Refusing race can foster solidarity across differently racialised groups
Evidence
Ricardo is not only against racism, then, but ‘against race’, and he recognises that the racial categories of white and black do not correspond to absolute or even coherent differences. Despite his subjection to extreme forms of police racism as a teenager, and his subsequent banishment to Jamaica, where he had no friends or family, Ricardo was still at pains to avoid ‘being racist to white people’. This suggests that the retreat into racial essentialisms is not the only response available to those violated by racism. Importantly, Ricardo’s convivial impulses, rooted in his humanistic rejection of ethnic closure, encouraged him to look sideways and to connect his experiences with others experiencing similar forms of state violence, even as they were racialised in very different, perhaps opposing, ways. Researchers and anti-racists would do well to learn from Ricardo’s ‘everyday wisdom’. — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 65
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the ‘theorized refusal of race’ school — Paul Gilroy’s antihumanism debates, and contrasts with identity-politics anti-racism. Also resonates with Du Bois whom the passage itself cites. — connects to: Finding ways to see the human in racialized others underpins cross-racial solidarity. — Amit Singh, “Carnal conviviality” and the end of…, 16; Racialized people can practice a vernacular anti-race-ism refusing racist categories — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 62; Racisms hybridize across racialized groups rather than staying within fixed boundaries (+2 more)
- SEED: The passage sits it against Du Bois’s ‘all white folk are not scoundrels’. An angle: how two centuries apart, Black thinkers independently land on the same discipline of refusing wholesale racial resentment.
- corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Luke de Noronha, The conviviality of the overpoliced,…, 65
Related
- Racialized people can practice a vernacular anti-race-ism refusing racist categories (similarity 0.83)
- Targets of racial violence can consciously refuse racial thinking itself (similarity 0.83)
- Racism is lived through class, place, age and gender, not race alone. (similarity 0.79)
- Finding ways to see the human in racialized others underpins cross-racial solidarity. (similarity 0.78)
- Deportees subjected to state racism can still refuse racial categories themselves. (similarity 0.78)