The Togetherness Wayfinder and the Solution to Racism

Tracking the development of race is like waking up from a dream to find oneself in a cold forest on a moonless night in a thick, dark fog. There are strange sounds and eerie sensations. The ground is moist and slippery. The smells are strange and sometimes turn your stomach. Everything feels slimy, sticky, prickly, or all three at once. Understanding how you got there is important, but you want to get out of there more than anything. Then you discover forces around you, and inside, you are holding yourself there, stumbling around in a place you would never ask to be. Someone hands you a guidebook that might show you a way out.  

The Raceless Antiracist is like the owner’s manual for a new toolkit: the Togetherness Wayfinder. This smartly arranged collection of tools is a navigational framework for bypassing the language of race(ism), repudiating colorblindness, rendering binary identities obsolete, removing the limits racialized oppression imposes, and exposing how racism masquerades as race. The Raceless Antiracist is a primer and call to action for media makers, parents, educators, and activists. It combines instructions for use, philosophical appraisal, literary analysis, and stipulations. It challenges us to use the Togetherness Wayfinder to catalyze a provocative truth: race is an illusion, and without it, racism cannot exist. The book is part of a dynamic, ongoing effort to restore humanity’s humanity. The initiative requires ongoing strategy refinement, regular tech updates, and a team of trainers and coordinators.

The author, Dr. Sheena Mason, is a raceless antiracist. She writes clearly and bluntly, as if she feels the weight of her task. The table of contents suggests a confident, thoughtful presentation informed by experience. Her lived experience as a foster child was harrowing, upsetting, and valuable. Her training has produced a clever, courageous, creative educator and scholar. Dr. Mason is a mother clearing space for children’s futures. She is an optimist committed to bringing good into the world. Like Atlas, she must have strong shoulders, a solid core, and sturdy legs because she has chosen to bear the world's weight by unflinchingly writing this dissonance-provoking book.

The book is grounded in philosophy and is supported by data from multiple disciplines. Her rhizomatic approach brings together far-flung perspectives that converge on the ethical content of bio/genetic research that fail to support the idea of different types of Homo sapiens that can be further divided into races. The work of William Montague Cobb provides a foundation for merging genetic data from identity by descent (IBD) and identity by state (IBS) with an adequate review of the scientific data related to human biological genetic diversity. Mason adds the vital issues of the mischaracterized racialization of disease and the crucial genetic findings that show human migration patterns out of Africa across Eurasia that then flow back into Africa. Additionally, the seminal work of David Reich and Joseph Henrich can be considered to provide substantive support for Mason’s argument.

Ubuntu, a Nguni Bantu term, is a tool in the Together Wayfinder toolkit. Ubuntu is often translated as ‘I am because we are.’ Ubuntu is realized by humanizing others. Those that are not part of my group are like me. Mason says, “In other words, Ubuntu ways of seeing and being center the acknowledgement that none of us exists within a vacuum. Hyperindividualism exists in antithesis to reality.” Ubuntu appears to be a Swiss army knife-type tool. It is always needed. It can be appropriate in every situation.

Mason argues that race is the imposition of a narrow hierarchical conception of humanity, thus exposing the purpose of the modern iteration of the concept. Imposition requires an application of power. Race(ism) is both an application of power and an effective deflection from it. Status, privileges, and control over those who are Othered are practical benefits of participating in the race illusion. She mentions the disguise worn by synthetic believers and constructionists of race, implying they are intentionally masking belief in biological race.  Mason must go deeper by explicating the powerful confusion imprinted by applying the illusion and creating the cognitive delusion of race. People who acknowledge race to be a scientific fallacy yet apply it practically may be delusional. Digging deep into the psychology of cognitive delusion reveals something so deep-seated that the illusion of race manifests as something absurdly organic and tangible. These implications make the Togetherness Wayfinder even more necessary.

The Togetherness Wayfinder emerged from Mason’s affirmational study of Blackness. She saw the imbalance in the lack of scientific substance related to race and the vibrant efforts to combat antiblack racism by asserting racialized identities. Racelessness became a counterbalance to the antiblack racism endemic in society and the corrective to the racialized antiracism movement. Here, Mason seems to nod, perhaps unwittingly, to an insight into the popularity of mainstream race warriors and the marginalized popularity of nationalist race-based ideologies. The racialized antiracism movement argues for a racialized or colorblind space of equal opportunity and status within the dominant, white-racialized mainstream. Nationalists racialized ideologies argue for a racialized space distinct and apart from the dominant, white-racialized mainstream. The difference is the antiracists expect to establish equal justice within a system designed for racial(ist) labor exploitation. In contrast, the Nationalist ideology establishes its own racial(ist) advantage system. The critical insight is supporting and maintaining the race(ist) architecture and the illusion of race.

This reveals another area where the theory of the Togetherness Wayfinder should be enhanced. Mason’s Theory of Racelessness presents a nuanced breakdown of categories using the philosophy of race. I have had many discussions about the Theory of Racelessness. It produces dissonance when people are challenged to apply racelessness. Using the Togetherness Wayfinder will be more accessible to grassroots practitioners when the dissonance is overcome. A section about ways to remove the dissonance will make the Together Wayfinder a more popular problem-solving application.  

The Raceless Translator is a tool in the toolkit. Mason describes it as “an intuitive tool that is based on a simple truth: when people use “race” to describe a person, they generally are actually saying something about that person’s culture, ethnicity, social class, economic class, experience with or participation in racism, or some combination thereof.” These factors are conflated as race. The Raceless Translator scaffolds above the incorrect conflations and points us to the intended meaning masked by race(ism).

