This series invites seasoned philosophers to share critical reflections on emergent and institutionalised shapes of and encounters within philosophy. The series collects experience-based explorations of philosophy’s personal, institutional, and disciplinary evolution that will also help young academics and students navigate philosophy today.
How did I come to create the theory of racelessness, a framework for studying, discussing, and addressing racism and a philosophy of race/ism, ethnicity, class, and culture? How did I come to present in a particular way the theory, my philosophy, in The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism (Pitchstone, February 2024)? Let me start somewhere close to the beginning of my story.
When I was about eight or nine years old, my adoptive mother told me that my adoptive father’s family didn’t like me because I was “black” or her because she was “brown” (i.e., Panamanian). I remember looking at my arms and wondering about my “blackness” and felt the pain one feels when who and how they are results in someone else’s disdain.
Of course, she lied. She was extremely physically and verbally abusive. The older I got, the more she realized that she had to keep me disconnected from virtually everyone else to maintain her control and secret. I was at an age when I had started to tell adults that my mother beat me despite her threats to kill me if I told.
But I didn’t know then that she had lied. I further internalized the belief that I wasn’t only unworthy of her love and affection—for whatever reasons—but was unworthy of anyone else’s love and affection because of who I was. Who I was included my “blackness.” It included my “race.”
Over the years of my childhood and then teenage years, various classmates called me “nigger” and “pubic hair.” One peer assaulted me on the school bus and spit a huge glob of mucus out of a bus window when I got dropped off at the middle school. Her spit landed in my hair. A skinhead chased and shot at my adoptive brother and another classmate—both racialized as black—when we were all about twelve. My brother came home screaming at the top of his lungs. The sound of his piercing scream still haunts me.
“WHAT HAPPENED?!” My parents and I all exclaimed in response. The skinhead had chased them through the trailer park until he—my brother—reached the refuge of our trailer all while being shot at. An investigation ensued and the skinhead—who was around 15 or 16—was kicked out of the park and sent to live with his father in Tennessee.
My brother’s “blackness” almost got him killed. What a world!
By the time I was an undergraduate, all I knew was that I wanted to help people. I especially imagined helping younger people by showing them that everything is possible and that they could overcome any obstacle, any trauma. Initially, I studied psychology with plans to get an advanced degree and be a youth and family therapist. But the literature and composition classes I took at the same time ended up pulling me into the world of literary studies.
Generally understood, literary studies involves the deep study, evaluation, interpretation, and criticism of literature. Modern literary studies is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature’s goals and methods. I saw the vastness of myself, others, the world, and the universe through literature and especially the body of work called African-American literature. And I just knew that I was called to help people by studying the thing called “race” and racism toward the goal of helping to identify and stop the causes and effects of racism.
As a genre, African-American literature has consistently been seen and defined as always having to do with “race” and racism. My mind became not only intent upon analyzing and really understanding the literature’s goals and methods but furthermore upon becoming infinitely more clear-eyed about the reality of race/ism and, as importantly, how to intervene and participate in what I understood countless writers to be participating: I didn’t know it at the time, but I was reading philosophy of “race” and doing it, too. Through my study, I joined the human rights efforts of people who get racialized as black in the United States.
I also opened my imagination to what would need to happen to create a world without race/ism. In other words, how would the world that many writers found themselves working toward by working against race/ism look? What would be required to create such a world? Was any of that even possible or worth working toward? I kept these types of questions at the forefront of my mind at all times.
As an undergraduate, I did an advanced honors project, which resulted in a one-hundred-page paper—a study of what I dubbed “institutionalized erasure” in African-American literary studies and American culture. I argued that erasure results from the imposition of “race” and a so-called racial identity onto Americans of more recent African descent. I graduated at the top of my class and was the chosen student commencement speaker. I continued my study of race/ism when I went to the University of Houston in Houston, Texas, and earned my Master of Arts in English. In particular, I continued to study the production and reproduction of blackness—that is “race.” I was convinced that if one wants to understand “race,” one must study “blackness.”
At Howard University in Washington, D.C., I started my Ph.D. in 2016. I had to take several gap years between degrees thanks to financial instability and the rightful estrangement from my adoptive family. But I could not be deterred from my calling to participate in human rights efforts in a meaningful way. I continued my study of race/ism and expanded my specializations to include American—more broadly—and Caribbean literature. I also had the very good fortune of connecting with Dr. Jacoby Adeshei Carter, a professor of philosophy and a philosopher of “race.”
