WORLD FUTURES 2022, VOL. 78, NOS 2-4, 156-169
Jim Dator
University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA
Abstract
This paper briefly compares Zia Sardar and Jim Dator in terms of their perspectives on normality, postnormality, and identity. Sardar struggles to root his identity as a British Pakistani Muslim. Dator eschews all assigned identities as a human being, striving to live as a human becoming who yearns to become posthuman.
I have been instructed and influenced by Zia Sardar in many ways for many years. Sardar does not suffer fools gladly, so I am glad and amazed that he has been so long-suffering with this fool.
Among my earliest memories, perhaps false as so many memories are, is of our discussion about robots and artificial intelligence during the break in some futures conference in western Europe in the early 1980s. Having witnessed his fervor in correcting erroneous notions about Islam held by westerners and Muslims alike, I was surprised when he did not reject the notion of autonomous artilects out of hand as a western science fantasy—as the extension of western colonialism into the sphere of post- humanity. He might well have argued that in fact autonomous artrilects are an extension of western colonialism, but he at least seemed willing to admit the possibility of their existence. Had I known then about his extensive education in mathematics, physics, and information science, I might not have been surprised. But that part of his academic background generally seemed to be a well-kept secret from most of us in futures studies who perceive him more as a polymath in the mold of Ibn Khaldun (arguably the founder of the social sciences, historiography, and futures studies) and a critical prophet in the Abrahamic tradition, perhaps along the lines of Isaiah.
Islam and Governance
One of the main contributions Zia made to my education, and thence to the education of several generations of my students, was a future-oriented understanding of Islam and especially of Islamic political theory. For several decades, I taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department of Political Science of the University of Hawaii at Manoa on “Political Design”—the design of new forms of governance. In the case of the United States, the Constitution of the United States was written between 1787–1789 by slave-holding white men. They were influenced by the writing of certain Greek, Roman, medieval, and early modern political philosophers particularly those of the Enlightenment who posited that humans are capable of high and sustained levels of rational thinking. The mechanistic physics of Isaac Newton dominated science. Various forms of Christianity informed their assumptions, especially Deism that (rather like Newton) imagined God as a kind of cosmic clockmaker who created the world as a superbly-designed machine whose operation could be understood by God-given human reason and used as the basis for all the processes and institutions human themselves created, including governments. However, after constructing this world, god turned his attention to other things, and did not intervene otherwise in human affairs. Humans therefore, being shaped in his image, properly acknowledged god as their creator, and imitated his creation in their own, but otherwise were left by god to their own devises. Evangelical and Fundamentalist forms of Christianity where Jesus intervenes directly in personal and communal affairs influenced American thought and action before and after the sliver of time when the Constitution was conceived, written, and adopted, but for a short while Deism, along with Newton mechanics, prevailed cosmologically.
While there have been many amendments to the original Constitution, the basic structure and mechanistic/rationalistic assumptions remain. Though brilliant for its time and purposes, it is a wholly obsolete basis upon which to govern anything now, but is considered by almost all Americans too sacred and precious to even modify, much less to wad into a ball, discard, and start all over again with new designs based on modern technologies and cosmologies fit for the Anthropocene Epoch— or at least for Postnormal Times.
For many years, my classes on governance design sought to correct seven “complaints” about governments, that they are:
– bureaucratic, placing the convenience of the governors over the needs of the governed;
– too nationalistic, privileging the nation-state over both smaller and larger units of governance;
– undemocratic, thwarting participation of some, while favoring other, groups and individuals;
– tmurderous, glorifying, using, and causing killing;
– patriarchal, insisting on a gender dichotomy that privileges men and violent masculinity, while marginalizing or oppressing other genders;
– unfuturistic, severely discounting the needs and wants of future generations while favoring some people and groups in the pre-sent; and
– based on obsolete cosmologies and technologies of western culture in the 18th Century.
