Against black racial identity

Jason D. Hill argues that blacks should lose their blackness.

This will not mean that they will cease referring to themselves as black. The world at large, as I have said, has picked out morphological markers and racialized them. In a very real way, people of color are stuck with those designators. But they can cease identifying psychologically and morally with the burdensome evil of racial ascription and all the ways in which it circumscribes life. Black Americans may learn the process of decoupling their robust or even surface self-images and depth-identities from racial-inflicted, denigrating identities designed for them for myriad reasons.

His piece goes 180 degrees against current trends. It aligns with my thinking.

9 thoughts on “Against black racial identity

  1. That last paragraph:

    An obsession with justice and entitlement shackles the soul to the compensations of the one who has harmed one. A spirit of grievance, paradoxically, places one in a dependent role on the other. Radical forgiveness frees the soul from resentment and fosters an ethic of care towards those who have harmed one. It not only forges radically new relationships, but it also heralds a model for a new type of humanity, a new planetary ethic and humanism devoid of bitterness. Free and living in that space of radical love and forgiveness, the virtuous man or woman, holding no racial identity as his standard-bearer, stands confidently with palms facing the universe and declares to the world, “I have no history. I have no race. I have only you, and the future.”

    Wow. Just… Wow.

    • It’s incredible to me that some people see this as utopian vs. dystopian.

      Avoiding a spirit of grievance is all well and good, but we don’t need a new type of humanity. We don’t need to detonate our histories or erase our peoples. And good luck getting “radical love and forgiveness” from identity-free secular humanism. The rage of secular humanists against their outgroups is quite intense.

  2. I disagree with this approach. I don’t see the problem with people keeping their own identity. I also think it’s absurd to say that Europeans ‘invented’ blacks. Races and identities are real things. It would be a real loss, if, in three hundred years, due to uncontrolled migration, the current peoples of Nigeria had been replaced by Chinese, or the Japanese by European whites.

    When I see people make attacks against “whiteness”, it makes me cringe, and all of it has actually made me see myself as more white than before (in years past, I would have described my identity as American with some nods towards ethnic heritage). It’s okay that there is diversity among humanity. It’s okay to be white. It’s okay to be black. Africa is always going to mean something different to a black person than it will to me. And that’s okay! We don’t have to pretend that races don’t exist. Even AI can see them, much to the dismay of progressives.

    • Eventually, everything will blend together, and distinct ethnic identities will erode. Human beings move around and mix far faster than natural selection differentiates us. To preserve current levels of variation indefinitely would require virtually no migration and also virtually no intermarriage between different groups, something that won’t be achieved voluntarily.

      I guess the question is, are we willing to impose draconian restrictions on what people can do and where they can go just to preserve (or fossilize) cultures as though they were exhibits in a cosmic zoo? Because short of a universal, extremely illiberal regime, the melting of the global pot is an inevitability, it’s just a matter of time.

      • People seem to get very upset over the disappearance of this or that random species of animal. They worry about the loss of biological diversity, yet seem to care little about the loss of human diversity. Yet to me, it seems a bigger deal for the Irish people, or the Jewish people, or the Japanese people, to go extinct than some particular species of bat or rhinoceros. And for clarity sake, I think it is good for us to protect rhinos from extinction!

        Culture as it exists today doesn’t need to be completely frozen (indeed, I would say that our culture and that of other countries has many bad elements). But cultures should be allowed to develop relatively organically, and nations should be allowed to preserve themselves by prohibiting permanent settlement of foreigners in large numbers. Some nations can be more open to immigration than others (what it means to be an American isn’t tied to a particular group of people the way being Irish or Japanese is), though even for them a more modest pace would be ideal (maybe 200K/yr vs. 1M/yr) so that the culture/society isn’t as impacted by it, and other nations should be allowed to preserve themselves as nations for their peoples.

      • Because short of a universal, extremely illiberal regime, the melting of the global pot is an inevitability, it’s just a matter of time.

        Dunno. Some observe that today’s world is more segregated than the 1950’s. The Hasidim/Amish/Indian tribes etc. seem to be a thing.

        When times are tough, ethnic cohesion trumps universalism; and times are always tough.

  3. We all know why blacks want to be blacks. It is advantageous. You get free stuff. You get power. It’s a ready made excuse for your failings. Duh.

    I can’t see blacks every willingly giving up such advantages. You are asking for disproportionate virtue out of them. Perhaps here and there a few talented tenth blacks that feel they could make it as individuals better then as blacks and would prefer to be individuals, but they are a minority of blacks.

    The only way blacks will give up racial identity and grievance is if it has a cost associated with it. That is if other races formed their own racial power block and pushed back enough to make racial grievance a bad deal for blacks.

  4. “Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word “race” has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.”
    -Jacques Barzun
    Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937)

    • “the race question appears a much bigger affair than a trumped-up excuse for local persecution. It becomes rather a mode of thought endemic in Western civilization. It defaces every type of mental activity — history, art, politics, science and social reform.”
      – Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Modern Superstition (1937)

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