The White Possessive: Identity matters in becoming Native, Black and Aboriginal

A prominent case in Canada, which remains contested is that of Joseph Boyden, a novelist by profession, who laid claim to many Indigenous affiliations. Boyden announced in public he had Mi’kmaq, Nipmuc, Metis and Ojibwe connections (Barrera, 2016). Boyden is a very successful novelist winning several prestigious literary awards for novels in which he featured the lives of first nations’ peoples. Outside of literary circles, his status as an Indigenous person of renown is evident by his appointment as an honorary witness at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings into Indian residential schools. Boyden’s claims to Native heritage were questioned at various times by First Nations people but Boyden’s responses to their questions were always ambiguous. This ambiguity led Jorge Barrera, a reporter from the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in Canada, to investigate Boyden’s claims. In 2016, Barrera found no evidence linking Boyden to any Native heritage having traced the family genealogy back 170 years (Barrera, 2016). Despite the public outing, Boyden continues to claim Native heritage. On CBC Radio in January 2017, Boyden spoke to CBC Radio describing himself as “a white kid from Willowdale with Native roots,” noting that “A small part of me is Indigenous, but it’s a big part of who I am”. Referring to the same interview Gaudry notes that ‘using pseudo spiritual language, Boyden claimed that he didn’t choose the Indigenous characters…specifically the stories I tell are…the voices that come to me’ (2018, p. 162). Gaudry argues that by shoring up his identity claims, Boyden strategically makes a connection to dead Native people to mitigate challenges by living Native people (2018, p. 163).

Boyden makes several racially strategic moves in the interview. First Boyden acknowledges he is also white, which serves to counter accusations of Native impersonation. Second, he claims some ‘small’ Native roots that are a big part of his identity. For Boyden being white is secondary to being Native even though he acknowledges Indigenous ancestry is a ‘small’ part of him. Boyden’s self-identification as Native reflects the performativity of what Dakota scholar Philip Deloria names as “playing Indian” (1999). Deloria’s work addresses white America’s obsession with Native Americans but his theoretical insights about performing Indian are relevant here. Boyden has invested emotional and physical meaning in performing Native, which he operationalizes to differentiate and disavow his whiteness. His capacity to self-identify as Native is a privilege and entitlement that comes with being a white male within a white patriarchal society. Boyden is seeking to embody Native identity through what I term “white Native accessorizing”. Being phenotypically white, Boyden’s performativity requires prompts and accessories. This entails displaying his feather tattoos and Native art background prompts, as well as wearing T-shirts that display First Nation designs for television interviews. The visceral power of these accessories is harnessed to affirm Boyden’s claim to a Native identity. These accessories are presupposed as Native in racialized and gendered discourses, as is Boyden’s white masculinity, which is afforded the privilege of racial invisibility as it usurps a Native identity without having to alter the white body in any way (Heyes, 2006, p. 273). Boyden’s self-identification works discursively by possession, ownership entitlement and value. Boyden’s claims to a Native identity is also enabled by the lack of legal exclusions or restrictions in place to prevent his appropriation of Native identity because within white patriarchal laws such an identity is presupposed as a white possession (Kolopenuk, 2012).

Boyden taught in Native communities and was accepted by families, some of whom provided testimonies in his article entitled My name is Joseph Boyden (2017) in which he explains that ‘being Indigenous isn’t all about DNA. It’s about who you claim and who claims you’. Interestingly the testimonies from Native people do claim him as family, but they do not claim him as being Native. As a white teacher he ensconced himself into First Nation communities, which provided primary data for his novels. In this article he is operationalizing and affirming a Native identity by providing testimonies from Native people who claim him as part of their extended family, an Uncle who he states is white but acted Native, and a DNA test that stated he had Native American DNA. Boyden stakes a possessive claim to a Native Identity through countering Native people’s criticism by meeting their criteria. He can demonstrate he has Native people who claim him as family, and he self-identifies as Native. In this way Boyden uses reverse logic to answer his critics and affirm his Native identity (Tallbear, 2013). Boyden used reverse logic to answer his critics and to affirm his Native identity. He made sure he included Native testimonies validating who he claims and who claims him. Boyden’s moral agency was clearly at play in this strategic approach to silence Native critics while identifying with them. The conceptual primitives were discursively at work rendering Boyden’s white identity invisible in the process of establishing who he claims and who claims him.