Not much has been written about new governance design, but I shared with my students what material I knew, and then shared what they discovered with subsequent generations of students. Along with material from other cosmologies and cultures, in order to encourage students to think about what contemporary Islamic governance might be in this context, I used Chapter Six from Sardar (1985) titled, Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come (1985). The chapter is titled, "Islamic State in the Post-industrial Age" and was to me a remarkable, and remarkably clear, statement of the topic. Sardar reviewed the theological basis of Islamic political thought, and then addressed the various attempts to develop actual Muslim polities beginning of course with the Medina state. He then discussed in brief but sufficient detail "the modern understanding of the Islamic State" focusing especially on the rationale behind and real experiences of Pakistan and Iran. He observed that "there are considerable difficulties with the whole notion of an ‘Islamic State.’ Indeed the term itself is self-contradictory: Islam is uncompromisingly universal; state is unquestionably parochial. An Islamic state with its fixed boundaries and allegiance to a particular nation, undermines both the universality of Islam and the notion that Muslims are one ummah, a single global community which shares common political, intellectual and spiritual goals" (p. 145).
Sardar then traced the rise of the western idea of the nation-state, and its captivity by ideologies that are fundamentally at odds with Muslim principles, so that "if the pursuit of an Islamic state becomes an ideology itself, then reason and justice are readily sacrificed to the alt[a]r of emotions. And there are always those who take upon themselves the role of the guardians of the ideology, who regard themselves more equal than others and are ever ready to prove it." "Dictatorship thus emerges. This is exactly what happened in the early stages of the revolution in Iran. Ideology is the antithesis of Islam. It is an enterprise of suppression and not a force of liberation. Islam is an invitation to thought and analysis, not to imitation, and emotional and political freebooting" (p. 147).
Finally, Sardar discussed in a very convincing and inspiring way the possible rise of the ummah state from the failures of the Islamic state, ending with a series of steps that need to be taken for that transformation. Of particular interest was what Sardar said about "the role of communication; How can computers, satellites, and modern communication techniques be best used for promoting integration and cooperation in the Muslim world and used to usher in a common polity that eventually leads to the creation of an ummah state? How can a proper balance be struck between the centralizing and pluralizing effects of modern communication technology? How can Muslim communities use this technology to maximize human choices without infringing on diversity, creativity and free flow of information between and among Muslim countries?" (p. 154) This was exactly the type of commentary I was looking for. I was espe- cially drawn to what Sardar said about the ummah because of its basis in values; because it did not require or privilege the nation-state system; because it affirmatively melded traditional virtues with new technologies; and because it was a form of global governance that also was also rooted in local communities.
Toward the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, I made an extensive sur- vey of the literature on the futures of governance—especially governance beyond the nation-state system—that existed at that time (Dator 1981a, 1981b). I concluded that there were basically three “piles” of views about the futures of governance. One (by far the largest and reflective of most political-science experts and practitioners) assumed without question that the current nation-state system would continue into the foreseeable future with only minor, incremental changes, if any.
The second set argued that various forces of globalization (or “planetization” as it was sometimes called then) were rapidly eroding the ability of individual nations, or even international systems, to manage them (whether one liked it or not, and there were some observers who favored the change and others who did not). Of course at that time, hardly anyone imagined that neoliberalism would sweep the planet (Ronald Reagan and his Voodoo Economics had only begun his first term in office, and the United States was still the number-one creditor nation in the world, a status it lost in three years, becoming the number-one debtor nation as Reaganomics very quickly “did its thing”). Globalization then was seen largely in non-economic terms, being driven by technological, functional (delivering the mail, guiding airplanes, allotting radio frequencies), environmental, religious, ideological, social, cultural (especially popular culture and sports along with a growing, positive desire of many people to create peaceful and diverse world cultures in addition to flourishing local and national cultures)—and a few economic issues (mainly dealing with the free flow of labor across national boundaries).
The third “pile” was composed of normative futures. In contrast to the first two, which simply forecast continuation on the one hand or transformation on the other, the perspectives in the third group contained preferred images of future governance from different ideological perspectives that would require affirmative action to achieve and maintain. Among those specifically identified were “socialists, anarchists, libertarians, feminists, liberals, pacifists, [and] mystics.” “And surprisingly, while they might differ profoundly in their diagnosis of the past and the present, they are astoundingly similar in their overall preferences for the future as far as the political structure of that future is concerned: decentralized, locally self-reliant, nonbureaucratic, nonhierarchical, anti-statist, and positively anarchistic, yet globally linked and interactive” (Dator, 1981b, p. 54).
