KVA: We should specify between race and ethnicity or other notions. Race has its own space, and it really didn’t exist as a robust space until 1620. So ethnicity—you are from somewhere and somebody, so that’s good news. You’re not white, but you are from somewhere and somebody. So you can claim that and then try— I think collectively the United States has to really—like I said, it’s a laundry list. Taking racial hierarchy down may be at the top of that list, and then we can deal with other embodiments. Seaton: Before I take a question, I’m forced to say something, which is that, as someone who wrote on race in the Enlightenment for my dissertation, and I teach about it as well, there is no human outside of race. So when the category of the human arose with Linnaeus’s Systema naturae—I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. . . . He was the person who came up with the notion of the sort of scientific categories though which we describe the human species. Also a fellow named Immanuel Kant, a rather well-known philosopher. Both of them, when they describe the category of the human in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively, [they] elaborately described it, and only described it, insofar as it related directly to race. So this fantasy fiction that there’s some human category that anyone can step outside of—I mean, Adrian Piper knows this quite well; she’s a Kantian philosopher herself. I think what she’s doing isn’t sort of saying that she doesn’t want to be black; I think what she’s saying is, she doesn’t want to be violently racialized and segregated. I don’t think those are the same thing. TCW: She’s actually saying both. She’s saying that she wants to belong to a tradition and a culture, but she told me—we spoke about this, and she told me that. I said, “Well, do you believe in a black sensibility?” She said no. There’s no Jewish sensibility, there’s no black sensibility. Seaton: Right, but I still think that’s not quite the same thing as saying that there’s this human category that exists outside of race. When she says there’s no black sensibility, I think what she’s saying is something much more complicated. I mean, I think that runs throughout her work; she’s actually one of my teachers. I’m not proposing that either of us can know for sure what she means— TCW: I have a long profile in the New York Times Magazine on her where she’s on record saying that she doesn’t believe people are white or black, and she’s not black. Seaton: I’ve read that.
Seaton: Right, but I think that she’s also— Well, anyway, I just don’t think there’s a human category that exists outside of race historically, philosophically, or intellectually. TCW: Is it possible that we could imagine one going forward though? Seaton: Well, right—yes. I mean, maybe Sun Ra would have to be the person to do that for us. Any other questions? Q: I can’t help but add as a medievalist [that] there was no conception of race the way we have it. The way they thought of a person was primarily as a soul, and the word for soul is feminine in Latin. And thinking of the Western European tradition in particular, but it’s not unique to that, this was a tradition that was kind of shared in many ways by the Islamic and the Jewish traditions as well. So this soul was not the body—it had nothing to do with it. It was often envisioned as feminine vis-à-vis a kind of masculine god. So I think that there are kinds of notions, a way of talking, about a human being that are not racialized the way they’ve been since the seventeenth century, and they’re interesting to consider. Schiller: The thing that makes a soul into a human being is a body to some extent, right? Q: That’s a little complicated. Ultimately, Christianity would say that—I mean, that human beings are essentially body and soul. But the sense, when we would talk about the subject, for example, or the person, they would say the “soul.” That’s the word that they used. Schiller: It’s just a matter of how do we—I’m not convinced that we could subtract the body and remain, and somehow still be talking about human beings. Q: Certainly in Christian theology that’s absolutely true. . . . The major division was between the human being, the angel, and the beast—those were the three categories. And the human being is differently positioned. Also, it had to do with whatever court law you followed and whether the law was set in Christianity, Judaism, or paganism/Islam (considered to be the same thing). But if you converted to another religion you were considered fully 100 percent to be one of [that group] as opposed to the other, and there are plenty of examples of that. One of the first converts to Christianity was an Ethiopian in the Acts of the Apostles. I’m not saying this is the answer to everything, but there are different ways of envisaging this.
TCW: She said it pretty clearly.
112
HA
Citizenship and Civil Disobedience
Q&A: MLK and the Legacy of Civil Disobedience in America
K. V. Adams, A. Schiller, and T. C. Williams
113
