Can We End Racism by Ending the Idea of Race Itself?
The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism, by Sheena Michele Mason, Pitchstone Publishing, 256 pages, $17.95
Is race real? In The Raceless Antiracist, a follow-up to her 2022 book Theory of Racelessness, Sheena Michele Mason argues not only that it isn’t, but that trying to stop racism while keeping the concept of race is like fighting “a flood by pouring water on it.”
Mason, a literature professor at SUNY Oneonta, suggests that these futile approaches fall into two categories: “anti-racist resistance” and “color-blindness.” While the first reifies race by making it the key to understanding most social phenomena, the second reifies it by treating it as a real thing that ought to be ignored, thus downplaying the reality of the racism that relies on it.
The Raceless Antiracist asks us to do something very uncomfortable: to adopt a new mental model, to think in a completely different set of categories. It doesn’t deserve a snap judgment. It’s a book for chewing on and wrestling with. It may puzzle or even disturb you.
Mason notes that our ancestors migrated at levels that most people grossly underestimate, leading to far more genetic mixing than people typically assume. She points out that our current understanding of DNA undermines a lot of assumptions that arose from observing external traits, such as skin color, nose shape, and eye shape, since such traits can arise from the same genetic allele but be inherited from entirely different people. Furthermore, thanks to the random genetic recombination that happens with every new generation, 75 percent of your genetic makeup is attributable to only 5 percent of your ancestors. A 23andMe test will tell you about only 8 percent of your ancestors, because they’re the only ones left represented in your DNA today. In fact, it’s possible that two dark South Africans can be more genetically divergent from one another than one of them is from a white Swede.
Even if race is a biological fiction—and I think Mason makes a strong case that it is—it could be real in the sense
Article from Reason.com
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