Why Transracialism Could Be Coming (And Why That’s Bad): A Critique of Robin Dembroff and Dee Payton

Transracialism is what it sounds like (a white person identifying as black). And it’s as bad as it sounds (dumb, disrespectful, and confusing to both black and white people). But given our current cultural defense of the primacy of internal feelings (I’m a woman because I feel like a woman) or what I call experientialism, I’ve been mystified over the past decade why racial identity blurring has remained unacceptable to mainstream liberals.

The most apt defense for accepting transgenderism but denying transracialism came in a 2020 article in the Boston Review (it’s well worth the read) by two philosophy professors, Robin Dembroff (Yale) and Dee Payton (UVA). They compare two headline case studies: Bruce Jenner’s transition to Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal’s transition to Nkechi Amare Diallo (born white then transitioned to identifying as black). Dolezal was serving as president of the Spokane NAACP in 2015 when her transracial identity was exposed and came under fire.

Dembroff and Payton lay out their argument for why they believe it is in society’s best interest to recognize and affirm Caitlyn Jenner’s transition, but not Dolezal’s. Their paper leans on a fascinating interweaving of utilitarianism and selective experientialism. What I mean by utilitarianism is that they base their conclusion of whether to recognize transracial or transgender identities as legitimate on their evaluation of that identity’s utility to the greater good of society:

“Put simply, then, we think that transracial-inclusive race classification would undermine our ability to track racial inequality, and for reasons that are irrelevant in the case of transgender-inclusive gender classification.”

You can see their chief moral end in view is one’s ability to track inequality over generations. Once they have established that as the highest moral good, then they weigh the good of identity recognition by its utility in reaching that goal.

In a sense, this is an inevitable byproduct of their second tenet, which it turns out, is really the theme of the whole paper: a repudiation of the philosophy of essentialism in favor of selective experientialism. Here’s their conclusion all the way at the bottom:

“Of course, there is room for debate. But we hope to have convinced you that essentialism will not settle it.”

Their rejection of essentialism is the heart of my critique.

The Real Argument Is About Essentialism

Let’s back up the train. What is essentialism? Essentialism, which is the opposite of selective experientialism, is the worldview that believes there are certain essential, permanent and unalterable realities, (most relevantly in human beings), that we can discover and describe, but never change. Practically speaking, it is the silly notion held by small-minded folks that someone born as a Vietnamese female human being is in fact a Vietnamese female human being. And that no amount of internal felt experience can ever make this person Scandinavian, or a male, or a cat.

Selective experientialism is a continuation of the existentialism popularized by Sartre and Camus, who contended that existence precedes essence. The Bible teaches that essence precedes existence, because we are designed (Genesis 2, Psalm 139). In other words, human beings are similar to computers, watches, and bicycles. You can certainly use a watch as a hammer, but that doesn’t change the nature of what the watch is and what it’s made for (i.e. that won’t go well).

Dembroff and Payton dismiss essentialism with a wave of a hand. It’s old-fashioned ignorance. After all, .2% of people are born with some chromosomal abnormality (intersex) so—poof! Gender as biology is silly. And of course we all know gender is complex and cultural, therefore it must be relative and experiential.

To their credit, Dembroff and Payton recognize race has had just as much if not more malleability. For example, they mention a racist-motivated 1890s US census had a category for mulattos and even “octoroons” (someone with one-eighth black blood). But then their utilitarian cards come back out when it comes why we should permit someone to cross-identify in gender but not in race. Why can gender be experiential, but race must be essential? Their answer: to protect someone’s relative experience of oppression. In other words, the legitimacy of identity categories depends on the utilitarian value of recognizing and honoring victimhood.

Defending victims and marginalized people is a good objective (more on that later), but placing victim experience as your standard for legitimizing identity will not hold the line against transracialism. Let’s think about why.

The Identity Standard of Intergenerational Inequity

The crux of Dembroff and Payton’s argument is that racial inequality accumulates intergenerationally, while gender inequality does not. Sexism, they argue, is more baked into societal norms, while racism has intergenerational accumulation. By identifying as a woman, you’re immediately signing up for all (or at least most of) the oppression directed against women, but if you’re a white person identifying as black, you will never really get it, because of your generational privilege. They mention most homes have a man and a woman, thus preventing gender-accumulated oppression, while most black families have been single race for many generations.

Already, this argument is leaving out the experience of mixed-race families, homosexual parents, single parents, non-black races, the complexity of ethnicities and cultures, or the racial dynamics of any country outside the US that has a different history—one not marked by the Civil War and Jim-Crow racism. But let’s go on.

