The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Way forward for Antiracism, by Sheena Michele Mason, Pitchstone Publishing, 256 pages, $17.95
Is race actual? In The Raceless Antiracist, a follow-up to her 2022 e-book Concept of Racelessness, Sheena Michele Mason argues not solely that it is not, however that attempting to cease racism whereas holding the idea of race is like combating “a flood by pouring water on it.”
Mason, a literature professor at SUNY Oneonta, means that these futile approaches fall into two classes: “anti-racist resistance” and “color-blindness.” Whereas the primary reifies race by making it the important thing to understanding most social phenomena, the second reifies it by treating it as an actual factor that must be ignored, thus downplaying the truth of the racism that depends on it.
The Raceless Antiracist asks us to do one thing very uncomfortable: to undertake a brand new psychological mannequin, to assume in a very totally different set of classes. It would not deserve a snap judgment. It is a e-book for chewing on and wrestling with. It could puzzle and even disturb you.
Mason notes that our ancestors migrated at ranges that most individuals grossly underestimate, resulting in way more genetic mixing than individuals usually assume. She factors out that our present understanding of DNA undermines quite a lot of assumptions that arose from observing exterior traits, equivalent to pores and skin coloration, nostril form, and eye form, since such traits can come up from the identical genetic allele however be inherited from completely totally different individuals. Moreover, because of the random genetic recombination that occurs with each new technology, 75 % of your genetic make-up is attributable to solely 5 % of your ancestors. A 23andMe take a look at will inform you about solely 8 % of your ancestors, as a result of they’re the one ones left represented in your DNA right now. In reality, it is potential that two darkish South Africans will be extra genetically divergent from each other than certainly one of them is from a white Swede.
Even when race is a organic fiction—and I believe Mason makes a robust case that it’s—it could possibly be actual within the sense that cash is actual: constructed by us however constrained in its “nature” by the aim it serves. Folks deal with it as actual, significantly the individuals who created the class as a rationale for dehumanizing these they oppress; and that, one may argue, makes it a social truth.
Mason rejects even this argument. We are able to construct franchises, merchandise empires, and little women’ goals out of princesses who create ice castles, however that doesn’t imply these princesses themselves exist. So too, race is just imaginary. It’s racism that’s the social assemble: a social hierarchy based mostly on an imagined class.
Mason sees this as an vital distinction, as a result of she believes that individuals trapped within the ideology of race are fated by no means to truly finish racism. We can not beat the sin by embracing its core mistake.
The phrase trapped is instructive right here. Consider how defining one’s blackness as resistance to whiteness simply prioritizes whiteness. What occurs if the “whiteness” of Whiteness Research applications—that’s, the affiliation of peach-colored individuals with authorized and financial privilege—have been really to vanish? Would the that means and objective present in celebrating gospel music or soul meals or the Civil Rights Motion disappear too? Clearly not! These “black” issues are usually not a celebration of race in any respect; they seem to be a celebration of a tradition shared by a selected ethnic group from a selected a part of the U.S. who underwent a selected set of historic circumstances that formed them in vital methods.
Mason calls this “translation”: As soon as one embraces racelessness, she says, one should translate what individuals actually imply after they discuss “race” into precise insights about tradition, ethnicity, class, or different classes. Contemplate Denzel Washington’s remark when he was requested about why it mattered that the director of Malcolm X be a black man. “It is not about coloration,” he replied: “It is about tradition.” He then went on to explain how a sure group of individuals understand how the odor of a scorching iron on their woolly hair makes them consider Sunday mornings and on the point of go to a sure sort of church service. Martin Scorsese might make an awesome movie out of the story of Malcolm X too. Simply not that movie.
By reifying race, thinkers like Ibram X. Kendi create a lure wherein black Individuals solely matter as a gaggle that is oppressed. By consistently referring to the disparate results of this or that coverage on “black and brown” individuals, when what we really imply is poor individuals, we reinforce the false concept that black and brown persons are all poor. By homing in on black males shot by police although extra white males are shot by police (right here, Mason cites the work of Harvard economist Roland Fryer), the media reinforce a worry of being gunned down by police that far, far outstrips its statistical chance and will itself result in harmful penalties. Mason believes her framework will assist individuals keep away from such antagonistic outcomes with out downplaying precise cases or results of racism.
In an surroundings like ours, the place racial classes are ubiquitous, this fixed work of translation would require a toolbox—one thing Mason calls the togetherness wayfinder. Right here, Mason’s tone shifts from a prominently philosophical one to a literary one. She leans closely on writers, from the African-American novelist Toni Morrison to the Chinese language-American creator Maxine Hong Kingston, from the Jim Crow–period black conservative George Schuyler to the nineteenth century poet Walt Whitman, as she presents methods to interrupt out of false dichotomies, to refuse assigned classes, and to recollect how complicated and storied our identities actually are.
Mason additionally argues, I believe rightly, that a lot of our struggles with questions of id, uniqueness, and belonging are grounded in our skill to obtain and provides love. In a deeply transferring part, she relates her expertise of being overwhelmed with a broomstick deal with by her adoptive mom, in addition to being rejected emotionally and known as a satan, regardless of her fixed makes an attempt to please via good grades and acts of service to her mother and father. I discovered it fascinating that Mason doesn’t relate whether or not her adoptive mother and father are white or black (or, as she would say, “racialized as white or black”). The expertise of being abused and rejected by one’s mother and father is, sadly, present in each society, each class, and each ethnicity. However it might probably undermine one’s skill to like oneself in ways in which ship one looking for one thing to establish with, to be pleased with, and to battle for. A lot of that comes out as hatred—from racists, from anti-racists, from anti-anti-racists. It may be conquered by love, however solely via an inside therapeutic that each individual should pursue for themselves.
I can quibble with a lot on this e-book. Whereas Mason is politically unbiased and attracts on a lot of heterodox thinkers, she is finally a leftist and I a classical liberal; when she requires combating hierarchical oppression, she is not essentially imagining the identical hierarchies that I do. However she is imprecise sufficient in these issues that they’ve little impact on how I reply to her concept of racelessness. If she’s proper concerning the methods the idea of race traps us into a number of iterations of the identical boring, and finally despairing, conversations, then it is price working collectively to “translate” that race discuss into one thing extra exact—into insights about financial circumstances, ethnic heritage, or tradition—and to jettison the remaining. After that, the arguments we would have about economics and public coverage can look to what’s really occurring slightly than what we merely think about.
This text initially appeared in print beneath the headline “How To Finish Racism.”
