Unraveling Race
Thomas Chatterton Williams wants to discard traditional racial categories.
It’s an interesting point of view. I think it lacks a connection to the real, dirty world of everyday reality.
Williams understands that his path is not necessarily for everyone. “I am not so ingenuous as to think everyone can want to reconceive themselves,” he writes. “But I do believe the more people of good will—white, black, and everything in between—try, the more the rigidity of our collective faith in race will necessarily soften.”
People mostly just want to have decent, happy lives. Race —obviously as a social construct and cultural angle— will determine a lot of outcome, out of the womb.
Of course you might want to identify with the powerful ones. Which are not black (not that we can’t be powerful but with an average wealth ten to a hundred times smaller, obviously, it’s very much harder).
And your face will determine a lot, as we all know. If you look like a negro, even if your skin is #FFFFFF you won’t be treated the same in western society. This intellectualism about what you call yourself and what you identify with, becomes pointless in the day-to-day life. It’s all about what opportunities are more or less available and how it’s consistently worse for black people, every, single, time. No matter what. If you can un-identify with blackness so that you can have a decent life, considering the receipts of the past 60 years, you might want to do it. It makes sense. Weak, but it makes sense.
As a black man I am not as free to choose as I want to be. In our society that’s more of a feature than a bug. I don’t have a problem identifying as black while doing black things like designing sound, a future home, reading a lot about everything, being extremely proficient with a computer and knowing its history as well as 90s rock or 80s funk etc.
The day wealth is completely, evenly redistributed, black people will be able to not care about race at all.
Which we didn’t obsess with in the first place, to be clear.