Transcend Race to Weaken White Supremacists
Thomas Chatterton Williams authored the book Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White and is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.. He holds that "Racism and race are two separate things," meaning that racism is the father of race, and not the other way around. What that means is that there are no distinct races within the species homo sapiens."
Here is an excerpt of an interview Chatterton-Williams gave, published at Aspen Ideas:
Q: "What does a world in which we have transcended race look like? What promise does it hold for people whose racial identity creates a sense of belonging that would be hard to want to let go of?"
A: [Thomas Chatterton Williams]: "I think a world in which we have transcended race would be one in which we fundamentally learn to interact with other people, and think of ourselves, first and foremost as individuals. We live in extraordinarily mixed societies already. I want to live in a world where we accept that a person’s physical characteristics and ostensible color category cannot adequately tell us how they will think or act, what kind of character they possess, or to which class they belong. Many of us profess to believe this already, but we don’t really behave like we do. And part of not behaving like we do is not putting too much stock in that sense of belonging based on abstract notions of “race.” I would just caution any non-white people who find it difficult to imagine giving up the solidarity and sense of empowerment they derive from membership in their racial group that this is also how white supremacists feel. Now, most well-meaning people can immediately understand the problem with a sense of meaning and pride based in belonging to a “race” when they think about “white” people professing this. We just need to be consistent now. Too often the “anti-racists” on the left start from the same limiting premises—that the racial category is impossible to transcend and therefore real, if not biologically real then so socially constructed that it amounts to the same thing—that the genuine racists hold to be true. In so doing they actually end up reproducing the very same flawed and dehumanizing ideas they wish to counteract."
I have categorized this article under the category of ""Race" and Racism" a term I use in scare quotes because I
don't believe in "race" even though (like Chatterton-Williams) I acknowledge the existence of racism, which is caused by the false belief in "race." I have written several articles on this topic (e.g., here). Most recently, I have been impressed with Thomas Chatterton Williams, Kmele Foster and Sheena Williams, author of the brand new book, Theory of Racelessness: A Case for Antirace(ism).
