All Race And Only Race All The Time
Oh, and white people, blah, blah, blah. Yawn. And bullshit.

My tweet:

I've never experienced anyone so toxically race-obsessed as Robin DiAngelo. My friends are my friends. Most, including the white people, are browner than I am, since I'm tan like typing paper. Some browner ones are browner than others. Least interesting thing about any of them. https://t.co/HIfoh37vVz

— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) August 21, 2020

Echoes of this in this piece at Unherd by Ralph Leonard, with the subtitle, "One of the most banal and vulgar ways to think about humanity is to classify by 'race'":

While cultural differences do certainly exist, they are not as distinct and solid as we might imagine. The truth is that 'black' and 'white' Americans are much more similar to one another than different. The entire shelf of modern American music would not exist without black Americans. What we call 'black culture' wouldn't exist without the European influences it had to draw upon. The point is made by Albert Murray in his masterpiece The Omni-Americans, which he wrote as a "counter-statement" to the "race oriented propagandists" of his day:

"The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multi-coloured people. There are white Americans so to speak and black Americans. But any fool can see that the white people are not really white and that black Americans are not black. They are all interrelated in one way or another."

"Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences", Murray goes on, "the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other." Murray made his declaration of America as a "multicoloured nation", not a multiracial one, in 1970. With decades of further immigration from all around the world, which has added new elements to America's national culture, his argument is even more true now than it was in his time. Yet I suspect Murray's words (notice how doesn't capitalise either black or white) would now be received with suspicion in some circles. Indeed, his arguments would be criticised as denying the 'reality of race' and therefore 'denying' racism.

The real problem with uppercasing racial categories is that -- like many of the symbolic actions that have followed this 'racial awakening', from toppling statues to woke rebranding by corporations -- it creates the illusion that wide-ranging change is 'finally' happening. But real progress will only occur when the material conditions of black Americans has improved, and when laws and institutional practices that empower police to brutalise citizens have been overturned. In other words, the prize is not symbolic concession, but radical social transformation. The former is easy and superficial; the latter is hard and substantive.

Ah-hah.

The growing influence of identity politics and racial essentialism in the media, academia and other mainstream institutions is all in the name of equality and diversity. Nevertheless, it is a way of thinking that permanently categorises human beings, putting them into rigid racial, ethnic and cultural boxes. Race isn't regarded as a social construct that can be explained and analysed historically, but as an omnipresent state of being which we must 'come to terms with'. Ironically this undermines the lived experience of belonging to a diverse society with all of its messy, complicated and very human dynamics.

Totally sick thinking. As a mediator, I see underscored that our assumptions about *individuals* (and that word's important!) are often wrong. The notion "white people" are monolithic & share a collective ugliness, a sort of racial original sin they're born with, is really vile. https://t.co/Kkt0ybBO4z

— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) August 22, 2020