My friends Sheena Mason, Eli Steele and Greg Thomas are three of the folks I can count on to cut to the chase about race, which is that it is most generally self-dealing, and self-serving if it serves any purpose at all. And seeing all we’ve seen and knowing all we know, we have decided that the high road is cultural and it is therefore a priority to deracialize culture. Make note that today, the spell-checkers of the world recognize ‘non-binary’ but not ‘deracialize’.
It is therefore a little bold and cutting edge for us, and others like those in Free Black Thought, to say that we are not anything racial except for those racial identities imposed upon us. Of course we must also admit the extent we may have wrecked ourselves in our previous naiveté. Like millions of others, I had to account for my Black Pride, and of course I had plenty reason to. It took quite a while and through some inspired learning and hard lessons that I figured out the difference between my life and my black life. Was it political? Was it religious? Was it cultural? Was it familial? Well, I can only say that by Black Nationalist design, it was supposed to be all of that combined. That is why we deal with the anachronisms of black identity today. We project back in time that all Africans on this continent were black like me, as if their struggles were mine and therefore my current political focus on struggle is eternal. Or in wokist terms ‘contemporary blacks culturally appropriate slavery’. We all have at one point. Time to get smart and stop looking backwards. All of us.
The Sea Change
I got down to my most recent update on race in the wake of the madness that gripped the nation after the death of St. George. Unlike the crew of martyrs behind him, it truly moved the needle on the way Americans were open to rethinking the idea and priority of race. However, in certain parts, I recognized a kind of “it’s about time” attitude. In short, a sense of appreciation that whitefolks were suspected of wrongdoing as much as blacks suspected they themselves were suspect. In other words racial turnabout was fair play. The lions had their historians. The shoe was on the other foot and fire was getting fought with fire. You cannot call any of that justice.
My recognition was that race was suddenly prioritized in a way it hadn’t been before; that was not a good thing. I believe the opportunists jumped on and made hay while the new sun of color was shining. Yet I knew that turnabout was not fair play and that this whole sea change was inevitably going to turn out to be a deadly tsunami. So I backed away. I called it ‘personal deracination’. What’s interesting is that there were historical parallels I saw myself, for example those who refused the term Black and were determined to stay Negro, and similarly those who refused the dreads and knots of Afrocentricity and retained the swim-prohibitive perms in their hair. As my regular readers know, I think the new racial presumptions can be best summarized by my friend Tabia Lee’s brilliant rubric:
Check it out if you haven’t before. I don’t think there is any light to escape the boxes she has drawn around how Americans think about race in the four categories of:
Naturalism
Neo-Reconstructionism
Constructionism
Skeptical Eliminativism
It should be noted that my discovery of K. Anthony Appiah’s version of Constructionism fueled most of my advocacy after I read his In My Father’s House in the 90s. The new race abolitionists, skeptical eliminativists have much in common with Constructionism, which while skeptical of the moral value of race, find ethical use in its analytical use. What I know that they perhaps don’t, is that AIs and plenty business models do not need race. So I’m looking to the future. So one differentiator can be answered by the simple question:
Should we teach AIs what we know about race?
My Bad
Way back when multiculturalism was new, I was evocative of black cultural production. I wanted a new generation of Spike Lees, Zadie Smiths and George C. Wolfes. But it didn’t take long for me to disabuse that idea. The notion that black culture should always necessarily connote or denote a racial message was something I expressly did not like. Apparently this was not a popular view. I must say that was relatively easy for me because I came from a successful family who started in the Black Nationalist vein but had never hated or feared or distanced themselves from white Americans.
The way I wrote specifically to talk about race used purposeful terminology that always used some escape logic. Basically, ‘whitefolks’ and ‘blackfolks’ had a definition that each could and did easily say that they were white, or black, know the various racial stereotypes about them and could accept or deny them as they pleased. Blackfolks understood that they don’t represent all blackfolks, but didn’t avoid being black. Whitefolks understood that they don’t represent all whitefolks but didn’t avoid being white. Making it deeper than that was, from my POV, essentialist and to be avoided at all costs. Most importantly, neither whitefolks nor blackfolks needed demagogues or policies to know how to get along with each other. Again, easy for me because I did that as a teenager.
From where I stood, while we had some political correctness and some racial obsessions, in the main white America and black America were at an equilibrium. Today we are seeking a new equilibrium because of three specific phenomena. Interestingly enough they all sport the names of black men.
Rodney King
Barack Obama
George Floyd
People still remember Rodney King, and it is the filming of his encounter with two dozen billy clubs that made people believe that, as the poet said, “this type of shit happens every day”. Of course he said “Can’t we all just get along?” and he was right. All the people who didn’t want to get along rioted in the streets. In that era of Public Enemy and Do The Right Thing, we were fraught.
Basically Barack Obama changed black politics. He destroyed Jesse Jackson. He mutilated Tavis Smiley. He elevated The Black Eyed Peas, and he claimed to be like Trayvon Martin. He made a lot of Americans believe we were post-racial. I didn’t buy it, and in fact he didn’t promise it. But he did have a Beer Summit.
George Floyd was the straw that broke the camel’s back and established the premise for a lot of blood money to be paid into BLM, DEI and ESG. He is the genesis for biggest corporate housequake since the 2008 housing crisis. If Michael Brown made America believe in race riots again it was St. George who brought the notion of burn baby burn beyond the ghetto, to places like Seattle and Portland.
