One of my regrets about my very spotty blogging as of lately is that I didn’t blog all the way through Laura Blumenfeld’s Revenge: A Story of Hope. I did eventually finish it, and was, I must say, completely gobsmacked by the ending — it was so cinematic I’m not 100% sure it actually happened, but it’s a great read. In one of the posts I did write about it, I mentioned her discussion of the role of revenge in bonding between families and others. “In aboriginal Siberia,” she writes, “the word for kindred families is cin-yirin, meaning ‘collection of those who take part in blood revenge.’”

I can’t escape the feeling that revenge has a role in the persistence of American racial identity. By creating a common grievance among black people, white Americans created a common motivation for revenge, and therefore, a common reason to fear them. I remember during the last presidential election, a commenter on a British newspaper’s online coverage wondered if Obama was going to take advantage of his position to take revenge against white people on behalf of black people — because that’s what the commenter himself would want to do, if he were a black American. Such notions seem pretty outlandish, especially when applied to Obama, but it has, I think, been bubbling in the American subconscious for a long time.

Probably the most illustrative case is Malcolm X. Although people worried about his inciting violence in his lifetime, his main form of racial vengeance was returning slander with slander. You think we’re an inferior race? Hey, you’re the inferior race! The story about a mad scientist creating the white race wasn’t original to him, but his rhetorical gifts made it weirdly compelling even to people who didn’t literally believe it. And I can’t help suspecting that, although Malcolm’s fans like to emphasize his late conversion from racism, he would not be so interesting a character if he didn’t give voice to that irrational sense of justice. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a lie for a lie. This of course goes against the idea that justice is inseparable from truth — you must first find out what really happened — but in the old reciprocity ethic, it makes perfect sense. Slander is a form of injury that isn’t quite like anything else, and you probably can’t know what it feels like to think you’re the inferior race unless you do.

I don’t know any white person that believes the Nation of Islam’s theory of racial origins, but I have known some with at least a vague idea that theirs is a genetically nasty race. A co-worker I had some years ago claimed that the reason white people conquered most of the world is that “the Cro-Magnons ate the Neanderthals.” There are a lot of problems with that theory of course, but you can see how it’s really white supremacy turned on its head. There’s that old Paleolithic ancestor again, forming those traits that redound to the present day, only in this case it’s a bad thing.

Eventually, Malcolm X realized that the world is bigger than America’s racial conflicts. In his autobiography, he describes a stopover in Egypt on his way to Mecca, where he meets a white man who “didn’t feel like a white man.” It was a clue that American whiteness is a cultural identity, not a racial one, and a rather parochial cultural identity at that. Malcolm didn’t live long enough to form a full-blown alternative to his former views, but his story has been a source of hope every since. Maybe it is possible to go through revenge and come out the other side.

Russell was kind enough to quote my posts on government and teleology in his own musings on the election in Britain. It’s funny how, even though we are basically agreeing with each other here, whenever I read him on the subject I get the feeling we’re talking about different things. I think this may be because he’s an academic who’s been thinking about all this at an advanced level for many years, whereas I’m still working on the basics, like “What is government for?” Lately, I’ve been thinking about a slightly different question: what is ethnic identity for?

I’ve been thinking about this partly because yet another kerfuffle recently broke out on the Internet over race and IQ, and partly because of Kelefa Sanneh’s recent review of “whiteness studies.” Sanneh mentions David Roediger’s advocacy of the “abolition of whiteness,” which I remember hearing Roediger discuss on the radio some years back. In one sense, abolishing whiteness sounds ridiculous. We tend to think of race and ethnicity as things thrust upon us from the past, embedded in our genes, like family. And of course, people tend to think of ethnicity as being family writ large: we’re descended from common ancestors, we look alike, we act alike, and so on. That’s true enough, but the family analogy also shows the limitations of defining groups by traits. Everyone in my immediate family, for instance, is quite tall. Still, there are short people in my extended family, my sister married a short guy, and if they have children they might too be short. So while tallness is certainly an inborn, heritable trait that runs in my family, it doesn’t define my family. What defines my family, like most families, is the fact that we are related.

To some extent, of course, all white people are related; but our common ancestor was back in the Stone Age sometime, whereas many white and nonwhite Americans share common ancestors who were a lot more recent. The renewed interest among African-Americans in genealogy is showing just how related black and white Americans are. So that raises a natural question: why are we still identifying with this long-forgotten Paleolithic ancestor when there are much more immediate connections to think about?

There are several possible answers to that question, but one that Sanneh doesn’t bring up is that you can’t abolish whiteness without abolishing blackness. At least, I don’t see how. If every nonwhite race keeps its identity, then whites kind of have to be a race by default. Either that or we break up into sub-races, like was once the case in Europe, but I don’t see how that could happen in America.

And in fact, the question of why blackness goes on existing is just as legitimate. Blackness was not an African idea; it came about mainly to define an occupational role, a slave class. That occupation no longer exists in the West, so blackness is now essentially defined by the past: these are the descendants of people who used to be slaves. That identification has helped preserve discrimination, but I suspect that most black people would also be alarmed at the idea of black identity disappearing. For that matter, so would a lot of white people. In a lot of ways, the story of black Americans is the modern Exodus, a stunning testimonial inspiring — and warning — people far beyond its original ethnic group. But does the new version of Exodus, like the old one, require the continued existence of the relevant group? And is it worth all the trouble? In one sense, it’s strange to keep a whole multigenerational identity alive just to tell a story, but sometimes I wonder if there’s anything to nationhood but stories.

There are other possible answers to the question, but I will get into that in a future post.