Deracializing People Doesn’t Erase Black American Culture. It Honors It.
My article “Why Deracializing People Is Essential To Combating Racism” created quite a stir. In the spirit of a vigorous exchange of ideas, I’ve summarized readers’ core objections and responded to each in turn.
This article addresses four objections. I’ll respond to the rest in a subsequent piece. In some cases, my words below extend and elaborate upon responses I made on social media or in comments to the original piece. For a full treatment of this topic, get my free e-book How To Be An Anti-race Antiracist. Even if you’ve read the book, I think you’ll enjoy these provocative exchanges.
1. This erases Black American culture
L.T. writes,
I’m going to have to disagree with yet another “white “ guy who sounds like he is arguing for the erasure of our culture as an answer to racism. (Excuse me if that’s not what you’re saying but that’s what it sounds like when this argument gets made.) Black is a culture. African American is a culture. I don’t have a problem saying the caste system needs to be erased but why do we have to be the ones who pay for that when being “white” isn’t a culture at all, and was invented for the sole purpose of creating the caste system. European Americans need to give up “whiteness”. Racism exists because “whiteness” exists. Not because Black people do!
L.T., thanks for engaging with me. I understand your skepticism in light of the many acts of erasure that we have both encountered elsewhere. I also agree with you that there is no “white” culture. White nationalists who want to preserve it are deluded. Progressives who call it out to emphasize the exclusion of Black Americans are failing to distinguish culture from politics and economics. In fact, as Nell Irvin Painter writes in The History of White People, some generations of Americans believed in multiple white races.
Yet, with regard to your primary charge, I think you’ve got the wrong guy. I wonder if you read my article before making your comment. If you did, you would notice that I honor and appreciate Black American culture: “You can let go of the disaster of Race as Classification while staying true to the dignity of culture.”
Biological race creates blinders that prevent many so-called white people from seeing Black American culture. If you think a group of people are born to be a certain way (one that is perhaps inferior to you), how can you appreciate the culture they have created and renew with each generation? It’s long past time for all of us to recognize the enormous positive influence that Black American culture has had on American culture. In fact, if I were to erase it, I would be erasing part of myself. That is not something I am willing to do. Racialized identity — no thank you. A beautiful and complex culture — yes, please.
2. Good idea, but too late. “Black” means culture
The core idea here: when it comes to the meaning of “Black” or “black,” the horse has left the barn.
B.G. writes,
It is possible this could have worked once. But now, “Black” is an ethnic group, a people with their own culture, language, customs, and cultural history. As Amiri Baraka wrote “Black is a country.” Race is not real as you note. Race is a social construct. There is biologically only one race. But the racial caste system exists and is not close to being taken apart. But what that caste system has made is a people. African Americans. Black people (capital “B.”). That is why Black is capitalized. It is the same as Irish or Italian or Polish.
B.G, thanks so much for taking the time to read this and provide a thoughtful response. I agree with everything you say here about the existing caste system — Isabel Wilkerson hit the nail on the head about that in her book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. I also see an ethnic group that has its own music, food, humor, art, dialect, and so on. In the article, I point out that differentiating false biological race from real culture/ethnicity is a way to appreciate and honor culture.
My dear friend and colleague, Greg Thomas, has written persuasively about what he calls Black American culture and what he calls the blues idiom wisdom. I’ve learned from him and authors like Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison to see the enormous contribution of Black American culture to American culture. I’ve learned to say “Black American” rather than “American” because there is no universal “Black” culture. The cultures in the Caribbean and various African nations are very different from Black American culture. So, it’s Black and American. Interestingly, Greg had a riveting debate with the late Greg Tate some years ago in which Greg argued on behalf of Ralph Ellison and Tate on behalf of Amira Baraka. Quite a (respectful) sparring match. A video recording of it is on the web…
What do you think of Greg’s idea of embracing everything you’ve written but using the term Black American instead of Black? Is there a downside to that? (Whether or not acknowledging this rich culture makes the deracialization project a promising or hopeless enterprise is a slightly different question).
B.G. responds:
Black American v. Black is a question of semantics. “Black” most people don’t know was a choice by African Americans politically, though the racial caste system sought to impose that status upon them for centuries by calling themselves “white.” That is why it is “Black” as opposed to ‘black.” The latter is the racial connotation. The only reason “Black” is not still more widely used is because Jesse Jackson made his famous “African American” statement. Black and African American and Black American are the same. But the latter two are just a more generous and unifying way of expressing the truth of who we are in this country.
I’m with you on why “Black” instead of “black” — at least for the written word. In the past year or two, many major publications have started capitalizing the B. Many white-identified people have switched to this, too, though I doubt most know the history you allude to. To generalize, whereas many black-identified people embrace “Black” with pride and as a way of honoring their parents and teaching their kids how to get by in the world, white-identified liberals and progressives more often interpret this to refer to a “race” of people who have been discriminated against and harmed. The acknowledgment of cultural richness is often missing.
