A Case For Racelessness
On July 6th, 2016, the internet was shaken by the news of two unarmed black men being killed by police officers - Alton Sterling, who was shot by Louisiana police in Baton Rouge while being restrained on the ground, and Philando Castile, who was shot by police in St. Paul, Minnesota after being pulled over for a broken rear light. Both killings were filmed and published on the internet before being removed or heavily edited due to their graphic nature. This day is especially significant to me because it was also the day I proposed to my now-wife. We were unaware of the news, caught up in the excitement of our engagement. The next day, as I watched the news, read my friends' reactions on social media, and held phone conferences with church leaders, I realized our engagement coincided with a pivotal moment in US history. Personally, I struggled with feeling excited about my engagement when the world was in an uproar over these tragedies. My future wife is white, which made me wonder if this was some kind of sign of what lay ahead for us as a couple. As I sat alone in a back room of the beach house her family rented, I came to a growing realization that this moment, at the very least, highlighted the racialization of our country and my need to acknowledge that race, and my interracial marriage, would matter to the world.
Until then, I was aware of our country's troubled racial history. In elementary school in Brooklyn, NY, we learned black history as a priority, with general American history as its backdrop. I was taught that the world saw me as a second-class citizen and that education and hard work would help me overcome a system stacked against people who looked like me. However, I was never taught any viable solutions to the problem of racism. In fact, I was explicitly taught that there was no solution. At some point, I subconsciously accepted the idea that the only way to exist in this world was to live charitably with those who understood the problem and were committed to not enabling it in their own contexts and communities. Over time, I learned that the problem was more nuanced than this solution. This became clear when the world still seemed to work differently for my white loved ones. It became apparent that the problem was not just racist ideology, but the racialization of human beings. Just like water is necessary to make something wet, assigning races to humanity is necessary for racism. This realization led me down a path of deep interpersonal inspection and personal introspection.
The church I was serving at the time was a healthy, diverse community committed to being on the right side of racism. We read books, attended conferences, and invited speakers to help us achieve true racial integration. However, the more we tried, the more difficult it seemed to eliminate the problem. What were we missing? My pastor and I would often get frustrated as we discussed our struggles. This frustration came from knowing we were dancing around a problem we couldn't quite pinpoint. Toward the end of my time at the church, I started a doctoral program in pursuit of a Doctor of Ministry. I knew my project would focus on finding a practical solution to the issue of diversity in the local church. I decided to tackle intersectionality, a framework for understanding how social and political identities overlap and intersect to create unique modes of discrimination or privilege. My goal was to tease out the complexities of intersectionality until a solution emerged. Unfortunately, the more I researched, the more complex the issue seemed, and the further away the solution appeared. I grew more discouraged as I recognized how intertwined race, social standing, wealth, education, and economics were. Specifically, I was discouraged by how often low social and economic standing, poor education, and criminality were associated with being black. Around this time, my pastor introduced me to The Theory of Racelessness, the work of a woman he had heard of. This led me to discover Dr. Sheena Mason, whose recently published dissertation I relied heavily on as I sought to overcome my writing block. I didn't anticipate that her work would change my perspective on race and ultimately derail my research, leading me to abandon it in favor of a more focused study on Biblical Hospitality.
In her dissertation, Dr. Mason argues that the problem with racism is the construct of race itself. She acknowledges the work of Ibrahm X. Kendi, author of "How To Be An Anti-racist," and commends his commitment to undoing racism. However, she arrives at a different conclusion on how to achieve this. While Kendi sees benefit in embracing race during the fight against racism, Dr. Mason argues that it's impossible to eliminate a problem by embracing its root cause. In the case of racism, race is its root cause, as it was created to subjugate one race to another. The more I read her work, the more I understood why my pastor and I had become frustrated and why I couldn't untangle race from other negative social markers. Dr. Mason contends that race was created to assign negative markers to certain groups of people. By embracing race, we will inevitably embody the markers it was meant to impart. This was revolutionary for me, and I imagine it will be for readers as well. Therefore, I will spread my explanation of this line of thinking over several blog posts. My goal is to help readers develop a framework for dismantling racism in their social contexts, primarily the local church, and moving towards truly healthy and diverse communities.
