Thread by @rasmansa

Race is not a natural category, but a political one.

https://twitter.com/rasmansa/status/1369781292842295301

I post this because a lot of people liked the initial tweet, seeing it as a cute platitude.

No. It's telling you that "race" cannot "explain" any outcome. The politics of a society is what explains those outcomes.

No child does anything "because they are black", because no child "is black". That doesn't deny that society labels that child as black and acts upon that racialization. It doesn't even deny that the child reacts in response.

That dynamic is the issue, not the child.

So if someone says "abolish blackness" (I'm using this one because people are sensitive about the parent ideology), it can't be about hurting the child racialized as black.

That racialization hurts the child. They can be so much more if allowed to be free.

But I will say it in fact.

We must abolish whiteness, and the offshoot categories it created like blackness.

We must see the ideology that categorized us and told us it's true, and the dynamic and harms it imposes on us. Let's abolish that ideology so that we can all just, be.

So let's talk about racial ideology, let's talk about how society racializes us and the politics that create these outcomes that we then fight about. Let's talk about how it harms us.

Let's resist internalizing these racial categories as essential elements of our being.

I sincerely hope at some point more of my brothers and sisters that are racialized as white will see how much this ideology restrains our unified potential, and how many people it requires sacrificing to maintain.

To tear it down isn't to tear you down, but to set us all free.