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But what does it say about us that the most common means we have to describe ourselves rely on categories that do not and cannot manifest on human flesh?
how indeed can you learn to look at yourself in the mirror and actually see what’s there without the background noise of prejudice and myth?
We are at the same time obsessed with “race” and wholly confounded by it.
In real life, too, the lived experience of “whiteness” is often construed as the absence of racial identity. It is the neutral starting point from which all else constitutes a deviation.
To speak about a thing clearly you must first be able to name it.
To speak about yourself, you must first be able to assemble a sense of origin.
will no longer enter into the all-American skin game that demands you select a box and define yourself by it. And
such persistent and flattening thinking that has led to so much human suffering, precluded and squandered so much human potential.
Their coddled upbringings left them unprepared for the type of misdirection girls like Stacey were conditioned to have to guard against
“Never to bring home a girl darker than you.” It’s a sentiment that is often but not always unspoken, rooted in dismal plantation logic, which, tragically, many blacks (and whites) would still recognize today even as it might appall them.
hate that points backward toward the self.
identities are complex and even paradoxical things.
and the difference was as essential if not more so than the similarity.
us.
But is this experirnce for whites? Is it only black and broown people who are constantly aware of this fungible aspect of identity? Maybe only in European countries …
diminishing value of whiteness as a racial category
as well as further evidence of the possibility that a total stranger who checks none of the same identity boxes you
do can nonetheless articulate your most ineffable aspirations and inner states more clearly than even your closest kin.
And while I now knew that it was impossible to marry or erect a future with “blackness” or “whiteness” per se, that knowledge did not entirely put me at ease. How could it? Overcoming such deep-seated fears is never strictly rational.
It is his consistency that I most admire here—his willingness to hold two bitterly conflicting ideas in his head at once: race is not real; race has harmed me severely—regardless of the particular circumstances, and not to allow his own biography or history to dictate his children’s.
even though Pappy believes America is irredeemably racist, he refuses to be.
black American life, while certainly conditioned by local historical circumstance—and thus distinct from other strands of the African diaspora—was not beholden to it. It was a racial irony or ambivalence that would take me several more years to understand clearly.
A person can never be reduced to a constellation of ideas or an intellectual stance, and I realize now that I had failed to extend to these men the same ambiguity in motive and taste I’ve grown accustomed to allowing for myself.
to combat a racist society is simply to bow out of its perverse customs and mores, rejecting its false boundaries even as they work tirelessly to claim you?
The problem of racial difference in America—and in modern life more broadly—is always presented as an economic, political, biological, or cultural problem. But I want to say that it’s at least as much a philosophical and imaginative disaster. We still struggle, in the twenty-first century, even to conceive of genuine and binding cross-racial ties.
but the parents inhabit a country that does not yet have civil rights, and they are posed in front of their new tail-finned Chevrolet with an unperturbed air that reminds me of something James Baldwin once observed about how racism dehumanizes us all but may in fact dehumanize the racist more severely.
an endless abyss of inhumanity from which names and dates seldom emerge.
But this is precisely the kind of bias it is in my power to, and that I must, reject—while being mindful not to fall into the trap of resentment—for it is with such minor and arbitrary preferences that entire worldviews are sustained.
Most white people don’t or cannot think very seriously and with adequate nuance and stamina about black people at all. And they lack the imagination or will to try.
Such de facto segregation and mutual alienation damages all of us, black and white alike—as James Baldwin and Martin
Luther King and many others have eloquently pointed out, it denies the former humanity while rendering the latter inhuman with indifference—but it hurts black people more, no matter how much I want Baldwin’s...
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it is true that it has come at a price—namely the terrible realization that so many people are unreachable and won’t allow themselves to be
reached
the privilege to be oblivious.
Adrian Piper in the spring of 2018 that I came to fully appreciate this tragic conundrum of racial incommunicability. In her 1992 essay “Passing for White, Passing for Black”
In this view, the conditions at the core of the country’s founding don’t just reverberate through the ages—they determine the present. No matter what we might hope, that original sin—white supremacy—explains everything, an all-American sonderweg.
The writer and linguist John McWhorter (who happens to be black)
‘My answer is that we not lose sight of the goal of racially transcendent humanism being the American bedrock. It’s the abandonment of this goal that I’m objecting to.’”
thinking people of goodwill across the political spectrum are going to have to find a new vocabulary to move beyond abstract racial categorization and reflexive tribalism.
“Treating race as a social fact amounts to nothing more than acknowledging that we were mistaken to think of it as a biological fact and then insisting that we ought to keep making the mistake,” the literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels incisively points out in his book The Trouble with Diversity.
Yet its very framing—the notion that some lives are essentially black while others are white—is both politically true in a specific sense and, in a broader way, philosophically inadequate.
But I am convinced that we will never be able to outwit such complicated and tenacious
pathologies with the stale and deficient mental habits that produced them in the first place.
A radical rethinking of “how racial differences are seen, how they appear to us and prompt specific identities,” to quote Paul Gilroy again, is what is needed today.
If we are ever to progress, we must first slough off these old skins we’ve been forced to don.
Racism rooted in centuries of skin bias is persistent and feels more urgent than just about anything else when you bear the brunt of it.
We can simultaneously resist bigotry and imagine a society that has outgrown the identities it preys on.
But I am talking about men and women living in twenty-first century Western democracies being free enough to decide not to passively—or even just uncritically—reproduce their received racial designations.
I have to accept a degree of agency in life because I know that I can’t consistently put into practice the belief that I do not choose.
2012 titled Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, by Barbara and Karen Fields
the Fields sisters argue that racism creates race,
