Personal Deracination

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Contextual Quote

Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which robes one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

- James Baldwin [1]


Discussion

By Michael DC Bowen:

"I’m going to talk about what I will call ‘personal deracination.’ The very essence of it is simple.

You remove your skin out of the skin game. You take your dog out of the fight. You cash in your chips and go home. You recognize that the game is rigged and the only way to win is not to play.


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In distinction from the some of the talk above, it means that you abandon whatever it is you think your racial role should be in improving ‘race relations’. You must first grasp the fact that anything having to do with race relations is a game for which you must don a uniform and represent your team. You never will get to be the leader of your team, and every time you attempt to be an individual, you will not get recognized unless you are following the team playbook.

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You have a racial identity whether you like it or not. You also have biology whether you believe in evolution or not. And because you have human biology, you also have human psychology. I am betting every bit of logic that can be extracted from my writing that human biology, therefore human psychology is universal across time and space, whereas racial identity is, as they say, ‘a social construction’. That means you have a choice.

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You are not white. You are not black. You are naked. But you have clothed yourself in a racial identity provided to you by the history of this nation. You may have, like I did when I was a young whippersnapper, gone overseas to bond with people you believed were part of your diaspora. It may or may not have worked. Doesn’t matter. What matters is, you know you had some of this uniform and you went to find others in similar getups. There is always that temptation - to make your race work somehow for you. That is the game you ought to give up. Says me.

Why? Because it doesn’t work. The faster you travel, the more your racial getup slows you down. You try to get out, but they pull you back in. Right now millions of people are accusing you of being typical of your race. You’re just another one, as far as they’re concerned. You’re an evil racist. You’re a dirty Jew. You’re an inscrutable Oriental. For every wondrous positive you’ve ever imagined yourself to be, there is its opposite in the minds of haters you may never see.


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You are not responsible for the behavior of people around you, nor for your race. You can be good or evil or mediocre or whatever you have been. Personal deracination is just you not caring and not expecting anything from the theories of race that are always out there trying to capture your attention and explain things in racial terms. It’s not difficult to notice, but it is all pollution. I’m not writing this ‘as a black man’ I’m writing this because I see the change and I know how to disarm the talk. I am hoping that you will possess the ethics and virtues and attempt to engage your own thoughts from that perspective.


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So if I’m not going to be black or white or any of that, what am I going to be? I’m dedicated to the American ideal. Simple. I mean what part of ‘black lives matter’ isn’t ‘liberty and justice for all’? Don’t answer - they’ll socially construct something.

I’m out of the race game. I have been for a while. I don’t find it a useful or virtuous distinction. I am from a small town called Black, and I don’t need to go home. I never really belonged there. Where ever you are from, what matters is how you survive this change. It won’t be easy, as new racial theories are constructed, and new kinds of ‘social justice’ are crowdsourced. Liberty and justice for all. Man, that’s something I can get behind."


(https://mdcbowen.substack.com/p/race-talk-doesnt-work?s=r)