Can someone be tran-racial?

[Leftsolidarity]

This is a strange question that I'm pretty much only asking out of boredom.

So seeing that gender is a social construct and all that, there are trans-gendered people.

Since race is also a social construct could one be trans-racial?

DISCUSS!

[Red Rabbit]

I am every race.

[Nox]

I'm a mish mash of different ethnicities including Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish and Dagestani so I guess I'm trans racial :P

[Agent Ducky]

No, I think he means, example: Someone who is white who identifies as Asian or something.
I don't think race works the same way as gender, really.
Although I do know a girl who is Latina/Mexican who desperately wanted to be Japanese and would identify like that sometimes.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

No. A middle-class white kid cannot identify as "black" no matter how badly the ignorant fuck wants to.

[shinjuku dori]

There are no middle class black people in America?

Who is Oprah Winfrew.

[Book O'Dead]

It's always possible to turn into Ali G.

Here he is talking about gender:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oftOCN1jkNo

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

So seeing that gender is a social construct and all that, there are trans-gendered people.
I think statements that "gender is a social construct" are easy to make when your experience of gender is congruent with your physical sex and when you don't consider that the experience of others may be very different.

[Positivist]

If by race, is meant the ensemble of social characteristics associated with a particular ethnicity, then yes you can. I don't think that means that you identify as "black" or any other race for that matter, but just act that way.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

It's certainly possible that people identify as a race which they are not, but gender is seen generally speaking as even more socially constraining than race. Thus, a white man can take on aspects of black culture while attaining his identity, while they cannot take on aspects of "femininity" without the real nature of their identity being questioned. That, and the things which drive us to fir the "feminine" or "masculine" social standards are much more precious than the cultural attachments of being white or black - in particular, our sexual desires, emotional states and familial attachments.

It is interesting how when race was more restrictive in its implications as far as individual identity was concerned, that people would take on aspects of the other, even at the cost of physical pain, to attain that identity. Malcom X has a good scene of Malcom straightening his hair with a lye substance to gain aspects of the white identity. However, this of course is not the same as the full-on identity conflict which transgendered people struggle with, but a mere desire to attain some characteristic of the "other" identity.


I think statements that "gender is a social construct" are easy to make when your experience of gender is congruent with your physical sex and when you don't consider that the experience of others may be very different.

Whose to say it's not a social construct which is not congruent with physical sex? Whose to say that whatever biological component correlates with transgender is not distinct from the social notion of what "gender" is?

[Brosa Luxemburg]

There are no middle class black people in America?

Who is Oprah Winfrew.

I never said that. How did you possibly get the idea that I thought that from my post?

[Peoples' War]

Maybe it's the strong beer, a glorious 7.1% fine Labatts, but I don't think it's a legitimate thing.

I think, in fact, it would be racist, in a way. It would consider that the racial divide is biological, and not along class lines.

[shinjuku dori]

Wow, left wing people who discuss race concept? Are you on wrong website. There is one for Nazi somewhere else. Race is pseudo-science concept from last century.

[MarxSchmarx]

Well, most trans people are trans because of the way their genes got arranged. The problem with trans-race is that all races have pretty much the same genes, and the genes that underlie the differences we use to characterize different races can't really be in conflict the way the genes underlying gender can.

But on the basis of social conditioning, I think roughly similar issues arise wrt race as well as gender. For example, in English there are a proliferation of slurs and insults for this - oreo ("black" on the outside, "white" on the inside), apple ("red on the outside, white on the inside"), egg ("white" on the outside, "yellow" on the inside), banana ("yellow on the outside, white on teh inside") hell there's even Pineapple for "brown on the outside, yellow on the inside".

Anyway, usually these are meant to be derogatory, but on rare occasions a few of them do describe a real social phenomenon. For example, across several countries, aboriginals raised in a predominantly white environment tend to internalize a lot of the value systems of their white neighbors, school friends, etc... and when they are around other aboriginals this stigma sticks and they have a very hard time adjusting to the aboriginal communities even if things like language barriers could be overcome.

[Leftsolidarity]

I think statements that "gender is a social construct" are easy to make when your experience of gender is congruent with your physical sex and when you don't consider that the experience of others may be very different.

I don't identify as cisgender so I don't know if that was directed at me. I view gender as a social construct, though.


No. A middle-class white kid cannot identify as "black" no matter how badly the ignorant fuck wants to.

Why not? What makes the kid ignorant because he is middle class and white? I grew up as a middle class kid and I am white.


Wow, left wing people who discuss race concept? Are you on wrong website. There is one for Nazi somewhere else. Race is pseudo-science concept from last century.

So we should ignore the fact that races exist in our society?

[Sea]

I reject the concept of trans-racialness. It presupposes that race should be an important part of identity.


Why not? What makes the kid ignorant because he is middle class and white? I grew up as a middle class kid and I am white.What makes him ignorant is that he thinks he can identify as black.


So we should ignore the fact that races exist in our society?It's our society that transforms innocent things like skin color into something as separating as the concept of race. We should acknowledge it to fight against this concept, not to perpetuate it.

