Whiteness, racism, and identity

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn , Issue 60, 2001, Pages 48-56

  Fields, Barbara J ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035561928     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0147547901004410     Document Type: Article

References (6)

1. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper have subjected identity to overdue historical and theoretical scrutiny, urging its replacement with more precise terms for the varied and often mutually exclusive ideas that it seems to cover. They warn against assuming that the current ubiquity of identity as a category of practice proves its validity as a category of analysis or even its existence, until recent times, as a category of practice. See "Beyond 'Identity,'" Theory and Society 29 (2000):l-47.
2. Perry Anderson has reminded us that agency in the sense of conscious, goal-directed activity, is an analytically empty concept unless one also specifies the nature of the goal and the relationship between the conscious intent of those who pursue it and its social result. Agency in choosing to marry at a certain age, for example, is not agency in bringing about the population growth or decline to which the choice contributes. Perry Anderson, "Agency," in Arguments Within English Marxism (London, 1980), 2-58.
3. As Brubaker and Cooper demonstrate, the concept of identity has grave shortcomings even when limited to individuals; particularly, its liability to reification and essentialism, which devotees have tried to correct by reducing the concept to a contradiction in terms. Defining it as contingent, fluid, and multiple may rescue it, at least nominally, from reification and essentialism, but only by raising the question of how, in that case, it is identity at all. In the transit from individual to collective, the concept becomes incoherent. Whatever one supposes to be the psychological, psychosocial, or psychoanalytic constituents of identity in the individual, they dissipate into feeble metaphor when transposed to the collective. Brubaker and Cooper, "Beyond Identity."
4. Agent in English, as Perry Anderson points out, can carry the opposite connotations of active initiator or passive instrument, free agent or the agent of another. Anderson, "Agency," 18.
5. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1789-1860 (Ithaca, 1998), 3-4. Note the apologetic quotation marks around "race" and "racial" and the quiet shift from identity to identification.
6. Rick Bragg, "Legacy of a Cuban Boy: Miami City Hall Is Remade," The New York Times, May 10, 2000, A20.