Utopian Dream: A Paradoxical Reality Book Review of The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race is the Future of Antiracism
Introduction:
For centuries a recurring dystopian of hauntological nightmares have plagued human beings across the globe primarily stemming from self-imposed ignorance, and complacency to the hegemonic social and political status quo. This dreadful truth precludes our weltanschauung that in turn characterises our ‘lived experience.’ The task is then to (un) learn our truth; to go beyond the internalised epistemic boundaries and (re)route our methodologies and theoretical orientations to establish a new positionality.
Tectonics Of Acceptance and Denial
Sheena Mason’s The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race is the Future of Antiracism, is a bold attempt to takeover this mammoth task. However, to grasp her raison d’etre of her ‘raceless political being’ and its potentiality, the reader needs to be familiar with the ‘heterodox’ philosophies of race and her ongoing dialogues with them that are succinctly underlined in her first book, Theory of Racelessness: A Case of Antiracism. Delineating on the theoretical overlaps and conceptual independence of the metaphysical and normative positions; Mason advocates for a skepticist eliminativist position which means to relentlessly question an a priori belief in race itself while practicing towards the eradication of whatever construes as race.
The underlying guiding assumption for Mason lies in her conviction that everyone is ‘raceless’, as. She states, ‘in eliminating “race,” that the theory of racelessness helps people recognise and imagine themselves outside of race(ism).’ (Mason, 2022). Therefore, at a level of generality this implies that racism is real but race is not.
Opposing the commonly held beliefs, debates, teachings, and adopted positionalities within the anti-racist discourses, such as, constructivists , reconstructivists, conservationists, and naturalists, Mason’s aim is to dismantle the very ‘intentionality’ of term ‘race’ and any corresponding auxiliaries that uphold the semantics of race a theoretical affirmation that is made clear in the opening paragraph of The Raceless Antiracist,
‘...racelessness is not a post-racial vision….Rather my focus is on the logical endpoint of antiracism-the undoing of our belief in human “races” and our practice of assigning “races” to humans…. Only through the abolition of [our] belief in “human races” and the discontinuation of assigning “races” to humans can we ever hope to complete the work of antiracism and inaugurate not merely a post-racial but a post-racist one.’ (Mason, 2024)
What stands out in her claim, apart from the purposeful distinction between the suffix(es) attached to the term ‘race(ial/ist)’, is the transfer of the responsibility from the social to the collective (as way to (re)read the causality of racism.) This responsibility entails an acceptance of the social construction of racism wherein the concept of ‘race’ operates as an ‘illusion.’ Thereby, -one comes to understand while the symptoms of racism manifest in the oppressive social structures the economic forces render these corrosive societal mores as a political imperative.
This political dimension shaped by economic forces impresses on the need to realise that the practice of racialisation has nothing to do with the bogey of the concept called ‘the universality of race.’ The modus operandi of practicing this responsibility of tackling the miasma of racialisation is what Mason calls The Togetherness Wayfinder.
An Epistemological-Activist Endeavour
To metamorphose into Mason’s ‘raceless political being’, one has to adhere to the tenets of ‘Togetherness Wayfinder’; which she describes it, as an operating ‘framework in theory and practice’ and ‘also a philosophy of “race” that not only extends the boundaries of racial skepticism and delineates precise paths towards racial eliminativism but also extends philosophies of humanity, culture, ethnicity, social class and economic class.’ (Mason, 2024, p. 8)
Contextualising within the backdrop of antiblack racism in the United States, “Togetherness Wayfinder”, weaves throughout the book, as a call to a pedagogical nuanced action, starting from myth (de)formation traversing towards a paradigm shift, wherein the reader is forced to abandon their internalised ‘racial/st’ tongue.
This is a form of reconstructive stance (loosely rooted in the Analytic Philosophical tradition), wherein the rearticulation of the terminology taken in its everydayness is used in altering the way we speak about race, yet presupposes and fortifies the idea of race. Mason is critical of this approach, as she argues, that through this articulation race is often conflated with culture, ethnicity social class, economic class, or racism. (Mason, 2024, p. 11) This (mis)translation reinforces a priority in race and subsequently the practice of racialisation. To (un)learn one’s language, and to reveal the internal contradictions that often crop up when we speak about race, one has to adopt what the author calls ‘the raceless translator.’
‘The raceless translator’ functions as a core conceptual device within the ‘Wayfinder’ not just theoretically or ‘intuitively’ (an adjective used for description by the author) but rather strategically significant.
The idea of the ‘Wayfinder’ deftly joins the first half with the latter of the book. While the first half aims to demystify the genealogy of race by tracing the interpellation and the coercive ramifications (via State sponsored classifications, corporatised genetic trials etc) the second part impresses on the need to attend to the protocols of the text and the practice of reading. It lays an edifice for further philosophical and literary device such as twilight, walking negatives, rememory, invisible ink, opacity, marronage that form the basis of each chapter. As lyrical as these words seem, the author constructs them through her own positionality recuperating traditional literary texts from their conventional interpretations, rendering them as unapologetically carnivalesque, as is evident in her reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior. She does not hesitate to employ ‘omnivorous poetics’ to unravel how literature transcends its origin, for instance, her interpretation of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘Leaves of Grass’ go beyond the human relations, and insist on reciprocity of species; (I translate it as an empathy for nature.)
Mason provides a highly empathetic and yet dialectical approach. The Raceless Antiracist is refreshing in a world suffocating with atomised politics of identities. The book intends on subverting the ‘heterodox’ ontologies of race yet ends up philosophising race, which makes it an interesting contribution to public philosophy.
The book challenges the paradigms that are in vogue and leaves a cerebral aftertaste with questions to rankle the mind: Can we truly embrace our racelessness? Does this require an ontological dismemberment? The proponents of racelessness, are often criticised of being caught up in the matrix of colorblindness conflating ‘whiteness’ with racelessness.
Mason threads this dilemma carefully as she’s affirmative of the “raceless being” as a core facet of any anti-racist discourse opting out of the colour schema that in some way or the other upholds the belief in human ‘races’ , she’s wary of the utopianism attached to her pedagogy, (the Togetherness Wayfinder) yet chooses to adhere to her praxis as way to transform reality.
However, in a transactionally fragmented world, wherein identities are inhumanely exploited, and subjugated it is hard to imagine how ‘the Togetherness Wayfinder’ would chalk out its journey.
By: Prakriti Sharan
Available on Amazon
