This collection invitations seasoned philosophers to share essential reflections on emergent and institutionalised shapes of and encounters inside philosophy. The collection collects experience-based explorations of philosophy’s private, institutional, and disciplinary evolution that will even assist younger lecturers and college students navigate philosophy as we speak.
How did I come to create the speculation of racelessness, a framework for learning, discussing, and addressing racism and a philosophy of race/ism, ethnicity, class, and tradition? How did I come to current in a specific means the speculation, my philosophy, in The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism (Pitchstone, February 2024)? Let me begin someplace near the start of my story.
Once I was about eight or 9 years outdated, my adoptive mom instructed me that my adoptive father’s household didn’t like me as a result of I used to be “black” or her as a result of she was “brown” (i.e., Panamanian). I keep in mind taking a look at my arms and questioning about my “blackness” and felt the ache one feels when who and the way they’re leads to another person’s disdain.
After all, she lied. She was extraordinarily bodily and verbally abusive. The older I received, the extra she realized that she needed to maintain me disconnected from nearly everybody else to keep up her management and secret. I used to be at an age once I had began to inform adults that my mom beat me regardless of her threats to kill me if I instructed.
However I didn’t know then that she had lied. I additional internalized the assumption that I wasn’t solely unworthy of her love and affection—for no matter causes—however was unworthy of anybody else’s love and affection as a result of of who I used to be. Who I used to be included my “blackness.” It included my “race.”
Over time of my childhood after which teenage years, numerous classmates known as me “nigger” and “pubic hair.” One peer assaulted me on the varsity bus and spit an enormous glob of mucus out of a bus window once I received dropped off on the center college. Her spit landed in my hair. A skinhead chased and shot at my adoptive brother and one other classmate—each racialized as black—once we had been all about twelve. My brother got here house screaming on the high of his lungs. The sound of his piercing scream nonetheless haunts me.
“WHAT HAPPENED?!” My dad and mom and I all exclaimed in response. The skinhead had chased them by means of the trailer park till he—my brother—reached the refuge of our trailer all whereas being shot at. An investigation ensued and the skinhead—who was round 15 or 16—was kicked out of the park and despatched to dwell along with his father in Tennessee.
My brother’s “blackness” nearly received him killed. What a world!
By the point I used to be an undergraduate, all I knew was that I needed to assist individuals. I particularly imagined serving to youthful individuals by displaying them that the whole lot is feasible and that they might overcome any impediment, any trauma. Initially, I studied psychology with plans to get a sophisticated diploma and be a youth and household therapist. However the literature and composition courses I took on the similar time ended up pulling me into the world of literary research.
Typically understood, literary research entails the deep examine, analysis, interpretation, and criticism of literature. Trendy literary research is commonly influenced by literary concept, which is the philosophical dialogue of literature’s targets and strategies. I noticed the vastness of myself, others, the world, and the universe by means of literature and particularly the physique of labor known as African-American literature. And I simply knew that I used to be known as to assist individuals by learning the factor known as “race” and racism towards the purpose of serving to to determine and cease the causes and results of racism.
As a style, African-American literature has persistently been seen and outlined as at all times having to do with “race” and racism. My thoughts turned not solely intent upon analyzing and actually understanding the literature’s targets and strategies however moreover upon changing into infinitely extra clear-eyed in regards to the actuality of race/ism and, as importantly, the best way to intervene and take part in what I understood numerous writers to be collaborating: I didn’t realize it on the time, however I used to be studying philosophy of “race” and doing it, too. By way of my examine, I joined the human rights efforts of people that get racialized as black in the USA.
I additionally opened my creativeness to what would wish to occur to create a world with out race/ism. In different phrases, how would the world that many writers discovered themselves working towards by working in opposition to race/ism look? What could be required to create such a world? Was any of that even attainable or price working towards? I saved a majority of these questions on the forefront of my thoughts always.
As an undergraduate, I did a sophisticated honors undertaking, which resulted in a one-hundred-page paper—a examine of what I dubbed “institutionalized erasure” in African-American literary research and American tradition. I argued that erasure outcomes from the imposition of “race” and a so-called racial identification onto Individuals of newer African descent. I graduated on the high of my class and was the chosen pupil graduation speaker. I continued my examine of race/ism once I went to the College of Houston in Houston, Texas, and earned my Grasp of Arts in English. Specifically, I continued to review the manufacturing and replica of blackness—that’s “race.” I used to be satisfied that if one desires to grasp “race,” one should examine “blackness.”