Colorblindness is a helpful example of the Racelessness Translator. Colorblindness fails as a remedy to race(ism) because it does not question the false foundation that asserts race(ism). Race(ism) is assumed and ignored. Its fractured nature is revealed when the odious language of colorblindness is simplified. There is an inherent contradiction in any humanist assertion of antiracism that emerges from a racialized assumption, like colorblindness, because any racialized assumption carries the denial of equal humanity. 

Mason applies the Raceless Translator to Martin Luther King’s famous dream, in which he wants his children to “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” She argues that King demands that he not be racialized. Racializing is the problem; skin color is not the issue. Racialization is the dehumanization that creates the Other. It makes the perception of difference and a dichotomy. This is a false difference because there is no genetic dichotomy.

In his dream, Martin Luther King did not refer to race when he said, “color of their skin,” as almost everyone mistakenly assumed. He referred to the devaluation of his children’s ethnicity, social status, and presumed experience that results from being racialized as Black Americans. The Raceless Translator admonishes and equips you to get beyond the cognitive delusion inherent in racialization and refer to the actual sources of and reasons for the devalued experience of people racialized as black. The color of the skin is not the reason.

However, the difference and dichotomy become empirically tangible only within the illusion of the “human race.” There is no human race; there is only the human species. The illusion of the human race incorrectly assumes differences and assigns undesired status and perceived power over those designated as The Other. Mason claims that this racializing worldview is asserted and believed by default. “But people during his lifetime intuitively translated King’s words to mean how I’ve translated his words, which is what made King so dangerous to the status quo. If colorblindness assumes “race” and tries to overlook it, then antiblack racism will persist." (Mason, 90)

Mason calls the creation of the false perception of difference and dichotomy madness. Madness is the puzzlement inherent in turning an illusion into a real thing. It is deeply embedded in the psyche and becomes an illusion. Again, Mason must probe deeper. The illusion is realized in the creation of the Other as not being like me. The Other is an actual or potential threat to me, a cognitive delusion, and must be restrained (a wall or ghetto), controlled (imprisoned or enslaved), or eliminated (killed).

Twilight is the next factor in the Togetherness Wayfinder. It is the space and process of growing from madness to clarity. In 1979, I began a lifelong inquiry into the dissonance of race(ism). I had recently learned about the spuriousness of race, and I started questioning the dissonance of the prevalent use of the concept. While making sense of Mason’s twilight tool, I recall an incident where I crafted language to communicate a raceless perspective. I was raised in Los Angeles, California. I was 22 in 1980; on my way to a planning meeting for a community education event about citizen oversight of the police, I stopped at a newly reopened gas station to fill up my car. The attendant who came to the car window was Asian and spoke with a prominent accent. I gave him a credit card and asked him to fill it up. Another attendant close to my age began checking the tire pressure as two more attendants cleaned the windows. Suddenly, the first man darted out of the office, stopped the gas pump, and confronted me, yelling what sounded like “thief.” We walked into the office, where he tried to process my credit card. A red light came on, and the man cut my credit card in half with scissors. I raised my voice, demanding to know why he did that. He yelled what sounded like, “Card no good. You thief. Pay money.” All the men started shouting in what I now know was Korean.

I knew there was a mistake, and I did not have enough cash to pay for the pumped gas. I needed to go home for the money. Cash was demanded on the spot. Since there was no reason to argue, I walked to my car, intending to drive home for the money. An attendant opened the hood of my car and reached into the engine compartment. I grabbed his hand before he could yank a handful of cables. The other men surrounded me in martial arts stances. A crowd was gathering around us. I released the man and yelled to call the police.

I told the Los Angeles Police officers what happened. They did not even try to understand the Korean men. They told me to go home, get the cash, and pay for the gas pumped into my car. As I pulled away, the men yelled angrily in Korean.

I returned with the money. I asked the man why he said I was a thief. Calmly, he told me they had been taught Black people lie, didn’t want to work, and would steal what they needed. I told them many people are like that, even in Beverly Hills, Little Tokyo, and Koreatown in LA. I told them the problem that day was that they did not treat me like an equal human being. And they should treat the people in their new neighborhood like their business clients and friends, or they would never be safe. In 1993, that gas station was burned to the ground in the Rodney King Rebellion. I started growing out of my madness and through the twilight that day. It was not apparent then, but the holes in the illusion of race were exposed.

Race has been constructed with the illusion of rebar-reinforced concrete around human identity. Mason calls upon the voices of writers who have dissected, deconstructed, and dismantled the race(ist) construct to show that it is not a solid concrete wall and rebar but more like a chain link fence when the illusion is penetrated. You can see right through it. When race is accepted as a non-existent lie and manipulation, the illusion topples, and new raceless realities and opportunities emerge. The toolkit’s design intends to lead the reader to an awareness of raceless possibilities. We can imagine living outside of the violent and oppressive limits of a racialized society.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Maxine Hong-Kingston’s The Woman Warrior are effective references to the interplay of paternalism and race(ism). They complicate and problematize the experience of being female in a racial(ist) society. Mason hears the voices of Morrison and Hong-Kingston’s characters, telling stories that re-member the experiences that take them into and through madness and twilight. They patch together the architecture of their whole lives, not just the cinder-block racialized oppression of dehumanization, exploitation, and pain. By re-membering, rememory becomes another tool in the toolkit to chip away at the racialized cinder block until the illusion is toppled. They re-construct an evidence-based history of the undivided humanity that makes them whole. They have not discarded the illusion. They see it for what it is: a horrible reality of the worst of us. They imagine living beyond it and constructing a new reality. (A project in progress is writing a curriculum about human progress. It will cover the 300,000-year history of hominids, contextualizing human progress, including the introduction of the notion of race, its manipulation into a social illusion and cognitive delusion, and its use in creating dehumanizing modern racism.)

