Strategic Essentialism and the Law
Strategic essentialism is the concept by which groups discursively homogenize themselves in a particular way for a particular goal, even if they are not a homogeneous group.
We can see it in the modern world when we think about contemporary racial politics. In the cultural-political sphere, we imagine women as being overwhelmingly pro-choice. We imagine Ethnocultural expressions as being uniquely related to race. Different ethnicities using the iconography from another ethnicity becomes appropriation; a negative view of the ethnocultural object or expression becomes a form of racism.
In 2010, Chastity Jones was refused a job offer on the basis that she refused to cut her dreadlocks. The job was a customer service representative in a company called ‘Catastrophe Management Solutions’. She was told that her dreadlocks violated the company’s policy on the basis that work ‘tends to get messy’. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) then filed a racial discrimination lawsuit. The argument, in a sense, was that dreadlocks were an essential part of African-American hair, which in discriminating against meant that one was discriminating against African-Americans. To put more simply, discrimination against dreadlocks was discrimination against black people. The case was lost by Chastity Jones and the EEOC on the basis that dreadlocks are not an immutable characteristic of race. The EEOC is continuing to try and appeal the case and bring it to the supreme court.
There is a problem of knowledge here with strategic essentialism. It’s the problem of a vanguard which advances an essentialist discourse whilst simultaneously claiming it is false. The mass of people who respond to this discourse, either negatively or positively, are going to view the group as these things being essentially related to a particular racial group. Moreover, what does this mean to those people within groups who don’t intuit these particular aspects as essentialised parts of their racial identity? In not seeing themselves in this new discursively created identity, they are made pariahs from within their own ethnic/racial/sexual identity. Moreover, the people who have power over the discourse are precisely those people who will have the power over what ethnocultural objects and expressions are essentialised. By the nature of being in this position of power within the discourse, they are going to find themselves distanced from actual ingroup preferences as to how such a strategy should occur. It becomes impossible to make a strategic essentialist claim whilst maintaining the entirety of the group you’re trying to essentialise. Some must necessarily be excluded because they don’t fit into this new constructed identity.
A more pernicious problem to be found within strategic essentialism is what it can achieve in law. Let us say that Chastity Jones won her case and that non-immutable aspects of racial identity could infact be turned into essentialised characteristics which would be protected by anti-discrimination law. The logic which would allow for these pseudo-essentialised characteristics to be protected in law could just as easily be used against them. It would transform the nature group identity from one of organic development to one defined by law. Blackness, Whiteness, Asianess and what it meant to be a man or a woman would be reified within our legal system. A cultural development inhibited by the gavel, cultivated by law to decide what constitutes the authentic expressions of the identity of people.
This is no way to decide upon cultural boundaries. It robs the ability of various people to decide what constitutes their own culture and places it in the hands of the state.
