Esoteric or Mystical Nature of Race Within the Neoliberal Anti-Racist Framework

Discussion

Rhyd Wildermuth:

"A final and crucial point Adolph Reed makes throughout his critiques of Anti-Racism is that race and racism both take on a kind of mystical or esoteric quality disconnected from material reality or practical discourse. Such a mysticism can be seen clearly in Ta-Nahisi Coates’ description of whiteness as a “bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them,” or in the repeated claims on sites such as Everyday Feminism that all white people have inherent privilege regardless of their actions or material conditions, paralleling the Catholic idea of Original Sin.

Reed likewise notices the religious language in multiple essays:

Racism and white supremacy don’t really explain how anything happens. They’re at best shorthand characterizations of more complex, or at least discrete, actions taken by people in social contexts; at worst, and, alas, more often in our political moment, they’re invoked as alternatives to explanation. In that sense they function, like the Nation of Islam’s Yacub story, as a devil theory: racism and white supremacy are represented as capable of making things happen in the world independently, i.e. magically. This is the fantasy expressed in formulations like racism is America’s “national disease” or “Original Sin”—which, incidentally, are elements of the liberal race relations ideology that took shape in postwar American political discourse precisely as articulations of a notion of racial equality that was separated from political economy and anchored in psychology and individualist notions of prejudice and intolerance.1

And also:

Those quotidian realities put pressure on the reductionist premise that racial subordination remains the dominant ideological or material framework generating and sustaining systemically reproduced inequalities and class power. This tension underlies a source the appeal of ontological views of racism as an animate force that transcends time and context. Because it is an evanescent Evil that is disconnected from specific human purposes and patterns of social relations, racism, again like “terrorism,” can exist anywhere at any time under any manifest conditions and is a cause that needs no causes or explanation.

Adolph Reed’s analysis of the esoteric or mystical nature of race and racism within the neoliberal Anti-Racist framework helps elucidate specific contradictions we often encounter within Woke Ideology. For instance, Woke Ideology generally concedes that race has no biological or physical basis and is instead a social construct. However, race is posited as something that cannot be transcended or switched because race is something nevertheless inherent (and inherited) in individuals."

(https://rhyd.substack.com/p/the-metaphysics-of-woke-identity?)

The Role of the Soul in Woke Ideology

Rhyd Wildermuth:

"though there may be no genetic or biological traits that form the basis of race, racial inequality is nevertheless an inherited trait, something that “accrues intergenerationally.” A black person inherits racial inequality, while a trans person does not inherit gender inequality. Racial inequality, then, is something transmitted or inherited, something a person is born with or into, and thus it cannot be transcended.

Adolph Reed’s observation that anti-racism poses racism and white privilege as a kind of animate force or Original Sin is instructive here. Teasing out the consequences of “intergenerationally-inherited” inequality, we see that it mirrors the Woke Ideological belief that a white person is born into privilege and also cannot transcend their whiteness. Thus, race can be posited as an essential or inherent feature that bears with it inviolable traits without actually being related to the physical body of the person (race as an essential or biological trait) at all.

To sound a bit like a medieval theologian for a moment, where then do these inherited traits actually reside if not in the body? The answer appears to be within a non-physical body both external and internal to the individual, occupying a social space through its intangible yet really-existing social reality. In other words, a soul.

A white person therefore cannot become a black person because they bear the indelible mark of whiteness (privilege that always operates and benefits them), just as a black person bears the indelible mark of blackness (inequality they inherit intergenerationally that will always disfavor them in social, economic, and political relations). But because race has no basis in physical reality (again, it is a constructed/made-up category created during the Enlightenment and the birth of capitalism), it is located outside physical reality just as the soul is seen to be in Christian theology.

The soul plays out also in the Woke Ideological framework of gender, but in a slightly different way. Gender, like race, is seen as an indelible and inviolable part of a person irrespective of physical reality (sex), and described as an internal sense:

Gender identity refers to one’s internal sense of feeling masculine, feminine, both, somewhere in between, or neither. Like many things that people experience internally, there is also a desire to express that outwardly, which is why gender identity can influence gender expression…

…Similar to sexual orientation, gender identity is generally viewed by therapists as something that people are born with, and not something they “choose”.

Thus, a trans person was born trans but mistakenly “assigned” the wrong gender or sex at birth. One doesn’t become trans, then, but rather brings their outward gender expression (and optionally, through hormones or surgery, their body) in line with their actual gender identity. That identity, as with race, is located somewhere outside of the physical characteristics of the person or “inside,” just as the eternal soul was described as both external to yet internally animating the physical flesh.

Thus, Woke Ideology—probably without ever realising it had done so—has re-created the metaphysical category of a soul in order to allow for transgenderism but exclude transracialism. That soul is both raced and gendered, but derives its race from generational inheritance (original sin) while deriving its gender from something fully transcendent to and independent of the flesh.

This leads to the fragile contradictions between the “sins” of white privilege and male privilege, another dialectical conflict awaiting resolution. Rachel Dolezal cannot be allowed to claim transracial identity because she cannot be allowed to escape her white privilege. On the other hand, a male immediately loses his male privilege when recognised as trans, because, as in the evangelical conversion moment, he becomes always-already trans woman, retroactively forgiven of all sins through transfiguration of the body into the qualities and nature of the true, eternal soul."

(https://rhyd.substack.com/p/the-metaphysics-of-woke-identity?)

More information

• From the same author and article: Trans-Racialism