Remember Rachel Dolezal, who had to resign as president of her local chapter of the NAACP when it turned out that she was white? It seemed a peculiarly American story at the time. But, as so often, the United States turned out to be a trend-setter. Angst about racial self-identification has now crossed the Atlantic.
Last week, it emerged that a British actor and director called Anthony Lennon had won part of a financial grant set aside for “theater directors of color,” despite being, as far as anyone can tell, completely white. Lennon’s parents were part of the post-war wave of Irish immigration to London. His father was from Waterford, his mother from Tralee. He has a dark complexion and curly hair, as some Irish people do, and says he decided some time ago to embrace his identity as “an African born again.” Lennon never sought to deceive anyone: He always admitted that his ancestry was white. He simply wanted to play a different role, being, in fairness, an actor.
You’d think that the correct liberal response would be, “So what? Let people call themselves whatever they want, dress however they like, behave in any way they please, provided they do no harm to others.” After all, we keep being told that race is a social construct. In a perfect world, then, skin color would count for nothing more than hair color, and we’d judge people wholly by the content of their character. Right?
Wrong. “Many of us are becoming sick and tired of racial imposters who are commodifying blackness for their own financial gain,” says the author Habeeb Akande. “You cannot wear the cloak of blackness when it suits you.”
“Using racial fluidity as a weapon is simply a more covert, insidious attempt to silence minority progress and elevate whiteness in spaces where it does not belong,” agrees Georgina Lawton, a mixed-race Guardian writer.
It’s hard to keep up. For decades, leftists fought to eradicate racial discrimination in all its forms. They have every reason to be proud of that struggle. Ending segregation and asserting the right of each person to be treated as an individual was a monumental achievement. Yet at some point, colorblindness went from being a liberal ideal to being a right-wing hang-up. Instead of demanding the right of all citizens to be treated the same, the modern Left demands their right to be treated differently.
In such an atmosphere, pretty much anything anyone says is potentially offensive. Here are some of the phrases now defined as microaggressions on campuses:
“There is only one race, the human race.”
“America is a melting pot.”
“I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”
Yet it was precisely these sentiments — or sentiments very like them — that motivated the civil rights campaigners. Ensuring that everyone got the right to vote, to go to school, to ride the bus, was fundamentally a campaign for equality before the law. When exactly did that become a reactionary concept?
A similar contradiction has crept into our discussion of sexual identity. The same people who insist that gender is non-existent, a patriarchal construct, are often the first to insist that the right to pick your own gender be enshrined in law. So the current position of the woke Left, if I understand it, is that gender self-identification is liberating but ethnic self-identification is oppressive.
How can anyone avoid giving offense when the rules keep changing like that?
The one constant is the determination to be outraged. We are dealing here not with a coherent philosophy, but with a frame of mind — a frame of mind that recalls that of the swooning Victorian matron.
Race used to be a legal, or at least semi-legal, category in many countries, including the United States. The vocabulary that accompanied official racial classification — “octaroon,” “mulatto” and so on — rightly strikes us today as revolting. The vocabulary of unofficial categorization — “passing as white,” “high yellow” etc — seems scarcely less gruesome.
Yet when you boil it down, is the reaction to the Dolezal and Lennon affairs so very different? What is their critics’ point, if not that race inescapably defines everything we are?
In this assertion, oddly, the alt-Right and the Antifa Left come together. Far from being opposites, they share the view that life is defined by a hierarchy of ethnic privilege. The alternative view — that we should all be judged individually by our honesty, intelligence, courage and generosity rather than by our physiognomy — would just recently have gone almost without saying. That it should suddenly seem controversial says nothing good about our generation.
