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Joseph Addington's avatar

If you want to make the case that racial consciousness can provide a meaningful form of identity, that's fine... but that means you have to be willing to admit that it can be so for whites as much as for mestizos or African Americans.

Are you willing to make that concession? If that's a bridge too far for you, then you might want to think about why that is, and stick with colorblindness.

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Kmele's avatar

Brief but important clarification:

I don't advocate for colorblindness. In fact, I've been a reliable skeptic of that aspiration.

And some more detailed thoughts (which I shared w/ Luis on X):

The unreality of witchcraft and blackness can be established in much the same way, despite many people identifying as practicing Wiccans—or millions more believing themselves *black.*

In the first case, prestidigitation isn’t real. You can sit on a wooden broomstick and whisper incantations until you’re blue in the face; it will never fly you to Paris.

In the second case, there is no essential or even technical similarity among all black people, nor any inherent difference between all black people and all white people.

The fundamental claims associated with these categories are fallacious.

People fear ghosts. They may even join affinity groups to protect one another from the incorporeal entities they believe lurk in the shadows. They may commend one another for their bravery in the face of imagined danger or erect towering monuments as a physical manifestation of their shared convictions.

But should you or I participate in—or casually endorse—their belief in poltergeists?

I do not doubt that many people forge intimate bonds based on racial fealty (and/or shared enmity). However, my considered opinion is that our collective commitment to race, as an idea, is actively harmful to individuals and society. Put another way, *the lies we tell ourselves have consequences.*

I am my son’s father, a biological man, and a citizen of the United States (among many other true things).

Am I black? Or perhaps a quadroon? Maybe an octoroon?

Most people would roll their eyes at two-thirds of those designations, yet they’ll thoughtlessly accept (or even forcefully defend) the other.

My position — rejecting race liberates individuals from reductive identities and fosters a more expansive (and honest) notion of personhood and human dignity. And I can contemplate the history/modern implications of injustices bound up with beliefs about race, without personally endorsing the same malignant falsehoods.

***

In Salem, they held witch trials. They managed to convict some people of witchcraft, and a few were punished severely. Importantly —despite the trials, convictions, and punishments— there were never any actual witches. That's not a minor detail; it's kinda the whole ballgame.

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