These same racialized and gendered logics enable white people without any Indigenous heritage to appropriate Indigeneity. Hollywood actors such as Espera Oscar de Corti, a Sicilian, who was known as Iron Eyes Cody come to mind (Dimuro, 2019). They can move in and out of an Indigenous identity when it suits their interests. Racially conceived and gendered discourse privileges white male bodies. Boyden’s claim to a Native identity did not need to arise out of a life lived as Native, nor did he need to demonstrate any Indigenous epistemology, nor to be ontologically tied to place, nor to explain his genealogy to human and non-human kin beyond his mother and uncle’s claims. Instead, within racialized and gendered discourse, authentication was mobilized discursively by Native ‘claiming’ testimonies, which did not confer cultural nor genealogical authority, but they did affirm familial ties. Within this racialized and gendered discourse race displaces Native cultural knowledge as the point of entry for Native identity and identification while white male identity remains invisible.

In surveying social media, responses on twitter by Native scholars to Boyden’s Native identity claims reiterated how self-identification is not what makes you Native. What is important is who claims you from within the tribal nation, who your kin and non-human kin are and knowing your communal and ancestral links to territorial homelands as well as living your life according to Native cultural ways of being. Belonging in this way is informed by Native epistemologies that provide the cultural criteria for who belongs, where you belong and how you belong in relation to humans, non-humans as well as nation and territory.

Belonging is integral to how identity functions, as exemplified in the case of Rachel Dolezal a white woman who chose to identify as a Black woman with Native American ancestry. Dolezal wanted to belong with Black people and constructed an identity around group solidarity, shared interests and personal security (Orbe, 2016, pp. 34–35). Dolezal’s claim to being a Black woman with Native American ancestry was refuted by her estranged religious parents who exposed Rachel as being white on CNN television (Dillion et al., 2015, p. 2). They produced photos of a young girl with blue eyes, blond hair and a freckled face who grew up in Montana. Her parents stated that Rachel’s ethnicity is a mix of German, Swedish and Czech. They came forward because they were worried about their daughter’s dishonesty and identity issues. Her mother said Rachel was ‘irrational and disconnected from reality’ while her father stated Rachel’s ‘actions aren’t those of a normal sane person’ (Botelho, 2015, p. 3). The deployment of insanity, abnormality and irrationality to explain Rachel’s racial deceit is a recuperative strategy to affirm the value of whiteness. White normality is predicated on white supremacy, a status which must be maintained. Thus, Rachel is positioned as a race traitor whose choice to be Black is explained by designating her identification as abnormal, irrational and insane. By claiming to be Black Rachel is distancing herself from the white supremacy that differentiates and classifies her and her parents as white with all the entitlements and exclusions that accrue in its negation of Blackness.

For over ten years, Dolezal assumed a Black identity which enabled her appointment at Eastern Washington University where she taught African American Studies, and her activism and position as the head of the Spokane branch of the National Advancement Association of Colored People. However, in June 2015 things changed for Dolezal. Spokane officials advised her she was under investigation for listing herself as Black and Native American on an application for a spot on the Office of Police Ombudsman Commission. Dolezal resigned as head of the Spokane NAACP and in the same month admitted to CNN, she was born white but identified as Black. In a later interview she felt ‘constrained by her biological identity which had been thrust upon her’ (Botelho, 2015, p. 4) and that ‘the controversy, especially the timing of it, caught her off guard. But her hope is that some good comes out of it, if it changes how some people think about identity’ (Botelho, 2015, p. 6). In another interview Dolezal explained she did not identify as African American, but rather as Black (Dillon et al., 2015, p. 2). She noted that her affinity with being Black was due to her oppressive childhood wherein she experienced deprivation and alienation. Dolezal’s attachment to African Americans occurred during her childhood as a teenager when her parents adopted Black children and it influenced her choice of college. She enrolled in Belhaven College, where as a white woman ‘she could participate in communities that valued interracial harmony’ (Heyes, 2006, p. 29). Subsequently, transition to Howard University, which is historically a Black university, presented problems for the young Dolezal. While at Howard she exercised her white race privilege initiating a lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. Her allegation could not be substantiated (ibid). On the Today show in June 2015 she asserted that if she had Native American lineage instead of African, her identity would have been more widely accepted and her story not so controversial because it is common for white Americans to claim Native American ancestry. The reduction of Native American identity to a phenotypically white racial category erases it as socially constructed through culture, kin, tribe community and territory (Tallbear, 2013, pp. 4–5). In this way Native Americans become the scapegoat for her whiteness. The lawsuit against Howard University and the categorization of Native American identity as white evince two things. Dolezal has the privilege to identify as white when it is in her interests to do so and she is conscious of the social acceptability and entitlements that being phenotypically white brings.

