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
