A Conversation with Lewis Gordon on Race In Australia

Abstract

Danielle Davis (DD): Firstly, I wonder if you could briefly outline your position on mixed race identities. Are they desirable? My concern about these categories/identities is they present US with a double-edged sword. That is, on the one hand they perhaps enable difference, yet they also have the capacity to erase it. (This is in specific reference to half-caste, quarter-caste classifications in Australian Government policy regarding Indigenous Australians that deliberately intended to "breed" out blackness.) Lewis Gordon (LG): The first part of the question is loaded, Danielle. When you say "desirable", what follows are other questions. "To whom?" "In what sense?" "For what purpose?" Already embedded in notions of desire are subjects whose wishes and wants already structure a certain relation to the objects of their desire. Of course, there is the other sense, for example, in which John Stuart Mill referred to its being desirable to be Socrates. In that sense, we are asking about a normative ideal. My position on that issue is not unique to mixed-race people but also to any people. The notion of its being desirable to be a certain type of people already has within it the notion of there being people whom it is less desirable to be. Of course, being bad people is not desirable. But here, the comparison is not between good and bad, ethical or unethical, or even good and evil, but between modes of existing over which an ontological configuration may intervene regardless of what one may think or prefer. Much of that is at the heart of mixture.