In March 2017, after the release of her book In Full Color, Dolezal asserted that racial fluidity should be recognized in the same way as transgenderism is and that transracial is a useful term to describe how race should be considered in the future. She notes:

we have evolved into understanding gender is not binary, it is not even biological but what strikes me as so odd is that race is not biological either and actually race has been to some extent less biological than gender

Dolezal’s self-identification as transracial is explicitly informed by feminism and prehistory, including claiming African ancestry because all humans walked out of Africa. The rationale for Dolezal’s entitlement to African ancestry is based on a theory of human origins, which is contested within archaeology. She claims a common human origin to substantiate her choice of race. In doing so she disavows the consequences the weight of race carried over centuries and continues to carry in the racial subjugation of people of colour to which she can claim no commonality (El-Taki, 2017). Gender like race cannot be reduced to a lifestyle choice because the historical pre-conditions under which we are born and the gendered and racial discourse that is constitutive of relations of domination, oppression, subjugation and normalization circumscribe our capacity to choose even when we believe we are making individual choices. As El-taki states:

When discussing the visuality of race one must consider that for people of colour their identity is sometimes not something they have necessarily chosen. Nor is it something they can choose to hide depending on the social atmosphere. Race is often an identity that is given to us, we are identified as we identify. Yet this identification is often loaded with historical, cultural, and socio-political ideology

Dolezal’s right to self-identify as transracial has its supporters. In the journal Hypatia, Rebecca Tuvel mounts a compelling argument for treating transracial the same as transgender. She notes that society now accepts individuals who identify with a gender that is not their biological sex. Tuvel proposes that as race too is not biological then it is possible to change it, as ancestry is no more predictive of one’s “actual” race than any other determinant. She explains that Dolezal could be Black in places where ancestry is not a predominant feature of a Black identity because ‘there is no fact of the matter about her “actual” race from a genetic standpoint, these features of Dolezal’s experience would be decisive for determining her race in that particular context’ and society should accept an individual’s decision to identify as a member of a race that was not assigned to them at birth (Tuvel, 2017, p. 267). She argues that changing race is theoretically possible. The main problem with Tuvel’s argument is that it is predicated on an equivalence between gender and race as social constructs. This equivalence works discursively by removing ancestry as a feature of racial identity. However, Tuvel fails to consider that within society and feminist theory ‘sex-gender is essentialized as a property of the individual’s body, while race is essentialized with reference to both the body and ancestry’ (Heyes, 2006, p. 267). The social construction of gender did not arise out of slavery, but it does have an ancestry in white women’s oppression that shaped gender identity for centuries as Sojourner Truth exposed when she asked ‘Ain’t I a woman?’

Suffice to say the white racial logics at play in Tuvel’s argument erase any biological element tied to race as Blackness or whiteness. However, there is a biological predisposition: the role of melanin in skin pigmentation. Skin colour is the normative visual marker deployed in the social construction of race; it is why some people can change their racial identity and pass while others cannot. It is Dolezal’s white skin that enables change through tanning and her straight blond hair was modified through chemical and aesthetic means to produce superficial phenotypical changes but these perceived attributes of Blackness mask Dolezal’s assertion as a white woman to claim a transracial Black identity.

Identity is in and of itself an integral part of how racialized and gendered discourse informs the deployment of racial cues and accessories in Dolezal’s playing Black. Dolezal differentiates herself from whiteness based on an oppressive childhood shared through Blackness as though whiteness has not oppressed other phenotypically white people based on differences in religion, class and ethnicity. In making equivalent Blackness and an oppressed childhood to rationalize claiming it, Dolezal equates whiteness with privilege, which is deployed to identify as Black. In effect, choosing to appropriate Black identity turns it into a possession that a white woman can own. White ownership of Black bodies is replaced by white ownership of Black identities.

