Deracialization Now: Part Two
April 2018 cover of National Geographic magazine
In part one, we established a clear distinction between race and culture, and proposed a way to begin the deracialization process by separating race and the state via the U.S. Census. Now we’ll offer examples of people of varied backgrounds and identifications who have taken the courageous step of getting off the karmic wheel of racialization, and continue with functional definitions of key terms of use in this effort. We’ll utilize these to reverse engineer the knotty nexus of race and a racial worldview, emboldened by the racialization-to-racism rat race. And, as promised, we’ll close with the wisdom of Toni Morrison as well as an Omni-American vision grounded in democratic aspiration and plural reality.
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.
There are notable individuals who have consciously and deliberately stopped identifying with the concept of race and who abjure the process of racialization. Author Thomas Chatterton Williams believes that it is possible and crucial to “unlearn race.” Jewish American executive coach Amiel Handelsman has embraced the goal of deracialization. Dr. Sheena Mason advocates a pro-human stance that she terms “racelessness.” Likewise, Dr. Carlos Hoyt advocates “anti-racialization.” In fact, Mason and Hoyt and I co-facilitated a conference in September 2022, “Resolving the Race-ism Dilemma,” grounded in this very perspective.
Artist and National Book Award-winner Charles Johnson argues that whereas we certainly shouldn’t be blind to the ways we have been racialized historically, neither should we be bound to it either. The Fifth Column podcast co-host Kmele Foster, a staunch libertarian individualist, calls himself a “race abolitionist,” and goes as far as rejecting self-identification as “black,” presumably because of the racial connotations of the word. Writer and former co-host of the FAIR Perspectives podcast, Angel Eduardo, disavows race as a fiction, as nonsense. Financial advisor and wealth consultant Adrian Lyles, based in Calhoun, GA, has created a nonprofit, P.U.L.L.—People United in Life & Liberty, where, on their website, they declare:
We seek to educate that how we define race is not only antiquated, it is widely obscure. No one can define what it means to be black or white. We believe there is one race of people called “Human.”
Are all of the people above simply deluded? Are they in denial about the history and even the continued prevalence of racism in the United States? Are they obtuse, blind advocates of color-blindness in some wish for a “kumbaya” future without conflict?
No. Each of these individuals has undergone deep self-reflection and study. Even though differences of emphasis can be found among them, they have concluded that the concept of race is fatally flawed. I emphatically agree. Further, the concept of race is kept alive by its prevalence in mainstream and social media, by the process of racialization, and by a ruinous ideology called a “racial worldview.” The late anthropologist Audrey Smedley, author of Race in North America: The Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, described a racial worldview this way:
By racial worldview, I simply mean believing and acting in accordance with the social convention that people can and should be regarded as members of one or more of a handful of nebulous, restrictive, contradictory, and conflicting subspecies called races.
This graphic illustrates how this noxious feedback loop works.
Yet to deracialize at any level—individual, interpersonal, or institutional—one must know what racialization is. It is not sufficient to assume that because race as a concept exists as a social norm and social fact that one therefore understands racialization.
What Is Racialization? Is it Inevitable?
According to Carlos Hoyt in The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding and Transcending Race, racialization is a five-step process or system—selection, sorting, attribution, essentializing, and acting—by which races are made:
Reverse Engineering Racialization for Good
Let’s take each step in the racialization process one-by-one and ask ourselves if it would be possible to interrupt it.
1. Would it be possible to stop selecting human characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, the size and shape of one’s nose and lips, and ancestral origins as signs of so-called “meaningful racial” difference? Indeed, modern science has determined that the biological conception of race is false, and that even diseases shared by members of ancestral groups from particular regions—for example, sickle cell anemia, which developed among ancestors who lived in malarial regions across the Mediterranean and Central and West Africa—are not exclusive to a “racial” group. According to the 2003 documentary, Race: The Power of an Illusion, in parts of Greece, 30% of the population carries the sickle cell trait. It is prevalent on the Arabian peninsula and in India, too (see the illustration below). The differences and similarities among human populations cannot be determined by a crude measure like “race.”
Prevalence of Sickle Cell Anemia
2. Would it be possible to stop sorting human populations into uniform sub-populations based on the characteristics listed above, or others? If throughout the span of recorded history, human beings had always sorted based on external physical characteristics and ancestry, then a strong case could be made that this is simply the way humans classify one another. However, although the cognitive practice of categorization is common among humans, the racialization chart above makes clear that the practice was codified in the United States in the 1700s. Racialization is not an eternal aspect of the human condition. If we began at a particular point in history to sort human beings in this way, we can creatively exercise human cultural intelligence and agency to choose to do otherwise.