These vibrant hopes and dreams were all brushed into the rubbish can of history by neoliberal globalism which swept across the planet as the mighty tsunami of commercialization, monetization, commodification, weak government, and glorified greed promoted by such books as Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom; Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom; Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat; Johan Norberg, In Defense of Global Capitalism; and Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization, until it too crashed down on the shores of the financial col- lapse of 2008 and the lee/rip tide of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is abso- lutely impossible now for anyone even to think of, much less discuss and move toward any kind of global governance in spite of it being more urgently needed than ever. It is every tribe for itself against everyone else. In contrast, Sardar’s description of the ummah seems an inspiring alter- native to me.
Postnormal Times
This must be a great time to be a historian. While the past is constantly being reinterpreted—statues torn down, textbooks burned and curricula re-written, lives once having no substance and thus invisible suddenly turning into black matter—at least the past has happened and can be investigated and reimagined, like the blindmen and the elephant. But pity the poor futurist, languishing now, Sardar (2015) said, in postnormal times–the stagnant eddy where humanity sullenly drifts waiting for the arrival of a future:
Postnormal times contrasts with three recent periods:
Classic: 1920–1950
Modern: 1950–1975
Postmodern: 1975–2005
Postnormal: 2005– (Sardar, 2015 p. 345)
Whereas Truth was “Monolithic” in the Classical Period, it now it is “Contradictory” in Postnormal times; Change was “Slow” but now is “Accelerating, Chaotic”; Systems once were “Simple, Closed”, but now are “Complex, Chaotic”; Key Concepts” were “Conquest, Supremacy, Progress” and now are “Complexity, Chaos, Contradictions, Uncertainty, Ignorance”; Knowledge was “Pursuit of Reasoned Inquiry”, and now is “Embedded in Uncertainty and Ignorance”; Governance once was “Representative Democracy” but now is “Complex, Chaotic, Unmanageable”; Nature was “to be Tamed and Exploited” but now is “Feral, Climate Change, Disappearing Species”; God was “Everywhere and Everywhen” but now is “Ignorance”; Marriage was “Monogamy” and now is “Hetero, Homo, Trans, Serial, Plural”, and more—all of the old certainties now profoundly uncertain. (p. 348–349). This is an informative typology.
In The Third Wave (1980), Alvin Toffler wrote about the “code” of Second Wave (Industrial Societies), namely: Standardization, Specialization, Synchronization, Concentration, Maximization, and Centralization (Chapter Four, “Breaking the Code”), whereas the code of the Third Wave (Super-Industrial Societies) is the opposite of these (Chapter Nineteen, “Decoding the New Rules”). Sardar (2015) said that Toffler was “partly correct” (p. 344). I would say Toffler was largely correct if we look at changes occurring from Sardar’s Classical and Modern periods through Postnormal Times. And this just brings us to the present. Postnormality is not about the future. “Postnormal times is theorized as an in-between period: the old paradigms are collapsing and new ones struggling to be born” (Sardar, 2017).
I wonder about the concept of “normality”. Just when was the world normal? When was the future known? While the speed of social and environmental change has increased almost exponentially, the fact of change has been a feature of the planet for over 3 billion years; of homosapiens for 200,000, and of homosapiens, sapiens for 15,000–when we co- evolved with the Holocene Epoch. If we consider the four periods from Sardar’s “Classic” to now, while there was substantial social and environ- mental change from 1920 to the present day, I think it was Elise and Kenneth Boulding, each born in the early 20th Century, who insisted that their grandparents had seen more change in their lifetime than they had seen in theirs.
At the end of Joel Barker’s video titled, Discover the Future: The Business of Paradigms (1989), he assured us that in spite of all the changing paradigms of the present, we do not need to fear the future. Look at our ancestors, he says, they experienced extraordinary changes and they turned out perfectly all right. But in fact they, and we, did NOT turn out “all right”. Toffler’s notion of future shock is real—we are still being taught to expect a future that never arrives, and when it does not, we freak out and deny the reality of the world we are actually in. Or, as Ronald Reagan said when his Voodoo Economics made the world safe for ruthless, selfish greed: “It is morning in America”.
