How the zebra got its stripes

In thinking more about race and racism, my thoughts turned to something that I feel contributes a lot to the discussion. First I considered "black and white difference." I looked at this for awhile:

Here the difference between black and white is clearly demonstrated. We have differentiated black colouring from white colouring.

But then I thought more about zebras, and the fact that the stripes on no two zebras are exactly alike. This made me think more about difference, and what differences are important.

It is logically impossible not to discriminate against individuals in arguments like Dei's. While professing to be "anti-racist," Dei's theory rests on the idea of "whiteness," a general category that groups many individuals under one title, one "race."

Everybody sees the world differently. Categories such as "whiteness" are created to group more that one point of view together. But it is impossible for two different people to share the exact same outlook and not be the same person. The use of categories like "whiteness" overlooks the natural and individual differences inherent between any individuals, whether they are "members" of that "race" or not. Difference is not a grouping together of black and white and comparing the two. Difference is the idea that no two individuals are exactly alike.

The least discriminant system would have an infinite number of categories. Once difference is admitted as being calculable under general headings that group individual difference together, it is left to the whim of a personal judge where the category lines are drawn. Categories used in the way Dei uses "Whiteness" lump together individual subjects. They make them objects of racism, their subjective character being judged by the colour of their skin.

Look at that zebra long enough and you will not help but be amazed!

clarification of Dei's point:

When I said that "...Dei's form of racism, involved his naming of the category "Whiteness" and then applying it to every White person as being something that every White person participates in "deliberately," whether they want to or not..."
I meant more that he names a category "Whiteness," then assigns certain values, practices, and modes of being that go along BY NATURE of WHITENESS, then assigns those values, practices, and modes of being (in his view, being racist) to every single person to whom one could assign the category "White." It sounds like racism to me when anyone starts discussing patterns of behaviour based on the natural dispostion (resulting from a specific position) of race, regardless of what race is being analyzed.
Maybe I am naive in thinking that another route is available to us in countering racism. But to me, to fight racism with more ideas about what a specific race confers on people "of that race" is to perpetuate distinctions and value systems based on race. I don't know how we can, as a "human" race, make racism history, but I really hope that we do.

first response to the concept of "Whiteness"

In the introduction to The Great White North? (Carr and Lund), George J. Sefa Dei writes that

"Racism is about maintaining White dominance and supremacy" (viii).

And later:
"As alluded to, Whiteness cannot itself be essentialized, especially when embodied Whiteness intersects along gender, class, and sexual lines....Notwithstanding these complications, however, it is also equally important to reiterate that there is a systemization and structuralization of dominance within social institutions that perpetuate White privilege and other forms of oppressions "inter-generationally" and/or through time and space, irrespective of class, gender, religious, language and sexual differences, particularly among dominant groups" (x).

Two questions arose for me out of the reading of this introduction. First, I would like to ask whether racism, fundamentally, is not the stigmatization and differentiation, or polarization of a number of people, based on their race. Racism and supremacy seem to go hand in hand; they both segregate or categorize people based on race, and then apply certain values to that race as a whole. Is racism the act of making race an issue? If so, Dei is he is singling out a particular race and identifying that race with a certain quality. If this fundamental definition of racism does not hold, or racism is not about the polarization of people based on race, then Dei must rethink his terms: he cannot define racism based on an idea of "white," because his definition rests on and expands out of a polarization of a particular group based on race. In making claims about what Whiteness does to people who are white, is Dei himself engaging in a form of racism, a racism that is not about "maintaining White dominance and supremacy"?
So is Dei's form of racism, (i.e. his naming of the category "Whiteness" and then applying it to every White person as being something that every White person participates in "deliberately," whether they want to or not) a good sort of racism, something that he thinks everybody needs to do more of?
Is racism ever good?

Secondly, I am trying to understand the notion of "embodied" vs. "essential" Whiteness.

What is the Meaning of "Cultural Identity"?

"Cultural Identity" is an interesting idea because it is the joining together of the idea of culture and that of identity. While sounding simple enough, it is probably a good idea to see how the ideas of culture and of identity interact.

Culture can be described as a collection of ideas or values or "norms" that reaches over many single individuals, that endures over time and informs a collective space. Culture is something greater and more powerful than any individual. It is a world of beliefs about the world to which individuals subscribe and feel a part of. However, it must be asked whether, in the way that "if a tree fell and no one was around to hear it, did it made a noise?", if a culture existed but no one was around to propagate it, does it actually exist?

This is where the question of identity comes in. A culture must be subscribed to by individuals that "identify" with it. Identification is a process by which something is seen as being identical to another. In "identification" as it is applied to individuality, the individual actually sees their self as identical, or at least a part of their "selves" (an idea that opens up a whole other issue about split/multiple identities within a coherent self) is identical, with the ideal of an individual delineated in the perspective of a particular set of norms. So "cultural identity" is the linking together of a collective body of "culture" with an individual act of "identification." What is interesting to ask ourselves is whether we are really in a position to "identify" with cultures. If people argue that culture is something that you are born into and grow up with simply by being in the presence of others in a society, then "cultural identity" would imply a being "without culture" enough to actively identify with it. In this way, identification involves a form of adoption.

What then happens to "culture"? Is culture something we choose? Identification involves some sort of choice, some sort of stepping back and evaluating the singlular "identity" of two separate things. Thus when we talk about what it means when we identify with one culture, more than one cultures, one big "multiculture," we are talking about the way the individual relates to culture, and how culture is changed by who relates to it. The two are brought together in the form of "identification," even though the one doing the identifying is inherently already part of something--a particular position in time and space that is part of a global and all-inclusive history--that can sometimes be left out of the equation. Once we distinguish one culture from another we overlook the inherent paradox of choosing an identity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMnk7lh9M3o

This is a great example of how culture is something that anyone can identify with.
And in identification, the culture itself is renewed.