At Howard College in Washington, D.C., I began my Ph.D. in 2016. I needed to take a number of hole years between levels due to monetary instability and the rightful estrangement from my adoptive household. However I couldn’t be deterred from my calling to take part in human rights efforts in a significant means. I continued my examine of race/ism and expanded my specializations to incorporate American—extra broadly—and Caribbean literature. I additionally had the superb fortune of connecting with Dr. Jacoby Adeshei Carter, a professor of philosophy and a thinker of “race.”
That was once I realized the terminology for what I had been witnessing and consumed with all alongside within the context of the US and as illustrated in African-American literature. I additionally got here to acknowledge that I’m a thinker of “race” and had been all alongside. My first articulation of what has turn into the speculation of racelessness was “We should undo race to undo racism.” In “A White Slave”: Albinism in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings (2019), I first current the beginning of the speculation. At the moment, I used to be calling it the speculation of albinism, however that naming had its personal host of issues and limitations. By the point I wrote my dissertation, I had come to name it the speculation of racelessness. I handed “with distinction,” an honor reserved for one thing like 1% of humanities Ph.D.s worldwide. I used to be, once more, a pupil speaker at my graduation.
My journey hasn’t been simple. As a survivor of specific and implicit race/ism and different traumas, I felt deeply related with what I believed was my “race,” what I believed was my blackness. Like many individuals, I understood blackness to be racial and cultural, ethnic, heritage, and so forth. I assigned the whole lot I like about myself to my blackness. I’m tenacious, audacious, daring, lovely, self-motivated, persistent, empathetic, type, loving, clever, hilarious, and distinctive.
So, whereas my thoughts was persistently displaying me that “race” is totally pernicious and that the phantasm of “race” outcomes from the fact of race/ism, my coronary heart saved me connected and instructed me to carry quick to my “blackness” (i.e., race). “Race” isn’t actual. As a substitute, racism hides its face behind what we’re instructed is “race” or “racial.” Think about that we’re detectives in an episode of Scooby-Doo. We’re chasing a villain with a masks on, in typical Scooby-Doo vogue, that claims “RACE.” We catch the villain and have our momentous demasking second. AHA! The villain shapeshifts from a single determine to 5: Ethnicity, tradition, social class, financial class, and racism itself. The excellence between and the way we, certainly, philosophize about any of those socially constructed classes issues if we’re honest about stopping the detrimental results of racism in addition to the causes.
Up till a sure current level, I mistakenly conflated the whole lot about myself, together with that which provides or displays worth, like how I present up culturally, with “race,” a grave error when then making an attempt to acknowledge extra clearly and cease extra successfully race/ism.
I frolicked in my advisor’s workplace crying. I didn’t need to “let go of my blackness” or to “let go of race” to undo racism. Ethically, although, I acknowledged that I additionally couldn’t not let go with out making myself the largest kind of hypocrite.
It wasn’t till I taught on the School of William and Mary and concurrently learn Barbara and Karen Fields’ Racecraft: the Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012) with my college students that one thing clicked in my thoughts. Like most individuals who come to my work, I had succumbed to the entice of conflating “nonracial” phenomena with what I believed was “racial.” I made the whole lot I like about myself a part of my “racial” make-up.
After all, it damage to noticeably take into account the necessity to “let go” or “undo” or “deracialize” myself once I had fooled myself into pondering that “race” was extra than a caste system, a technique to subjugate me and individuals who get racialized equally. The phantasm of “race” is reflective and proof of that hierarchical system, not the extra popularly believed inversion. In different phrases, “race” doesn’t trigger racism. The presence of race/ism truly requires the assumption and upholding of the fiction of “race” towards the purpose of subjugating groupings of individuals—some as human and others as subhuman if in any respect human. In some ways, my thoughts knew that earlier than my coronary heart did. However I nonetheless wanted to do the tough work of extra totally liberating my thoughts, my creativeness.
To say that I feel deeply and obsessively in regards to the matter of race/ism could be an understatement. I stay intentional about exploring what, why, and the way I feel. And I’m deeply dedicated to serving to different individuals query themselves and their very own beliefs and methods of seeing and being. How philosophical of me!
