Deconstructing Race

Editor’s Note: This is NOT going to be an exhaustive or comprehensive discussion of race. The purpose of this thought experiment is to start over—or at least attempt to start over—in the way we look at and think about race. I know, good luck.

Definitions seem to be in the news a lot these days, as conservatives show us that defining woke is really difficult, defining woman is easy (duh, n. 1. someone who can kill with a smile and can wound with her eyes and can ruin your faith with her casual lies) and defining a chair is a horse of a different color. But there’s a word getting used a lot that we don’t take enough time to defining at all.

That word is race. It has come up quite often in the days following the so-called Supreme Court’s decision to declare it unconstitutional for colleges or universities to consider race when making final admission decisions (Racists v. People Racists Call Racists For Trying to Mitigate Racism). So I went looking for a good definition of race, not spelled out as a definition per se. I wanted to see how that definition is spelled out practically. In other words, I want to know how we show our understanding of it in a really basic way.

So I searched for the list of options the U.S. Census gives people to ask about race, and here’s what I found:

I swear to you, I typed out my search intentions in my previous paragraph before reading the excerpt above. Nevertheless, “a social definition of race recognized in this country” was exactly what I was looking for.

Each of the main labels are defined in more detail on that page, but I want to focus on the labels themselves, because that’s the shorthand we typically use when we discuss these things. As a rule, we don’t take time to spell out our definitions. And that last sentence: The concept of race is separate from the concept of Hispanic origin, is infinitely interesting. It’s quite common to discuss Latino communities as people of color, but when we classify how we discuss different races, Hispanic is considered a decidedly non-racial category—it’s a matter of national origin.

Yet, as the Census Bureau says openly, “the race item includes racial or national origin or sociocultural groups,” which is to say, “When we say race, sometimes we mean race and sometimes we mean where you’re from or ethnicity.”

So they’re saying race is a thing they’re not going to define, yet their including the word race as part of that definition, winking, and saying in a slightly lowered voice, “You know what I mean.”

They never list “skin color” as one the categories, but when you eliminate all the national origin categories, what you’re left with is black and white, though they’re listed in the opposite order for some reason.

So, effectively, when the U.S. Census Bureau or any similar group or agency uses the word race, what they mean is skin color, and the skin colors with which they are primarily concerned are white and black, in that order. But we as a society have made a choice, conscious or otherwise, to diffuse the import of what we know race really means by including some national-origin labels in the mix with the two skin-color labels . . . but if you’re national origin is Hispanic, we still need you to tell us your skin color.

Okay, so maybe defining race is pretty complicated after all, and that’s without even considering a single drop in the ocean of history.

The other prize-winning term in all of this is self-identification. Here in the middle of this long, drawn-out explanation of what we mean by race when we talk about how society classifies its own people . . . we have an invitation to participate by selecting the label you’d like to slap upon your own forehead. Don’t worry! You can pick more than one!

When any one of us selects that box, we’re agreeing not just to take part in the system—no, that’s far from the most important aspect of this—we’re also taking ownership of the individual label(s) we wear. At that point of agreement, the category changes from being an assessment of race as a social construct to being an expression of personal identity. I stop belonging to the category of White People and start announcing myself to the world as the proud owner of my personal whiteness. Now we can say, “My race is white,” and, “Her race is black,” and “Their race is Asian.”

We drop the pretense of societal labels and choose instead to make those labels our own. In so doing, we acknowledge and validate the label of race—and, really, the significance of skin color—as something more noble than a 15th-century innovation to justify slavery.

That mental switch—that maybe none of us (myself included) ever consciously turned on in our brains—changes the circuitry of how we consider race’s role in society. We lose sight of the very clear and obvious fact that race is a product of racism and not the other way around. Racism was the plan. As long as race is considered a valid part of how we classify each other, we will continue to operate under the paradigm of racism.

So let’s just ignore race. Sorry, Mr. Italics, that’s not the clever solution you think it is. At this point in our society’s trajectory, race is still a very real, undeniable product of a very real, undeniable and deeply entrenched system of racism. It’s not that our systems are kinda racist. Racism is the system. Pretending that ignoring race dismantles the system is like pretending ignoring your cough cures you of COVID. That technique doesn’t end the problem, it helps spread it.

Despite what the clever little self-identification ploy leads us to think, race is not a personal expression and it never can be. Or I should say it can’t be only that. Yes, we can acknowledge our place in a racist social system or our personal connection to a group of people who have been similarly classified. There is culture and history and meaning that has been borne out of that construct though the years and the shared experiences each group and individual has amassed over that time. It would be foolish to dismiss all the human baggage collected, all the triumph, tears, and tragedy produced as a result of racism as a system.

So when the Supreme Court rules that a college can’t consider a student’s race when making a final admissions decision, they’re falling victim to (or taking advantage of) the self-identification trick.

“Well, you see, the student’s race is the thing in question here. As a matter of equal protection, we can’t allow the student’s race—which definitely belongs to the student as part of their personal identity, because that is how they self-identify, after all—to be used against them.”

But when you see race itself as a product of racism, which it most definitely is, that entire argument makes no sense. When you acknowledge the race applied by society to each student, you see racism at work in every label. You see that white supremacy, the author of the racial system, has engrained those labels so intrinsically into our society that we can erase neither the labels nor their effects. You see that the purpose of race as a category was and is to promote white people and oppress black people.

When you acknowledge what race means, you see very clearly that the Supreme Court has ruled not that colleges may not consider a student’s race when making admissions decisions but that they may not consider our society’s system of racism when making admissions decisions. They have declared it unconstitutional to hold a racist system accountable.

This should not come as a shock. Racism is the system.

I invite you to see the system of our society not as racist but as racism itself. If you do this, you will begin to see the solutions most people suggest and view them as steps toward the moderation of racism as opposed to the dismantling of racism. You’ll realize that, as a society, we don’t want to end racism so much as dial it back a bit and make it work better in the 21st Century. I mean, we can certainly try to reform racism, make it kinder and gentler. Make it great again, maybe? But in the end, no matter how much upholstery you swap out or pinstripes you add on, you’re still driving a Ford Racism . . . or a Tesla.

We can’t get rid of racism by ignoring its most common symptom (race). We can’t eliminate it by trying not to be racist. It’s a system inside of us like a virus. It needs to be surgically removed. Doing that takes time, intention, and a whole lot of uncomfortable side effects. But if you want a world in which race is no longer a factor, the Supreme Court as constructed absolutely cannot and will not help you. We cannot ignore it. We have to do the work to get rid of it.

Step one: see it for what it is.