Deracialization Now: A Response to Glenn Loury and Clifton Roscoe
Image from The Developmentalist, the first site to publish this essay, as “Considering Deracialization”
In small pockets of the intellectual heterodoxy there are rising calls for deracialization—eliminating race and racialization, as far as possible, from our sense of self and our public life. Most certainly a minority position, this radical idea faces an uphill battle, not the least because many academics and public intellectuals take the existence of race as a social and historical fact as a basis for their incredulity about the prospect of ever disentangling ourselves from race.
Linguist and Columbia University professor John McWhorter has said that it is beyond his capacity to wage such a battle. Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics at Brown University and host of The Glenn Show podcast, has recently featured guests who have discussed variations of the deracialization idea with more or less optimism, such as economist Rajiv Sethi of Barnard College and the Santa Fe Institute, and Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute. After hearing these conversations, Professor Loury’s friend Clifton Roscoe felt compelled to write an essay arguing against deracialization, which Glenn published on his Substack platform in August 2022. It’s titled “Race Is a Reality in America. Here’s How We Deal With It.” He writes:
No offense to those who think we should deracialize America, but that train left the station long ago. We can’t deracialize America any more than we can eradicate Covid. The best we can do is to learn to live with both.
I emphatically disagree. Here’s why.
In his intro to Roscoe’s essay, Loury agrees with those who counter the progressive tendency to overemphasize race, sniffing out racial bias everywhere, when we should be striving, Loury argues, for meritocracy. But giving up race altogether is a bridge too far, he contends, because, as he says, “I draw sustenance from traditions particular to my African American heritage, and I wouldn’t give those traditions up for anything. Given that race will likely remain a social fact for the foreseeable future, what part should it play in our society?”
I’m also nourished by those traditions in Afro-American life and history deriving from a rich cultural heritage—spiritual, linguistic, culinary, dance, and musical traditions, for instance. Nevertheless, I’ve embraced what Dr. Carlos Hoyt, in The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race, calls a “non-racial identity.” Is it possible to separate race and heritage, race and culture? Yes.
Separating Race and Culture
For sure, it’s certainly true that many of the cultural responses that we black Americans, as a self-identifying group of people, created and refined were directly as well as indirectly related to the American racial predicament. However, that history does not mean that we can’t or shouldn’t appreciate and embrace those cultural riches even as we discard the concept of race—and the practice of racialization.
I’m far from the first to make a distinction between race and culture. The late writer and cultural critic Stanley Crouch wrote in 1994:
We can no longer afford to traffic in simple-minded and culturally inaccurate [emphasis added] terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’ if they are meant to tell us anything more than loose descriptions of skin tone. We are the results of every human possibility that has touched us, no matter its point of origin.
Also in 1994, author and cultural philosopher Albert Murray was interviewed by a fellow novelist, Louis Edwards. Murray made a clear differentiation between race and culture as categories for understanding behavior:
...if you go from culture, instead of the impossibility of race... You see, race is an ideological concept. It has to do with manipulating people, and with power, and with controlling people in a certain way. It has no reality, no basis in reality... So what you enter into to make sense of things are patterns and variations in culture. What you find are variations we can call idiomatic—idiomatic variations. People do the same things, have the same basic human impulses, but they come out differently.
Ralph Ellison, author of the classic novel Invisible Man, published 70 years ago, was interviewed by three Afro-American writers, Ishmael Reed, Steve Cannon, and Quincy Troupe, in 1977. He said:
...the pervasive operation of the principle of race (or racism) in American society leads many non-blacks to confuse culture with race [emphasis added] and thresholds with steeples, and prevents them from recognizing to what extent the American culture is Afro-American. This can be denied, but it can’t be undone since the culture has had our input since before nationhood. It’s up to us to contribute to the broader recognition of this pluralistic fact. While others worry about racial superiority, let us be concerned with the quality of culture.
Of course, confusing race and culture occurs among nominally black folk also.
I spent a considerable portion of the course I taught in 2020, “Cultural Intelligence: Transcending Race, Embracing Cosmos,” bracketing and distinguishing between race and culture based on insights such as those above. From my perspective, race is a categorization and hierarchical sorting of human beings into subspecies based on skin color and phenotypic differences. The express purpose of such selecting and sorting—and, as we shall soon see, of attribution, essentializing, and acting in a racist manner—was to enable the oppression and exploitation of darker-skinned people by situating them within a caste-like structure whereby those classified as white had more ready access to the social, economic, and political benefits and opportunities of a modern system of free enterprise.
Culture, in contrast, is human meaning and values expressed in forms of creative production (art and technology), rituals, patterns of behavior, and ways of seeing and being in the world—lifestyles. One can also view culture as shared agreements, practices, and symbolic communication among groups of people. Another approach to culture is more developmental, as in the use of education to cultivate and improve the human capacity to elevate and refine, thereby producing more “cultured” individuals.
In How Culture Works, anthropologist Paul Bohannan used a simile to describe how culture helps humans expand beyond our biological inheritance: “Culture is like a prosthesis—it allows the creature to extend its capacities and to do things that its specialized body cannot otherwise do.”
By definition and intent, race separates and divides. Conflating race and culture twists and tightens this division. Separating or bracketing culture from race tends toward appreciating human commonalities and differences in a more nuanced manner than judging and stereotyping groups of people based on skin color will allow.
Scales of Deracialization: Separating Race from the State
Another reason I disagree with Professor Loury and Mr. Roscoe is because they presume that deracializing the entire society is too large an ask. As Roscoe says, “we can’t deracialize America.” Why not? Here’s his claim:
Perhaps the best argument for why we can’t deracialize America is that activists won’t allow it. They use race as both an offensive weapon (“Everything about America is racist, and so are you if you don’t agree!”) and a defensive weapon (“You’re not black, so shut up and listen to us!”). They even use race as a weapon against black people who disagree with them (“You’re not ‘authentically’ black, so you shut up, too!”).
Seems to me that the self-serving, spiderweb logic of race-based activism that Roscoe objects to would offer even more reason to pursue deracialization. One approach toward this end would be a separation of the state and race, as David E. Bernstein argues in his recently published book, Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.
Disaggregating race from the state can begin through the U.S. Census, which currently compels people to racialize themselves by asking: “What is this person’s race?” Carlos Hoyt recommends adding this question: “How is this person racialized?” By making note of how others racialize us, the government could still track bias, discrimination, and differential outcomes based, at least partly, on how one is racialized. Furthermore, those who don’t identify by race at all could check a box. And those who wish to continue racializing themselves can do so, too. The 2030 Decennial Census Form, then, could look like this:
This alternative Census form was created by Carlos Hoyt as part of a petition to abolish compelled self-racialization in the U.S. Census. I invite you to read it and to consider signing it today.
Deracializing Oneself and Others
Moreover, deracialization could take place at a smaller scale, too. An individual can choose to stop racializing him- or herself, and to stop racializing others in speech, thought, and behavior. The same is true for smaller groups of persons rather than an entire society of 335 million people . . . .
The above is part one of an essay that appears in the Journal of Free Black Thought. What will follow in part two is my closing argument, emphasizing the ways we can untangle ourselves from the process of racialization that creates factitious “races” and a socialized conditioning defined as a “racial worldview.” These ultimately undergird racism. Step-by-step, I demonstrate how and why deracialization is not only possible but necessary, closing with a prescient quote by Toni Morrison.
Thanks to Jake Mackey for excellent edit suggestions and for the many hyperlinks provided for readers and researchers.
To read part two of this essay, go here.