point. To say: “I reject this man’s identification with African American culture because I see that he is not entirely of African descent” is like saying “I reject this man’s identification with Frisia because to me, he just looks Dutch.”
The way to respect otherness is to find out how people represent themselves, how they identify themselves, not to arrogantly impose terminology you have invented. That is particularly important when the terminology you invent mirrors terminology which has been used to oppress people historically.
Or a last example, not about English. “Sudaca” is a racist term in Spain for South American. I have had students go to Spain and learn this word, but not realize it is an insult. When they then use it around Latin Americans, they insult them unwittingly. Saying “Oh, I didn’t know” is fine the first time. But to say “Well among my non-Latin American friends it is not an insult, it is just a cultural designation, so I want Latin America to get used to that” is just silly.
On Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:50:32 +0900, H wrote
> It suddenly struck me yesterday: you and my students are not using
> the same language! You are NOT using English, but the US (or N-
> American) subvariant/version of it with all the local connotations.
> My students use another variant (and I a third): theirs, which is
> anything they can muster, and can be termed either world-English,
> international (business) English, Japanese-English or whatever.
> They are NOT studying English – after a heavy day at the office –
> to please ‘Americans’, to cater to US-sensibilities. Those days are
> (not completely yet) over. ‘Black person’ in their English is simply
> a translation (anglification) of the Japanese word ‘Kokujin’, which
> is as neutral as such terms can possibly be, and has nothing at all
> to do with self-image, cultural identifation etc. The scientific
> term ‘Negroid’ is the closest I can get to it in my English.
>
> Just after I’d typed the previous lines, I read this (in Dutch):
> , in (my) English that
> means . How apt. I
> think it will one day, maybe sooner than most people can imagine,
> but not just yet. Just like (or: as, depending on one’s version of
> English) the British/English still have not gotten (or ‘got’) used
> to the fact they’ve lost control over ‘their’ (?) language, the
> North-Americans will have to accept that English as used
> internationally is no longer ‘theirs’.
>
> > > Meanwhile I have a thought, re your friends’ ideas on whether Obama is
> really “black” … note that almost all African-Americans, including
> those in Central/South America and the Caribbean, are mixed, and a
> lot of them are lighter than he is. Exactly, that’s why many
> Japanese will describe someone as ‘mixed’, rather than ‘black’.
>
> > On what authority do they presume to tell him what he is?
> Leslie, they’re not Americans. ‘They’ don’t, i think, presume to
> tell him anything. The students who first asked me about it (he has
> a foreign wife and two ‘interracial’ kids by the way), simply stated
> logically that a person with a white mother and a black father is of
> mixed race. The guys knows his Mendel. I explained to him roughly
> what you wrote about the US-situation. If my students acknowledge
> any ‘authority’, it would be logic or science or the Japanese
> culture or international conventions or who knows what, but actually
> I don’t comprehend the point, and I’m pretty sure they don’t either.
> There is no authority. There are people born in Japan, who speak
> only Japanese, have Japanese passports, have never been to Korea or
> anywhere else outside Japan, and nevertheless identify themselves as
> Koreans. Should such a person take offense/offence when a foreigner
> describes him as or calls him Japanese?
>
> Greetings, H
I also said the following at one point. Of course to some extent I am practicing on H. the resistance to patriarchal + racist arguments I read elsewhere – but he IS one of the people who has expressed them. I’m not being entirely fair since he is not as well read on these matters as I. But still.
—
Or finally, this might be put simply enough to get through:
If you decided to call me a kike, which is an offensive term for a Jew, and I asked you please not to call me that name, would you
A: apologize and stop,
OR
B: insist that it was your right to call me that because you speak “world English” and you find the term accurate for you?
Imagine this dialogue with that Afro-Venezuelan businessman:
Hy and students: We have decided the correct term for you is Negroid.
Businessman: A-hem. That term, to me, has insulting connotations due to the racist ways in which it has been used historically. I am proud of all of my ancestry and I consider myself Afro-Venezuelan, not “negroid.”
What will you say?
A: We do not care. Negroid is the term we like, for our own reasons. If you find it insulting, that is your problem, not ours.
OR
B: We are sorry to have offended you. We will use a different cultural term.
*
And also – and this has nothing to do with language – to go around *anywhere* and talk about Mendel and “negroids” makes you look like a racialist crank form about 1920. It is not just in English that this stuff has been discredited long ago. The bibliography on this in other languages is enormous.
Finally – I have noticed in the course of the years that a lot of white people justify their continued use of racist terminology, approving references to people like Mendel and Gobineau, etc., by saying they are “resisting U.S. categories.” Yet what they are concretely resisting is antiracist activism and scholarship by NON WHITES in the U.S. and also THE CARIBBEAN (see people like CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, etc.) … many of whom are NOT from the U.S. and not all of whom speak or write in English.
The next thing(s) that occur to me are these:
* If learners of English as a foreign language are free to assign words any meaning they like, then why not do the same to syntax?
This of course leads to a host of other observations on language variation, canonicity, and my usual favorite, the penchant of the English department for ignoring contexts and assuming theirs is universal.
And on how you have to have a discipline before becoming interdisciplinary.
I could write a whole long essay on these things, too, but then I would have to be writing a book for a popular audience … not a bad idea actually if I formulated it right. I could go on television.
It would be about antiintellectualism inside academia and out, and the general penchant in so many disciplines and forms of thought for ignoring context(s). I could give examples now, but I have to grade.
This is just to say that I have been feeling intellectually and spiritually refreshed after every visit to your blog. Thank you.
Hi Katie and thank you! You mean, even if I post my arguments by e-mail with persons on other continents … ?
But we do try to stay smart here, and to walk in the spirit (despite our atheism). 🙂