Mason uses Èdouard Glissant’s concept of opacity to explain the quality of seeing beyond the chain link fence. Mason calls this ‘reading the invisible ink,’ another critical tool in the toolkit. Mason explains,                 

In other words, it problematizes frameworks that reduce, essentialize, and dehumanize, which is what race/ism is designed to do, and it prevents us from understanding – even if not agreeing with – other perspectives. By acknowledging the often opaque nature of humanity, we can create a way for everyone to find and dwell in the twilight, the in-between space that black-and-white racial/st ideology prevents and masks. (Mason, 149)  

With deft insight, Mason parses George Lamming’s novel In the Castle of My Skin to highlight two more tools: marronage and creolization. By this point, the toolkit is expected to show a degree of empowerment such that marronage is possible. Marronage is the escape from enslavement and psychological colonization. Creolization is the discovery and assertion of self. Creolization manifests in personal emergence and community building free of the limits imposed by racialization.

The concepts of Nation and Diaspora are shown in the toolkit. Mason uses Omnivorous Poetics to introduce them. Our identity is not shaped by allegiance to borders. Identity is shaped by how our humanity is expressed by growing beyond transethnicity - the creolization of culture and ethnicity, to new organic identities. We can allow identity creolization when we break free of the ego-gratifying limits of asserting one’s national hubris. Creolization begins to sync humanity with the organic flow of nature. When we decolonize our imaginations, there are no imaginary, illusionary, delusionary, pseudo-intellectual borders around our humanity to be used for managing wealth and power. Managing wealth and power remains. Using race(ism) for the purpose is overcome.

Omnivorous Poetics in the Togetherness Wayfinder requires us to locate our emancipated selves within the family of life on our planet and our planet in the cosmos. The re-memory tool reconnects us with our common archaic humanity. Omnivorous Poetics requires us to reconnect our elemental existence with all that has been created and manifest. The physical world is all stardust. Humans are stardust. We are in a relationship with more than every human. We are in a relationship with everything.   

Dr. Mason offers a robust toolkit to aid in reconstructing humanity. The time has come to tackle the task. Western culture is at an inflection point. The global dominance of Western systems of colonization and imperialism is eroding on multiple fronts. The Raceless

Antiracist is a vital contribution, a guidebook on how to effectively minimize the penchant for violence while engaging in action that renders the scourge of race(ism) into history. The Togetherness Wayfinder wants to help us turn a dehumanizing stain on human history into a stepping stone to an even more humanizing future. Creating a raceless world is an idea whose time has come.

By: Dr. Arnett Duncan

Executive Director

Kweli Educational Enterprises, Inc.

Surprise, Arizona

On the utility and Judeo-Christian idiom of Sheena Mason’s “togetherness wayfinder”

In this review, I highlight and evaluate the pedagogical purpose, philosophical substance, and theological tenor of Sheena Mason’s antiracist hermeneutic, the “togetherness wayfinder,” as seen in her most recent book, The Raceless Antiracist. Likewise, I will consider how the book’s central theory functions as a sort of Catholic social teaching without the archetypical limits and containment of de jure Catholic doctrine. Most of my analysis will take a metatextual view of her monograph with a penchant to privilege its paratextual material (foreword, introduction, appendix). The reason I am centering these sections that might seem less central to the text is because Mason’s “togetherness wayfinder,” which is the hermeneutical key to unlocking the fuller essence of the intellectual substance in her chapter studies, is most clearly illuminated in the paratext. This present review seeks to help readers of The Raceless Antiracist understand how and why a reading act faithful to the theoretical tenants of the wayfinder unlocks Mason’s vision of human flourishing.

Much can (and should) be said about Sheena Mason’s marvelous monograph, The Raceless Antiracist. In short, Sheena argues that the notion of “race” reinscribes “racism,” the roots of which––intellectual history reveals––are found in the categorical (and hierarchical) thinking of Enlightenment Europe. Thus, it is most prudent to refrain from using a vocabulary of “race” altogether and to replace it with alternative, more accurate categorical indices and considerations: economics, culture, class, ethnicity, history, nationality, diaspora, etc. In fact, Sheena consistently spells “race” either with scare quotes or as race/ism, and she similarly creates the modifiers race/ist (racist) and racial/st (racial) to “highlight the deep reciprocal connections between the apparition of “race” and racism and to make clear that the illusion of “race” itself is a symptom––an effect––of racism” (9). Faithful to her method, Mason modifies terms such as “black” and “white” with the adjective “so called” (9).

Thus, if “race” is tantamount to a man-made myth from early modernity––which it is––then Mason’s call for racelessness must be taken seriously. If you have doubts, then consider the attitudes toward “race” in the Roman Empire. A good social historian of classical antiquity would say that skin color (“race”) was not a limiting or even extenuating consideration in sociocultural or political advance in the Roman ranks. Status was indexed according to other considerations, such economic status, culture, or class. Because Roman articulation of its own sociopolitical systems could not simply fall back onto the ‘logics’ of the biological myth that modernity calls “race,” Rome (unlike the USA) was better prepared to tell the facts about its past and present inner-workings without feeling the need to “tell it slant” by introducing faux-raciological rationales.

While our world today maintains the morally laudable choice to not feed humans to hungry lions, Mason’s book compellingly signals a continuing blind spot in our present racial/st discourse. Although her theory of racelessness is broadly applicable to “hel[p] people free themselves from binary modes of thought as it pertains to social identities and overlapping and interlocking systems of oppression” (xix), Mason nevertheless maintains a particular focus on how we theorize “race” in a way that at least holds back, and at worst actively harms those who are racialized as “black.” How timely a text! The question remains, then: if the myth of biological “race” is a pseudoscientific, fallacious fabrication first published in a 1684 French science journal, if geneticists have empirical evidence that deconstructs the biologically deterministic racial/st fabrication that grew up concurrent with colonization and the modern European nation-state [see Chapter 3], and if “racial groups” can show more genetic variation within themselves than across the so-called races… then why do we still rely upon racial/st indices in popular parlance today?