Dolezal acknowledges that race is a fiction but substantiates its social saliency through the gendered and racialized discourse she deploys in playing Black. She has no direct substantive experience to support her identity claim, instead she has played Black vicariously through others. She has no ontological lineage in Native American and African American ancestries and histories as free peoples before the terror of whiteness invaded their shores. White self-identification as Black is demonstrative of an entitlement to seize and possess a Black identity, it is not an ontological and epistemological substitute for being African American and Native American.

Unlike Boyden and Dolezal, whose assumed identities were a part of their public persona, Elizabeth Durack’s usurpation of an Aboriginal male identity remained a secret for some years. Durack, a distinguished and wealthy white artist, exhibited works in London’s Whitechapel Gallery along with other famous Australian male artists Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan (Hasluck, 2012). Durack was born in 1915 and spent time during her adolescent years growing up on the family’s pastoral stations in the Kimberly region, which relied on the labor of Mirriuwong-Gajerrong men and women who worked for meagre wages. Elizabeth spent a lot of time in the company of Aboriginal male employees with whom she claimed an affinity. Durack admitted it was this rapport that informed her decision in 1994 to create an Aboriginal male identity as Eddie Burrup. Durack consciously created Eddie Burrup and enlisted her daughter Perpetua Durack, in establishing his existence. Perpetua created a fictitious biographical history to provenance Eddie Burrup’s paintings before sending them to an art gallery in Sydney. The biography stated that Eddie Burrup was a Karajarri man born around 1925 in the Bidyadanga area of south Broome. He lived and travelled all over the Kimberley, a sparsely populated region of wilderness and rugged ranges with an isolated coastline, working for mining companies. Within a short timeframe, Eddie Burrup’s art gained attention and was highly sought after generating public interest in the artist. Eddie was extended numerous invitations to attend the openings of his exhibitions, which Durack declined on his behalf apologizing to art dealers and galleries for Eddie’s reclusive ways.

In the mid-1990s Burrup’s work was deemed to be at the forefront of Aboriginal art and his work was nominated for the prestigious Telstra 13th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in October 1996. In 1997, when it became almost impossible to remain incognito, after consulting with close friend Robert Smith, Durack contacted a reporter from the magazine Australian Art Monthly to write an article about her invention of Eddie Burrup. In the article, Durack believed she had done nothing wrong in creating Eddie Burrup. She explained the reason for the masquerade was the paintings would not receive the same recognition if it was known that they were produced by a white woman (Casement, 2016, p. 423). Durack spoke of the affinity she had with Aboriginal men and the cultural understandings she acquired through watching their corroborees, which were off limits to Aboriginal women. She was merely transferring this rapport onto canvas. Durack recalls that when her daughter Perpetua first saw the new paintings, she said:

but they’re sort of Aboriginal, mum…of course, if these were done by an Aboriginal, then they would get somewhere. But, she said, you’d never agree to doing that. You’ve always played things so dumb and so straight, you’d never sign things under another name

Subsequently Elizabeth told Perpetua ‘I’m not totally opposed to signing those morphological works under a nom de plume, and it was as though from that moment, Eddie Burrup appeared’ (Durack in Hughes, 1997, p. 2). In the 1997 interview with Robin Hughes he asked about the transition of Elizabeth’s art to Eddie’s and she stated:

Yes, some of the morphological works were Eddie Burrup’s, which could be shown as Eddie Burrup’s. But then Eddie Burrup took over more and it became the totemic tumult of Eddie Burrup’s basic expression. The tumult that has occurred…within the Narranganni, because of the neglect into which they have fallen, both with the present world of the Aboriginal people, and because they were so ignored…in the decisions of Mabo. The fact that the land was shared with the totemic creatures…was neither known nor considered and so Eddie Burrup’s work concerns the totemic world in tumult, and he talks through that world, and that’s the essence of his world, and that’s the way the paintings come out, you see

Once Durack’s deception was made public, the response from Aboriginal men and women was not measured. Doreen Mellor, who curated Burrup’s works at the Tandanya gallery, said ‘it’s a massive fraud, how can anyone appropriate a culture like that’. Others stated it was the ultimate act of colonization. Aboriginal art curator Djon Mundine asserted the hoax was a total obscenity particularly Durack’s claim that her family had lived on the land for years and she felt as deeply as Aboriginal people about it and knew the culture.

