There Are Many Aspects To The Lie Of Race

As of this writing, I’ve had well over 4000 conversations online. Most of them about “race.” Yet I’m painfully aware that race, as most people think of it, doesn’t exist.

In my article, The Progressive Rebranding Of Racism, I pointed out that the concept of “race” is a lie that we’d all be better off abandoning and J had questions about what that would look like in practice. Specifically about whether defining himself by the “black” parts of his family tree could be a way of…abandoning the idea that the “black” parts of his family tree define him.

Yeah, I didn’t get it either.

J and I went back and forth for weeks, so I’m only sharing a part of our conversation here. We begin as I repeat for the umpteenth time that upholding traditions or learning about your ancestry is not the same thing as defining yourself by the colour of your skin…

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Steve QJ:

“So, because not all of my ancestors were enslaved, and neither was I, there's no point in honoring those who were?”

Please will you stop misrepresenting what I'm saying. Conversations where I'm constantly repeating myself because the person I'm talking to is reacting to what they're afraid I'm saying instead of what I am saying are exhausting.

For the final time, I'm not saying that there's "no point" in honouring tradition. Any tradition. Buddhism, maypole dancing, facial scarification, go for it. Live your best life. I'm not sure that learning about tradition honours slaves, and I suspect that you personally aren't going to dig up anything that historians haven't already found and preserved, but again, there's no problem with anybody doing this.

However, you framed your interest in pre-slavery traditions specifically as something that was "taken away from you." You talked about "living by those traditions." You took issue with a line in my article that says that "race" (as in, the idea that we are divided as human beings by the colour of our skin) is a lie that we should abandon.

This then, is no longer simply about curiosity or learning. It's reaching back to a specific part of history, and claiming the pain of it as your own. And doing so on the basis of some supposed innate connection to that pain. You suggested, counterintuitively, that this might be a means of "abandoning the lie of race."

There is a difference between studying something and defining yourself by it. Your framing heavily suggests the latter. That's my only issue. And yes, I would say exactly the same thing about Jewish people who devoted themselves to the Holocaust as opposed to historians who try to preserve the facts of what happened. In fact, I've had some interesting conversations on that very topic.

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J:

Please, for the final time, I ask that you answer my question: in your mind, does what I do — learning all I can about who my enslaved ancestors were before they became slaves, and passing on that knowledge — qualify as a way of rejecting the lie of race?

[editor’s note: for the sake of brevity, I’ve cut out some comments here that get repeated later]

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Steve QJ:

No. Clear enough? I thought we'd established this in the first few replies. It's not necessarily affirming that lie either (though as I've said, I think tying yourself to your enslaved ancestors over any of your other ancestors leans in that direction).

But no, clearly learning as much as you can about your enslaved ancestors doesn't qualify as rejecting anything. And passing it on as if it's some kind of inheritance even less so.

I'm not trying to tell you how to honour anybody. As I've said already, to each their own. But you asked for my opinion, remember? Don't be mad because I gave it to you.

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J:

Thank you. And, no, I'm not mad. Still appreciate you Steve. It's probably my own fault for going on so many tangents, but this was definitely not established.

Now I can finally tell you why I disagree, whether or not you care to know:

There are many aspects to the lie of race. It's not just that folks get split into "us" vs "them." They get split into "Superior" vs "Inferior" -- and still today "Black" is devalued.

You defy racism when you take time to learn and share about the "Black" parts of you that are still devalued -- because in learning and sharing about them, you show that they're important. And there's always more to learn in this area -- so you can stay in defiance for as long as "Black" continues to be devalued.

I can already hear you saying: "but you're still buying into the idea of race because there's no real such thing as Black."

I get that -- but the people and cultures that get called "Black" are absolutely still real. And they're worthy of attention precisely so we can get at exactly what's beneath the label -- instead of saying "they're just people", and assuming there's nothing unique about them whatsoever, which is another way of ignoring them.

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Steve QJ:

“I can already hear you saying: ‘but you're still buying into the idea of race because there's no real such thing as Black.’”

😅 No, I'm saying you're still buying into the idea that black people are devalued.

Devalued according to whom?! Who gets to define our value? Why do you care about their opinion? Whose approval do you need before you can say that black people are no longer devalued? And how does focusing on a time when black people were legally devalued help that?

The people and cultures that "get called black" never called themselves black. As you say, they called themselves Yoruba and Igbo and Chamba and so on. You're buying into framing that was invented to justify slavery and then complaining that that framing isn't favourable. Why not just reject the framing altogether and be you? An individual, whose history is the history of the whole human race.

If you want to learn about your Bakongo ancestry, go ahead! Who would dare suggest that you shouldn't? Certainly not me. But that's not who you are. It's not authentic to "live by those traditions" simply because you have that genealogy somewhere in your family tree. Any more than it would be authentic for you to live (or define yourself) by the traditions of the slave owners you said lay elsewhere within it.