Answers abound, but Mason’s is simple, and clear. In short, Sheena says we should not. She calls for the elimination of “racial” categories, citing their race/ist roots that remain inextricably and toxically tethered to the racial/st categories themselves. Thus, the winning move is not to play; rather, we can (and must!) leave racial/st indexing behind and adopt new rubrics of sociocultural analysis that comprise more accurate anthropological categorizations.

If taken seriously, then Mason’s call would disrupt and deconstruct dominant racial/st discourse, especially in Western academe and democratic identity politics. The subsequent critical fruits would be legion for our cultural moment, helping us to think soberly and sincerely about what we would otherwise call “racism.” Mason gifts us a more factual framework that could free us from a vocabulary of “race relations” and guide us, for instance, to consider the broader, universal spirit of evil behind not only the KKK’s domestic terror against Americans racialized as “black” (plus Catholics and Jews), but also behind other evils such as the Holocaust, or any of the other 20th century genocides wherein ethnic groups often of the same “race” hated and even killed one another. Being stripped of our racial/st language, we are forced to look deeper into inter- and even intra-“racial” violence, where the mythos of biological “race” does not account for the mechanisms of rotten self-love (hate, greed, pride) lodged far deeper than the accidents of superficial pigmentation. To address systems and sentiments of deep-seated evil, we do well to move beyond the pithy diagnosis of “racism.”

Having cast aside the limiting vocabulary or race/ism, the “togetherness wayfinder” unlocks a trove of expanded terminology and leaves us better equipped to analyze, name, grieve, and celebrate how those racialized as “black” have navigated and negotiated with “whiteness.” Stateside today [see Sheena’s Chapter 9], such unlocking would “decolonize our minds” from race/ism and thereby posture the USA to embrace its “creolization” (174) and so cease from conflating “black” with “poor,” or “white” with “rich.”

What did Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy teach us about the face of rural Appalachian poverty? And what of the USA’s elite HBCUs and historically affluent suburban enclaves primarily comprising so-called “black” Americans? Did not notions of nativism work together with Jim Crow to operationalize a biopolitical (read: lynching) and economic dominance not only over the descendants of African slaves, but also over Italian immigrants? Race/ism is simply too shallow a hermeneutic to meaningfully read the fullness of a culture. Moreover, the ever-reductionistic notions of race/ism lack the capacity to (re)catechize an ethnically divided populace toward solutions––or healing.

Here's how Mason’s theory could sound in a “Sociology 210” undergrad course, for instance. Having entered the apertures afforded by racelessness, students gain access to a broader terminological trove of sociocultural analysis. For midterm group projects, students set aside the limitations of race/ism and begin to take a sober, sincere look at mental health outcomes, making sense of the data concerning male suicide rates across ethnic demographics. If the so-called “white” men are the privileged oppressors, then why are so many of them killing themselves? Why do Native American men have the highest suicide rates, and why do Hispanics and so-called “blacks” have the lowest? Empowered by Mason and unfettered from the totalizing (thus limiting) binary that is Kendi and DiAngelo’s racialized “white/other” (and probably Marxian) paradigm, students of Sheena can approach data sets better equipped to see, name, and grieve the multidimensionality of both social excellence and decadence. Such perspicacity also helps students to work toward conclusions that had previously been rhetorically inaccessible and even epistemically blocked due to the intellectually stifling and logically unfalsifiable tenants of racial/st theory so insistent on upholding and centering that sociocultural construction called “race.”

Liberated by Sheena’s theory, a college sophomore might post something like this in his SOC 210 online discussion forum, answering Sheena’s “Day 12 prompt question” in the Appendix as he identifies intersectionalities and describes how systems of unjust partiality (“racism”) work:

“…after Biblical defenses for slavery could no longer stand up to our nation’s 13th Amendment, former salves (of recent African descent) and sharecroppers (mostly of northern European descent) took on subservient roles and jobs that were like slavery! Then, as more European immigrants (i.e. Italians, who weren’t considered “white”) came to the US in droves during the Gilded Age, factories and fields filled up with immigrant labor––including children! I thought this was a land of liberty and justice… for all?! Industrialization, sharecropping, and the prison system were like new forms of slavery… they arrested people (especially so called “black” males descended from African slaves) for bogus stuff like “loitering!” Why?! This history is unhinged!”

Hermeneutical freedoms afforded by racelessness allow for robust, deeper readings of religious discourse, too:

“I wonder… after the 13th Amendment was passed, which Protestant churches continued to justify slavery, using “the curse of Ham” to justify bad treatment of so-called “blacks?” Was it rich planters and industrialists, or the so-called rural and poor “whites” … or both? I also saw some photos of Catholic priests and religious sisters walking across that huge bridge in Selma with MLK… I wonder how, or if, my Protestant church denomination was involved in the Civil Rights Movement?

Rather than broadly (and blindly) asserting that “racism” is responsible for different outcomes, this sophomore now uses alternative terms of analysis that pick up on latent intersectionalities, yielding a more honest, factual, and fruitful sociological evaluation.

To be fair, this sort of nuanced analysis already happens––but not everywhere, and not enough. In my judgment, when such ideas are either explored with students or translated from the academy to the polis, the fruits of a raceless analysis can be hard (intellectually and emotionally) to harvest and then hold because racelessness eludes easy answers. Racelessness necessitates that its readers develop a metaphysical moral ethic to discern the ontological essence(s) of groups and individuals (hard work) rather than the stay at surface level pigmented accidents (easy work). The raceless reader is left wondering whether Solzhenitsyn was right (…and he was) in The Gulag Archipelago when he asserted:

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”

The order of simplified binaries and racial/st terminology can give a quick yet costly cognitive rest. A raceless lens, though, allows the readers and critics to see the ubiquitous permeation of evil––and good.

