are all imagined hammers equally light?

Coleman's piece pushed me further toward a tension I've been grappling with in this course. There is a part of me that wishes to confidently step forward and say all of the following: Yes, endorse all structures of limitation as mediums! Produce for the delight of producing. Play. Own the performative and engage agency of identity, problematic and retroactively-constituted as all that may be. Traverse the fantasy of your symptom, observe ideology, and then enjoy it anyway.

Yet, I'm left with another unsettled voice. Am I not in a position of tremendous privilege, and how am I to express this? Is it not a call to action? Who am I to call anyone to action but myself? In my life, the bulk of my entanglement has been with Ideological State Apparatuses, and at that register, perhaps I have such confidence. But what of human beings with identities that are regularly entangled with Repressive State Apparatuses?

Coleman says "the prosthetic logic of human identity bears on questions of race — rendering race a technology — then the historical weight of racism may be transmutated into a lightness (or speed) of being" (184). Is this a uniform lightness? If race is an imagined hammer, does everyone's hammer weigh the same amount? (And, of course, even by asking that, I'm (re)constituting someone's closed loop of racial identity)

In her example of Obama, she gives hint of the difficulty of these questions: "Does race as a technology mean that Obama, by pulling this magic lever, was not perceived as a black person by his audience? No; it means that there was no prejudgment, or at least much less prejudgment, of what it is to perceive a black person" (189). In saying "at least much less prejudgment," she addresses the theory-and-practice space I am grappling with.

I read Coleman as another thinker articulating strategies for motion as a kind of justice. "The subject, in such a case, is mobile, rather than moored to the historical valuation of race as it has been sutured to the biological" (184). One's race becomes a medium for navigating motion. I support this, but have conflicts about the best role in endorsing this strategy. The practical answer might've come last class, in the eloquent call to be "responsible with the stories you tell." Am I capable of that level of responsibility when it comes to staging representation of race? Of this I am still unsure.