Embrace culture, not race

African-Americans can and should have pride in their heritage without relying on race.

Glenn Loury

– who is not exactly a fan of the woke racial agenda – nevertheless hesitates on the idea of racial abolition, for understandable reasons. In a 2022 dialogue with racial abolitionist Kmele Foster, Loury asks for a "sense of racial identity… on behalf of blackness", on these reasonable grounds:

I don't just mean dark skin. I mean, descent from enslaved persons in the United States who migrated up the Illinois Central Railroad from Mississippi and Alabama to places like Chicago and Detroit, who fought first to be citizens, then to be equal citizens against travail, and so on. Those stories imparted to one's children. You descend from people of this sort, you embody the aspirations of prior generations who labored so that you could have this opportunity. The food you eat, the music that you listen to, the style, the way you carry yourself, the musical form that you can create, and art and the literature that I read of people who have struggled with the conditions of blacks in the history of the United States, producing great works of profound human interest but rooted in the African American [experience].

So why eschew all of that? I agree that the racial coloration is itself meaningless, but that experience, those stories, that narrative, that history is not meaningless. It's something around which a sense of identity could be built. And why would I throw all of that out on behalf of a race abolition program, Kmele?

My response, not far from Foster's, is: you don't have to throw out those stories to abolish race. Because those stories do not constitute a people's race, but rather their culture.

I agree that Loury's people have a lot to be proud of, as described here, and I wouldn't want to get rid of that pride. But here's the thing. What makes those people a group with historical contributions and achievements to be proud of is not fundamentally their race, their blackness. Because the world is full of people who share that "blackness", that "race", and yet do not share Loury's people's story at all. That people's noble struggle to rise up from slavery and segregation, a struggle that gave the world the brilliance of Martin Luther King, was not a struggle shared by modern Nigerians or Ghanaians. The ancestors of the latter might well have been among those who sold Loury's ancestors into slavery! Loury's people gave the world jazz and rock'n'roll and hip-hop; they did not give the world reggae. Black Jamaicans' ancestors were also enslaved, but they are still a different people, a different culture, with its own struggles. There's reason for Loury to be proud of the deliciousness of Nashville hot chicken, but not the deliciousness of injera.

Little Richard and Chuck Berry: two African-Americans who greatly enriched the world through rock'n'roll.

What it is for Loury to be proud of his heritage is very different from what it is for a Ghanaian immigrant to be proud of her heritage – just as a Spaniard's heritage is very different from a Pole's. Maybe if you go back four hundred years, Loury and the Ghanaian might have roughly similar ancestry – but those four hundred years make all the difference. Four hundred years ago, almost nobody would have described their identity as "Italian" or "German"; those national identities were created along with their nation-states within the past three centuries, less time than an American-born black culture has existed separate from anything in Africa.

What makes Loury's case difficult is that there is unfortunately no good term to describe his people, the ones who were brought over as slaves to United States territory in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries and then rose up from it. This is in part because, in an era that had few immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean, they could simply be described as "black" (or "Negro"); distinctions within the race used to have less salience. Now that they do, the most common term in use to describe that people is, unfortunately, "African-American" – unfortunate because that term, in that usage, winds up meaning the exact opposite of what every similar term means. An "Asian-American" is a voluntary immigrant to the US from Asia, or the descendant of people in the past few generations who were; "African-American" in this sense demarcates the people who aren't voluntary immigrants from Africa or their descendants. It's a terribly confusing way to speak.

It's a shame that the woke movement's mania for new coinages – "LBGTQIA2S+", "AAPI", "Latinx" and so on – never extended to coming up with some new term for that group and its unique struggles. There is apparently the term ADOS – American descendants of slavery – but it hasn't really caught on. I think it's better than "African-American", since the latter is so confusing, but it's still not ideal; it'd be better to have a term that emphasizes the group's achievements and positive contributions. I'll probably mostly stick with "African-American" for the moment, because it's important to be understood, and that goal isn't well served by picking up a term that I've only ever seen on Wikipedia.

The point, though, is that Loury's people, whether we call them ADOS or African-American or something else entirely, should be defined by their culture, a culture developed through history, rather than their race: a culture that they share with each other, but not with others assigned black at birth. And the reason for that can be put a little too simply: culture is good, race is bad. Culture is part of what makes human beings human, constitutes us, gives us our minds and our ideas and our histories. And it is always full of difference, culture is always cultures, and that difference is a source of much of humankind's beauty, a reason we still care, rightly, about authenticity. Human beings have always recognized differences between cultures, a separation between "us" and "them" that, while sometimes a source of conflict, can also be a source of cooperation and exchange – we are who we are and you are who you are, and that makes us different people in a way that's important for our living together.

I don't think many would want to live in a world that had abolished cultural difference. A future utopian world, it seems to me, would still recognize something like French people, something like Americans, something like Yoruba, something like Japanese, and honour that these groups are significantly different from each other – but the differences would not be about race. It would recognize African-Americans, ADOS, as a people like these others. My Indian heritage would make as much difference in North American life as my Scottish heritage, and no more. I don't come from either of those places; it is Canada and the United States, not India or Scotland, that have made me who I am.

Culture constitutes our personalities, our cares and aims; it makes us who we are at a deep level, it allows us to become who we want to be. Race does not. Race is a fact about how people perceive us, one that holds us back and gets in the way. Culture is the people and the world that raised you, shaped you, bequeathed you your hopes and dreams. Race is the way people see you when they know nothing about who you are.

I have argued on expressive individualist grounds that we should not let ourselves be defined by biological categories like race: we should have the freedom to define ourselves, to become who we are. Our self-definitions and choices don't come in a vacuum; they come out of our inheritance from our culture, and the experiences we have learned in that culture. They are also shaped by the biological drives that affect what we take pleasure in and what we need to survive and be healthy. They don't come out of being sorted into biological categories like race – or related ascriptive categories like caste. Culture constitutes us; race limits us.

When Jona Olsson tells white people to see non-white people like me through the lens of race, she is not just refusing to see me as an individual – though she is certainly doing that. She is also misidentifying my group identity. She is assuming that I am constituted not by being a gender-fluid Canadian modernized Buddhist – identities that make me who I am on the inside, the content of my character – but by my ancestry, and one half of my ancestry. I have more in common with my white Canadian ancestors, the ones from the place that made me who I am, but I look more like my Indian ancestors, and Olsson tells white people to see me as one of the latter instead. No wonder so many so-called anti-racists like to talk so much about "black bodies": just like the segregationists who came before them, they are heavily invested in reducing human difference to our bodies, to our visible bodily signifiers, rather than the cultures that make us who we are inside.

If you are a white native-born university-educated English Canadian or northern American from an urban or suburban area, I can pretty much guarantee you have more culturally in common with me, a "person of colour", than you do with a white immigrant just off the boat from Ukraine or Latvia. And I have a lot more in common with you, in turn, than I do with people from India who share my brahmin heritage – let alone with Pakistani Muslims. But the advocates of racialization don't want to see that. They are determined to reproduce race as a category – and with it, I think, they reproduce racism. I refuse this. Let all of us, including African-Americans – perhaps especially African-Americans – be defined not by our race but by our culture.