Losing Our Race
with John McWhorter and Greg Thomas
What would it mean to “deracialize”? For African Americans, “race” often serves as a kind of shorthand that indicates the deep and diverse traditions, practices, attitudes, and cultural styles particular to the descendants of black slaves brought to this country in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. While the biological conception of race may well be worth jettisoning, can we do so without discarding our rich inheritance as black people along with it?
John and I both agree that, in the long term, our present conception of racial identity needs to change. The question is whether it will naturally collapse under the weight of an increasingly heterogenous society in which, over time, racial self-identification will make less and less pragmatic sense or whether it must be ushered out by a concerted effort. In this week’s conversation and in his essay “Deracialization Now,” our guest Greg Thomas advocates for the latter. He thinks we must begin the work of deracialization now in a conscious and intentional way. I’m not so sure, though, because I’m not even sure what I would be asked to give up. Can we—I mean black Americans—pass on our cultural inheritance without a conception of race? I’m curious to know what you think.
This post is free and available to the public. To receive early access to TGS episodes, an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.
JOHN MCWHORTER: I have biracial daughters. They are seven and ten. Of late, I'm hearing from gentle, concerned people, both white and black, that I need to pay more attention to developing their racial identity. Because they are half-white and they are half-black, and they're being raised in a kind of mongrelized upper-middle-class white world, where frankly, at their ages, color doesn't matter at all. There are some people who are worried that maybe I need to take the girls to Jack and Jill, something like that. They need to have a black identity.
GLENN LOURY: I know just the person, John. My daughter Lisa is a big Jack and Jill operative. So if you need to get hooked up ...
JOHN MCWHORTER: Really?
GLENN LOURY: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
JOHN MCWHORTER: I'm not remotely close to the idea.
GLENN LOURY: I've been to so many beautillions, I couldn't even begin to count.
JOHN MCWHORTER: It's a wonderful tradition, but everybody is thinking, “Well, they have to realize how people are gonna see them.” And you can imagine what “them” look like. They're these little pecan-colored people. But you know, we have to acknowledge that they're gonna be seen as black American people and discriminated against. And so, what a lot of people would say to you is that we can't think about this too hard because the cultural analysis is nice, but my daughters are somehow misbegotten or they're in danger if they don't identify strongly enough with the culture. Where do we put that?
GREG THOMAS: That's a great example. My daughter happens to be in her mid-20s, and she went through different developmental challenges based on this. But let's just focus on your seven and ten-year-old. In 1973 at Harvard, there was a conference on Alain Locke. Ralph Ellison, Harold Cruse, Albert Murray, and another gentleman who's a historian, I can't remember his name. But he's one of the founders of Black Studies at Harvard. And one of the things that Ellison said on that occasion is, “Look, you white students need to realize you're part black, and you black students need to realize you're part white.” In a very just straight up, down-to-earth way. And that's cultural, because there's all these cross-influences.
But you are talking about literally, biologically, they are mixed. And what I would say is teach them that they're “Omni-American.” Omni-American is an identity—it's the title of Albert Murray's first book—that recognizes our differences but also what we hold in common. So an Omni-American identity says that we can have these ethnic differentiations, these idiomatic variations, these different histories. What you talk about often is the black church, Glenn. I grew up in the black church, too. These are institutional carryovers of our history that certain values are a part of, and all of that stuff. So that's fine.
It's not an either-or proposition. One of the things about jazz—and this is through drama and comedy, where they talk about “yes and”—it ain't either-or. It's “yes and.” You can have both a black American ethnic and cultural identity and a heritage that you identify with and take value from, and you can have a larger American identity as well as a larger global identity, which is more cosmopolitan. Again, when you look through the lens of culture, these are not conflictual things. But getting folks to go from race to culture is not that easy.
GLENN LOURY: No, I don't understand. There's something I'm missing. Then why the deracialization? Let's just say we got a lot of things going on at the same time. Why do I have to “de-” anything? Hold on. Let me finish this. So the great philosopher Leo Strauss, in a lecture at Hillel at the University of Chicago in 1963, asked the question, “Why do we remain Jews?” And he gives an answer. One answer is they won't let us not be Jews. That is, you try to convert, they still dig you out and they burn you in the oven.
But the other answer was to do anything else would be to dishonor our fathers. We're hewing to a tradition. So I want to take your in-a-hurry passion about deracialization, which I don't see the imperative for, and apply it to the Jews. Why should they remain Jews? Why wouldn't the same argument apply to any—and I don't just mean the Jews. Why wouldn't it apply to the Armenians? Why wouldn't it apply to the Irish in Northern Ireland? Why doesn't everybody who's got a group, who's got an identity, who calls themself a thing, get over it? Why is it that the blacks have to be the subject? America's got a problem for sure. Slavery and the Civil War and all of that are a problem. Blacks are gonna solve the problem by forgetting who their fathers were?
GREG THOMAS: I think you're doing the same conflation, Glenn. You're doing the same conflation. I mean, heritage is not the same thing as race. Now look, I understand ...
GLENN LOURY: But answer my question. If it applies to blacks, it applies across the board. But you're busy telling blacks to stop being black.
GREG THOMAS: No ...
GLENN LOURY: I'm sorry. I'm being pejorative. I'm intentionally being provocative. I apologize. I know that's not what you're saying. Everybody, I know it's not what he's saying.
