Ta-Nehisi Coates: Accidental Transracialist?
on Ariana Grande's ethnofluidity
Though we won’t condemn or condone them, Cracks in PoMo is very much interested in examining the phenomena of transracialism and ethnofluidity.
There are many ways we can attempt to explain it. We can write it all off as morally and socially irresponsible—a form of appropriation, fetishization and exoticization, mockery, or belittling other cultures…or perhaps “stealing” their cultural innovations for the sake of financial benefit (a la Elvis).
We could give it a pass as a form of festive decadence, of celebratory revelry, like what we find at carnival and other times of “anti-structure” when the “pressure valve” of propriety is released. It could be the result of a mental illness like split personality disorder, or pathological narcissism. It could also just be a way to express one’s love for another culture, or it could simply be the result of hanging around people of a another culture more than people from their own.
It could also be a way to cope with the disenchantment, atomization, and deracination of our age dominated by technocratic globalism. As we wrote in our piece on Rachel Dolezal aka Nkechi Diallo:
Perhaps in more “enchanted” ages past, inhabited by what Charles Taylor would call “porous selves,” the “set of cards” dealt to us–mundane realities like our race, ethnicity, gender, physical abilities, family and country of origin, with all of their fragility and the nuisances they carry with them–had the capacity to point us toward said “ideal” realm. Despite having once served as signs that held the keys to transcendence, in our disenchanted age of anomie and atomization spawned by the expansion of impersonal bureaucracies and global technocracy, they are stifling forces to be escaped from.
The prospect of “transitioning” away from the circumstances handed to a person–by society, fate, the gods–speaks to an intrinsic yearning for transcendence, for some eternal reality that resonates with the individual’s need for fulfillment more than anything else in our present realm of existence.
[Also read my review of Oli London’s book on his ex-transgender/racial experiences.]
The transracial phenomenon came up in the news cycle once again, as former Bachelor star Josh (now “Jontay”) Seiter recently [pretended] to come out as transracial (W2B) (after having pretended to come out as transgender (M2F)). We thought we’d look at two other iterations of transracialism and ethnofluidity: Ariana Grande and Teena Marie.