Or if you want something more current, circumspice.
We have always lived in postnormal times. Or at least I have.
It is impossible to predict The Future. But I believe it is possible
and necessary to forecast alternative futures. Many people seem to view the past as a series of inevitable steps toward the present but, in fact, the past was also a succession of alternative futures one of which materialized even though others were possible and perhaps preferable. “What if?” sto- ries of alternative histories make this very clear, and I believe that history should be taught at least in part as a continuously evolving consequence of individual and collective actions taken and not taken from an array of options. If we were able to see history this way, perhaps forecasting alter- native futures and envisioning, designing, and testing preferred futures would become a postnormal part of our thinking and acting–individually and collectively—as well.
After reading a manuscript by Sardar about postnormal times I asked him, “don’t you think other futures are possible? This all assumes high tech. Is collapse or discipline not possible? Could you say a few words about that, or do you want to imply only one, certain future is emerging?” He replied, “Jim - I am implying that within postnormal framework only one future is emerging. For alternatives, we need to go beyond pnt [postnormal times].” (Sardar, J. personal communication, November 10, 2015). It seems to me to be a strange kind of postnormality that only comes in one flavor.
Zia Sardar, Normality and Identity
As I understand what Sardar has written about it, Zia’s life seems very normal: It was a constant search to find, fiercely claim and defend normality in his Pakistani, male, Islamic identity. I rely on Chapter One of Sardar (2018). A person of Pakistani Origins. He begins by describing his travails while endeavoring to get his
Pakistani Origin Card which is for ‘a foreigner with annulled Pakistani nationality or born to parents who have previously held Pakistani nationality’. That could be me. Both my parents ‘held’ Pakistani passports and I too ‘held’ one, or rather a part of one, when I came to Britain on my mother’s passport. I say could for a good reason. One could always be ambiguous and play with the idea that one is or is not a person of Pakistani origins. For me identity has always been malleable. There have been times when I have consciously chosen not to be a person of Pakistani origins, for example, when I worked in Saudi Arabia I insisted on being seen as British ... .(p. 4).
Later, he asks, “Are my origins located in the place I was born or can they be traced back in history to the religion, culture and civilization I identify with?” “I decided to put [these questions] aside. I am going, finally to embrace my roots”, he resolved (p. 4).
I left Pakistan at the age of ten, when my parents migrated to London. But ever since, Pakistan has refused to leave me. Believe me, there have been times when I have tried to ditch every last vestige of my Pakistani Self...(p. 6). Here is my dilemma. When I want nothing to do with Pakistan, it clings on to me. When I want to get close to Pakistan, it repels me; just as often, I am repelled by it. So there is a perpetual tug of war constantly pulling in opposite directions. I have been trying to resolve this quandary for decades, with little success. (p. 8)
So, while he claimed his identity is malleable, it seems clear that being Pakistani was always the major part of it. If so, what is “Pakistan”? He said, “I am constantly juggling three different Pakistans. A Pakistan that is projected onto me by the perception of others; it does not matter where I go, it is always there. A Pakistan that is bigger than the geographical Pakistan; it incorporates the whole of South Asia, its long history and rich and diverse cultures. And a Pakistan of my memories.”(p. 12)
He then provided many examples of the first “Pakistan” including instances of bullying, taunts, and insults. He made clear the ambivalent attitude of many Pakistanis toward the United States, and how certain events have led many Americans to have wholly negative views of Islam, and thence often of Pakistan. He concluded, “The Pakistani Self is a truncated Self, a false Self, an aimless awara Self that can never find solace and comfort of home in the physical and mental territory within which it is located. It is a curtailed self because it has cut itself off from the culture and imagination of the region to which it belongs. Pakistan is the product of Partition.” “Partition was a traumatic rupture that has left painful scar tissues that still suppurates and spurts poison” (p. 25). Finally he confessed, “I had not realized how much I too, a diasporic person in search of my Pakistani origins, suffer this sense of separation and loss” (p. 26). “A distorted, disturbed Self cannot express itself in rational and sane ways. It reveals itself only in extreme positions. Hence, the varieties of extremism in Pakistan are truly dumbfounding” (p. 29).