As a result, many white-identified people get confused between the true cultural connotation of “Black” and the false racial meaning. I think this confusion is less likely to happen with “Black American.” Whereas “Black” can bring to mind a universal “black” race, adding the word “American” indicates we’re talking about nationality and culture. This is especially important when speaking, because “Black” and “black” sounds the same. A second benefit of “Black American” is that it acknowledges what history textbooks and social narratives have so long denied: Black Americans are as American as anyone else and have contributed to American culture as much as any other group.
Who has a right to name people?
Let me now address a concern that neither L.T. nor B.G. mention yet is “in the air,” as they say. Some Americans identified as black — or progressives of any racialized identity — might say, “What gives you, a white-identified guy, the right to name me?”
Here’s my take: if you and I are in direct conversation, I’ll call you whatever you’d like to be called. This article — and the e-book it draws from — isn’t about you in particular. It’s about 47 million Americans. Some people want to be called “black” or “Black.” Others prefer “African American.” Still others prefer “person of color,” or “Black American.” In other words, no single term will please everyone. So, when speaking about an entire group rather than one person, I have a choice. Given this reality, I’m going to choose the term that best reflects the world I am committed to creating. For now, that term is Black American.
3. Speaking of “Black American culture” racializes people
This objection is almost precisely the opposite of the first two. Dr. Mansa Keita (a Twitter pseudonym) writes
Racializing the very very nebulous concept of culture is in my view worse than racializing people socially. On what basis is a person from Chicago culturally the same as one from Florida…outside “black”? That’s exactly what “Black American culture” does. These are simply Americans, and based on how they look and have been racialized…The idea that black folks in Boston share culture with those in New York is…typical.
I don’t assume that everyone with darker skin who is identified as black shares the same cultural heritage and practices. (One sentence in the essay implies this; I have since revised it). Doing this would indeed be racializing. It would ignore the very different cultures of Jamaican Americans, recent immigrants from Sudan, or many dark-skinned people raised in white-identified families. However, there is a distinct Black American culture shared by people in Chicago and Florida. Not all black-identified people in these places share this culture (and there are variations of it), but vast numbers do.
I emphasize this for three reasons. First, to show that we can rid ourselves of biological race yet still honor culture. Second, to reinforce the enormous contributions of Black American culture to American culture. By the way, if it seems like I repeat this point every other paragraph, that’s because (a) it’s true and (b) it gets too little attention across the political spectrum. Finally, it allows us to more fully appreciate the power and flexibility of culture. Once culture is something we learn rather than something we are born with, it opens up enormous possibilities. No music, art, language, movement, or humor is the sole and exclusive property of any particular group. For example, when I’m feeling down—or up, or in between — I like to cue up Earth Wind & Fire. The music inspires me and influences who I am and what I contribute to the world.
4. Discussing racial inequality requires racializing people
More from Dr. Mansa Keita:
If you can talk about racial inequality, you must be able to say there are racial groups socially. You must conclude that some people belong to a given group or not. That is racialization. So if you say “I don’t recognize you as black, regardless of what anyone says”, that’s fine, but society does. It becomes a refusal to recognize rather than an affective action.
Tracking discrimination and inequality is precisely why every four years, the White House’s Office of Management & Budget (OMB) instructs the Census Bureau to collect data on “race.” Without such data, you can’t track disparities between different groups. So, we are aligned on this.
Yet we don’t need the word “race” to do this. A more accurate term is “racialized identity.” When an employer fails to hire someone for discriminatory reasons, it’s not because of who they are. It’s because of how the employer perceives them. Not their “race,” but their racialized identity. The same could be said of why police officers pull over and arrest people with darker skin at alarmingly high rates. Blaming these actions on the target’s “race” is what Karen and Barbara Fields call Racecraft. It’s inaccurate, and it points the finger at the wrong person.
This is why I’ve learned to shift from calling people “white” or “black” to calling them “so-called white” or “black-identified.” This highlights the truth of racialization rather than the falsehood of biological race.
Getting back to the U.S. Census and other official documents, we could ask people how others identify them — and then track discrimination, income, etc. using these categories. Carlo Hoyt, Jr. presents this novel idea in The Arc of a Bad Idea: Understanding And Transcending Race. If OMB were to instruct the Census Bureau to do this, the impact would be momentous. As I describe in How To Be An Anti-race Antiracist, this would have two beneficial outcomes. First, it would allow us to free official documents and the data they produce of racial essentialism. Second, it would produce better data. As Hoyt describes, if you want to track discrimination based on how people are seen by other people, wouldn’t it be smart to ask them how other people see them?