Despite the negative press and galleries refusing to show the work, Elizabeth could not let go of Eddie. In a letter to her daughter she wrote “As Eddie draws me deeper and deeper into his world, I find myself becoming not only reluctant but actually resentful of putting him on the back burner…I can’t really live without Eddie B now,” Durack admitted, “He has become a part of me — me in fact.” Durack continued to paint as Eddie Burrup until she passed in 2000. Her daughter Perpetua, in responding to the reaction to her mother’s persona as Eddie Burrup noted:

Over the “lonely journey” of her long working life, Elizabeth Durack produced a great deal of work, some of which came almost too easily, some of which she struggled with, much of which simply poured out. In the end the daemon, Eddie Burrup, possessed her

In analyzing the case of Eddie Burrup, Casement argues that it extends our comprehension of the intention behind reverse passing and the tensity between ‘the ontological status of people and things versus social context’ (2016, p. 422). Durack felt entitled to take on an Aboriginal male identity to gain recognition and status for her art because in the social context of the pastoral station she was invited to witness male corroborees. Durack was cognizant of the intrinsic value that would be attributed to Burrup’s work in a racialized market obsessed with Aboriginal art. In developing Eddie’s biography, racial logics were at play in ascribing authenticity and provenance to the artwork of an Aboriginal man who lived a semi traditional life in the Kimberley. Durack assigned Burrup’s gender and traditional credentials to distinguish him from the gendered, embodied whiteness of her work and the urban Aborigines who she believed had lost their culture. After the masquerade was exposed Durack felt entitled to continue to paint pseudonymously, Eddie was her white epistemological possession; she invented, subjugated and owned him. Towards the end of her life Durack consumed the persona when she painted; Eddie and Elizabeth became one in creating art. Her daughter Perpetua wrote that ‘the work is powerfully redolent of Aboriginality’ (2009, p.73). She quotes Elizabeth who wrote in 1954:

The more I endeavour to write a ‘description’ of the paintings…the more impossible it becomes…I could proceed at tedious length on the fact that visually the works stem from what I know of our Aboriginal sacred life and ceremony; that the paintings hang around this ceremony…however, without wising to indulge in fantasy I can frankly say I am not quite sure where this particular crop of work came from. I know that while I worked on it, I was in a peculiar state of being possessed – this particular expression called for this particular treatment

Like Elizabeth, Perpetua attributed her mother’s compulsion to paint as an Aboriginal man to being possessed by Eddie. To apportion blame to Eddie in this way enables Durack to claim innocence for the deceit and appropriation. Eddie is dispossessed from the ground of moral value so that Durack can retain hers. Elizabeth’s and Perpetua’s explanations for inventing and appropriating Eddie is restricted to the production of art. Outside the social context of producing art Elizabeth’s subjectivity remained white heteronormative and female as is evidenced in the interview with Robin Hughes for Australian Biography (1997). In this interview Durack continually references Eddie within the context of her painting processes.

Elizabeth separates Eddie from her life outside painting in her roles as wife, mother, grandmother and daughter. Elizabeth performs Aboriginal male drag only in creating art. Her performance as Eddie speaks to a repressed desire for Aboriginal men, whom she explains regard her as sexless and that is why they let her watch their ceremonies (O’Connell, 2001, p. 45). To invoke the idea of being sexless is a way of eliminating sexual desire from consciousness, of driving it from thoughts and behaviour. However, repressed sexual desire often surfaces. Elizabeth separates her female body from Aboriginal women’s bodies that are desired by Aboriginal men. In becoming an Aboriginal man Elizabeth is unconsciously repressing her sexual desire. Durack equates herself with Aboriginal men whom she recognizes are not Aboriginal women. O’Connell notes that like Daisy Bates, Elizabeth Durack perceived herself as an honorary Aboriginal person (O’Connell, 2001, p. 45). However, Durack is clear about the gender by which she identifies, it is as an Aboriginal man named Eddie. To identify as an Aboriginal female artist would bring to consciousness her sexual desire for Aboriginal men. Elizabeth’s fondness for Aboriginal men extended to visiting them in prison and inviting them to share her house upon their release; Colin Johnson who later became Mudrooroo was one of them (Bunyipitude, 2011, p. 1). In claiming that the Aboriginal men saw her as sexless, Durack erases the sexual and racial power relations that prevailed on the station. To this end there is a deafening silence around the existence of any Aboriginal women artists in the Kimberley, who we know existed. Elizabeth diminishes Aboriginal men’s capacity to see her as the white male boss’s daughter whom they must disobey. Elizabeth as the white man boss’s daughter was entitled to any and everything Aborigines possessed on the Durack pastoral station. Consent to paint was not sought from the Aboriginal men who allowed her to witness their business because she already possessed their approval. Elizabeth’s idea of Aborigines’ ownership of land was totemic beliefs and ceremonies, totally disconnected from the dispossession that gave the Duracks title deeds to their lands.