Jim Dator as a Human Becoming
Using Sardar’s comments as a template, let’s look at the question of identity for Jim Dator, starting with my name. While Sardar knows a lot about his name and his roots, and wants to know more, I know nothing about my ethnicity on my father’s side, and have never had the slightest desire to know. Ernest Dator drowned shortly after I was born, in Newark, New York, and we immediately moved back to DeLand, Florida, my mother’s home. Within the next few years, all of the remaining males in her family died, and I was reared, fatherless, by three capable women—my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt.
“Dator” does not give me a clue as to what my ethnicity might be. It is a simple name, but a rare one. In the US, my name is pronounced “Dayter”. In Europe and many other places it is “Dahtoar”. In Japanese, “De-ta- “(Data). It could be a modified version of any number of European or Asian names—Datorelli, Datorovich, Datorstein, Deiter. No one instantly “knows what I am” as soon as they hear my name. No one ever told me I had to do something because of family, tribal, cultural, or religious tradition. While growing up, I caught no breaks for being young or male. We all were doing everything we could to stay alive and help each other.
On the other hand the world around me was bound up in Southern American racial, patriarchal culture. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was the dominant rule for child rearing, and many of my schoolmates bore the signs of a “good switching” from their father. I was never disciplined physically. In addition, any self-respecting husband was expected to beat his wife if she got uppity. The three women who cared for me were intelligent, hardworking, and thoroughly uppity, but never beaten, there not being any males around to do the beating.
Through their own example and few words, they showed me that gender, sexual orientation, age, class, ethnicity, accent, appearance, religion, ideology, and the color of a person’s skin were of no special importance. Everyone was to be treated with respect, as each person wished to be treated. Though I had many Negro playmates, I could not go to school with them, nor they with me. After playing, we had to use separate toilets and drink out of separate water fountains. We could not sit together on the bus. I absolutely could not understand any of it!
No one in my family marched in the occasional Ku Klux Klan parades, but I saw that the fathers of some of my friends did, while their mothers cheered from the sidewalk. One of the last mass lynchings in the US occurred when the Klan eliminated a thriving all-black middle class community one or two counties over.
Although DeLand, Florida was home base, for various reasons, I lived in over eleven different places in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, before I graduated from high school. While my roots were shallow, the varieties of nourishment they received were rich.
Sardar refers to himself as Awara–a homeless wanderer: eines fahren- den Gesellen, Mahler would say.
The phrase I chose to characterize me in my high school annual was the same sentiment, but not quite so grand. It was the opening lines of the song that Nanki-Poo sings when asked who he is in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, The Mikado: “A wandering minstrel I, a thing of shreds and patches ... .”
When civil rights movements aimed at “desegregation” emerged in the 1950s, I was active in them, and imagined we were making progress toward racial justice and equality. At one point in the 1960s, my home served briefly as a safe house for Black Panthers on the move. I have many stories to tell of this period. When desegregation ended as a goal and Black Power emerged instead, whites were told to fuck off. I was sorely disappointed, but fully sympathetic. When I graduated from the amazingly liberal but nonetheless Southern Baptist college, Stetson University, in DeLand, I left immediately and eventually got as far away from the American South as I possibly could on this planet, though I did return regularly to visit my grandmother, mother, and aunt until they died in their late 90s–100s.
After a year getting a MA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and four years for a PhD from the American University in Washington, DC, a year studying at the Virginia Theological Seminary (Anglican) in Alexandria, Virginia, and another year learning Japanese at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, and then Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, my first fulltime job was for six years teaching, in Japanese, in the College of Law and Politics of Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan–followed by three misbegotten years among the hollows and hillbillies of Virginia Tech, in profoundly misnamed Blacksburg, Virginia. I jumped at the invitation to join the Department of Political Science of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu to get back to the Asia/ Pacific. Honolulu was the home I had been looking for all my life –and yet I soon spent two years in Toronto, Canada, producing futures-oriented programing for TV-Ontario and, in the process, visiting almost all universities and many colleges in all provinces in Canada. Subsequent travels, especially for the World Futures Studies Federation, the International Space University, and the State Justice Institute, took me for extended periods of time to almost all of the US states, and to more than sixty other countries all over the world for extended periods of time, including seven annual spring interludes at the InterUniversity Center for Postgraduate Studies in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. Most recently, I have spent considerable amounts of time in south Korea—now Zooming there from Honolulu.