That was when I learned the terminology for what I had been witnessing and consumed with all along in the context of the US and as illustrated in African-American literature. I also came to recognize that I am a philosopher of “race” and had been all along. My first articulation of what has become the theory of racelessness was “We must undo race to undo racism.” In “A White Slave”: Albinism in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings (2019), I first present the start of the theory. At that time, I was calling it the theory of albinism, but that naming had its own host of problems and limitations. By the time I wrote my dissertation, I had come to call it the theory of racelessness. I passed “with distinction,” an honor reserved for something like 1% of humanities Ph.D.s worldwide. I was, again, a student speaker at my commencement.
My journey hasn’t been easy. As a survivor of explicit and implicit race/ism and other traumas, I felt deeply connected with what I thought was my “race,” what I thought was my blackness. Like many people, I understood blackness to be racial and cultural, ethnic, heritage, and so on. I assigned everything I love about myself to my blackness. I’m tenacious, audacious, bold, beautiful, self-motivated, persistent, empathetic, kind, loving, intelligent, hilarious, and exceptional.
So, while my mind was consistently showing me that “race” is thoroughly pernicious and that the illusion of “race” results from the reality of race/ism, my heart kept me attached and told me to hold fast to my “blackness” (i.e., race). “Race” isn’t real. Instead, racism hides its face behind what we are told is “race” or “racial.” Imagine that we are detectives in an episode of Scooby-Doo. We’re chasing a villain with a mask on, in typical Scooby-Doo fashion, that says “RACE.” We catch the villain and have our momentous demasking moment. AHA! The villain shapeshifts from a single figure to five: Ethnicity, culture, social class, economic class, and racism itself. The distinction between and how we, indeed, philosophize about any of these socially constructed categories matters if we are sincere about stopping the detrimental effects of racism as well as the causes.
Up until a certain recent point, I mistakenly conflated everything about myself, including that which adds or reflects value, like how I show up culturally, with “race,” a grave error when then trying to recognize more clearly and stop more effectively race/ism.
I spent time in my advisor’s office crying. I didn’t want to “let go of my blackness” or to “let go of race” to undo racism. Ethically, though, I recognized that I also couldn’t not let go without making myself the biggest type of hypocrite.
It wasn’t until I taught at the College of William and Mary and simultaneously read Barbara and Karen Fields’ Racecraft: the Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012) with my students that something clicked in my mind. Like most people who come to my work, I had succumbed to the trap of conflating “nonracial” phenomena with what I thought was “racial.” I made everything I love about myself part of my “racial” makeup.
Of course, it hurt to seriously consider the need to “let go” or “undo” or “deracialize” myself when I had fooled myself into thinking that “race” was more than a caste system, a way to subjugate me and people who get racialized similarly. The illusion of “race” is reflective and evidence of that hierarchical system, not the more popularly believed inversion. In other words, “race” doesn’t cause racism. The presence of race/ism actually requires the belief and upholding of the fiction of “race” toward the goal of subjugating groupings of people—some as human and others as subhuman if at all human. In many ways, my mind knew that before my heart did. But I still needed to do the difficult work of more fully liberating my mind, my imagination.
To say that I think deeply and obsessively about the topic of race/ism would be an understatement. I remain intentional about exploring what, why, and how I think. And I am deeply committed to helping other people question themselves and their own beliefs and ways of seeing and being. How philosophical of me!
As a theory, there are rules, tools, language, and particular knowledge and ways of seeing and being that underpin and uphold the theory as a framework. Anyone can engage with my research to undergo or continue to develop their own way of seeing and being. My sincere hope is that the ways of seeing and being that result in engaging with my work will be staunchly outside of the confines of race/ism, by which I mean white supremacy in places like the U.S. I come from an Afrofuturist bend. In Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Ytasha L. Womack defines Afrofuturism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation.” In the same book, Womack quotes Ingrid LaFleur who defines it as “a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens.” I work from within the cultural imagination of those seeking liberation from white supremacy even as some people miss the entire point largely because of the machinery of race/ism.
The core tenets—revised language from my first book Theory of Racelessness (2022) for clarity—of the theory of racelessness are as follows:
- Our belief in “race” and practices of racialization are not meaningless because racism and valuable aspects of humanity hide behind what we call “race.”
