Objectify This

So I was browsing my own blogroll the other day (yeah, that’s the thing down to the left), and I stumbled across this really interesting piece on double consciousness at, you guessed it, Double Consciousness. You’ll have to read it for yourself.

Most of my education about double consciousness comes from my very wise Black Studies professor, who taught a course on Invisible Man, and was, hands down, one of the best teacher/scholars I learned from in college. He was the one who gave me permission to leave the hard sciences by informing me, very gently, that according to most postmodern scholars, there is no such thing as real ‘objectivity’ anyway. This was an immense relief, because it freed me to study things that I was interested in, rather than feeling an obligation to memorize more facts about the “true” nature of things.

The idea of ‘objectivity’ implies a separation or a lack of relation to the subject being observed. I do not claim to be objective; a second cousin of mine just informed me today that according to some genetic testing done on his uncle’s Y chromosome, I am definitively patrilineally descended from group Q, Native Americans. This was a rumor that had lingered in my family, for some time, that is now confirmed. Yet I am the same; whatever I inherited or did not inherit was not affected by my knowledge of its origin.

Just today, before I got this news, I was thinking about this because my (white) coworkers commented on my flippant usages of such phrases as “ain’t no thang,” and I shrugged and thought to myself, why not use it? Why not recognize that race is a social construction? And, lo and behold, newsflash from the universe, in the form of the genes on this guy’s Y chromosome: I am less white than I thought. Woohoo.