I have seldom visited any place where I have not felt at home, or felt I couldn’t happily make it my home. My wife, Rosemary grew tired of my coming back from some trip—Buffalo, New York, for instance–proclaim- ing how nice it was and how lovely it would be to go live there. We flourished during our six years in Japan and really hated to leave. My three children all attended Japanese schools. I seriously thought of staying in Japan forever and often wonder what my life might have been like if I had. I certainly would always have been henna gaijin (if there is one country confident in its identity it is Japan!). One grandson married a Japanese woman and lives in Kyoto. He might attempt to become a Japanese citizen. His experiences should make Sardar’s struggles to gain a Pakistani Origin Card seem like child’s play. At the same time, my two years in Toronto were among the happiest of my family and if we had not had Honolulu to return to, we might well have stayed. I remain nostalgic for the China that I visited so many times in the 1980s, and for Korea, even North Korea. I spent considerable time in various communist countries in the 1980s. The only place in the world where I felt a bit nervous, and relieved when the Pan Am flight took off for Budapest, Frankfurt, and Honolulu, was Bucharest, Romania in the1980s. When I visited again several times in the 21st Century—in part thanks to Zia—I felt I was returning home again after all.
I went to Tokyo and Toronto and came to Hawaii to live for many reasons, but one was so my children would know what it was like to be an immigrant, an ethnic minority–to experience the discrimination—positive and negative–that being a gaijin or a haole entails, as well as to embrace the beauty, difference, and unity of all cultures. While they also lived all over the world, they all came back to Hawaii to savor the richness of variety and edgy acceptance that Aloha provides.
Having no pre-assigned ethnicity; not feeling especially masculine and since childhood vastly preferring the company of women to men; having totally rejected the culture of the American South (and hence the culture of most of America and the West), and having discovered futures studies, I realize that I am not a normal human being, predefined, labeled, and packaged. I am a human becoming. My identity lies forever ahead, forever changing.
It never occurred to me at any point in my life to identify as white. There was nothing about white culture that encouraged me to feel any affinity with it at all. For years, perhaps a consequence of reading Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis (1947), I fancied I was part Black. I had all the desirable features, except for my extremely thin hair—but maybe then I was part native American. Algonquians in upper New York and Canada once told me I looked like I might be. Of course I was not culturally Black or native American at all! But then I do not in the slight- est feel culturally white American either. Clem Bezold, of the Institute for Alternative Futures, likes to tell the story that when I was nominated to become president of the World Futures Studies Federation during a conference in Beijing in 1988, he was able to secure my election by emphatically assuring everyone that I was the most non-American American he knew.
But what I think I am may not matter much. Sardar said there are three ways he is a Pakistani—when others perceive him as one; when he embraces the broader culture of South Asia of which Pakistan is a part, and in his memories of Pakistan and himself. Sardar also says his identity is malleable. Sometimes he feels like a Pakistani, sometimes British. I think I have something of the same with me. While I do not feel “white” and do not wish to be identified as “white”, I have no doubt clung to white privilege when it was useful to me when others perceived me as white. While I prefer to see myself as not white, and happy when others are not sure either, I would be profoundly fooling myself if I felt for a moment that my white privilege was not there when I allowed it to be.