I think our disagreement is based on the fact that I fundamentally don't accept there's anything unique about the people beneath any label. You and I are not the same because we're "black." And you and I are not fundamentally different because we have different degrees of "black" ancestry. Culture is interesting, but people are people. With all of the attendant flaws and virtues. This simple fact is precisely what makes all bigotry so wrong and stupid and evil.

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J:

“No, I'm saying you're still buying into the idea that black people are devalued.”

I think we've arrived at the heart of the matter.

Before we go any further, I need clarification: in your mind, how long has it been since blacks stopped being a genuinely oppressed group, however you're defining the term "oppressed"?

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Steve QJ:

“how long has it been since blacks stopped being a genuinely oppressed group”

We might just slip into semantics here, but by my definition, black people (I loathe the term “blacks”) aren’t an oppressed group. Describing them as such would require some kind of legal component that affects all black people which hasn’t been the case for 60 years in America. I mean, is Oprah oppressed? Is Barack Obama oppressed? Is Jay Z oppressed? Are the millions of other successful, well educated, happy African Americans oppressed?

Black people experience varying degrees of prejudice in white-majority societies as do minorities of various types in almost all societies. I believe everything possible should be done to reduce and hopefully completely eliminate this. But calling oneself oppressed today, when our lives are better than 90% of the world, is narcissistic at best.

Now, of course, black people in America and South Africa are unique in that there was legally enforced discrimination against them, the after-effects of which certainly haven’t been corrected for all of them. I take this issue extremely seriously. But it's a separate issue to the question of black people as a whole being “devalued”.

The "value" of black people, like the value of all things, is subjective. Bitcoin, gold, a family heirloom, they have no intrinsic, fixed value. It's in the eye of the beholder. So If you allow the beholder to be some racist archetype that you probably very rarely actually encounter, you might feel that you're devalued. But that's up to you. It's incredibly important to absorb this idea.

Black people are thriving at every level of society. Business, fashion, culture, politics, science you name it. Again, I want that to continue and to grow and I believe it will. The fact that some people are uncomfortable with that, as long as they can’t stop it (which they can’t), doesn’t affect my perception of black people's value in the least. I’m not in the habit of taking my cues from racists.

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J:

“black people (I loathe the term “blacks”) aren’t an oppressed group. Describing them as such would require some kind of legal component that affects all black people which hasn’t been the case for 60 years in America. I mean, is Oprah oppressed?”

It seems that black people didn’t meet your criteria for an oppressed group even during slavery — an institution never formally invoked into law, and which never affected all black people at any given time.

We’ve always had black faces in high places — going back to before Benjamin Banneker, one of thousands of “happy” African-Americans born free in the 1700’s.

I think you and I could have had this exact same conversation a hundred years ago or more, never mind sixty, since for you the existence of any successful black folks seems to mean there is no racial struggle to concern ourselves with.

Are you sure you didn’t leave anything out in your definition of “oppressed”? Need to make sure we’re still on the same page before going any further.

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Steve QJ:

“It seems that black people didn’t meet your criteria for an oppressed group even during slavery”

Yeah, as I feared, this is semantics. Look J, we're going to have to establish a certain degree of good faith here. If I'm constantly having to choose every word so there's no possibility of you twisting it to mean something else, this conversation, which is already a tangent to the main point, simply isn't worth participating in for me.

I'm not a racism denailist (obviously). I'm not arguing that black people as a demographic weren't oppressed during slavery and segregation (obviously). I'm not saying that black people don't still face racism to varying degrees today (obviously).

If these aren't obvious to you, from having spoken to me thus far and read my writing, I'm honestly not interested in doing the work required to convince you.

Describing black people, as a whole, as an oppressed group, gives an inaccurate picture of the conditions that black people, as a whole, face today. It's not about black faces in high places, it's that there were formal, legal barriers to success for black people that don't exist today. It's about the fact that it's fair to say today that a black person can become anything they want to become.

This was not fair to say 60 years ago.

Anyway, this entire question feels like a purity test and I'm not trying to prove myself to you. If you think I don't understand that racism impacts black people, even though I am a black person, go for it. As I said, I don't even see what this has to do with the topic we were discussing.

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I’ve pointed out before that the idea of “race” persists because it feels right.

The largest, most visible organ on person A looks similar to the largest, most visible organ on person B, so obviously it’s sensible to lump them into a single category. I mean, their skin is a similar shade! How could they not be the same genetically and temperamentally and culturally?

But “race” also persists because many people, tragically more of them black than white, define themselves by their skin colour’s similarity to others in the past. And most, like J, are extremely selective about this process (I presume J doesn’t feel it’s important to “uphold the traditions” of his white, slave-owning ancestors).

One of the many problems with the reparations conversation (aside from transracial people) is the difficulty in deciding who qualifies. How direct does your slavery lineage need to be? What if your ancestors were both oppressors and oppressed? Does anybody have a claim to the pain of their great-great-grandparents?

Black people in America suffered terrible oppression in the not-too-distant past. I don’t think any sane person denies this. And the legacy of that oppression still affects some of those black people today. Also demonstrably true. Wouldn’t it be great if the focus was on helping those people rather than whether somebody else, simply because they had similar coloured skin, was entitled to a percentage?