3. Would it be possible to stop attributing traits (temperaments, talents, behaviors) to racial types? If we understand why and how human beings stereotype others into fixed and oversimplified images, we can grow beyond such a practice. Those drawn to white nationalism, for example, view non-white peoples as a threat based on stereotypes and a psychological need to bolster their self-concept by feeling superior to those perceived “others.” If blues musician and social activist Daryl Davis could, through empathy, deep listening, music, and heartfelt logic, convince a number of KKK members to come out of their robes and disavow racism, then on a larger scale we can grow beyond stereotyping individuals into racial subspecies who supposedly think and behave the same because of select human characteristics such as skin color. Doesn’t the idea that we can tell important things about a person’s values, skills, and experience solely based on their external features strike you as absurd?
4. Would it be possible, in turn, to stop viewing differences based on the illusory idea of race as natural, immutable, and hereditary? If 1-3 are possible, and they are, then not essentializing human beings based on race is not only possible but desirable. In fact, this heightened consciousness beyond essentialism has already been accomplished by millions of people since the advent of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
5. Is it possible not to be racist, not to believe in race, and not to treat people according to a double standard based on their racial classification? Indeed, it’s possible and millions have decided, from the 1960s to today, that being an overt racist is socially unacceptable, and beyond the pale, so to speak, of the Overton window.
Of course, there are still people who hold racist beliefs and enact racist behaviors. Researcher Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of the 2014 book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, uncovered evidence of explicit racial hatred through Google searches. The racial epithet, in either singular or plural form, used in seven million American searches every year is “nigger”—often as searches for “nigger jokes.” (Fortunately, however, as Steven Pinker points out in his 2018 book, Enlightenment Now The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, searches for racist jokes are on the decline, as the figure below shows.) To take another example, racial prejudice appears to have a negative effect on the wages of workers racialized as black. Indeed, “at least one third of the black-white wage gap” may be explained by racial prejudice. Other studies show a lesser gap, though any percentage based on discrimination should be noted.
Clearly, there is progress yet to be made. Nevertheless, in our legal system and in our public discourse, a belief in racial reasoning and justifications for it—up to and including Affirmative Action and “anti-racist” calls for “equity”—is being called into question by a rising tide of persons whose values align with classic liberalism.
Conclusion
If we value the dignity of each and every individual, and if we believe that we share equal citizenship status as Americans based on that dignity, classical liberal principles are a good start for the deracialization effort. Let’s share the value of deracialization with individual American citizens and let them decide whether to continue racializing themselves and others or to stop this lethal practice in their own minds and behavior.
Deracialization can be achieved while maintaining allegiance to specific idioms and practices that derive from cultural, ethnic, religious, and ancestral identifications. I know this is true because I myself have enacted this perspective by remaining rooted in an Afro-American cultural milieu via my family, close friends, and associates as well as the blues, jazz, gospel, and other forms and artifacts of expression distinctive to my idiomatic group. Yet I’m also a citizen of the wider world, as cosmopolitan as jazz itself has become. I’m willing to venture that there are many others in the U.S. and elsewhere who would take to heart a stance of “rooted cosmopolitanism” and discard the idea of race, the practice of racialization, and the calamitous racial worldview—if they were given a choice, for instance, on their Census form.
If we stop conflating race and biology, race and culture, race and heritage, race and ethnicity, race and ancestry, even race and economic and social status, we can disentangle and disinfect ourselves from this Gordian knot of racialization and move closer to the fulfillment of our democratic American creed. I agree with the master novelist and essayist Toni Morrison, whose writings wrestled with ways to acknowledge the impact of race and racialization without being bound to it, whose writings are a testament to the humanity of ancestors too often forced to be fugitives in their own land, whose writings sculpted and shaped a way to recognize a cultural home for the many thousands gone whom others were intent on making existentially homeless through bigotry and what Albert Murray called “the folklore of white supremacy.” In a 1994 essay, “A Race in Mind: The Press in Deed,” Morrison wrote these wise words:
...although historical, race bias is not absolute, inevitable, or immutable. It has a beginning, a life, a history in scholarship, and it can have an end.
—Toni Morrison
Deracialization won’t be easy. Neither was sending astronauts in rocket ships to the moon, ending the transatlantic slave trade, ceasing to believe in witches or that the universe revolves around the earth. A long, hard road ahead doesn’t mean that we should give up, lacking the guts and courage to scaffold and put into effect deracialization over time. If we do so, perhaps we can move closer to an Omni-American variation on the nation’s motto, E pluribus unum: Out of many, we embrace a common pluralism of civic excellence and cultural accord.