[Magón]

There are no middle class black people in America?

Who is Oprah Winfrew.

If Oprah's seen as middle class, then I'm worse than just poor with the occasional ability to do things I enjoy.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

I don't identify as cisgender so I don't know if that was directed at me. I view gender as a social construct, though.
I think gender roles are social constructs. I think gender identity is a complex mix of things.

[shinjuku dori]

Maybe these are trans racial?

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%AE%E3%83%A3%E3%83%AB

Some thing to discuss at your next racial studies group at the Nazibund;)

[Hiero]

Well, most trans people are trans because of the way their genes got arranged. The problem with trans-race is that all races have pretty much the same genes, and the genes that underlie the differences we use to characterize different races can't really be in conflict the way the genes underlying gender can.

But on the basis of social conditioning, I think roughly similar issues arise wrt race as well as gender. For example, in English there are a proliferation of slurs and insults for this - oreo ("black" on the outside, "white" on the inside), apple ("red on the outside, white on the inside"), egg ("white" on the outside, "yellow" on the inside), banana ("yellow on the outside, white on teh inside") hell there's even Pineapple for "brown on the outside, yellow on the inside".

Anyway, usually these are meant to be derogatory, but on rare occasions a few of them do describe a real social phenomenon. For example, across several countries, aboriginals raised in a predominantly white environment tend to internalize a lot of the value systems of their white neighbors, school friends, etc... and when they are around other aboriginals this stigma sticks and they have a very hard time adjusting to the aboriginal communities even if things like language barriers could be overcome.
I imagine and know that not all cross-cultural interactions aren't as negative, and may be instrumental in survival in everyday life. Some people utilise multiple ways of interacting with people like aboriginal ways and non-aboriginal ways in part of their daily life. Like working at a factory and coming home to different household. For instance they may take up the individual bounded concept of humans in the work place, but return to kinship responsibilities at home.

My experience with Islanders (Samoans and Tongans) in Australia my friends exhibited cross-cultural identities and style of interaction well. In high school we functioned in similar contexts, but Islanders in their home and 'community' life still followed kinship and mormon culture. I noticed this in two different ways of reciprocation, sharing, lending etc. I think these things go unnoticed or re-interupted in racist notions, that certian people assimilate better that others.

Overall the questions is flawed. If races are social constructs, no one can be 'trans-racial'. One there is no racial, it is construct. And construct means, well that, a social construction. That is not in the minds of people only, but in practices, power discourses, ideology, culture, class, and gender. We misrecognised those processes as naturalised, endemic categories such as 'race' and 'gender' (gender her not as a process but here as Gender). In Bourdieu's terms, all (re)cognition is misrecognition:


While it must be reasserted, against all forms of mechanism, that ordinary experience of the social world is a cognition, it is equally important to realize – contrary to the illusion of the spontaneous generation of consciousness which so many theories of the ‘awakening of class consciousness’ (prise de conscience) amount to – that primary cognition is misrecognition, recognition of an order which is also established in the mind. Life-styles are thus the systematic products of habitus, which, perceived in their mutual relations through the schemes of the habitus, become sign systems that are socially qualified (as ‘distinguished’, ‘vulgar’ etc.). The dialectic of conditions and habitus is the basis of an alchemy which transforms the distribution of capital, the balance-sheet of a power relation, into a system of perceived differences, distinctive properties, that is, a distribution of symbolic capital, legitimate capital, whose objective truth is misrecognized. Bourdieu, 1984:168

If it is a social construct, you can't accept that someone can be 'constructed socially' as white and then say 'I feel Black' and it has any validity. However someone can have an experiences of heterogeneity (that I discussed above), different experiences that are usually labelled as one or another category. For example being from an aboriginal family but going to a predominant white public school, which later on life on acquiring white habits some racist asshole may call you an ‘Oreo’.

That would be my explanation of the trans-sexual. I think us all experience different gender experiences as kids, as adults cannot segregate genders as much as people do race or ethnicity and class. I think males and females just are interpellated (see Althusser, Foucault, Butler) different ways, which some reject having been exposed to alternatives. As humans do as Bourdieu sees, we misrecognise this process as natural, in cisgender and transsexual.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Wow, left wing people who discuss race concept? Are you on wrong website. There is one for Nazi somewhere else. Race is pseudo-science concept from last century.

I'm not going to validate this post with a serious response but holy shit what are you on about

[shinjuku dori]

Because race has been known to science to have been mistaken idea from 300 years before now? Have you not updated your knowledge since the Dodo bird was living?

[Jimmie Higgins]

This is a strange question that I'm pretty much only asking out of boredom.

So seeing that gender is a social construct and all that, there are trans-gendered people.

Since race is also a social construct could one be trans-racial?

DISCUSS!Being trans is an identity created by and based out of certain kinds of sexual and gender repressions. Since people are socially compelled to adpot these gender roles, people who don't fit into them are repressed and harassed and so out of that comes a need to find a community, refuge.

