Race categories become an illusion blocking self-examination

Evidence

For Baldwin, even in his later work, the category of race all too often pulls us out of the places where the hard work of self-examination happens. It can easily become an illusion of safety, because so many questions are settled beforehand by the assumptions and stereotypes that come with our understanding of race. Baldwin rejected that illusion, without qualification. He did so even in the darkness of the after times and amid the despair he so desperately sought to hold off. Fixed identities and static categories that deny the complexity of who we are block the way to that new creation Baldwin so desired, and we end up stuck right where we are. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 317

Categorization

• DEFINE: Directly defines ‘the after times’ as the darkness in which Baldwin still refused the illusion of fixed racial categories — core to the reader’s key concept.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how exactly does Glaude’s ‘after times’ frame reshape how we read late Baldwin’s race writing?
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Wound of the Label: When Knowing Someone Becomes a Way of Erasing Them”; the MOC “The False Compass: How Racial Categories Reorder Bodies, Minds, and the Self”