So last night's Jay Smooth MSNBC debacle on "All In" reminded me
of the awkward moment Piers Morgan had with Janet Mock when discussing
gender theory.

It was ridiculous that Nancy Giles didn't do her homework prior to appearing
on a "race" segment with Jay Smooth, but it is reasonable to conclude that
a random person meeting Jay for the first time (without knowing of his media
presence) might not think he's black, based on appearance.

Which brings me to the point of this post: Why don't we discuss racial identity
with the same fluidity analysis as we do gender/sex?

After the Piers Morgan/Janet Mock discussion, everyone saw it fit to deliver
a teachable moment that presented a progressive discourse on gender identity:

"Biological sex refers to the equipment you’re born with, which comes with plenty of factors — there are many conditions that can make people intersex. Gender, on the other hand, is a fluid spectrum from man to woman to bigender to everything else that people choose to identify with. While your parts are biological, your gender pronouns are not — they were created by people, and they are chosen by people. They might wear clothes generally associated with other genders, they might not. They might use opposite, gender-neutral, or non-gendered pronouns…and again, they might not."

Why have we not adopted the same analysis for racial/ethnic identity? While our ethnographic DNA is the makeup we are born with (similar to biology in gender identity), it could be argued that "race" (alike gender) - could be subject to a similar spectrum of fluidity analysis that varies from person to person, depending upon how they self-identify. It seems that while we are more open to a flexible construction of fluidity as it pertains to gender identity, race theory and racial discourse is still very much planted in "black" and "white" - quite literally, with no effort to introduce fluidity or to accept multiplicity identity when it comes to something like race, even though many of us are comprised of multiples "races" as categorized in a census report.

Is it appropriate to keep race polarized in black and white identity? Is gender identity so inherently different that we can't apply the same analysis to race? Why or why not?




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