Guest Post: Why Can't We Play With Ethnicity?

On the embattled category of ethno-fluidity

Stephen G. Adubato

is a New York-based writer, a professor of philosophy, and author of the Cracks In Postmodernity Substack. I find his work consistently sharp and provocative. So I’m pleased to publish this guess essay by Stephen, exploring a question that often pops up in social-media slop discourse but rarely gets a more thoughtful treatment: why can you identify as another gender, but not as another race?

My Greek, Italian, and Armenian genes have always thrown people. While having a discussion with my high school seniors about getting ready for college, I was once asked by one of my Afro-Dominican students what it was like dealing with racism on campus. My Filipina co-worker once tried to commiserate with me about being the object of racial microaggressions. On another occasion, I ran into a black-American friend at an event full of white people. She hugged me and remarked that she was “so relieved to see another person of color” there. Latino immigrants will often come up to me in the street asking me for directions in Spanish (which I speak). And the dude at the halal truck often tries to strike up conversations with me in Arabic (which I don’t speak).

Whenever I attend concerts or events full of people belonging to a culture that is not my own, it’s often easy for me to blend in. When people think I’m another ethnicity, it’s easy for me to roll with it. Except I don’t merely fall into it and let it roll. I actively choose to lean into it. I get a rush from it all.

But I’ve always enjoyed crossing boundaries. As a child, I always had a flair for dress-up: I relished putting on outlandish costumes and putting on shows for my family members. There was something alluring about taking on another person’s identity, about crossing over to the “other side” and entering into the mysterious realm of pretending to be someone else.

That allure took on an edge of thrill when I took on “forbidden” characters—namely when I put on my mother’s clothing and embodied a female persona. Something about breaking a taboo, and about making my parents clutch their pearls, gave me a rush. But it was more than just the electrifying sensation of transgression that drew me to crossdressing: there was something objectively attractive, inherently beautiful about many of my mother’s articles of clothing.

Eventually, my flair for acting and dress-up veered into the lane of crossing cultural and ethnic boundaries. I enjoyed playing characters that belonged to cultures other than my own nearly as much as I enjoyed playing female ones. And just like my attraction to embodying femininity, my attraction to embodying other cultures was driven both by a fondness for transgression, and also by genuine fascination. But when you compare cross-gender and cross-cultural dress-up today, there’s a dissonance. Progressives will celebrate cross-dressing, and in the same breath tell you “cultural appropriation” is a harmful sin. I’ve always found this confusing.

Of course America’s complicated politics of migration and ethnicity means that borrowing from other cultures lands differently depending who is doing the borrowing. But even so, there’s a real cognitive dissonance in treating all forms of cultural appropriation as categorically evil (and transracialism as anathema) while encouraging gender fluidity and applauding transgenderism. My own gender and ethnic fluidity were driven by similar impulses. And in my observation, while some of my peers who identify as trans seem genuinely to be grappling with deep identity challenges, others are fairly obviously grappling mostly with bourgeois ennui. The main reason they choose to experiment with gender rather than ethnicity is that there is more social capital there.

I’m not saying “ethnofluid” is a real identity category, or that transracials like Rachel Dolezal ought to be accorded the same social acceptance as transgenders. I don’t even want to remove the moral stigma against “cultural appropriation.” Rather, I want to draw attention to the way that this form of moral puritanism has closed down the space for play.

In times past, figures like court jesters, drag queens, and vaudeville actors occupied a social space Charles Taylor called “anti-structure.” Such spaces were on one hand amoral, decadent, and transgressive, and on the other were celebrated for how they contributed to the common good. The presence of such figures on the margins of “respectable” society provided a release valve from—and a metacommentary of sorts on—normal social conventions and the boundaries of nature.

Such transgressive figures are the decadent counterpart - in a similar, albeit inverted, way to those called to “supernatural” vocations like prophets and monastics. While the former call to mind our more base proclivities that lie beneath the “natural” and the norms of respectability, while the latter provoke us to contemplate higher ideals that transcend said norms did). Thus, while normalizing trangressive their behaviour would be detrimental to the social fabric, completely eliminating it is not just impossible, but culturally self-destructive, killing off important channels for mischief and creativity.

Today, we laud transgenders as moral heroes and condemn culture-vultures. But in times past, it was understood that the impulse to play with identities and personae is neither good nor evil. The loss of spaces of “anti-structure” is part and parcel of the flattening of our collective imagination and the confusion of our moral compass, as well as our self-seriousness and distaste for revelry. The elimination of the distinction between that which is frivolously amoral, and that which is incontrovertibly immoral or straight up evil, has produced this bizarre tendency to arbitrarily normalize some forms of transgression and to demonize others.

And there is something unrealistic about trying to hold all people to an intransigent standard of moral purity. Ultimately, what would life be without the entertainment provided by the jester and the provocations of the dandy, or the revelry of carnival—when social norms were momentarily rendered ambiguous for the whole populace? Where would we be without the deviants like Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose “exoticist” fascination with “Oriental” cultures inspired profound works of art, poetry, and cultural criticism? The puritanical mentality that would demonize such “exoticism” wholesale would risk quashing the inspiration for his innovative work: an inspiration ultimately rooted in a recognition of objective value and beauty.

I can’t morally defend my thrill for breaking taboos. But I think it unwise to demonize all forms of cultural experimentation and exoticism. It might be amoral or insensitive, but there is social value in ethnofluidity, as a source of cultural innovation and creativity. We would do better to rehabilitate a space for such playfulness, by making more spaces for anti-structure. Doing so might, in turn, help to revivify our collective imagination—or in the least, our sense of humor.

Follow Stephen at Cracks in Postmodernity. His work is also featured in the forthcoming anthology Inversion: Gay Life After The Homosexual (Verdurin, released 12 November)