Guest Blog: Race, Stereotyping, and Socially-Constructed Knowledge (by Sean Yang)
June 18, 2007 08:00

i don't know the yi jing well enough to say offhand how sean yang, i guess, feels he's sterotyped, either by others or himself, but there's an awful lot of yang without much yin to hold it down. i'll look into this and report back, but first his printed message:

back when i was young, liberal scholars were coming to terms with the many odious ways the term 'race' had been employed up to that time (mid-twentieth century). the general feeling i remember was that the concept was untenable, for many of the reasons that yang points out. even though i thought i got their point, i still obediently checked the box for 'caucasian' when asked about my own race. afterall, weren't all my ancestors from northern europe? (i didn't yet know there were jews in my family tree), and i was definitely white, even if my brother got a striped butt from wearing swimming trunks with red and white stripes for too long in the sun. it was only when hispanic-american came to be distinguished from caucasian that i began to check the box for 'other'. the notion of 'caucasian' has become largely a social construction associated with various attributes i feel aren't particularly applicable to myself, a stereotyping we'd, or at least i'd, be better off without.

what's the problem here? i think yang does an expert job of bringing all the aqal considerations we would want to include in an integral perspective on race. stereotyping, by definition, leaves out most of these. caucasian seems to have come to mean 'not a minority', more appropriately signaled by checking 'other'. a much more appropriate stereotype, i feel, at least in my case, would be 'assimilated: no longer a minority'. i mean, i've been ready to become a world citizen for some time now, just waiting for that integral world federation to get off the ground. i'm what's called a human being. if you really want to understand me, that's a good place to begin.

ralph

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the hexagram the subject of yang's photos has been stereotyped with is called guo in chinese, which means encountering, in particular, the meeting of male and female, according to the translation i have. not at all sure how this fits in!?

i now realize i mimicked what yang had done at the end of his article, in looking beyond the finite limitations imposed by stereotyping to the infinite, both of which already always are.

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a frivolous interpretation of the hexagram: obviously, yang has alot of yang!

more seriously, as KW intimates, my country was the homeland of the first really great, developmental psychologist, james mark baldwin, but france and other countries appreciated him more, which evidently led him to leave in his later years.

my library happens to have a copy of vol. 1 of his 'history of psychology', and i felt i should read something by him just to see for myself why KW might rate him so highly. it was a quick read, even for someone as slow as myself: less than 6 hours. it left me wondering why he had to break this work up into two volumes. since my library doesn't have vol. 2, and i really want to know the rest of this story, i'm going to have to do some treasure hunting.

coincidentally, a central concept of this work is 'race'. he uses the term in a sense i had almost forgotten about, although that was what i was trying to get at in a previous message: the human race. no one says that anymore, the more scientifically correct terminology is assumed to be 'the human species'. well, that is correct with regard to biology, but humanity is more than just biology, and that was what was implied in that earlier, now forgotten, terminology.

as baldwin uses it, it fits right into aqal: race is contrasted with, and complements, individual, just as aqal contrasts the collective holon with the individual holon. not only that, in tracing the dialectic of these two in history, he also weaves in the interior and the exterior.

i can't tell you yet how this story ends, but i definitely recommend the first half.

ralph

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