We Want to Unmake Race
A proposal for radical change
Centuries ago, a terrible idea was born, an idea that ravaged the world, that justified and fed the flames of war and genocide, torture, brutal oppression and the institutionalization of slavery—among other atrocities. This terrible invention was the concept of race. Its blood-drenched history is plain for anyone to see. Because of the invention of race, untold millions died in the European and Arab colonization of Africa (as many as ten million in the Congo alone). In the transatlantic slave trade, over two million humans perished even before more than twelve million reached their prison bases in other continents, where the unimaginable horrors of their inhumane treatment persisted. More than four thousand African Americans were lynched—often tortured, castrated, and burned to death before crowds of hundreds or thousands of eager spectators. The concept of race sits at the heart of the Namibian genocide (seventy-five thousand dead), the Holocaust (six million dead), the Armenian genocide (over one million dead), the Rwanda genocide (one million dead), and the ongoing genocide in Sudan (more than two and a half million dead, and more than nine million displaced)—the list could go on and on. Weighed on a moral balance, it is incontestable that the concept of race has done vastly more harm than good.
The consequences of the idea of race are a feature, not a glitch. From the outset, the function of race was to oppress and dehumanize others. And yet, in spite of all the suffering it has wrought, race still permeates our lives and thought. We continue to casually check the “race” boxes on medical and census forms, on college and job applications, on licenses and surveys. It is second nature for us to categorize human beings racially. Some people cherish race as central to who they are, and some use it as a weapon to disparage those “others” who they deem not to be members of their own kind, obsessing about the question of who “qualifies” as belonging to one racial group or another—and who doesn’t. Mostly, we take all of this for granted as “the way things are.”
Why do we hang onto race, despite its many evils? Many do so because they think it is something real and tangible—an indisputable fact of human biology. But even though we are all socially marinated in the ideology of race, and are inclined to take its reality for granted in our everyday lives, the verdict from science is that race has no biological basis. Racial categories are not inscribed in our genes and our bodies. They are social artifacts, designed to do harm.
Others are well aware that there is no scientific basis to race, but they hang onto racial identity because they believe that races are socially rather than biologically real. For these people, racial solidarity is a means for empowering groups that are or have previously been marginalized and oppressed. They see race as something that is separable from racism, and they believe that we can and should embrace the former without endorsing the latter. We, the authors, strenuously disagree with this commonsense view, because the facts tell a different, more disturbing story. Race is an illusion, and a destructive one.
The historical record is clear: racism birthed race, not the other way around. People didn’t observe that there are other races in the world, and afterwards develop racist attitudes toward them. History shows us that the idea of race was invented. It proliferated and persisted as a tool for legitimating oppression, wrecking lives, and strangling human potential. The legacy of the invention of race lives on in poverty, mass incarceration, police violence, and huge disparities in health, longevity, education, income, and wealth. And today in the United States the far right is waging a campaign to erase the hideous racial history at the root of today’s inequities and injustices. It seeks to teach our children that enslaved people benefitted from their enslavement and abuse, and that today they are afforded just as many opportunities as anyone else. The majority Supreme Court seems intent on turning back the clock by denying the inherited disadvantages that arise from our long history of racial oppression, treating 2024 as “year zero,” utterly dissociated from centuries of brutal oppression. Racism is ongoing and is increasingly emboldened by white supremacist groups across this country. And since the horrors committed by Hamas on October 7, and the brutal retaliation by Israel, blatant antisemitism and Islamophobia have reared their ugly heads. It has seeped into the political mainstream and is slowly but surely nudging the Overton window into the wrong direction.
Given the many evils that the invention of race has brought, it follows that in doubling down on race—even in the laudable service of diversity, equity, and inclusion—we are reinforcing an entrenched evil.
Our goal is to show that the struggle against racism requires us to destabilize and ultimately do away with the very notion of race. The usual strategy of affirming racial identities is exactly the wrong way to go, because it sustains the platform on which racist practices stand. It is possible to reject race while also working hard to illuminate its toxic history, seek reparations for past racially-based wrongs, and vigorously condemn racism. We argue that the centuries-long festering sore of American racism can only be healed with explicit and uncensored education in racial history. More provocatively, we assert that uprooting the poisonous myth of race not only supports but is crucial for addressing and ameliorating racial injustice.