Frankly, I would not be surprised if the most recent wave of literary ecocriticism has emerged from professors’ phlegmatic frustration with progressive peers who tirelessly tout social anthropology’s choleric, cheap, cookie-cutter dualities (i.e. “black/white”) at the expense of deeper inquiry into the nature of things. Mason’s musical monograph understands this critical gridlock and takes it a step further. Rather than envisioning a day when “little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls,” Mason dreams of a day when children can simply hold hands one with another. Her mature move beyond borders of “race” invites readers into inquisitive inductions that supplant race/ism’s damning deductions. Without “race,” love comes more readily (see Chapter 11). Echoing Sojourner Truth (“Ain’t I a woman?”), Sheena’s strong strand of social ontology privileges human personhood, permitting the individual to have a hearing.

Sheena’s text, to borrow from Barthes, is written in a “readerly” way, not a “writerly” way. With candor, a call, and a clear conclusion, Sheena invites us into her life, her studio, her story nestled at the heart of her theory. Moreover, if James Olney was right that autobiography is a categorically malleable genre with no definite delimitations, then I would motion that The Raceless Antiracist doubles as Mason’s self-story, running as a fitting, syncopated subplot that keeps the tale’s theoretical taxonomy and teleology tethered to a human heartbeat. This is why Mason can so effectively mete out an authoritative (though not authoritarian) maternal energy in her Introduction as she illuminates the intellectual work of her hermeneutic: “Listen,” she commands her readers as she turns to “[t]he express purpose of the togetherness wayfinder” (8):

1.) race/ism is a self-perpetuating social construct,

2.) “race” and “racism” are fundamentally indistinguishable,

3.) “racialization” creates an inescapable socioeconomic hierarchy,

4.) language of “race” affects people differently, acting as a barrier to healing and unity,

5.) “race” must be translated into more accurate, comprehensible terms (i.e. cultural, social, ethnic, economic, causes/ effects of “racism”),

6.) race/ism’s manifestations vary in location and intensity, and its existence can be ended (10, paraphrased).

Those who skim this paratext will miss not only Mason modus operandi, but also the pragmatic and pedagogical utility––not to mention the very soul––of the wayfinder.

Before this, the foreword comprises a glowing endorsement from Rev. Dr. Starlette Thomas. Her warm yet frank tone is undergirded by a Biblical lexicon and Pauline lexemes that together transmit the tenacity and tenderness so characteristic of the New Testament’s pastoral epistles. Rev. Dr. Thomas’ tone-setting reveals this theory’s heart from the start; she tells readers: “in your hands, you hold a treatise, comprehensive instructions for our social healing and deliverance” (xi, emphasis added). In the book’s end, the aforementioned Appendix includes a “Togetherness Wayfinder 45-Day Guide.” Each day has a practical writing prompt with a corresponding writing exercise. If deconstruction theory came to diminish, demolish, and destroy, Sheena has come to build-back-better.

In my estimation, as Sheena builds her case, her methods and mission could be described as a sort of secular version of “Catholic social teaching.” Inaugurated in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, the tradition of Catholic social teaching (CST) discerns prescient social challenges and aims to apply a translated Christian ethic in an accessible idiom to the challenges of our (post)modern world. Concerning “racism,” CST is far from silent; Lumen Gentium, Gaudium et Spes, and pastoral letters from various Catholic prelates (whether popes and bishops) share with Sheena a tenor, trajectory, and stated aims. What, then, is their difference?

Mason maintains (with sincerity and humor) that “most people will recognize that I am as far to the left as you can be without being completely off of the spectrum” (3). She’s right about how left she is, although this does not diminish the fact that the essence of her work betrays the patent provenance of a Christian religious framework. Consider how Chapter 10, “Home,” shares in Christ’s metaphor for ‘the wise man who built his house upon the rock.’ Concerning Christian intertextuality, G.K. Chesterton notes in his book Orthodoxy how modernity not infrequently borrows pieces of the Christian whole, adopting and adapting particulars toward an end that may look, sound, and even feel like the orthodoxy, despite sometime substantive derivations therefrom. In my judgment, this is what Mason has done with her “togetherness wayfinder.” Her substantive derivation, though, is small, if at all, given that the wayfinder traces a cultural hermeneutic whose contours convey caritas.

These configurations of Judeo-Christian charity are unsurprising, though. In the West, Jorge Luis Borges asserted, we belong to the Jews and the Greeks, and I would venture to say that the Hebrew laws concerning ontological care for the sojourners, the fatherless, and the widows shaped the West’s moral teachings more than Hellenistic virtue ethics ever did. Indeed, when our Western ethics compassionately consider smallness, particularity, portraiture, weakness, marginality, charity, youth, or senescence (i.e. the weak, the individual), we are but participating in the Levitical law and Sermon on the Mount’s impulse to foster solidarity and fraternal charity with manifestations of feebleness and fragmentation––the kind of fractured frailty that coalesces in the cross of the incarnate Christ.

Sheena, then, participates (whether knowingly or unknowingly) in this deeply Christian task––creedal convictions notwithstanding. Nevertheless, the “togetherness wayfinder” and Christianity differ in their epistemic roots, even if they both share in the mood of the law and the prophets, because religious orthodoxy as such does not state itself in her book. But, regardless of the epistemic roots of Mason’s mission, she presents an argumentation and conclusion that correspond mightily with Part II of the main Christian message, which is willing the good of one’s neighbor (“…and the second one is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself” Matt. 22.39).

Mason maintains an optimism that could lead readers to think that public opinion can be flipped to mimic a monochromatic Othello board. In that sense, there is an aspirational arc to her theory. To the cynical reader, Mason’s optimistic call to action could sound pollyannaish. But, who cares? That is the cost of postulating in the prophetic mode, and for those fed up with skin-deep cultural criticism, Sheena’s theory is a bright spot in the theory world.