GREG THOMAS: It's cool. I like antagonist to cooperation, man. It's cool.
GLENN LOURY: Yeah, that's what you called it. Antagonistic. [laughs]
GREG THOMAS: So listen, okay. First of all, you're talking about a Jewish heritage. You're talking about a two thousand-year-old [sic] heritage. It was only with the advent of race, racialization, and a racial worldview that Adolph Hitler and the Nazis used the same type of white supremacist ideology but applied it to a German mode and applied it to the Jews, where they became a race.
Race has only been around as a concept for about 400 years or so. Matter of fact, it's less. So when I say deracialization, I'm not saying deculturalization. I'm not saying de-ancestry, de-heritage. I'm not saying any of those things. I'm saying that holding onto this concept of race, the process of racialization, a way of seeing the world through the lens of race has been destructive, remains destructive. And if we to use what they say in phenomenology, what Husserl [says], if you bracket race from those things, at least temporarily, and look at them differently, that you can still maintain all the good stuff that you talk about from the culture and the heritages and the ancestry and not forget without holding onto the racial concept.
[The Journal of Free Black Thought] chose the title “Deracialization Now.” Yes, there's an urgency. But I started by saying we have to scaffold it. We're gonna have to do this in stages. That's the reality. So my question is, what would it take for us to begin scaffolding, to move in the direction of that transracial humanism that I think both of you agree is a direction that we should be moving in?
"Our" race? Please define same. Though we all are descended from sub-Saharan West African territories, there are likely countless cultures (not to mention lost languages) lumped into one category. There is no unbroken cultural tradition, but rather bits and pieces, if that, combined yet unidentifiable no matter whether we use that as a starting point, or invent some Kwanzaa assumption of a common starting point, which, in all practical terms, is embarking on a fool's errand.
This attempt would of course be further complicated by acknowledging other units among the African diaspora, such as Puerto Rican, Haitian, Cuban, Jamaican, Mozambican peoples scattered about, so variegated that finding a common thread beyond skincolor and facial features would be impossible. Not even African religions survived the transplantation and reordering that slavery imposed.
Apart from characteristics imposed by DNA, what about the differing cultural imperatives developed over that timespan? In the USA alone, such traditions separate groups culturally and by manner of tradition and amalgamation with white society. Blacks born and reared in Boston may be visually the same as blacks from Birmingham or New Orleans, and have suffered most of the same societal handicaps, but the similarity pretty much ends there, though we are united in our common struggle for equality, respect and opportunity. What do blacks in East St. Louis have in common with the blacks on Carolinas' outer banks, who comprise the Gullah speech patterns and habits? Time, distance and external influences work against the sort of unity the question seemingly seeks to establish; a noble idea nullified by history as lived.
Is this pouring cold water on a well-meant idea? Or simply facing facts? Blacks in the New World form a charming crazy quilt of cultures and outlooks, but commonality sufficient to gratify any quest such as the one envisioned is bound to founder on the shores of reality. Unless my personal vision is so befuddled by noticing the incongruities and differences of time and place that my perspective is inapplicable to the central question. I leave that to the originators of this "Losing Our Race" idea to decide. While doing this (if it is possible), consider a parallel quest: Taking stock of the myriad cultural and appearance differences visible among whites, from Moscow to London to Paris, to Madrid to Ukraine. Guard against navel gazing. Broaden your scope. Prepare to be awed by what you find. Then adjust the parameters of your proposition and re-state it, or narrow it, or somehow make it an attainable quest.
And avoid assumtions of racial purity of any sort. "Our" DNA is spread far and wide, even among those who do not take us into account when speaking of their ancestry. And vice versa. You may not see the task as undoing a Gordian Knot, but that's what it actually is. Behold the two strains of the Thomas Jefferson family, one claiming to be wholly white, the other to be a blend of white & black, thanks to the bond between Thomas and Sally Hemings. This is seen on many Tuesday evenings when "Finding Your Roots" is telecast, to the surprise of many of the show's guests who learn more about themselves and their family lineages than they arrived prepared to understand.
Which reminds me of a magazine article I read in 1949 in a popular magazine raising an alarm with the headline, "20,000 Negroes Disappear Annually," or words to that effect. Statistics showed they did not die or emigrate, yet were no longer around to count their presence. Explanation: They were blacks who simply stepped across the color line (being white-looking enough to succeed at it), and never looked back. Their black genes, though overwhelmed by white genes, course through the veins of many whites without their knowing it. Lines blur. Fate confounds us, and carried to the ultimate of searching, must be disregarded, or the entire quest founders. Face it: Race is an ephemeral construct invented to explain away evident biological and political truths. Hardly a basis on which to set forth any such study that assumes a rational, scientific starting point. I await your findings. which presumably are the basis for your quest.
Exasperating, isn't it? Nature's laws always outweigh man's rules and many of man's suppositions.
Ted Manuel TedZ.Manuel@gmail.com
My personal life experience has been that race is NOT the diversity that matters, it's education, talents, social mores, and what used to be called "your upbringing"...Were you raised to respect others, those in authority, or to be rude, angry and indiscriminately rebellious? I was mentored, collaborated with, and hired many folks who didn't look like me and their race had nothing to do with the respect and friendship I extended to them. Or for that matter the results we achieved! I can't wait to hear "This is the first XXXXX to do whatever." Where XXXXX isn't race, but a unique background portfolio they are bringing to the task at hand!