They use the case study of racial oppression that took place within the Canadian Indian Residential School system (IRS) from 1879 to 1996. Indigenous children were forced to enroll in these schools to assimilate into Euro-Canadian culture. Then in 2006, the Canadian government issues $1.9 billion in compensation to all these former IRS students. Here’s the rub. In order to qualify for reparations, you can’t merely identify as an IRS student, you have to demonstrate the fact of that enrollment within that time period. The authors believe this clear and hard identity boundary is a good thing.

Here’s what just happened: in the case of IRS students, suddenly essentialism is okay. Not only okay, but needed. You either are an indigenous person or not. You either were in that school system during those years or you weren’t. That is an essential identity fact that they will defend. It’s not permitted for you to identify into that indigenous group solely on the basis of your internal feelings and experience. This is why I call it selective experientialism. The relative strength of your inner feelings and experience no longer carries the day in this case. In the case of the IRS, essential, objective realities trump inner experience.

But here’s the difficulty—they still defend this boundary line on the basis of experience. It’s because the experience of indigenous peoples was one of oppression and victimhood, therefore we need to draw tighter lines around defining that experience. The same situation is in play for black people in America today, Dembroff and Payton argue. They have an experience of victimization that a white person cannot understand. I agree with this, but I believe that as long as recognition is built on a philosophy of experientialism instead of essentialism, it will fail to hold the door shut against transracialism.

As I mentioned earlier, Dembroff and Payton’s transracial guardrails are only relevant within the American context. The authors would have to consider and make entirely different arguments every time you talk about a different ethnic-racial combination. What about a Chinese or Japanese person wanting to identify as Taiwanese (after historical eras of oppression)? What about a Russian wanting to move to and identify as a Ukrainian?

The authors recognize some of the limitations of their subjective definitions, but their purported aim of tracking inequality won’t work within their experiential philosophy—not even in America. Exactly how far back do you need to trace your blackness in America to count as black? Does John, a black person whose family were slaves in Alabama in the 1800s grant legitimacy to Mark, whose family moved from Nigeria to New Hampshire in the 1940s? Who adjudicates the line of sufficient suffering from inequity? What about an orphaned Tutsi child who came to California in the 1990s as a refugee from the Rwandan genocide? Can she identify as black, despite having a completely different victim experience?

The contradiction here is that supporting transgenderism prioritizes experience over essentialism, while their reason for denying transracialism requires that experience be tied to certain factors of essentialism. It’s unclear who decides these factors and their relative importance. I do not believe that defense against transracialism will work long term, because the left’s commitment to experientialism runs too deep. It’s too important of a foundation for too many other moral positions.

Why Transracialism is a Problem

Some of Demberoff and Payton’s intuitive fears are spot on. Opening the door to transracialism will create the same sort of in-fighting that the feminism movement has had with the trans-movement. There are challenges to being a woman. There are challenges to being black in America. We should honor and respect those. Our awareness of those challenges is threatened when we define those identity categories by experience instead of biological essentials.

Elevating experience, particularly victim experience, as the truth over essential biological facts will continue to have an insidious effect on our compassion as a whole society. You’ve probably noticed. As the subjective grounds of mental and emotional experience claim higher and higher priority, other people tend to tune those things out more and more. It’s harder to filter between real challenges and victimization brought on by real injustices versus a nurtured and self-fulfilling narrative of a troubled life that someone has “identified into” to gain sympathy or acceptance.

We need to recognize and care for people experiencing racism, sexism, and gender dysphoria. These struggles and attacks come against core aspects of your identity and worth. The whole philosophy behind fighting against sexism and racism is that we should not make assumptions about someone’s inner experience based on their outward appearance. But that is precisely what we are enabling with a philosophy of experientialism. What you feel inwardly must manifest on the outside. Your inner experience must overrule every external “essential.” This actually makes it easier, not harder, to stereotype people based on their appearance.

The Solution: Essentialism, then Experience

The secret lies in understanding that identity is both essentialism and experientialism, or being and becoming, as I’ve written in my forthcoming book. The biblical worldview grounds you in essentialism first, and experientialism after. There are many essential truths in this world that simply cannot be bent through the superpower of felt experience, no matter how much you try. God is the biggest one. He is eternal and immutable. The name he uses to introduce himself to his people is essentialism defined: “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14).

As humans, we are finite and mutable. Experience does change us. But we can only make sense of that experience if we hold onto many essential givens of our world and our life which we will never be able to redefine. God wants you to build your identity on the essentials of his identity and his Word. If you try to use your experience to start digging up that foundation, you’ll be destroying your identity, not building it. When you begin to see certain essentials (such as your sex, gender, ethnicity, and dependence on God) as fixed instead of always wondering whether they’re real, you can start experiencing the journey of understanding and enjoying those essentials.