While her “togetherness wayfinder” does not deliver the fullness of what Johannine Scripture would call “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn. 14.6), Mason’s theory is unmistakenly working along those lines, offering help, healing, and hope in an academic idiom. Deft and nimble, Sheena effectively finds her way through the muck of race/ism and racial/st theories to deliver a love translated into theory. How much more, then, shall the wayfinder translate the limiting discourse(s) of race/ism into more adequate vocabularies that allow for fruitful conversation to flow more freely within our human taxon’s academic, political, and religious spheres!

By: Russell Galloway

PhD Candidate

Department of Modern Languages & Classics

The University of Alabama

The World Without Race?

Many social ills and psychological distortions seem to rest on core ideas or beliefs. Racist practices and ideologies seem to rest on asymmetrical beliefs about human races that became imbedded in modern life from the 18th century to the present day. The originary expression was French adventurer François  Bernier’s 1684 essay, "A New Division of the Earth", published (at first) anonymously in the leading European intellectual and scholarly outlet, Journal des sçavans.  From at least the ancient world, people had divided other people into groups different from their own, based on lineage, geographical origins, customs, religion, and so forth, but there was no system that could be applied to each and all human beings. Bernier provided that system by stipulating that all of humanity consisted of four––this number was elastic, sometimes swelling to sixty or shrinking to three in coming years––races. The divisions were based on physical traits but the “first race,” Bernier’s own, consisted of Europeans. And so it was unwounded and embellished, sometimes in ugly common ways, but in its heyday from the most exalted echelons of learning and society. Almost always with what we would now consider racism, ideas of race flourished with presumed foundations in biology. This view persisted until the 1930s saw learned separations of physical race from inherited human culture and custom. And eventually, the physical sciences of human biology reached a consensus that there was no evidence of racial blood, genes, or DNA, and even physical traits believed to be racial varied more within each so-called human race than between any two of them.

The idea of race was dead in science by the end of the 20th century, leaving ideas of race in society, along with apparently recalcitrant forms of racism. It therefore seems natural that “we” should get rid of our ideas of race, because they have no scientific foundation in biology and racist beliefs and practices are inextricable from them. That is, to really abolish racism, “we” should abolish race. This is a smooth assumption and Sheena Michele Mason devotes The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race is the Future of Antiracism to making that case.

Mason’s project is a noble one and I want to begin here with a certain fealty to the text before suggesting why some may not be convinced by this particular form of antiracist racial abolitionism. Mason’s Preface and Introduction provide the main focus and aim of the book, although they do not provide a summary of the ensuing chapters. Mason’s focus is on antiblack racism as the major paradigm of all racism. This means that the meaning of “black race” is an important target for this book. The method of the book is explained through the idea of togetherness wayfinder, as follows:

The core argument behind the togetherness wayfinder is that the un-doing of racism requires the undoing of the belief in human “races”—the idea that humans can be divided into different “races”—and the practice of racialization to undo various social and economic power imbalances. Put another way, only by ceasing to maintain “race” ideology, which includes articulations of colorblindness and more explicitly “race”-centered discourse, and its corresponding language can we stop how society upholds racism, sometimes unintentionally. Listen. Rather than center “race,” I contend that we should center race/ism. The express purpose of the togetherness wayfinder is to disrupt and destroy racism. To do so, we must embrace and put into practice certain rules, philosophies, tools, information, and language to end racism, which is a socially constructed system of economic and social oppression that requires the belief in human “races” and the practice of racialization to reinforce various power imbalances (P. 32).

            Mason carries through as a togetherness wayfinder guide, throughout the book. Chapter 1, “Architecture: Understanding Race/ism,” is a discussion of how racism requires ascribing racial identities, together with stereotypes, such as poverty, that are unrelated to those identities. Chapter 2, “Madness: Identifying Systemic Race/ism,” provides a survey of institutional or structural racism, chronicling how it divides and alienates real people and their cultural products. The African idea of ubantu provides a contrast by how people are who they are through their fulfilling relations with others, relations precluded by racialization (assigning race) and its inexorable racism. In Chapter 3, “Human Relation: Embracing Our Rhizomatic Origins,” Mason begins to provide a vision of a future without race and racism, but nonetheless based on real, non-essential human differences that include shared “racial” ancestry (genealogy). Chapter 4, “The Racelessness Translator:  Translating the Meaning of ‘Race’” explores the real background provided in Chapter 3, by showing how race is taught and learned through practices of racism. Mason here argues for humanism that is not implicitly racially white, but can recognize differences without assigning them to race. For instance, the idea of “color blindness” is not the same as the idea of racelessness. By the same token, Mason shows in Chapter 5, “Twilight: Disconnecting Freedom from ‘Race,’” how human freedom is limited when people confuse racist ideas with the meaning of race. Thus, in Chapter 6, “Walking Negatives: Defying Dehumanization,” Mason argues that returning to humanism requires undoing racialization (and with that, racism), including imposed identities of authenticity or bi-raciality that presuppose racialization. Chapter 7, “Rememory: Reconciling Our Shared Humanity,” emphasizes the importance of undoing racialization in narratives about the past, here making rich use of literature.

The remaining four chapters of the book and its conclusion further develop the theme of reclaiming (or claiming) humanity through the undoing of race. These developments are important for fleshing out how the world could look and feel without race/racism. For instance, Chapter 11, “Consolation and Maternal Energy: Practicing Radical Love,” draws on bell hooks to introduce love into the author’s account of personal abuse in a racist society:

Antiblack race/ism has done and continues to do so much harm. We need to infuse more love into our discourse, our practices, our psyches to give people the tools needed to flourish as individuals and collectives. As it stands, we live in a nation that is plagued with increased mental unwellness, social instability, and violence. Anti-black race/ism buttresses that instability. Together, we must learn how to love ourselves and each other truly as ourselves and not as avatars for our respective so-called races (P. 190).

