Should “affinity groups” be eliminated because they are a form of segregation?
Someone from the so-called “Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism” (FAIR) said:
“Segregation has a new brand name: racial “affinity groups.” Race-based “affinity groups” have exploded in prevalence across the United States over the last few years, moving from workplaces into schools, religious congregations, and other organizations all across the country. Affinity groups can also be organized around other identity categories such as gender, sexuality, disability, and religion, but affinity groups were first created around racial identity.”
They then wrote an essay explaining why, and also commented later on their post:
“Groups with shared interests can meet. Being gay is not merely a skin color, but changes how you choose to live your life. It would similarly be crazy to say that religious groups don’t have a shared “affinity” and shouldn’t be allowed and encouraged to congregate separately.
But there is a time and a place for such meetings. And to diminish the evil effects of racialization, we must stop assuming “race” means anything beyond skin color. Race implies nothing that would give a group shared interests requiring us to separate.”
My response:
It seems to me that “race” is less a sign of skin color, than of the social meanings produced by the body’s visibility.
If “race” only meant “skin color” then why would blacks have been segregated in the first place? Was it because people didn’t like their skin color? Or because there were additional meanings arbitrarily associated with skin color through social conditioning?
Affinity groups offer people a chance to acknowledge their non-belonging. There is nothing ‘positive’ in blackness, in the sense that there is nothing inherent to the people in the group that the group comes to share. The group comes together, I imagine, to acknowledge their state of non-belonging to a culture that generates a meaning (i.e., “race”) that the body does not actually possess.
Of course, it would be nice for everyone to get along, but it is also important to acknowledge that people in a group that has been historically rejected, might want a space to acknowledge and discuss that rejection.
If other folks need support for their negative encounters with racialization, then it seems like a perfectly sensible thing to want. LGBT folx, black folx, and many other folx often share similar traumatic and jarring experiences due to how people treat them.
To say that race implies nothing that would give a group shared interests is true in its way, but only if you remove the historical record from the equation. It’s not that they get together “because” they are “black.” They get together because they world tends to see them as “black,” to give meaning to that “blackness,” and to treat them as “black.”
Being “gay” is not a skin color, it implies a set of preferences and activities. Being “white,” is not (really) a skin color either, but the history of racialization and “white” identity also seems to have come with certain preferences and activities. Not “because” someone is “white,” but because they have been conditioned into buying into the meaning of whiteness, blackness, etc. (“Race” is nothing but this social conditioning)
The social conditioning of racialization is not something that so-called “black” people have ever benefited from or been particularly interested in, which is precisely they might want to get together to discuss their experiences.
The book ‘Racecraft’ by Karen and Barbara Fields lays this out quite nicely. (And by ‘this’ I mean both the illusory nature of race, as well as the social habits which keep its meanings in place.)
