This investment in ethnic-racialized identification is a form of coercive mimeticism that forces children to replicate expected identity roles – the impact is alienation and psychic violence

An essay in the collection authored by David O. Sears and Sheri Levy, ‘‘Childhood and Adult Political Development,’’ illustrates how Chow’s notion of ‘‘coercive mimeticism’’ might be seen to function in young ethnic-racialized power-knowledge relations that compels this mimicry internal to biopower. The authors’ work is interesting in the context of this discussion because of how they link the acquisition of ethnic-racialized identity to ‘‘political development.’’ Political development on these grounds, although perhaps necessary at a particular stage in the development of a young ethnic-racialized subject’s politicization, must ultimately, given the contemporary politics of multiculturalism in U.S. universities today, be subjected to serious criticism. The notion of politicization around ethnic-racialized identity that is being compelled in young people is a form of coercion, taking the shape of a compelled unpaid labor of ethnic- racialized resemblance and representation on college and university campuses in the service of following through on the post-Bakke 1978 decision’s “diversity rationale.” Richard T. Ford explains, “The diversity rationale is benign when understood as one of many possible reasons a university might care about the racial demographics of its student body. But it is dangerous when codified as the only reason race is significant… A more subtle and much more per nicious implication hovered over post-Bakke university life: only by highlighting their own distinctiveness could minority students justify their presence in the universities that admitted them.’’ In attempting to understand children’s ethnic identity development, Sears and Levy turn to Jean S. Phinney’s and William E. Cross’s three-stage model of ethnic identity. In the first stage, ‘‘unexamined ethnic identity’’ (Phinney) or ‘‘preencounter’’ (Cross), children have not explored their ethnic identity… Children who have not examined their ethnic identity might have negative feelings toward their own group (Cross 1978, see Phinney 1989). In the second stage, ‘‘ethnic identity search’’ or ‘‘encounter and immersion,’’ young persons seek out information about their group (e.g., reading books on ethnicity, visiting ethnic museums). This stage is considered a turning point akin to an identity crisis (Erikson 1968). Active identity exploration often begins in high school or college but may begin in middle school or even younger as children express identity through joining ethnicity-based peer groups (Rotheram-Borus 1993). Regarding the negative feelings arising in the children discussed in the italicized sentence, perhaps it has less to do with the children having not examined their ethnic-racialized identity and more to do with their having come to understand in some way that their identity—insofar as they will be seen to actually possess one by others—will be predicated on the labors of ethnic-racialized resemblance. At the very least, we need to entertain this possibility. In a culture like that of the United States, where virtually all aspects of daily life are profoundly suffused with racialized meanings, to deny that children’s negativity regarding their respective cultural groups might not also be a protesting response to the imperative that they accept being marked out as culturally different material to begin with is to deny the complicated cognitive and intellectual work carried out by children. The authors continue, “In stage 3, ‘achieved ethnic identity’ or ‘internalization,’ adolescents have developed positive self-concepts as members of their group.” This three-step process describes how children learn to assume an identity as ethnic-racialized in U.S. culture. They internalize the various disciplinary codes and rules of proper ethnic-racialized comportment in order to be able to resemble the acceptable American ethnic-racialized subject. The process also describes how this internalization works to preempt the interpretative labor—to engage, we might say, in Spillers’s practice of interior intersubjectivity—that might allow the children to ask why these extra categories attach to them and not others and why fully assuming these ethnic-racialized identity categories provides the primary means upon which they will be thought to have reached the status of intelligible human subject. Children are in fact manifesting these questions. We are not listening closely enough to this embattled speech, because we are not sufficiently imbued, like the lame psychoanalyst who can’t intervene at the Symbolic because she prefers to play cat and mouse in the Imaginary, with the new terms and conditions lending social and cultural intelligibility to ethnic-racialized subjects on the basis of self-mimicry. In the passage that ends chapter 3, Ford writes, ‘‘It may be that the price of providing our descendants with a world free of social stigma and oppression of identities such as race, a world we could be proud to call more just, is that they would not share our identities, that they would be our heirs but not our descendants.” Our deafness to this embattled, learned speech among young ethnic-racialized subjects, who are choking on these coercive edicts, amounts to our irresponsible and shameful refusal to not allow them to choose not to be our descendants, to not be plagued by our symptoms. We need to take seriously that these young people may draw their inspiration from the difficult and, for some, impossible declaration that Fanon startles his readers with in the concluding pages to Black Skin, White Masks: ‘‘In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of color… I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and my future.’’ Why should these children have to suffer the persistent ghosts and symptoms of their ancestors? The three steps outlined in the experiment above describe the implantation of ethnicity and race as, to use Spillers’s language, ‘‘a poisonous idea . . . insinu ates itself not only across and between ethnicities but within.’’ The re- searchers never ask: Why do the children do this? Why do they think they have to do this? What compels an understanding of identity, ethnic-racialized or otherwise, in this way? Again, the question arises: ‘‘Who, for example, decides what constitutes a problem for the patient? And by what criteria?’’ One of the researchers they rely on, Cross, understands a ‘‘strong ethnic identity as serving the protective function of filtering one’s social worldview so as to . . . make it less dehumanizing.’’ A strong ethnic-racialized identity, as I have been arguing, is predicated on a strengthened ego. This is held out to some as the instantiating condition defining their humanness and, from a Lacanian position, could result only in a more thorough alienation of the human subject. What if the very idea of a ‘‘strong ethnic-racialized identity’’ is what in fact dramatizes a racialization practice that, to return to Cross’s words, reveals to the child the ‘‘social worldview’’ as more ‘‘dehumanizing’’? What would constitute a weak ethnic-racialized identity? More important, what is the purported effect of a weak ethnic-racialized identity on a child? Sears and Levy claim, ‘‘The protection comes from accepting that racism exists and affects all blacks, that negative outcomes are because of a racist system and not the self, and that one can use various strategies to deal with racism (withdrawal, assertion, avoidance, passivity). Other functions that a strong identity may serve include providing purpose, meaning, and affiliation, often expressed in celebration of accomplishments of the black community.’’ The commonsense nature of this claim is very seductive, and I certainly don’t want to be construed as suggesting that celebrating the cultural productions, histories, or traditions of a group to which you understand your self linked to or belonging to is bad. I am saying that this characterization of the best defense against racism is hardly that. It works as an Imaginary explanation, however, as long as one remains intoxicated by the idea of a strong ethnic- racialized ego. These approaches seem to accept that race won’t budge, as we argued earlier, without understanding the need for an interpretative practice like Spillers’s interior intersubjectivity that tries to explain to oneself and to others why race won’t budge, why, as Seshadri-Crooks writes, ‘‘it shows no evidence of disappearing or evaporating in relevance.’’ These clinical and speculative exchanges on ethnic psychology, Hispanic psychology, and political psychology reveal a tremendous disparity. A culture criticism and ideology critique like Chow’s or a legally inflected critique like Ford’s understands the consequences of accepting the terms of being an ethnic-racialized subject in a way very different from what is imagined by the ‘‘clinical’’ material as the major stumbling block: weak ethnic-racialized identi- ties–qua–egos. Let me restate the central problem as this book has seen it: we have developed no language to talk about ethnic-racialized identity that is not entirely ego- and social psychological and that does not imagine a strong ego as the desired outcome in a racist, white supremacist world.