Here’s the thing. As a black American, I didn’t give any of these people permission to change the way people look at me, interpret the meaning of my [black] life or change the balance of racial power. So I wrote…
You have a racial identity whether you like it or not. You also have biology whether you believe in evolution or not. And because you have human biology, you also have human psychology. I am betting every bit of logic that can be extracted from my writing that human biology, therefore human psychology is universal across time and space, whereas racial identity is, as they say, ‘a social construction’. …You are not white. You are not black. You are naked. But you have clothed yourself in a racial identity provided to you by the history of this nation. …There is always that temptation - to make your race work somehow for you. That is the game you ought to give up. Says me.
What are the chances that if you are one of the blackfolks that you are black like me? What are the chances that what’s right for you is right for me? What are the chances that what you think is good for the race actually is? Well, Black History gives us the names of dozens of brilliant individuals who haven’t yielded us a solution for the race.
I’ve decided not to give people a choice. So arbitrarily on January 1, 2024 I’m going post-black, and I’m taking my deracinated friends with me. I’m not going to step back inside me pre-1967 or pre-George Floyd borders. I’m off in a new direction. In doing so, I will launch a new publication here on Substack where I will concentrate such matters that I find critical to deracializing culture.
The Post-Black Discovery
It all hangs on this thing that all of us know but haven’t articulated well. All I can do until I reduce the concept in time to something more concise is to tell a story with certain parallels.
It was Paul Simon’s Graceland album that introduced me and my American world to the songs of Ladysmith Black Mambazo in 1986. When I went to their first US concert at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, I was impressed by three things.
Most of the audience was not black.
I sat one row behind the great Bernie Casey in the good seats. I had no idea he was that tall.
The singers performed dance moves that were very much like those found in black college fraternity step shows.
So there was an instant familiarity coupled with some ignorance and some alienation. This event turned out to be as entertaining as I expected, but in those three contexts I did not expect.
So what is black culture? It’s some fraction of that good stuff that has escaped America and has proven its value overseas. Here we were on the other side of such an equation, in America singing and dancing like South Africans which we were not, racially, ethnically or politically. Yet the joy of their music, which was often Christian, communicated itself perfectly. What is world historical about any achievement becomes replicated around the world. It is no longer the property of a race, of a sect. It is now an edifying concept that others can and will use without permission.
One needn’t pay homage and royalties forever. We don’t become beholden to the Italians for pizza. We needn’t bow down to Arabs when we use their numerals or algebra. To separate race from culture is not an offense against culture, but rather against race. Africans speak English. Europeans speak Hindi. You’re just another part of me.
Power & Money vs Culture & Sharing
To deracialize culture is conceptually simple. In America, it is to return to a standard of sharing and of the presumption of drama free desegregation. You might simply remember the invention of multiculturalism was done during those same 1980s as the prototype of diversity. If you want to mark it with a milestone, call it the critical success of Public Enemy’s Nation of Millions. What were we doing just before that? Cosby Show. Integration. But people wanted power, not just friends. So multiculturalism carried an explicit suggestion that minorities were owed attribution for those creations of theirs which became mainstreamed. If you’ve heard the original Hound Dog and Elvis’ version, it’s hard to even say they’re the same song. But did we really care about Big Mama Thornton or Leiber & Stoller or power & money? Thus was born the authentic trademark stamp which has hardened culture back to race & ethnicity.
The fact is that the Neo-Reconstructionists are having a field day, resegmenting and resegregating by race. Integration seems impossible to certain folks, as do colorblind ethics and deracination. I personally don’t need the entire nation to flip all its racial scripts, but I am showing you a way away from these dark days. I don’t think anyone can pretend that media companies like Disney haven’t exploited this kind of authentic trademarking for money & power and that this corporate monetization is destructive of shared culture. We are all poisoned by a refusal to share and share alike.
There is no panacea in a deracialized future. It will be one less stumbling block to accuracy and clarity. It’s obvious that there’s much profit in racial confusion and obfuscation, and special markets for DEI and other dysfunctional methodologies. BLM product marketing, while fading a bit, still gets green lights for blackified entertainments and entitlements. Concepts like liberty and justice for all get cluttered up with racial and authentic ethnic qualifications. Those who made St. George the reason and have gained from it won’t give up easily. You can expect people to fight about it. You could also say that’s the same as it ever was - like coal fired furnaces. But it is clear to me that what began as the monetization of minority enterprises has mutated into a hardening of racial lines and a dozen different kinds of ‘anti-racism’.
Race is fixed. You cannot evade the history of its distortions and manipulations if you lay claim to it. Nobody can make white into black or black into white racially speaking. As long as there is the slightest molehill of a difference, it will have mountainous repercussions. Those who trade in race are 100% confident in this and they are right. But to step out of that category, willfully and thoughtfully is the wisest choice. They can only stand there jaw-dropped calling me foolish for trying it, because the permanence of the race trade is the only way they view black American success. This is yet another reason to defend the philosophy of science, which you know I do.
The Darkest Side
In reserve is our feudal selves. So this deracialization is an ethos of peacetime. If it comes to war and I’m a black target, I will find trenchmates where I can. But I already know the US Armed Forces have forged a non-racial brotherhood and that those brothers in arms will spend their lives for liberty and justice for all. So I’ve got that real advantage. I’ll bet my life on it if I ever have to.
There are enough implications here to continue on later in the new race oriented ‘stack. I just wanted to underscore some of my philosophical reasons and orientation toward a race-free culture in America. It even seems like a Brazilian attitude might be an improvement. Never thought I’d say that.
Extra Bonus
Here’s a video I made 14 years ago in consideration of Skip Gates. I hope it demonstrates my prioritization of socio-economic status over race within black America at one of those pregnant moments when everybody’s asking what to think about race today.
Yeah I’m still bourgie, but I put my sense of humor more forward, and I still don’t second-guess black people.