As a concept, there are guidelines, instruments, language, and specific data and methods of seeing and being that underpin and uphold the speculation as a framework. Anybody can have interaction with my analysis to bear or proceed to develop their very own means of seeing and being. My honest hope is that the methods of seeing and being that lead to partaking with my work shall be staunchly outdoors of the confines of race/ism, by which I imply white supremacy in locations just like the U.S. I come from an Afrofuturist bend. In Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Ytasha L. Womack defines Afrofuturism as “an intersection of creativeness, know-how, the longer term and liberation.” In the identical e book, Womack quotes Ingrid LaFleur who defines it as “a means of imagining attainable futures by means of a black cultural lens.” I work from inside the cultural creativeness of these searching for liberation from white supremacy whilst some individuals miss your entire level largely due to the equipment of race/ism.
The core tenets—revised language from my first e book Theory of Racelessness (2022) for readability—of the speculation of racelessness are as follows:
- Our perception in “race” and practices of racialization usually are not meaningless as a result of racism and beneficial facets of humanity conceal behind what we name “race.”
- “Race” doesn’t exist biologically for people or as a social development.
- Though we’re all racialized by ourselves and others, we’re raceless.
- Race/ism is a social and/or financial class hierarchy of people based mostly on the assumption in race, practices of racialization, and subsequent reinforcement of assorted energy imbalances (i.e., hierarchies). Within the U.S., the hierarchy locations individuals who get racialized as white on the high and people racialized as black on the backside.
- Racialization is the method of making use of an inescapable social hierarchy—“race/ism” and energy imbalance—to people.
- Racism doesn’t exist all over the place in the identical means. As some philosophers say, “race” doesn’t journey.
- We will overcome racism.
The first software of the speculation is a racelessness translator, an analytical course of that anybody can study. It helps individuals translate that which is perceived or presumed to be “race” or “racial” into extra apt and exact language, like tradition, ethnicity, social class, financial class, and racism itself. Bear in mind the Scooby-Doo villain.
The racelessness translator is an analytical software that allows us to translate what we presume is “race” or “racial” into tradition, ethnicity, social class, financial class, racism as outlined by the speculation itself, and sometimes some mixture of the 5. To finish racism as we all know it within the U.S., we should do the tough work of correctly translating racelessness (i.e., “race”). That can then expose us to the fact of what “race” actually is: racism hiding its face, a seemingly everlasting social and/or financial class hierarchy of people based mostly on our beliefs in “race,” practices of racialization, and hoarding of or deference to energy. This isn’t a matter of mere semantics or rhetoric. It’s a matter of recognizing these hierarchies and selecting to forge a greater path ahead for all of us with out race/ism.
One of many best advantages of such translation is that it strengthens our skills to witness and testify to how racism masquerades and will get carried as “race”—dynamics that make combating racism from inside and utilizing racial/st ideology so cyclical and even regressive. The opposite instruments of the speculation embrace structure, the strolling destructive, rememory, maternal vitality, invisible ink, twilight, insanity, comfort, nation, diaspora, and residential.
When correctly understood, the speculation permits for extra astute identifications of what racism is and isn’t, and what is going to and received’t work to cease racism and its unwell results in its tracks. Additional, the speculation opens the door to extra proliferated understandings of tradition, ethnicity, nation, humanity, and so on., that bridge divides that needn’t be and typically aren’t even essentially based mostly on the fact of every formation. How we understand an issue influences how we try to unravel mentioned drawback or whether or not you’re employed to unravel and resolve the issue in any respect. My notion of an issue may also have unwell results on me which might be worsened if my notion isn’t rooted in efficient Reality. At present, many individuals inhabit half-truths or much less. Such is the design of human societies—cabs of American politics and society extra particularly.
To keep away from the unintentional upholding of racism, I take advantage of the phrases “race/ism,” “race/ist,” “racial/st, “antirace/ist,” “race/ism/much less,” and “antirace/ism.” The purpose of those twin coinings is to focus on the deep reciprocal causal connections between racism and “race.” Most Individuals tacitly consider that race exists independently of racism or racist techniques, attitudes, and actions. They presuppose that there are inherent “racial” options of people and that “racism” and “racist” beliefs and actions are biased in opposition to these so-called racial options or that racism has magically already ended, rendering “race” a non-factor. Utilizing the nonstandard, virgule spellings of race/ism, race/ist, and so on., gives visible indicators that emphasize the connection between what we understand to be “race” and what’s truly racism—causes and results.