But I have done many things intended to deny or at least limit my whiteness. Such as my hair, as I have already mentioned. It rules out being Black, while making being native American vaguely plausible. But it is more than that. My hair has always been a matter of concern to others. My aunt, among others, criticized my hair as a teenager one too many times, and so I cut it off—a crew cut—and kept it that way for many years. This offended many people who saw it as low class. In Japan (at the time anyway) it was assumed that any male with a crew cut had been severely defeated in some contest and was living in shame. So I let it grow, and at one point in Japan someone accused me of looking like one of The Beatles. So I let it keep growing and eventually I was assumed to be a dirty hippie—stopped and frisked for that, most dramatically in Singapore airport transferring to a flight for Kuala Lumpur. After hippies became yuppies, I kept the hair and even to this day the first question I get after a talk is about my hair—nothing else seems to matter. And of course, cabin attendants, waiters, clerks and the like are always asking me, “May I help you ma’am?” since I look like a fat old lady—which, if it is an insult, is to fat old ladies of the world, not to me.
My spreading flat nose, thick lips, dark brown eyes, and tannish skin help me vanish unremarkably in many nonwhite parts of the world. This confusion is what I want. Another motto of mine has long been “Always make a bad first impression” because things can only get better. It works. I have often gotten in trouble for not wearing a necktie (and laugh now that I see it is the style for Very Important People to wear a jacket but no necktie. I guess I’ll have to rummage up a tie and start wearing it). While a daily bath is as important to me as it is to any Japanese, I choose to wear old grungy (but clean) clothes and shoes, and not look spiffy and neat. Some of you will remember my engineer boots–until taking them off repeatedly for TSA inspection made that tedious. In short, I have done everything in my power to be unattractive in the eyes of others so that if they think I am a white male, at least I am a disgusting specimen of one.
A few years before she died, my mother revealed that Ernest Dator was not my father. And his death was not an accidental drowning but suicide when he discovered that fact. Apparently my biological father was actually of Italian origin. After living all my life happily as a person with no assigned identity, that complicated things a bit. First of all, Italian immigrants were initially declared to be nonwhites by the ruling Anglo- Saxons and north Europeans of America. Their status was murky even when I was young, though Italian Americans are decidedly white now. Second, I had no interest in contacting my biological father or his family. I had no more desire to learn about his family history than I had about the Dator’s. He was a total nonperson in my life and that was fine with me.
What I am trying to make clear here is how utterly bemused I am by this whole frenzy about historically-determined identity. Not wanting to be shot while Black (and all else that goes with that) I can fully understand. Say her name and defund the police—and rage against the whole system of racism, YES! (and class, gender, sexual-orientation....). But I do not see how reinventing one’s historical roots helps with that. Struggle for what you want to become, not against what others say you are: Black IS Beautiful!
Ethnic identity is an extremely important thing in Hawaii—not only for native Hawaiians but also for almost every one else. America’s take- over of Hawaii in 1893 was illegal and immoral, as were the conditions for the vote for or against statehood in 1959. Racism was a major factor in Hawaii’s history, and has not vanished away. At the same time, a large proportion of people living in Hawaii are of “mixed” ethnicity. One of the first things one does on meeting someone for the first time is to recite your genealogy and to learn theirs. Nonetheless, I marvel at this fixation on the past and the way the past fixes us with an indelible stamp. How debilitating to think one’s identity is preordained and that you are doomed to remain wholly determined by it! I am particularly baffled by this when a futurist frets about her identity. Better, indeed, to construct a malleable, fluid, adaptable futures-oriented identity—a human becoming—it seems to me.
So I think it might all come down to this: we seem to live in a world in which, if I have been assigned an identity that diminishes me and allows others to oppress me—whether assigned by my family and friends, or by my foes—then I have four choices: 1) to accept it and go on about my life; or 2) to strive to change and enhance the reputation of my assigned identity—make sure everyone knows that Black is Beautiful and that Black Lives Matter; or 3) to deny my assigned identity and assume that of the dominant class; or 4) just reject the entire notion of assigned identity, whether ethnic, gender, age, class...and all the privileges and handicaps that go along with any identity, and have the courage to be.
References
Barker, J. (1989). Discover the future: The business of paradigms. Charthouse Learning.
Dator, J. (1981a). Beyond the nation-state? Images of the future of the inter- national political system. World Future Society Bulletin, 15(6), 5–14.
Dator, J. (1981b). Beyond the nation-state: Three images of global governance. The Futurist, 19(4), 24.
Lewis, S. (1947). Kingsblood royal. Random House.
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