Last month, South African singer Tyla responded to scrutiny of her self-described race. Taking to X (formerly Twitter), Tyla wrote: “Yoh guys. Never denied my blackness, idk [I don’t know] where that came from. I’m mixed with black/Zulu, Irish, Mauritian/Indian and coloured. In ‘Southa’ [South Africa] I would be classified as a coloured woman and other places I would be classified as a black woman. Race is classified differently in different parts of the world. I don’t expect to be identified as coloured outside ‘Southa’ by anyone not comfortable doing so because I understand the weight of that word outside SA. To close this conversation, I’m both coloured in South Africa and a black woman. With that being said Asambeee [let’s go].”
Why was this clarification necessary? Why were some people so emotionally invested in how one woman self-describes? Underlying these questions is the deeper issue of what “race” actually is – and why we cling to it.
Arguably, Tyla embodies the inherent fragility of racial classification. Is she black or coloured? As she herself points out, the answer depends on which country she is in. Clearly, conceptions of race are bound to place (and time). Importantly, for this reason, conceptions of race are not neatly bound to sets of physical traits.
To put it this way: race is the significance we attribute to physical characteristics. It is not the characteristics themselves.
Staggering claim
As an example, consider Israeli Jews. Since the events set in motion in October 2023, a common criticism of Israel has been that it is “white supremacist.” Considering the historical violence of actual white supremacists against Jews, this is a staggering claim. Ethnic identity is complex. The obsession with being able to neatly divide people into categories of “whiteness” and “blackness” is rigid, simplistic, and unscientific. There is no single gene, no single skin tone, no single physical attribute of any kind, which bestows the quality of “blackness” or “whiteness.”
Race is a social, not a biological, condition. It is ultimately arbitrary and subject to change.
Given this, why do some cling to racial labels? It would be easy to point to the political expediency of these labels. Historically, racially distinguishing people served to justify expropriation of their labour and resources (without compensation, of course). Categorising people is a way to simplify the processes of organising and relating to them. It also serves to control populations through the strategy of divide-and-conquer. Race has further been used as a stand-in for cultural identity and as an extension of chauvinism.
Still others use the argument that, “If you don’t see race, you don’t see racism.” As American activist Saira Rao put it, “If you are colorblind, you don’t see race. If you don’t see race, you don’t see racism. If you don’t see racism, you are not actively anti-racist. If you are not actively anti-racist, you are racist. It is not complicated.” Central to Rao’s contention is the idea that race shapes experiences and outcomes in concrete ways. Certain experiences cannot be detached from certain racialised attributes. To address one, we must see the other.
Circular reasoning
But here the circularity of Rao’s reasoning emerges. If racial categorisation causes certain negative experiences, how can those very experiences be ended through… racial categorisation? Entrenching the significance attributed to difference only… entrenches the significance attributed to difference.
In reality, the significance of any given attribute is constantly evolving. It is only set in stone if we choose to regard it as such. What constitutes the experience of being a given race differs across generations. Moreover, it is further complicated by class and education level.
Kimberlé Crenshaw tried to take this into account with her theory of intersectionality. Intersectionality acknowledges that the experience of, say, an unemployed black male, differs in complex ways from that of, say, an educated black female. Everyone is situated within multiple categories of identity. These categories of identity compound or mitigate one another in various ways. In this way, the theory attempts to fortify racial categories against deconstruction, by making them more nuanced.
Intersectionality
But ultimately, intersectionality wraps itself into knots evading an inevitable conclusion: that everyone is finally an individual. Stating this doesn’t erase the reality of group-based oppression. But that’s really the entire problem with persecution or discrimination based on group: it denies people’s individuality.
It assumes that all members of a given group share common capabilities, outlooks, and resources (or lack thereof). This assumption can, in certain areas, become self-fulfilling. If you treat a whole group of people as if their outcomes are identical and pre-determined, then similar outcomes will tend to be replicated and entrenched for that demographic.
The only way to ensure people are not reduced to the groups they are part of, is to treat them as individuals. Redress for past oppression can be implemented through addressing its specific impacts, rather than through addressing the attributes on which it was predicated. For example, why not make restorative resources available directly based on measured disadvantage, rather than on race?
Race, like life, is ultimately what one makes of it. No individual should ever be forced to conceptualise themselves in a certain way, merely on the basis of arbitrary characteristics.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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Photo by Adam Przewoski on Unsplash