Getting rid of race

I am a true academic geek (wait, isn't that just being repetitive? Aren't all academics GEEKS, otherwise how did we end up studying a narrow subject for so long and so intensely) because I had my final meeting of the Paul Gilroy reading group on Tuesday, and I was scrambling to finish the book, Postcolonial Melancholia, before the meeting not because I feared letting down my group members (it's the end of semester and most people were only able to get through the intro and to skim one of the chapters) but because I couldn't put it down. That's right--this dense piece of cultural criticism had me up late and up early because I thought it was a page turner.


And why? Because I was intrigued by Gilroy's central idea--the one that animates his entire work and, I would argue, that informs his other works as well:

Lets get rid of the category of race altogether and focus on anti-racism.

If you are saying, "Huh?" then let me try to break it down. It's sort've like a chicken or egg thing--which came first, race or racism? Gilroy says

"If the historical anomaly represented by archaic racial division does, contrary to expectations, remain legally or morally open, if it is still somewhere 'on hold' and therefore a muted part of the history of our present, the discomforting events to which these discussions refer are most likely to be recovered or remembered in the name of the same racial, ethnic, and national absolutes and particularities that I intend to call into question. 'Race' would then become an eternal caue of racism rather than what it is for me--its complex, unstable product" [emphasis mine] (14).

It's not race that causes racism--it's race that is a byproduct, an after-effect, of racism. We (especially Americans) are immersed, obsessed, disgusted by, proud of, distraught over race because we are living with the legacy of racism--because racism, the colonial, imperial, institutional forms of racism have undergirded the systems of power and philosophy that comprise our lives.

Although Gilroy's audience is mainly other academics (or any non-academics willing to slog through the jargon), and although he does not give concrete, practical examples about HOW we are to eliminate the category of race and to, instead, insist on a category of anti-racism, his work provokes thought and debate on this subject, and highlights what is for many counter-intuitive: race, while having a material effect, is nonethless a total fabrication--a social construct invented to dehumanize one group of people for the benefit of another group.

And it makes me giddy to think what we could do if we could shift the conversation from race to racism--or more specifically, if we could start to recognize the ways in which an anti-racist paradigm and philosophy would really benefit us ALL because we are ALL impacted/invested in a racist ideology that has constrained us into believing in race--into believing that we need to chop people up into categories and to hang values and judgments on people based on race.

Now, let me be clear, I recognize that we have lived with race for a long time and we will have this category around for quite a while. And I'm not about to stop teaching Asian American literature in favor of "American" literature or to stop talking about race and America and mixed-race America just because I agree with Gilroy's call to shift our focus.

But I do think that trying to have conversations about the history of race and about what an anti-racist praxis would look like is really key because racism is the key--it's the ideology that permeates so much of our lives and that is so pernicious that we take it for granted and we choose not to see the ways in which it has infected the ways we live our lives, and I'm not just talking about obvious stereotypes, I'm talking about the things you never think twice about like the mere fact that the land I own was cultivated as a result of the transatlantic slave trade and taken as a result of American Indian displacement. Sure, some people think of this all the time, but the majority of us never truly realize that these two signal events as the cornerstone of America's founding is also the reason (free and cheap labor and land that was taken) we were able to become a rich country and a powerful first-world nation and that there were other people--those whose skin tones and practices literally looked different from Europeans and were rendered inhuman by European thought that allowed this to happen. And we are living with the aftermath of this history. And if you think that this is something that happened in the past and doesn't impact our current lives, then you need to look at Jena 6 and the noose incidents and even the last post I wrote (which is nothing compared to these other two events) to understand that people still judge and discriminate based on race.

So what do we do? What does an anti-racist praxis look like? Well, to start with, it is about cross-ethnic/racial coalitions as well as paying attention to class/sexuality/gender intersections. It's like I wrote in a previous post--we need white allies to talk about racism and preach anti-racism, and to have straight folks stand up for queer rights and to have those of us in the middle-class advocate for working class and poverty stricken people--and not just to do this as a "cause" but to work WITH people who comprise these communities.