Race, ultimately, is a nihilistic non-identity, a solipsistic Manichean construct of categoric antitheses, in which white is everything that is not Black, and Black is everything that is not white. It is also a process of racialization, of ordering social reality in racial terms, and thus must be confronted not with mere conceptual critique, but with action. At present, much of that action is subsumed in, well, conceptual critique. Some of that work is valuable. However, if our prevalent social, political, and academic discourses on race are any measure, the majority of that work falls into the vindicationist trap of attempting to affirm human worth through negating its negation (anti-racism?!), which involves an ironically implicit embrace of non-identity. Somehow, there continues to be a blind and stubborn refusal to recognize a basic logical and moral truth: 0 x 0 = 0.
Not least among the consequences of this absurd state of affairs is the aggressive and methodic reduction of Blackness to a decidedly racialized identity. Black, far from referring to a particular people and their historical legacy, has once again come to represent everything that it is ascriptively not: Not free, not whole, not equal. It even seems that we have consciously extended this archetypal model of self-as-negation to other categories of identity, such as gender. Even when we aren’t talking about race per se, it’s likely that we’re actually talking about race.
We can’t continue to evade the work of building just relationships by furiously pretending that reconfiguring our categories of analysis is the same as reconfiguring reality, that changing the map changes the territory. Representation is an abysmally poor substitute for transformation.
