The World Without Race?
Many social ills and psychological distortions seem to rest on core ideas or beliefs. Racist practices and ideologies seem to rest on asymmetrical beliefs about human races that became imbedded in modern life from the 18th century to the present day. The originary expression was French adventurer François Bernier’s 1684 essay, "A New Division of the Earth", published (at first) anonymously in the leading European intellectual and scholarly outlet, Journal des sçavans. From at least the ancient world, people had divided other people into groups different from their own, based on lineage, geographical origins, customs, religion, and so forth, but there was no system that could be applied to each and all human beings. Bernier provided that system by stipulating that all of humanity consisted of four––this number was elastic, sometimes swelling to sixty or shrinking to three in coming years––races. The divisions were based on physical traits but the “first race,” Bernier’s own, consisted of Europeans. And so it was unwounded and embellished, sometimes in ugly common ways, but in its heyday from the most exalted echelons of learning and society. Almost always with what we would now consider racism, ideas of race flourished with presumed foundations in biology. This view persisted until the 1930s saw learned separations of physical race from inherited human culture and custom. And eventually, the physical sciences of human biology reached a consensus that there was no evidence of racial blood, genes, or DNA, and even physical traits believed to be racial varied more within each so-called human race than between any two of them.
The idea of race was dead in science by the end of the 20th century, leaving ideas of race in society, along with apparently recalcitrant forms of racism. It therefore seems natural that “we” should get rid of our ideas of race, because they have no scientific foundation in biology and racist beliefs and practices are inextricable from them. That is, to really abolish racism, “we” should abolish race. This is a smooth assumption and Sheena Michele Mason devotes The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race is the Future of Antiracism to making that case.
Mason’s project is a noble one and I want to begin here with a certain fealty to the text before suggesting why some may not be convinced by this particular form of antiracist racial abolitionism. Mason’s Preface and Introduction provide the main focus and aim of the book, although they do not provide a summary of the ensuing chapters. Mason’s focus is on antiblack racism as the major paradigm of all racism. This means that the meaning of “black race” is an important target for this book. The method of the book is explained through the idea of togetherness wayfinder, as follows:
The core argument behind the togetherness wayfinder is that the un-doing of racism requires the undoing of the belief in human “races”—the idea that humans can be divided into different “races”—and the practice of racialization to undo various social and economic power imbalances. Put another way, only by ceasing to maintain “race” ideology, which includes articulations of colorblindness and more explicitly “race”-centered discourse, and its corresponding language can we stop how society upholds racism, sometimes unintentionally. Listen. Rather than center “race,” I contend that we should center race/ism. The express purpose of the togetherness wayfinder is to disrupt and destroy racism. To do so, we must embrace and put into practice certain rules, philosophies, tools, information, and language to end racism, which is a socially constructed system of economic and social oppression that requires the belief in human “races” and the practice of racialization to reinforce various power imbalances (P. 32).
Mason carries through as a togetherness wayfinder guide, throughout the book. Chapter 1, “Architecture: Understanding Race/ism,” is a discussion of how racism requires ascribing racial identities, together with stereotypes, such as poverty, that are unrelated to those identities. Chapter 2, “Madness: Identifying Systemic Race/ism,” provides a survey of institutional or structural racism, chronicling how it divides and alienates real people and their cultural products. The African idea of ubantu provides a contrast by how people are who they are through their fulfilling relations with others, relations precluded by racialization (assigning race) and its inexorable racism. In Chapter 3, “Human Relation: Embracing Our Rhizomatic Origins,” Mason begins to provide a vision of a future without race and racism, but nonetheless based on real, non-essential human differences that include shared “racial” ancestry (genealogy). Chapter 4, “The Racelessness Translator: Translating the Meaning of ‘Race’” explores the real background provided in Chapter 3, by showing how race is taught and learned through practices of racism. Mason here argues for humanism that is not implicitly racially white, but can recognize differences without assigning them to race. For instance, the idea of “color blindness” is not the same as the idea of racelessness. By the same token, Mason shows in Chapter 5, “Twilight: Disconnecting Freedom from ‘Race,’” how human freedom is limited when people confuse racist ideas with the meaning of race. Thus, in Chapter 6, “Walking Negatives: Defying Dehumanization,” Mason argues that returning to humanism requires undoing racialization (and with that, racism), including imposed identities of authenticity or bi-raciality that presuppose racialization. Chapter 7, “Rememory: Reconciling Our Shared Humanity,” emphasizes the importance of undoing racialization in narratives about the past, here making rich use of literature.