- “Race” does not exist biologically for humans or as a social construction.
- Although we are all racialized by ourselves and others, we are raceless.
- Race/ism is a social and/or economic class hierarchy of humans based on the belief in race, practices of racialization, and subsequent reinforcement of various power imbalances (i.e., hierarchies). In the U.S., the hierarchy places people who get racialized as white at the top and those racialized as black at the bottom.
- Racialization is the process of applying an inescapable social hierarchy—“race/ism” and power imbalance—to humans.
- Racism does not exist everywhere in the same way. As some philosophers say, “race” doesn’t travel.
- We can overcome racism.
The primary tool of the theory is a racelessness translator, an analytical process that anyone can learn. It helps people translate that which is perceived or presumed to be “race” or “racial” into more apt and precise language, like culture, ethnicity, social class, economic class, and racism itself. Remember the Scooby-Doo villain.
The racelessness translator is an analytical tool that enables us to translate what we presume is “race” or “racial” into culture, ethnicity, social class, economic class, racism as outlined by the theory itself, and often some combination of the five. To end racism as we know it in the U.S., we must do the difficult work of properly translating racelessness (i.e., “race”). That will then expose us to the reality of what “race” really is: racism hiding its face, a seemingly permanent social and/or economic class hierarchy of humans based on our beliefs in “race,” practices of racialization, and hoarding of or deference to power. This is not a matter of mere semantics or rhetoric. It is a matter of recognizing these hierarchies and choosing to forge a better path forward for all of us without race/ism.
One of the greatest benefits of such translation is that it strengthens our abilities to witness and testify to how racism masquerades and gets carried as “race”—dynamics that make fighting racism from within and using racial/st ideology so cyclical and even regressive. The other tools of the theory include architecture, the walking negative, rememory, maternal energy, invisible ink, twilight, madness, consolation, nation, diaspora, and home.
When properly understood, the theory allows for more astute identifications of what racism is and isn’t, and what will and won’t work to stop racism and its ill effects in its tracks. Further, the theory opens the door to more proliferated understandings of culture, ethnicity, nation, humanity, etc., that bridge divides that needn’t be and sometimes aren’t even necessarily based on the reality of each formation. How we perceive a problem influences how we strive to solve said problem or whether you work to solve and resolve the problem at all. My perception of a problem can also have ill effects on me that are worsened if my perception isn’t rooted in effective Truth. Currently, many people inhabit half-truths or less. Such is the design of human societies—cabs of American politics and society more specifically.
To avoid the unintentional upholding of racism, I use the terms “race/ism,” “race/ist,” “racial/st, “antirace/ist,” “race/ism/less,” and “antirace/ism.” The point of these dual coinings is to highlight the deep reciprocal causal connections between racism and “race.” Most Americans tacitly believe that race exists independently of racism or racist systems, attitudes, and actions. They presuppose that there are inherent “racial” features of humans and that “racism” and “racist” beliefs and actions are biased against these so-called racial features or that racism has magically already ended, rendering “race” a non-factor. Using the nonstandard, virgule spellings of race/ism, race/ist, etc., provides visual signs that emphasize the connection between what we perceive to be “race” and what is actually racism—causes and effects.
There are six philosophies of “race.” Three answer the question “What is race?” “Race” is hereditary, synthetic, or imaginary. The other three answer “What should we do about race?” We should preserve, reform, or terminate “race.” Each of us holds two philosophies of “race” even without the language to name them. Some philosophers of “race” have dubbed these theories naturalism, constructionism, skepticism, conservationism, reconstructionism, and eliminativism. I have renamed these philosophies to increase understanding and coherence among non-philosophers of race.
If you believe that “race” is hereditary, it is biological. If you hold that “race” is synthetic, you believe that “race” is a real phenomenon that is human-made. If you contend that “race” is imaginary, like me, you know that “race” isn’t biological and, therefore, doesn’t exist biologically in humans. My view of “race” as imaginary takes me further. I hold that what people identify as “race” are other misidentified constructions, like ethnicity, culture, social or economic class, or race/ism itself. One cannot effectively stop the causes of race/ism while maintaining belief in “race” and practices of racialization. Reformers, typically synthetic-believers, work to refashion how “race” is conceived and how it operates in any given society. Preservationists, often hereditary-believers, want to keep “race.” Finally, belief-terminators like me, usually imaginary-nonbelievers and sometimes synthetic-believers, sometimes work to eradicate the belief in “race” and the practice of racialization. In this context, “racelessness” means and reflects an imaginary-terminator or synthetic-terminator philosophy.
