He Said, He Said: Race

West on Racism and White Supremacy

“Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them. No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves—psychic violence—reinforced by the powers of state and civic coercion—physical violence—for the primary purpose of controlling their minds and exploiting their labor for nearly four hundred years. The unique combination of American terrorism—Jim Crow and lynching—as well as American barbarism—slave trade and slave labor—bears witness to the distinctive American assault on black humanity. This vicious ideology and practice of white supremacy has left its indelible mark on all spheres of American life—from the prevailing crimes of Amerindian reservations to the discriminatory realities against Spanish-speaking Latinos to racial stereotypes against Asians. Yet the fundamental litmus test for American democracy—its economy, government, criminal justice system, education, mass media, and culture—remains: how broad and intense are the arbitrary powers used and deployed against black people. In this sense, the problem of the twenty-first century remains the problem of the color line.”

“Race Matters” (1993, Updated 2001)

Williams on Racial Identity

“Of course, black and other non-white people cannot meaningfully renounce their ‘race’ if significant numbers of whites don’t join them; but neither can even the bestintentioned white people do this in a vacuum. We are a composite nation as well as a nation of composites, and—alt-right fantasies of an all-white ethnostate in Montana and the Pacific Northwest notwithstanding—we are stuck together. The racial resentments conjured and magnified by the 2016 election amount to a giant step in the wrong direction; it is impossible to deny that. But falling back into our narrow identities—even those forged by legitimate grievance and foisted upon us by the bigotry of others—only delivers a further victory to the opponents of a healthy society. To shift this dismal paradigm, thinking people of goodwill across the political spectrum are going to have to find a new vocabulary to move beyond abstract racial categorization and reflexive tribalism. Merely declaring race a construct won’t be enough...Racism rooted in centuries of skin bias is persistent and feels more urgent than just about anything else when you bear the brunt of it. It can make other conversations seem luxurious if not irrelevant. But the situation is not zero-sum: We can simultaneously resist bigotry and imagine a society that has outgrown the identities it preys on. In fact, we have to.”

“Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race” (2019)