![]() ![]() ![]() For example, Jews and Muslims are religious groups, yes, but have both been racialized and treated as fundamentally Other by European and American White Christians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries ( Joshi 2020 Blumenfeld et al. Such categories are all related and they tend to leak into one another. 3 Nor am I making a distinction between such kinds of identity as race, ethnicity, ethnoracial group, or indeed religion. I am not surrendering to the pseudoscience of eugenics or any of its contemporary successors-race as subspecies, a biological category, discernible by physiognomy or genetics, and determinative of character and abilities ( Gould 1996 Marks 1995 Stern 2016 Kevles 1985 Tucker 2007 Sussman 2014 Roberts 2012). 2 I will use the term “race” to refer to any primary identity of an individual or group that is inherited from kinfolk (biological or cultural) and that is commonly deemed to be permanent. Some Preliminary Considerationsįirst, let me describe what I mean when I talk about race in this paper. Thus, I am writing in the direction of a theory of racial change. Racial change is rare, but it does happen, and I want to try to understand it. I am not doing this because it is the main issue in racial studies-far from it. I am writing to explore the circumstances under which individuals or groups may be prone to changing their identities, and to try to assess what is the work that such racial change is doing. 1 As is appropriate for a special issue on the theme of mixed race, many such people do indeed have complicated ancestries, and mixed people tend to have more identity options than those who see themselves as monoracial. It turns out that there are people who have changed their race or another primary identity, sometimes more than once. This article, however, is about people who could raise their hands if they were asked a similar question. We assume that race is a stable and essential part of our makeup, a ground to our identity. Ask the same audience how many have changed their racial identities over the course of their lifetimes, and it is unlikely that a hand will go up. Our racial identity is something we all know about ourselves. A is Black, B is Muslim, C is Japanese, and so are all of the members of their respective families and kin groups. The complexity and contingency of these processes may tend to diminish our commitment to the very idea of social inquiry as science.Īsk an audience of a hundred people to tell you what their racial or ethnic identity is and just about everyone in the house usually can do so. And sometimes it is an individual’s, a family’s, or an entire ethnic group’s choice to make a change. Sometimes changes in identity are imposed by governments, by institutions, or by society at large. Sometimes it is mainly a matter of changes in context and the menu of identities that are available. It describes three major intertwined processes at work. It seeks to understand what kinds of circumstances produce racial change, what sorts of people and groups are likely to change identities, what processes facilitate identity change, and what kinds of work that change is doing. This article sets out an agenda for understanding the phenomenon of racial or other primary identity change. At different times in their lives, or over generations in their families and communities, their identities have changed from one group to another. The theory enunciated here is directed to illumine individuals and groups whose lives are more complicated than that. We are accustomed to thinking of identities-racial, ethnic, often religious-as if they were permanent, unalterable features of individuals and groups. ![]()
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