Race, while also a social construct, acts differently in US society. There are many examples of people "passing" as another race - often to avoid racial discrimination. But the point of passing, is to do it invisibly, so no "passing" community or identity ever formed because the whole point of it was to mask your ethnic background, not because you felt like identified more with a different gender.


Because race has been known to science to have been mistaken idea from 300 years before now? Have you not updated your knowledge since the Dodo bird was living? Race may be a social construct, but it has material effects on the lives of people. Just because Christ doesn't exist doesn't mean that the Inquisition or the Roman Church were figments of people's imagination with no impact on class forces or society in general.

"Race" doesn't exist? No, not in the objective sense, but racism sure as fuck exists in our subjective situations in capitalist society.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Well, most trans people are trans because of the way their genes got arranged. The problem with trans-race is that all races have pretty much the same genes, and the genes that underlie the differences we use to characterize different races can't really be in conflict the way the genes underlying gender can.


Is there actually any real conclusive evidence of a common genetic cause in transgendered people, and does this common genetic cause always result in transgenderism or only sometimes? There seem to be untested assumptions here. I'm not saying you're wrong but they are certainly claims which could use some support.


I reject the concept of trans-racialness. It presupposes that race should be an important part of identity.


Is there any in-group/out-group category which society should endorse an important part of identity above their individual character? People have their identities, identity, both gender and race, thanks to their conditions and not genes, etc. Being a man or being a woman should have very little to do with "who you are" in the real sense.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Because race has been known to science to have been mistaken idea from 300 years before now? Have you not updated your knowledge since the Dodo bird was living?

I think everyone here at revleft who isn't in OI yet understands race to be an artificial social construct, one that plays a role in the organization of modern capitalist society. It is well worth studying. Asking questions about race doesn't make somebody a racist. Accepting preconceptions about race does.

[seventeethdecember2016]

Only in ethnically mixed cultures, like Brazil, will you see such things.

European history doesn't quite have a deeply rooted trend like that.

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

So long as their are visible, tangible and easily identifiable cultural aspects of race / ethnicity, I don't think so (at the mo I think ethnicity and nationality carries with it a lot of cultural baggage with stereotypes and perceived norms for that race or group).
A white kid that dresses and behaves in a way that is widely considered to be black would automatically be seen as somehow mocking or belittling that race / culture, or just be a target for mockery by others, whether they meant it or not.

[Zav]

Gender is a social construct based on gender roles, and is irrelevant. Sex is biological, and one can be trans-gender because one's sex and gender identity don't match. Race, however, is a myth. It is based on nothing more than skin color. One could possibly feel like their skin should be a different color, but I think that has more to do with body image than dysphoria.

[bad ideas actualised by alcohol]

Maybe these are trans racial?

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%AE%E3%83%A3%E3%83%AB

Some thing to discuss at your next racial studies group at the Nazibund;)

Nobody here can read Japanese although I think you are talking about the pictures.
Oh and discussing race doesn't make you a Nazi, troll harder.

[MarxSchmarx]

Is there actually any real conclusive evidence of a common genetic cause in transgendered people, and does this common genetic cause always result in transgenderism or only sometimes? There seem to be untested assumptions here. I'm not saying you're wrong but they are certainly claims which could use some support.


Actually the genetic basis of transgenderism doesn't require that transgendered people share the same genetic causes. all it requires is that there be some genetic basis; in fact there could be multiple genetic causes.

Anyway, some of the evidence so far for some genetic foundations is mounting, e.g.,

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-11/discovery-transsexual-gene-raises-more-questions-answers

But there could also be developmental issues that are biological, but not strictly genetic, for example, maternal physiological effects during pregnancy. However, such non-genetic causes don't seem to me to be really social constructs the way race is

[Luís Henrique]

Only in ethnically mixed cultures, like Brazil, will you see such things.

You mean "transracialism"?

Sorry, it is absolutely inexistent in Brazil.

Luís Henrique

[citizen of industry]

Because race has been known to science to have been mistaken idea from 300 years before now? Have you not updated your knowledge since the Dodo bird was living?

Then why are you so racist in your other posts, claiming that Japan is all drug free and the west is the "hellfire of decadence," that foreigners living in Japan are not Japanese and have no right to free speech, that "half" children are doomed, that western countries are illiterate, etc.? Where does race come into play in those situations?

[Brosa Luxemburg]

Why not? What makes the kid ignorant because he is middle class and white? I grew up as a middle class kid and I am white.

No, you misread what I said. I was saying that there are middle class white kids who try to act what they think as "black" because they think it's cool and those types of kids are dumb motherfuckers. I wasn't saying all middle class white kids are ignorant.

[shinjuku dori]

Then why are you so racist in your other posts, claiming that Japan is all drug free and the west is the "hellfire of decadence," that foreigners living in Japan are not Japanese and have no right to free speech, that "half" children are doomed, that western countries are illiterate, etc.? Where does race come into play in those situations?

American English teacher in Japan is not a race. Sorry frienduy.