Despite its identification of a problem and demonstrated solutions (which is often lacking in anti-racist writing), several aspects of Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race is the Future of Antiracism are not clear. What is its aim? The use of  ‘together wayfarer’ suggests a proposal or call for a movement, and for that to succeed it only needs to be rhetorically persuasive and motivational enough for people to take it up. However, if the aim is to abolish ideas and uses for race for “we” who are progressive and liberatory, it would have been more effective to include theorists and take better aim at how black race is culturally defined in black-white racial binaries, that is: To be white, a person must not have a black appearance or known black ancestry, whereas to be black, either black appearance or black ancestry is sufficient. Thus, there is no positive definition of white race or racial identity except that it is not black race or racial identity. This means that black and white are defined as logical contradictories. If that logic were correct, everyone would be either black or white, which we know is not true, because some people are mixed black and white race and others, such as Asians, are neither black nor white.  Mason’s stated focus on black race and antiblack racism unfortunately may seem to buy into the false contradiction of the black-white binary, as a description of our status quo. But the variety and multiplicity of human groups that is already recognized shows that this binary has already been partly overcome.

Mason’s assumption throughout this book that the practice of racism requires a core idea of race could have been better examined, empirically. Dehumanization and oppression are important parts of racism, but they are also applied to women of all races, religious groups such as Jews and Muslims, disabled people, trans people, indeed, to all of the oppressed. Also, people such as U.S. Hispanic/Latinos can plausibly claim to be victims of racism, without having been categorized as a race, since they are officially an ethnic group. These considerations do not detract from the harm and historical intensity of antiblack racism. But neither does antiblack racism detract from the harm and historical intensity of the German murder of 6 million Jews or the genocide of indigenous peoples throughout the world.

Related to Mason’s close identification of race or categorizing people racially, with racism, is that it leaves out much of the historical motivation for racialization after Bernier’s “New System of the Earth.” Colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade were well underway before hierarchical, white-supremacist taxonomies of race took hold. But modern slavery was established during the Enlightenment that seemed to grant all human beings a measure of equal rights. Racist hierarchies and racist ideologies provided plausible exceptions to those Enlightenment ideals. A specific case in point is that the zenith of U.S. antiblack racism occurred after antislavery abolitionists made their voices heard before the U.S. Civil War. If modern racism developed along with racialization, after the theft of resources, people, and lands created unearned wealth, then the connection between race and racism in Mason’s focus on the racism inherent in core ideas of race, over-simplifies this history. The key cause-effect relationship is not between race and racism but between economics/greed/criminality, first, and then, race/racism.   

However, despite its conceptual gaps, Mason’s Raceless Antiracist is worth reading for its many astute analyses of the connections between racism and race, and its dedicated optimism. I recommend it for readers of all ages, in all academic and general practices dedicated to progressive liberation, especially young scholars and activists who feel that their generation will be the one to abolish racism.

By: Naomi Zack

Distinguished Professor of Philosophy

Lehman College, City University of New York

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Utopian Dream: A Paradoxical Reality Book Review of The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race is the Future of Antiracism

Introduction:

For centuries a recurring dystopian of hauntological nightmares have plagued human beings across the globe primarily stemming from self-imposed ignorance, and complacency to the hegemonic social and political status quo. This dreadful truth precludes our weltanschauung that in turn characterises our ‘lived experience.’ The task is then to (un) learn our truth; to go beyond the internalised epistemic boundaries and (re)route our methodologies and theoretical orientations to establish a new positionality.

Tectonics Of Acceptance and Denial

Sheena Mason’s The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race is the Future of Antiracism, is a bold attempt to takeover this mammoth task. However, to grasp her raison d’etre of her ‘raceless political being’ and its potentiality, the reader needs to be  familiar with the ‘heterodox’ philosophies of race and her ongoing dialogues with them that are succinctly underlined in her first book, Theory of Racelessness: A Case of Antiracism. Delineating on the theoretical overlaps and conceptual  independence of the metaphysical and normative positions; Mason advocates for a skepticist eliminativist position which means to relentlessly question an a priori belief in race itself while practicing towards the eradication of whatever construes as race.

The underlying guiding assumption for Mason lies in her conviction that everyone is ‘raceless’, as. She states, ‘in eliminating “race,” that the theory of racelessness helps people recognise and imagine themselves outside of race(ism).’ (Mason, 2022).  Therefore, at a level of generality this implies that racism is real but race is not.

Opposing the commonly held  beliefs, debates, teachings, and adopted  positionalities within the anti-racist discourses, such as, constructivists , reconstructivists, conservationists, and naturalists, Mason’s aim is to dismantle the very ‘intentionality’ of term ‘race’ and any corresponding auxiliaries that uphold the semantics of race  a theoretical affirmation that is made clear in the opening paragraph of The Raceless Antiracist,

‘...racelessness is not a post-racial vision….Rather my focus is on the logical endpoint of antiracism-the undoing of our belief in human “races” and our practice of assigning “races” to humans…. Only through the abolition of [our] belief in “human races” and the discontinuation of assigning “races” to humans can we ever hope to complete the work of antiracism and inaugurate not merely a post-racial but a post-racist one.’ (Mason, 2024)

What stands out in her claim, apart from the purposeful distinction between the suffix(es) attached to the term ‘race(ial/ist)’, is the transfer of the responsibility from the social to the collective (as way to (re)read the causality of racism.) This responsibility entails an acceptance of the social construction of racism wherein the concept of ‘race’ operates as an ‘illusion.’ Thereby, -one comes to  understand while the symptoms of racism manifest in the oppressive social structures the economic forces render these corrosive societal mores as a political imperative.