The remaining four chapters of the book and its conclusion further develop the theme of reclaiming (or claiming) humanity through the undoing of race. These developments are important for fleshing out how the world could look and feel without race/racism. For instance, Chapter 11, “Consolation and Maternal Energy: Practicing Radical Love,” draws on bell hooks to introduce love into the author’s account of personal abuse in a racist society:
Antiblack race/ism has done and continues to do so much harm. We need to infuse more love into our discourse, our practices, our psyches to give people the tools needed to flourish as individuals and collectives. As it stands, we live in a nation that is plagued with increased mental unwellness, social instability, and violence. Anti-black race/ism buttresses that instability. Together, we must learn how to love ourselves and each other truly as ourselves and not as avatars for our respective so-called races (P. 190).
Despite its identification of a problem and demonstrated solutions (which is often lacking in anti-racist writing), several aspects of Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race is the Future of Antiracism are not clear. What is its aim? The use of ‘together wayfarer’ suggests a proposal or call for a movement, and for that to succeed it only needs to be rhetorically persuasive and motivational enough for people to take it up. However, if the aim is to abolish ideas and uses for race for “we” who are progressive and liberatory, it would have been more effective to include theorists and take better aim at how black race is culturally defined in black-white racial binaries, that is: To be white, a person must not have a black appearance or known black ancestry, whereas to be black, either black appearance or black ancestry is sufficient. Thus, there is no positive definition of white race or racial identity except that it is not black race or racial identity. This means that black and white are defined as logical contradictories. If that logic were correct, everyone would be either black or white, which we know is not true, because some people are mixed black and white race and others, such as Asians, are neither black nor white. Mason’s stated focus on black race and antiblack racism unfortunately may seem to buy into the false contradiction of the black-white binary, as a description of our status quo. But the variety and multiplicity of human groups that is already recognized shows that this binary has already been partly overcome.
Mason’s assumption throughout this book that the practice of racism requires a core idea of race could have been better examined, empirically. Dehumanization and oppression are important parts of racism, but they are also applied to women of all races, religious groups such as Jews and Muslims, disabled people, trans people, indeed, to all of the oppressed. Also, people such as U.S. Hispanic/Latinos can plausibly claim to be victims of racism, without having been categorized as a race, since they are officially an ethnic group. These considerations do not detract from the harm and historical intensity of antiblack racism. But neither does antiblack racism detract from the harm and historical intensity of the German murder of 6 million Jews or the genocide of indigenous peoples throughout the world.
Related to Mason’s close identification of race or categorizing people racially, with racism, is that it leaves out much of the historical motivation for racialization after Bernier’s “New System of the Earth.” Colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade were well underway before hierarchical, white-supremacist taxonomies of race took hold. But modern slavery was established during the Enlightenment that seemed to grant all human beings a measure of equal rights. Racist hierarchies and racist ideologies provided plausible exceptions to those Enlightenment ideals. A specific case in point is that the zenith of U.S. antiblack racism occurred after antislavery abolitionists made their voices heard before the U.S. Civil War. If modern racism developed along with racialization, after the theft of resources, people, and lands created unearned wealth, then the connection between race and racism in Mason’s focus on the racism inherent in core ideas of race, over-simplifies this history. The key cause-effect relationship is not between race and racism but between economics/greed/criminality, first, and then, race/racism.
However, despite its conceptual gaps, Mason’s Raceless Antiracist is worth reading for its many astute analyses of the connections between racism and race, and its dedicated optimism. I recommend it for readers of all ages, in all academic and general practices dedicated to progressive liberation, especially young scholars and activists who feel that their generation will be the one to abolish racism.
By: Naomi Zack
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
Lehman College, City University of New York
Available on Amazon
