On Deracialization

 

https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/deracialization-now

The author, Greg Thomas, claims we conflate race and culture and they’re entirely or at least functionally or practically separable from each other and that for all of us deracialization is in order. What’s wanted is a rooted cosmopolitanism. Thomas says he is rooted in the culture, traditions and history of his people but he proceeds now in self identification as a citizen or the world but with roots in the culture of his “milieu,” his “idiomatic group”:

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“Deracialization can be achieved while maintaining allegiance to specific idioms and practices that derive from cultural, ethnic, religious, and ancestral identifications. I know this is true because I myself have enacted this perspective by remaining rooted in an Afro-American cultural milieu via my family, close friends, and associates as well as the blues, jazz, gospel, and other forms and artifacts of expression distinctive to my idiomatic group. Yet I’m also a citizen of the wider world, as cosmopolitan as jazz itself has become. I’m willing to venture that there are many others in the U.S. and elsewhere who would take to heart a stance of “rooted cosmopolitanism” and discard the idea of race, the practice of racialization (as it exists on the census form for eg.) 

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My first thought is that as things now stand self consciousness of race or ethnicity is ineradicable nor need it be eradicated in our private spaces even as I think “race and state” should be separated. 

And my thought is also that Afro-American cultural milieu” is inextricably bound up with the self consciousness of race and it’s not conflating culture and race to think so. They’re inextricable if one seeks self meaning from his heritage. Instead of deracialization or de-ethnicizing oneself, the better view, I’d think, is simply (or not so simply) not to be reductive or essentialist about it. Thomas, I think, is having it both ways, clinging to what he professes to be jettisoning from his sense of  himself.

Sent from my iPad