Tranquil Union Watch
Who Are You, or What Are You? The Problems With Identity
Which explain why blues, purples and sensible reds often talk past each other.
The post from Kim Bui embedded just above is a good read. I’d even go so far as to say an important one. I’m going to pick a couple of bones, that said.
The heart of the matter is in my title above: the word ‘identity’, while not quite a contranym, comes pretty close. Depending on usage, it can either mean your individual uniqueness (Who you are … as in, say, your government ID) or the various groups/classes/attributes you share with others (What you are). For STEMmy types who are picky about precision in language, it should only be the former, since that’s the math definition. I’ll try to persuade those who disagree.
But I don’t want to get stuck on the terminology aspect for now … “arguing over semantics”. Bui’s title, her use of “complex” and “intersecting” identities, her lived experience and the crux of her piece all point to the same core issue: whether there’s any useful What sense of the term, other than faction aggregation and politics. Hold these thoughts.
Everyone’s a bundle of attributes … of What-Identities. As Bui puts it [her emphasis]:
Phenotypes are not ethnicity, which is not nationality, which is not culture, which is not language
Phenotypes are visible characteristics (like skin color). Ethnicity is the culture or group dynamic you grew up in. Race is a constructed grouping of people with similar backgrounds or phenotypes. Culture can transcend ethnicity. Language is used as a gauge of whether a person is “enough” of a group to claim that identity. Most people, including myself, often conflate one descriptor with another.
Absolutely correct. She could also have added genotypes/haplogroups to the list, or age, or income/wealth level, or birth order, or height/weight/attractiveness/SMV, or education level, or zip code, etc… but why quibble when the rest is so spot on. I draw the reader’s attention in particular to “Race is a constructed grouping”. Indeed, and I note that it’s encouraging that the public schools I’m familiar with here in the SF Bay Area teach these days that race is not a scientific concept.
Good place to start.
(She could have also added citizenship to the list, but given the worldview/dogma of her Stanford JSK Fellowship context, I realize that’s a trigger term for the words-will-always-hurt-me types. For anon.)
Bui is quite right about the conflation of the descriptors, as well as the essential math/statistics. My beef with the term ‘intersectionality’ is that it didn’t need inventing (by not very quantitative law professor types … who else?), since multiple regression analysis is part of any standard introductory statistics curriculum … likely not a requirement for (pre-)law, which could explain the re-invention.
Of course when you start combining attributes, the instances/individuals become harder to bucket or pigeon-hole … or what really matters to the activists, legal and political: to pad the numbers of their particular single or narrow issue faction.
For examples of more rigorous treatments of the topic, by academics who actually understand statistics, consider the work of Greta R. Bauer and Ayden I. Scheim, who summarize it neatly:
Intersectionality now has a long history of application in qualitative research. Yet, as an “analytic sensibility” (Cho et al., 2013), its optimal applications in quantitative research remain unclear.
That last part is academia-speak for something in between “not very rigorous” and “baloney”. Note the flowers they offer via the qualitative vs. quantitative distinction. Anyone on a tenure track in the social studies who doesn’t want to commit career suicide has to euphemize when they’re near the third rails of cancel culture.
The simplified demonstration of the methods they propose concerns how the intersection of ethnoracial group and sexual and gender minority (SGM) status impacts a measure of psychological distress (“Kessler 6”). The chart below summarizes their findings (lower numbers, meaning distress level, are better).
Note the three rows without ‘-’ signs, meaning their distress levels are not higher/worse than any of the other groups.
For my purposes here, there are no greater conclusions to be drawn, either of the problem recognition or policy prescription varieties. I do invite the reader to ponder the Black non-SGM (aka straight) comparison to White SGM cells in this matrix.
Activists who look at the world through a single attribute lens … say, either just race or sex-and-gender … hate this Bauer & Scheim kind of actual science. They much prefer their dogmas and political campaigns. Especially reasoning from tropes like “systemic white supremacy” … in 2024 … when they’d struggle to define what systems are, or exactly what the boundary is of this or other systems they posit. Sadly, too many of them might not pass the “-1/12 vs. 1x1=2” discernment test.
Hats off to Bui for being courageous enough at least to address the intersection aspect, with a minimum of wokery. I, for one, say keep it up: it’s a voice and perspective we should hear more of in the Big Conversation.
