Against Race

Via David Brooks' Sidney Awards, I discovered a powerful article arguing something I have long believed: that the only way to eliminate racism is to eliminate race. Subrena E. Smith and David Livingstone Smith are a mixed race couple, both professors, both committed to equality but high dubious of the way (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) we are trying to fight it. In The Trouble With Race and Its Many Shades of Deceit they write:

We want to make it clear that we fully endorse the aims of DEI programs. But we object to how they are carried out, for, as noble as these aims are, there is a fatal contradiction at the heart of much of what goes on in them, a contradiction that threatens to undermine the entire enterprise. Although the purpose of anti-racist training is to vanquish racism, most of these initiatives are simultaneously committed to upholding and celebrating race. One can see this quite clearly in the work of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, well-known voices in the anti-racist movement. Both of them presume that we can oppose racism while leaving the concept of race intact.

But in the real world, can we have race without racism coming along for the ride? Trying to extinguish racism while shoring up race is like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. It can only make matters worse. To get rid of racism we have to get rid of race.

As I never get tired of pointing out, race has no biological reality; people from east and west Africa are more different from each other than Chinese are from Welsh. Race is a social construct, and it is not a neutral one:

Race was fashioned for nothing that was good. History has shown us how groups of people “racialize” other groups of people to justify their exploitation, oppression and annihilation. . . . Race is and has always been an ideological weapon. It was shaped and honed to give advantage to one group of people by oppressing others. It has birthed genocide and chattel slavery, underpinned lynching and mass incarceration, and has been used to excuse exploitation, degradation and poverty. This sordid history shows how racism has not been added to the fabric of race, but rather is woven into it.

Here the Smiths deal with what I regard as the only serious objection to eliminating race, at the theoretical level:

A further objection against abandoning racial identities is that they can be politically useful for galvanizing solidarity among oppressed people. For example, when Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael) proclaimed “Black power!” he united African Americans under the banner of racial pride. Nevertheless, we have observed the ways that racial solidarity extracts a price. An appeal to race may unite people within a group, but it also segregates them from others. And however emotionally compelling and politically expedient, racial solidarity is built upon a lie, since there are no races.

At the practical level, of course, there is a more immediate objection, which is that most people believe in race and think in racial terms, and that is not going to change any time soon. So for the people tasked with promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, maybe race is something they do have to consider. But any such short-term measures should always be weighed against the long-term harm of promoting racial thinking, because that is the real enemy of a just human future.