In Honor of Juneteenth
Let's make a future without racism
Our common country is the United States. Here were we born, here raised and educated; here are the scenes of childhood; the pleasant associations of our school going days; the loved enjoyments of our domestic and fireside relations, and the sacred graves of our departed fathers and mothers, and from here will we not be driven by any policy that may be schemed against us.
That very little comparatively as yet has been done, to attain a respectable position as a class in this country, will not be denied, and that the successful accomplishment of this end is also possible, must also be admitted; but in what manner, and by what means, has long been, and is even now, by the best thinking minds among the colored people themselves, a matter of difference of opinion.
--Martin Robinson Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852)
In honor and recognition of the history and significance of Juneteenth, I write to invite you to consider that how we have gone about ending or at least resisting racism in the United States has taken us as far as it can. (Read a bit about a speech I delivered at a church on Juneteenth.) We need fresh pathways and frameworks toward a future without racism. I present the togetherness wayfinder as one such framework in my forthcoming book The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism (October 2024). In this paper, I give a very brief overview of why I have come to conclude that we need new methods for what we have come to call antiracism and a very brief overview of what the togetherness wayfinder offers anyone interested.
The core tenets and definitions of the togetherness wayfinder (formerly the theory of racelessness and alternatively raceless antiracism) are as follows:
1. Race/ism (i.e., racism) is a socially constructed system of economic and social oppression that requires the belief in human “races” and the practice of racialization to reinforce various power imbalances.
2. “Race” is an imaginary component of the socially constructed reality of racism (i.e., race/ism).
3. Racialization is the process of applying an inescapable economic and social class hierarchy to humans that creates or reinforces power imbalances.
4. The belief in human “races” and practice of racialization affect people differently. These differences serve to uphold the machinery of racism, acting as obstacles to unification, healing, and reconciliation.
5. Translation of what one means by “race,” including the presumed absence of “race” in any context, can lead to understanding and bridge-making. The racelessness translator helps people interpret “race” into something being said about the causes/effects of racism, culture, ethnicity, social class, economic class, or some combination thereof.
6. Race/ism does not exist everywhere in the same way and can be ended.
The primary tool of the wayfinder is the racelessness translator, which allows us to translate that which is perceived or presumed to be “race” or “racial” into more apt and precise language. Specifically, when we talk about “race,” we are really actually talking about one of five other things—culture, ethnicity, social class, economic class, or racism itself—or some combination thereof. By properly translating “race,” we expose the reality of what we really mean. That then lends to increased shared understanding and clarity about racism and other aspects of humanity. It lays bare the reality of racism and enables us to imagine and create a different and far better future. This is not a matter of mere semantics or rhetoric. It is a matter of recognizing human-made systems of oppression and choosing to forge a better path forward for all of us without race/ism.
The other tools of the togetherness wayfinder include what I refer to as architecture, the walking negative, rememory, Ubuntu, creolization, opacity, marronage, maternal energy, invisible ink, twilight, madness, consolation, nation, diaspora, home, and philosophies of “race” that are seldom taught and commonly misconstrued. When best understood, the wayfinder allows for more astute identifications of what racism is and isn’t. It also allows us to determine what will and won’t work to stop racism and its ill effects in their tracks. Further, the togetherness wayfinder opens the door to a better understanding of culture, ethnicity, nation, humanity, etc. In The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism, I explain and illustrate each aspect of the wayfinder. (The book is available for preorder almost anywhere you can buy books.) Here’s a visual representation of what I chart in the book:
In the US and elsewhere, the continuing policy of upholding the belief in “race” and practice of racialization help to maintain the dehumanizing effects and material impacts of racism or race/ism, as I often write it. But we cannot simply “skip to the good part,” as Morgan Freeman and many others suggest. We need to navigate carefully and strategically to bring into fruition a better future for all versus just hiding and ignoring real problems. Over the centuries, many people have written about the topic of “race” and the history of race/ism, especially antiblack racism. In 1852, Martin Robinson Delany, an American abolitionist, journalist, physician, military officer, and writer who is credited by some scholars as the first proponent of black nationalism and for coining the Pan African slogan “Africa for Africans,” wrote that Americans of more recent African descent were not enslaved because of actual or perceived inferiority. Rather, he rightly argued that enslaving Africans and their more recent descendants enabled wealthy Europeans and their more recent descendants who got racialized as white within the antiblack paradigm to maintain and increase their wealth, meaning their economic, political, and social power.