James Baldwin once wrote, “It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself and half-believed, before I was able to walk on this earth as though I had a right to be here.” We hold that, wherever one is placed in the racial system, vomiting up the filth requires us to expel the septic notion of race that is at its core.
Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance of the history of race will know about the filth that Baldwin spoke of. When something is dirty, you typically clean it rather than throw it out. So, as some might ask, why not treat race that way? Why not preserve race as a reality, but one cleansed of its accretions of evil? Some race theorists called “reconstructionists” promote that approach, including Michael Hardimon, a prominent and sophisticated philosopher. Hardimon argues that, although we have inherited a “pernicious, traditional, essentialist concept of race” from colonialism and slavery, we can replace it with a different conception of race. We can choose to see races as groups of people distinguished by patterns of visible physical features and linked by a common ancestry from a distinctive geographical region, with no hierarchical element.
While we accept that this program is possible in principle, we consider it to be unrealistic and ineffective in practice. Racial classification has never been an innocent exercise in taxonomy. From the outset, it has served the interests of one group by legitimating doing harm to others. Of course, it’s possible to imagine a world in which describing someone as Black or White would be as innocuous as describing them as tall or short. But that’s not the real world where we are living. And what about the many ambiguities that arise in our historically rooted definitions of race: who is really White? Who is really Black? What makes them so? Subrena’s Jamaican culture bears little resemblance to her neighbor’s Yoruban culture which bears little resemblance to that of the New York City-raised chef in my local restaurant—and yet, we are all supposed to belong to the same “race” because we share certain physical variations (but not others). Contrary to the pronouncements of its advocates, race does not affirm and celebrate difference. It obscures and erodes it.
Underlying all of these questions and stamped into the foundations of our culture are racial stereotypes that first emerged centuries ago. The historical roots of many of these racial stereotypes are deep, and they are without fail always ugly. For example, research has shown that African Americans are often given less pain medication then European Americans for identical injuries. Subrena personally encountered this recently when recovering in hospital from major surgery. When her discomfort turned into agonizing pain, she called the nursing staff several times, unsuccessfully requesting painkillers. It was only hours later, when the suffering became so great that she was reduced to tears, that she received analgesia. In relating her traumatic experience to the night nurse, she told her, “You know, there are people who believe that people who look like me have a higher pain threshold” to which the nurse responded, “Well, you know, there are biological differences….”
As we’ve already established, there is no scientific reason to think that Black people are less sensitive to pain than White people are—and certainly medical professionals should know this—but here is where racial mythology has its insidious hold. The idea arose during the 18th century as a way to make the physical abuse of enslaved people morally acceptable. The philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in 1802 that Black people “have a thick skin” so “when one disciplines them one cannot hit them with sticks, but rather whip them with split canes”—a claim made all the more remarkable considering the German probably never encountered any Black person in his lifetime.
This is but one malignant way among countless others that our racial past is cemented into our culture and habits of thought and action. As Karl Marx wrote, “The traditions of past generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” We are burdened and bound by our history. In light of this, efforts to reform the concept of race are bound to fail.
And fail it should. Imagine that present-day Germans decided that they wanted to preserve the swastika as an emblem of national pride, but one cleansed of its specifically Nazi connotations. The new, reformed swastikas would be emblazoned on public buildings and governmental letterheads. Would you accept that German swastika was sterilized of its evil undertones? I very much doubt it. Now consider the fact that the crimes committed in the name of race include the Holocaust and American slavery, in addition to many, many other horrors. How can one possibly justify retaining race while rejecting those countless atrocities it was invented to perpetuate?1
In the final analysis, we believe, making excuses for retaining race is promoting the White supremacist project, and amounts to making common cause with the enemies of humanity.
Join us in unmaking race.
This little fable is actually not far removed from a real-life controversy that has been unfolding for some time now in the United States. Defenders of the confederate battle flag propose that it stands for traditional culture rather than slavery, and should be preserved and celebrated. Likewise, statues honoring Robert E. Lee and other confederate heroes.
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How would you suggest we abandon race as a concept? By never mentioning it? That's many whites' approach. Race will disappear if no one ever talks about it? I guess add colorblindness to that and we'll have...what?