Can We End Racism by Ending the Idea of Race Itself?
Author Sheena Michele Mason offers an alternative vision for anti-racism.
The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism, by Sheena Michele Mason, Pitchstone Publishing, 256 pages, $17.95
Is race real? In The Raceless Antiracist, a follow-up to her 2022 book Theory of Racelessness, Sheena Michele Mason argues not only that it isn't, but that trying to stop racism while keeping the concept of race is like fighting "a flood by pouring water on it."
Mason, a literature professor at SUNY Oneonta, suggests that these futile approaches fall into two categories: "anti-racist resistance" and "color-blindness." While the first reifies race by making it the key to understanding most social phenomena, the second reifies it by treating it as a real thing that ought to be ignored, thus downplaying the reality of the racism that relies on it.
The Raceless Antiracist asks us to do something very uncomfortable: to adopt a new mental model, to think in a completely different set of categories. It doesn't deserve a snap judgment. It's a book for chewing on and wrestling with. It may puzzle or even disturb you.
Mason notes that our ancestors migrated at levels that most people grossly underestimate, leading to far more genetic mixing than people typically assume. She points out that our current understanding of DNA undermines a lot of assumptions that arose from observing external traits, such as skin color, nose shape, and eye shape, since such traits can arise from the same genetic allele but be inherited from entirely different people. Furthermore, thanks to the random genetic recombination that happens with every new generation, 75 percent of your genetic makeup is attributable to only 5 percent of your ancestors. A 23andMe test will tell you about only 8 percent of your ancestors, because they're the only ones left represented in your DNA today. In fact, it's possible that two dark South Africans can be more genetically divergent from one another than one of them is from a white Swede.
Even if race is a biological fiction—and I think Mason makes a strong case that it is—it could be real in the sense that money is real: constructed by us but constrained in its "nature" by the purpose it serves. People treat it as real, particularly the people who created the category as a rationale for dehumanizing those they oppress; and that, one might argue, makes it a social fact.
Mason rejects even this argument. We can build franchises, merchandise empires, and little girls' dreams out of princesses who create ice castles, but that does not mean those princesses themselves exist. So too, race is simply imaginary. It is racism that is the social construct: a social hierarchy based on an imagined category.
Mason sees this as an important difference, because she believes that people trapped in the ideology of race are fated never to actually end racism. We cannot beat the sin by embracing its core mistake.
The word trapped is instructive here. Think of how defining one's blackness as resistance to whiteness just prioritizes whiteness. What happens if the "whiteness" of Whiteness Studies programs—that is, the association of peach-colored people with legal and economic privilege—were actually to disappear? Would the meaning and purpose found in celebrating gospel music or soul food or the Civil Rights Movement disappear too? Obviously not! Those "black" things are not a celebration of race at all; they're a celebration of a culture shared by a particular ethnic group from a particular part of the U.S. who underwent a particular set of historical circumstances that shaped them in important ways.
Mason calls this "translation": Once one embraces racelessness, she says, one must translate what people really mean when they talk about "race" into actual insights about culture, ethnicity, class, or other categories. Consider Denzel Washington's comment when he was asked about why it mattered that the director of Malcolm X be a black man. "It's not about color," he replied: "It's about culture." He then went on to describe how a certain group of people know how the smell of a hot iron on their woolly hair makes them think of Sunday mornings and getting ready to go to a certain kind of church service. Martin Scorsese could make a great film out of the story of Malcolm X too. Just not that film.
By reifying race, thinkers like Ibram X. Kendi create a trap in which black Americans only matter as a group that's oppressed. By constantly referring to the disparate effects of this or that policy on "black and brown" people, when what we actually mean is poor people, we reinforce the false idea that black and brown people are all poor. By homing in on black men shot by police even though more white men are shot by police (here, Mason cites the work of Harvard economist Roland Fryer), the media reinforce a fear of being gunned down by police that far, far outstrips its statistical likelihood and could itself lead to dangerous consequences. Mason believes her framework will help people avoid such adverse outcomes without downplaying actual instances or effects of racism.
In an environment like ours, where racial categories are ubiquitous, this constant work of translation will require a toolbox—something Mason calls the togetherness wayfinder. Here, Mason's tone shifts from a prominently philosophical one to a literary one. She leans heavily on writers, from the African-American novelist Toni Morrison to the Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kingston, from the Jim Crow–era black conservative George Schuyler to the 19th century poet Walt Whitman, as she offers ways to break out of false dichotomies, to refuse assigned categories, and to remember how complex and storied our identities really are.
Mason also argues, I think rightly, that many of our struggles with questions of identity, uniqueness, and belonging are grounded in our ability to receive and give love. In a deeply moving section, she relates her experience of being beaten with a broomstick handle by her adoptive mother, as well as being rejected emotionally and called a devil, despite her constant attempts to please through perfect grades and acts of service to her parents. I found it interesting that Mason does not relate whether her adoptive parents are white or black (or, as she would say, "racialized as white or black"). The experience of being abused and rejected by one's parents is, sadly, found in every society, every class, and every ethnicity. But it can undermine one's ability to love oneself in ways that send one searching for something to identify with, to be proud of, and to fight for. Much of that comes out as hatred—from racists, from anti-racists, from anti-anti-racists. It can be conquered by love, but only through an internal healing that every person must pursue for themselves.
I can quibble with much in this book. While Mason is politically independent and draws on a number of heterodox thinkers, she is ultimately a leftist and I a classical liberal; when she calls for fighting hierarchical oppression, she isn't necessarily imagining the same hierarchies that I do. But she is vague enough in those concerns that they have little effect on how I respond to her theory of racelessness. If she's right about the ways the concept of race traps us into multiple iterations of the same boring, and ultimately despairing, conversations, then it's worth working together to "translate" that race talk into something more precise—into insights about economic circumstances, ethnic heritage, or culture—and to jettison the rest. After that, the arguments we might have about economics and public policy can look to what's actually happening rather than what we merely imagine.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "How To End Racism."