Elizabeth’s impersonation was shaped through the tensions between the social and the ontological. Durack witnessed Aboriginal men’s ceremonies and did identify as an Aboriginal man but her ontology was presupposed by the body and culture that designated her as white woman. Irrespective of her need for an Aboriginal male identity she does not share the same ontology of Aboriginal men whose connection to country as traditional owners comes from a different epistemology and embodiment. Durack invented Eddie to try to achieve an intimacy with Aboriginal men from which she was ontologically and sexually excluded as the white man boss’s daughter. Once exposed as a fraud Durack sought to recuperate her white virtue by deploying the convenience of affinity to legitimize her continual entitlement to this appropriation.

Durack, Dolezal and Boyden claim their respective Indigenous and Black identities through connection to a group that they wish to belong to as part of their true self. Boyden’s link to being a Native man is through DNA and kinship, Dolezal’s connection to being a Black woman is through shared oppression and Durack lays claim to being an Aboriginal man via cultural affinity. The assumed identities are of pragmatic value, they have social currency in their careers as novelist, academic/administrator, and artist. All three stake a possessive claim to the identities they assume because they believe they are entitled to do so. Despite claiming different racial identities, the commonality in the Boyden, Dolezal and Durack appropriations is that they all share a commitment to individualism whereby moral, political and legal claims of the individual prevail over and against a collective group identity. However, Boyden, Dolezal and Durack’s individual identity claims are not outside the violent histories that enable their manifestation. Individualism operates discursively to naturalize and normalize the violence of appropriating Indigenous and Black identities. This form of racist expression is violent (Goldberg, 1996, p. 59). Durack, Boyden and Dolezal identify themselves as a racial other; this recognition is at the root of an alienated identity in otherness. As Goldberg argues ‘self-determination is a precondition for self-recognition or self-conscious identity. This assertion of white self-determination requires the other’s otherness to be negated or cancelled in the very process of appropriating’ (ibid).

In the very making of racial otherness by material and discursive means, different modes of racial appropriation can be mobilized by white subjects within a white patriarchal nation. The body politic is heavily committed to discursively and materially reproducing and normalizing racisms through subject formation and the construction of national identities (Goldberg, 1996, p. 30). In this way national identity as a form of property affords ontological value to white subjects as configured through the logic of capital; identity as a form of property grants the white subject capabilities and entitlements to appropriate.

Identity is one of the pre-conceptual elements that is already racially presupposed, and the colonizers used a variety of means to identify Indigenous people. They invented homogenized racial identifiers such as Natives, Indians, Aborigines and Blacks to label and control lives. These ways of identifying us are embedded in legislative, judicial and administrative regimes that make us ‘special’ subjects of ‘special’ laws to ensure we receive ‘special’ treatment as dispossessed Indigenous peoples in Canada, the USA, Australia and positions African Americans as displaced and diasporic Indigenous peoples from Africa.

Identities were imposed to restrict and contain our mobility, take our lands, and quantify us. Identity is inextricably tied to how Indigeneity is governed and contained by the state; Indigeneity exists in white western patriarchal law and imaginary as an epistemological possession. In this way identity produces a tension between the social and the ontological, between the identification and being.

Within Greek philosophy ontology inheres in ‘becoming’ but is underpinned by ‘being’ as the underlying reality of the world; there is a ‘being’ behind nature, which is the ultimate truth. In this sense ‘being’ is the metaphysical dimension of the ontological, but it is non-existent within the pre-conceptual element of identity, instead ‘becoming’ is indeed intrinsic to identity. However, the racialized and gendered logics of becoming draws authority from within a futuristic orientated episteme that produced them. In the West, the white self can be transcendent, assume an identity and become anyone. Self-shifting is integral to the transitory, fragile and superficial nature of white identity formation and individualism; it is an enactment of white possession whereby the ever-evolving transformative possessive subject of academic disciplinary knowledges must always be placed above the non-white ‘other’.