~~Studio portrait of Major Martin Robinson Delany (1812 - 1885), a Union officer and recruiter during the American Civil War. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor during the war. (Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)~~
The ideology of inferiority through the belief in “race” and practice of racialization came after the machinery of humanmade social, political, and economic hierarchical constructions were already on the ground. Abolitionists like Delany sought to end chattel enslavement and forms of enslavement around the world. They often did so while operating within the belief in “race” and practice of racialization that they were born into. That is especially true the further back in time one goes since humans had not yet developed science and technology enough to know better (i.e., that “race” is not biological, that there is no “essence” to “race”). Most people before the 1900s believed that “race” was, indeed, biological. Delany was no exception.
But that belief in biological “race” and the practice of racialization was steeped into the fabric of American society largely as a Trojan Horse, a decoy of sorts. Its purpose was not scientific. Its design was not to enlighten or act as a neutral descriptor. And neither “race” nor the practice of assigning “race” to the human species is arbitrary, meaning not based on any principle, plan, or system. Rather, the belief in human “races” and the practice of assigning “races” to the human species simultaneously reflects and mains the reality of race/ism. Like abolitionists seeking to end enslavement, to continue to strive to create a future without racism while maintaining the components required for its survival is like trying to stop a flood by dousing it with water.
In The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), Delany shows how the ruling class—that time’s elite—demarcated Africans and those of more recent African descent as fit for subjugation in all realms of life whether enslaved, freed, or maroons for practical reasons. Africa represented an entire continent of people that Europeans turned Americans could exploit for labor. Those Europeans and then early Americans needed an ideological apparatus—a system—that would ensure the success of the social, political, and economic hierarchies they started and desired to maintain and continue to develop.
The belief in and illusion of “race” and the practice of racialization became necessary components of that early hierarchical system, one that spanned across all facets of life. Delany writes, “It is not enough, that these people [Africans and then enslaved Americans] are deprived of equal privileges by their rulers, but, the more effectually to succeed, the equality of these classes must be denied, and their inferiority by nature as distinct races, actually asserted. This policy is necessary to appease the opposition that might be interposed in their behalf” (Chapter I). That system is one that remains albeit without chattel enslavement but that makes it still thoroughly pernicious and dangerously subterranean.
“Race” is caught up with how one thinks about the human. Our belief in “race” and practice of racialization determines who gets dehumanized in practice and action and why—who has power and why, as evidenced by the history of colonization, chattel enslavement, a failed Reconstruction, Jim Crow, de facto segregation, etc. In places like the US, “race” often gets conflated and collapsed with ethnicity, culture, social and economic class, and as evidence of racism itself. If we let it, the togetherness wayfinder can lead us toward a future where everyone is rightly humanized and humans are seen as commonly biological alongside all other species.
How the “human” has been constructed has been to distinguish humans from animals and to distinguish some humans from “those seemingly human humans who are really like animals or fully animals.” But if we cut through the racist imaginings of how the supposedly “nonhuman” human behaves, etc., we see that all of what makes us human includes all of what we tend to assign to “monsters,” “animals,” and other “nonhumans.” So long as we continue to lie to ourselves, we will also continue to endanger those populations deemed inferior and all biological life on earth. And the efforts of Delany and other abolitionists will continue to fall just short of complete liberation and end of antiblack race/ism.
When engaged and practiced, the togetherness wayfinder helps people free themselves from binary modes of thought as it pertains to social identities and overlapping and interlocking systems of oppression. That freedom translates into
1. a clearer understanding and identification of economic and social systems of oppression;
2. an expanded conception of the human, culture, ethnicity, social class, economic class, and racism;
3. a mode of seeing and being that lessens the internalization of racism-induced traumas;
4. an internalized method of ending the causes and effects of racism that manifest from within individuals and desiring the end of the causes and effects of racism externally (i.e., structurally, etc.).
Let us turn again to Delany who writes,
Moral theories have long been resorted to by us, as a means of effecting the redemption of our brethren in bonds, and the elevation of the free colored people in this country. Experience has taught us, that speculations are not enough; that the practical application of principles adduced, the thing carried out, is the only true and proper course to pursue. (Chapter V)
Indeed. To date, racist, antiracist, and colorblind theories have been and continue to be put forth in response to the persistent machinery of race/ism, which includes and requires the components of the belief in “race” and practice of racialization. The practical application of antiracist theories that include those components cannot by design bring into fruition the change that Delany and other abolitionists, people who were enslaved, and countless others envisioned or envision just as racist and colorblind theories cannot.
The genesis of the belief in “race” and practice of racialization require an abolitionist position toward both. Rather than seek the abolition of the symptoms of race/ism, as chattel enslavement was, we must seek the abolition of its roots: the belief in “race,” practice of racialization, and the attendant economic, social, and political power imbalances that exist and persist thanks to the human capacity to dehumanize humans in favor of exploitation and domination.