Can We Have Race Without Racism?
 

Can We Have Race Without Racism?
Roger Berkowitz 

Subrena Smith and David Livingstone Smith have argued that while DEI programs are important and necessary, they are undone by a fundamental contradiction, the demand to end racism while elevating and preserving the importance of race. The problem, they see, is that race falls apart once it is divorced from its essentialist and biological understanding. For them, “Race was fashioned for nothing that was good,” and the effort to celebrate race is a dangerous game that undermines the laudable goals of DEI programs to vanquish racism. The essay is worth your thought. 

We are professors of philosophy who teach, write and speak about race, so the controversy swirling around anti-racist education strikes close to home. Like many other educators, we are haunted by the worry that one day a student, offended by facts, will mobilize to harass us and call for our dismissal, or worse. The academy and its place in the wider social arena have become so embroiled in conflict that we no longer take academic freedom as a given. In an age of shrinking enrollments, ballooning tuition costs and aggressive right-wing activism, coupled with donors ready to flex financial muscle to influence the curriculum, few of us can be certain that our employers will have our backs.

It is also personal. We are a so-called mixed-race couple. One of us, Subrena, is a brown-skinned woman descended from West Africans brought in chains to labor on the sugar plantations of Jamaica. The other, David, is a beige-skinned man of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, a descendant of refugees who fled the racist pogroms of Eastern Europe for the safe haven of the U.S. and who grew up in the Deep South at the tail end of the Jim Crow era. As such, we both have skin in this game.
We want to make it clear that we fully endorse the aims of DEI programs. But we object to how they are carried out, for, as noble as these aims are, there is a fatal contradiction at the heart of much of what goes on in them, a contradiction that threatens to undermine the entire enterprise. Although the purpose of anti-racist training is to vanquish racism, most of these initiatives are simultaneously committed to upholding and celebrating race. One can see this quite clearly in the work of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, well-known voices in the anti-racist movement. Both of them presume that we can oppose racism while leaving the concept of race intact.

But in the real world, can we have race without racism coming along for the ride? Trying to extinguish racism while shoring up race is like trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. It can only make matters worse. To get rid of racism we have to get rid of race.