A Paradigm Shift on Race
Glenn Loury, Greg Thomas, and John McWhorter on The Glenn Show
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions popularized the phrase “paradigm shift,” which, generally speaking, refers to a radical change in a field of endeavor from prevailing attitudes and beliefs to a new baseline of assumptions and methods.
For the past three years, I’ve been testing the waters on a paradigm shift regarding race.
In 2020, during my course “Cultural Intelligence: Transcending Race, Embracing Cosmos,” I shared videos and quotes from a scholar that I’m now proud to call a colleague: Dr. Carlos Hoyt, whose 2016 work, The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race helped me come to terms with a perspective that I had been moving towards but didn’t quite have a label for it: a non-racial worldview.
Considering that race is reinforced everyday in our way of speaking about identity and groups, in mainstream to social media as well as in all from scholarship to regular, interpersonal conversations, it’s fair to say that “a racial worldview” is the norm, the status quo, a reigning paradigm.
My approach during the Cultural Intelligence course, and in the six-month course I co-taught with Jewel and Amiel Handelsman in late 2021 to early 2022, “Stepping Up: Wrestling with America’s Past, Reimagining Its Future, Healing Together,” was to share perspectives on what I call “deracialization,” ways to free ourselves from the racial paradigm, but without proselytizing.
Ever since my born-again Christian period as a teenager in the late 1970s, I’ve been wary of attempts to try to convert others to my own belief systems. I think that modern adults should exercise agency, thought, and choice on their own when presented with information and with, one hopes, wisdom. So I didn’t strive to convert the course participants, who, by the way, were mostly people racialized as “white,” into desegregating their minds about the racial paradigm, but did present evidence and resources in that direction.
In my posts here in the same time period, I’ve attempted to take the same approach.
Antagonistic Cooperation with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter
But now the ante has been raised: in this blog, and at two online platforms—The Developmentalist and Free Black Thought (FBT)—I challenged the esteemed Brown University economist and public intellectual Glenn Loury, and a contributor to his The Glenn Show Substack, Clifton Roscoe, in an essay that FBT titled “Deracialization Now.” In it, as you may recall, I lay out a case for why the racial paradigm—consisting of the belief in race (either as a biological reality or social construction), the process or system of racialization, and a superordinate racial worldview—inevitably becomes racism and a basis of social division. I proposed culture as a much better way to frame human development and interaction, and asked readers to separate race from culture, ancestry, ethnicity, and heritage.
To his credit, Professor Loury read the essay and realized that although he didn’t agree that we need to let go of race completely now, that I wrote the essay in good faith.
But that affirming tweet didn’t mean that he wouldn’t challenge me strongly to defend my position when coming on his show again, this time with his bi-weekly podcast partner, John McWhorter, a linguist, a columnist at the New York Times, and professor at Columbia University. The episode was taped and released during the Christmas holiday season.
As you’ll see in the 40-minute conversation, which at times got heated, we engage in democratic discourse and disagreement without descending into the muck and mire of name-calling and assumptions of bad faith dealing. Yet the assumptions of our points of view on the racial paradigm come into conflict, as to be expected when one paradigm challenges another.
Paradigms don’t change overnight. But for there to even be consideration of creating a different status quo and worldview, we must engage in dialogue and debate. That, indeed, is what occurred in this public conversation, which will be one of many to come in which a “non-racial worldview” challenges a “racial worldview.”
Take a look for yourself and feel free to share your thoughts by writing in the comment section underneath this post on our site.
An Invitation from NJPAC for a film and panel discussion
“Jewish people and Black Americans have experienced a history of intolerance and discrimination and both groups have used the arts as tools of resistance. In a climate of growing antisemitism in the United States, it is vital that people form allyships to combat hatred because intolerance of all kinds is a threat to humankind. In this PSEG True Diversity Film Series event presented by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, we’ll explore how creativity is a resource for building unity and positively shaping the future.
In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on January 27, this month’s PSEG True Diversity Film Series selection is Petit Rat. This award-winning documentary tells the story of a French Jewish girl’s dream of becoming a ballerina, cut short by World War II. She and her parents are hidden by French Christians in a small town in Vichy, France where they survive the war. Petit Rat is a portrait of a mother and her daughters, bonded by the intergenerational trauma of war and uplifted by the resilience of familial love.
We’ll be joined by the filmmaker for a panel conversation, along with other multicultural leaders who are combining social justice and the arts.
How to participate:
Register here. Following registration you’ll receive a link to watch Petit Rat; it is also available for streaming on PBS Passport.Join us for a virtual panel discussion at 7PM on January 23.
Our panel will be moderated by Isaiah Rothstein, Rabbinic Scholar and Public Affairs Advisor at Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), and the founder of JFNA’s Initiative for Jewish Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; the Jewish Youth Climate Movement; and Kamochah, a community for Black Orthodox Jews.
Our panelists include:
Vera Wagman, Director and Producer of Petit Rat
Anna Glass, Executive Director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem
Greg Thomas, Co-Director of the Omni-American Future Project, an initiative committed to fighting racism and antisemitism and strengthening unity through music
Daniel Wise, Playwright and Director of the Broadway musical Soul Doctor, the untold story of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Nina Simone and the impact of gospel on Jewish music”