There are six philosophies of “race.” Three reply the query “What’s race?” “Race” is hereditary, artificial, or imaginary. The opposite three reply “What ought to we do about race?” We must always protect, reform, or terminate “race.” Every of us holds two philosophies of “race” even with out the language to call them. Some philosophers of “race” have dubbed these theories naturalism, constructionism, skepticism, conservationism, reconstructionism, and eliminativism. I’ve renamed these philosophies to extend understanding and coherence amongst non-philosophers of race.
If you happen to consider that “race” is hereditary, it’s organic. If you happen to maintain that “race” is artificial, you consider that “race” is an actual phenomenon that’s human-made. If you happen to contend that “race” is imaginary, like me, you realize that “race” isn’t organic and, due to this fact, doesn’t exist biologically in people. My view of “race” as imaginary takes me additional. I maintain that what individuals determine as “race” are different misidentified constructions, like ethnicity, tradition, social or financial class, or race/ism itself. One can not successfully cease the causes of race/ism whereas sustaining perception in “race” and practices of racialization. Reformers, sometimes synthetic-believers, work to refashion how “race” is conceived and the way it operates in any given society. Preservationists, typically hereditary-believers, need to maintain “race.” Lastly, belief-terminators like me, often imaginary-nonbelievers and typically synthetic-believers, typically work to eradicate the assumption in “race” and the follow of racialization. On this context, “racelessness” means and displays an imaginary-terminator or synthetic-terminator philosophy.
The follow of racialization assaults individuals’s ethnic, class, and cultural distinctions and similarities by typically obliterating or typically obscuring how tradition, class, and ethnicity exist and the way people exist outdoors of race/ism. Eracesure is the end result of the follow of racialization for every of us. As well as, I coined the phrases erace and eracing. Erasure, as sometimes spelled, is outlined as an act or occasion of erasing, a spot the place one thing has been erased, a spot or mark left after erasing, and an obliteration, and a elimination of writing, recorded materials, or information. The custom of pondering and expressing oneself past “race,” the historical past of obscuring such examples of thought from each canon, the historical past of misinterpreting or mislabeling various philosophies of “race,” and the final follow of racial/st ideology overdetermining how race/ism is taught, realized, learn, outlined, and included or excluded from conversations are examples and proof of erasure. You’ll be able to see that my “institutionalized erasure” argument from 15 years in the past stays (although modified).
My examination and analyses of public discourse usually accepted as both “white,” “black,” or “colorless” verify my conviction that racial/st language outdoors of and inside antiracist efforts—extending to civil rights actions that predate the coining of antiracist—typically perpetuate the imbalances of energy and company individuals typically search to vary. Antiracist initiatives proceed to be (e)raced in the truth that racing (which means the act of making use of raci[al/st] language and beliefs) options has the other meant impact. It erases or (e)races (concurrently changing erasures with “race” which, in flip, causes additional eracesure and the method continues cyclically) even because it tries to light up the issue of erasure. Eracing, eracesure, and erace point out and implicate the actions taken by society that lead to some type of subjugation based mostly on race/ism. Eracesure occurs when an individual racializes themselves or society racializes the particular person and when an individual refuses to acknowledge and know the signification of their racialization. That’s very true relating to the impression of “whiteness.” Eracesure is only one important however impermanent consequence of race/ism.
The purpose of my coinings is that seeing our fellow people in racial/st phrases—seeing them as “raced”—truly creates the assumption in “race” and maintains the follow of racialization, dehumanization. That’s, understanding human variations (that are attributable to tradition, ethnicity, class, and different elements) in both “benignly” “racial” or malignantly racist methods creates and maintains the assumption in “race” and follow of racialization, which then reinforces race/ism. Therefore race/ism and my different spellings maintain earlier than our eyes the truth that racism—the causes and results—creates and requires our continued perception in “race” and follow of racialization. To get rid of racism we should get rid of our perception in “race” and our follow of racialization.
As alarming as as we speak typically is when the know-how of race/ism continues to play out so clearly in our cultural–together with political and academic–techniques, I stay optimistic. Every thing is feasible. I’m audacious sufficient to think about a future with out race/ism—with out white supremacy—not a utopia however a world the place human beings really do see themselves and one another as unified throughout similarities and variations. In such a world, we’d radically love and look out for each other. I’m as a result of we’re.