The practice of racialization assaults people’s ethnic, class, and cultural distinctions and similarities by sometimes obliterating or often obscuring how culture, class, and ethnicity exist and how humans exist outside of race/ism. Eracesure is the outcome of the practice of racialization for each of us. In addition, I coined the terms erace and eracing. Erasure, as typically spelled, is defined as an act or instance of erasing, a place where something has been erased, a spot or mark left after erasing, and an obliteration, and a removal of writing, recorded material, or data. The tradition of thinking and expressing oneself beyond “race,” the history of obscuring such examples of thought from every canon, the history of misinterpreting or mislabeling alternative philosophies of “race,” and the general practice of racial/st ideology overdetermining how race/ism is taught, learned, read, defined, and included or excluded from conversations are examples and evidence of erasure. You can see that my “institutionalized erasure” argument from 15 years ago remains (though modified).
My examination and analyses of public discourse generally accepted as either “white,” “black,” or “colorless” confirm my conviction that racial/st language outside of and within antiracist efforts—extending to civil rights movements that predate the coining of antiracist—often perpetuate the imbalances of power and agency people often seek to change. Antiracist initiatives continue to be (e)raced in the fact that racing (meaning the act of applying raci[al/st] language and ideology) solutions has the opposite intended effect. It erases or (e)races (simultaneously replacing erasures with “race” which, in turn, causes further eracesure and the process continues cyclically) even as it tries to illuminate the problem of erasure. Eracing, eracesure, and erace indicate and implicate the actions taken by society that result in some form of subjugation based on race/ism. Eracesure happens when a person racializes themselves or society racializes the person and when a person refuses to acknowledge and know the signification of their racialization. That is especially true regarding the impact of “whiteness.” Eracesure is just one significant but impermanent outcome of race/ism.
The point of my coinings is that seeing our fellow humans in racial/st terms—seeing them as “raced”—actually creates the belief in “race” and maintains the practice of racialization, dehumanization. That is, understanding human differences (which are attributable to culture, ethnicity, class, and other factors) in either “benignly” “racial” or malignantly racist ways creates and maintains the belief in “race” and practice of racialization, which then reinforces race/ism. Hence race/ism and my other spellings keep before our eyes the fact that racism—the causes and effects—creates and requires our continued belief in “race” and practice of racialization. To eliminate racism we must eliminate our belief in “race” and our practice of racialization.
As alarming as today often is when the technology of race/ism continues to play out so clearly in our cultural–including political and educational–systems, I remain optimistic. Everything is possible. I’m audacious enough to imagine a future without race/ism—without white supremacy—not a utopia but a world where human beings truly do see themselves and each other as unified across similarities and differences. In such a world, we would radically love and look out for one another. I am because we are.
Sheena Mason
Sheena Michele Mason is an assistant professor of English at SUNY Oneonta, where she specializes in Africana literature. She holds a PhD in English literature from Howard University. She founded Theory of Racelessness, an educational firm. Her forthcoming book The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism is now available for preorder.
Thanks Sheena-
I don’t share the same hope you do. I think this way of thinking needs to find a way to be palatable and easily conveyed to the public. It has to take on legs. It has to be seen as the new “woke”
I often hear that “white people have to give up their whitened and THEN black people can give up blackness” and I don’t see either of those things happening. It can’t also be a “you jump first” thing.
I do think it’s harder for racialized black people to give it up because so much reclaimation and cultural identity has gone into the term especially 60s onward. Whereas whites investment in white as an identity is most grounded in being the dominant majority in a racialized society.
I would love if an artist/musician/public figure was somehow able to help present this to the public. Though at the same time I could understand why some would not because I think people find this idea more dangerous.
I’ve tried to have these kinds of conversations with folks who either accuse me of ignoring a problem, upholding white privilege or being confused as to what I’m saying. Sometimes asking people to contend with race isn’t real has had a lot of “well……” responses.
My reply is is that I recognize my racialization in society and don’t ignore it and all that comes with it. But I will personally NOT I identify that way and I will not identify others that way.