This political dimension shaped by economic forces impresses on the need to realise that the practice of racialisation has nothing to do with the bogey of the concept called ‘the universality of race.’ The modus operandi of practicing this responsibility of tackling the miasma of racialisation is what Mason calls The Togetherness Wayfinder.

An Epistemological-Activist Endeavour

To metamorphose into Mason’s ‘raceless political being’, one has to adhere to the tenets of ‘Togetherness Wayfinder’; which she describes it, as an operating ‘framework in theory and practice’ and ‘also a philosophy of “race” that not only extends the boundaries of racial skepticism and delineates precise paths towards racial eliminativism but also extends philosophies of humanity, culture, ethnicity, social class and economic class.’ (Mason, 2024, p. 8)

Contextualising within the backdrop of antiblack racism in the United States, “Togetherness Wayfinder”, weaves throughout the book, as a call to a pedagogical nuanced action, starting from myth (de)formation traversing towards a paradigm shift, wherein the reader is forced to abandon their internalised ‘racial/st’ tongue.

This is a form of reconstructive stance (loosely rooted in the Analytic Philosophical tradition), wherein the rearticulation of the terminology taken in its everydayness is used in altering the way we speak about race, yet presupposes and fortifies the idea of race. Mason is critical of this approach, as she argues, that through this articulation race is often conflated with culture, ethnicity social class, economic class, or racism. (Mason, 2024, p. 11) This (mis)translation reinforces a priority in race and subsequently the practice of racialisation. To (un)learn one’s language, and to reveal the internal contradictions that often crop up when we speak about race, one has to adopt what the author calls ‘the raceless translator.’

‘The raceless translator’ functions as a core conceptual device within the ‘Wayfinder’ not just theoretically or ‘intuitively’ (an adjective used for description by the author) but rather strategically significant.

The idea of the ‘Wayfinder’ deftly joins the first half with the latter of the book. While the first half aims to demystify the genealogy of race by tracing the interpellation and the coercive ramifications (via State sponsored classifications, corporatised genetic trials etc) the second part impresses on the need to attend to the protocols of the text and the practice of reading. It lays an edifice for further philosophical and literary device such as twilight, walking negatives, rememory, invisible ink, opacity, marronage that form the basis of each chapter. As lyrical as these words seem, the author constructs them through her own positionality recuperating traditional literary texts from their conventional interpretations, rendering them as unapologetically carnivalesque, as is evident in her reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior. She does not hesitate to employ ‘omnivorous poetics’ to unravel how literature transcends its origin, for instance, her interpretation of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘Leaves of Grass’ go beyond the human relations, and insist on reciprocity of species; (I translate it as an empathy for nature.)

Mason provides a highly empathetic and yet dialectical approach. The Raceless Antiracist is refreshing in a world suffocating with atomised politics of identities. The book intends on subverting the ‘heterodox’ ontologies of race yet ends up philosophising race, which makes it an interesting contribution to public philosophy.

The book challenges the paradigms that are in vogue and leaves a cerebral aftertaste with questions to rankle the mind: Can we truly embrace our racelessness? Does this require an ontological dismemberment? The proponents of racelessness, are often criticised of being caught up in the matrix of colorblindness conflating ‘whiteness’ with racelessness.

Mason threads this dilemma carefully as she’s affirmative of the “raceless being” as a core facet of any anti-racist discourse opting out of the colour schema that in some way or the other upholds the belief in human ‘races’ , she’s wary of the utopianism attached to her pedagogy, (the Togetherness Wayfinder) yet chooses to adhere to her praxis as way to transform reality.

However, in a transactionally fragmented world, wherein identities are inhumanely exploited, and subjugated it is hard to imagine how ‘the Togetherness Wayfinder’ would chalk out its journey.

By: Prakriti Sharan

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The Ethics of Social Punishment

“The Ethics of Social Punishment should be of interest not just to academics, but to anyone who has wondered about what we owe to each other in contexts of wrongdoing. Radzik’s accessible treatment of these issues displays wisdom, clear-thinking, and an admirable concern for both moral progress and the dignity of wrongdoers. Not only does Radzik’s book mark an important contribution to the scholarly literature, it also stands to help its readers live better by informing their practices of social punishment.”

by J. P. Messina

as always, we invite you to read, share and contribute.

Everyday Punishment by J. P. Messina

The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India

“Alpa Shah’s The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India is coming at a time, when India as a nation is standing on a catastrophic crossroad that precisely reiterates the emphasis of self-reflexivity as a way to grasp the processes of freedom currently facing an existential threat.” Prakriti Sharan

opp gives thanks to the wonderful Prakriti Sharan for drawing our attention to this work, during a period when uncovering and reflecting on our histories has become more urgent than ever.

as always, we invite you to read and contribute.

Prakriti Sharan

Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods

opp’s review forum gathers together a series of contributors who offer different perspectives on the same book for an extended and rich reviewing conversation. opp invites readers to share their thoughts in the form of a review, response, critical reflection, or even a creative work or essay. Our second review forum focused on Mariana Alessandri’s 2023 book Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods. Explore the work of our contributors below.

Elisabeth Schilling.

Alexandra Abranches.

Rob Sayce.

Ayushi Jolly.

The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does

opp’s review forum gathers together a series of contributors who offer different perspectives on the same book for an extended and rich reviewing conversation. opp invites readers to share their thoughts in the form of a review, response, critical reflection, or even a creative work or essay. Our first review forum focused on Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary and Lori Gruen’s 2023 book The Good It Promises, The Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism. Explore the work of our contributors below.

Dan Boscov-Ellen.

Wyatt Radzin.

Gary Francione.