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