Big Think

Melvin Bray commented on Cory Booker on Race in America on November 9, 2008, 11:44 AM

I so reside where Mayor Booker is coming from. "God forbid if we ever get to a point where we 'transcend our race'" (Cory Booker on BigThink.com). Nevertheless, that is not what I believe 'post-racial' means%u2014transcendence would be 'non-racial,' well-meaning, yet a sociological nonentity%u2014although it may be exactly what a lot of heretofore-exclusively-privileged persons hope 'post-racial' means. I get the distinct impression that many want it to mean 'over and done with race.' However, as Robert Jensen reminds us in his book The Heart of Whiteness, "race is a fiction we must never accept; race is a fact we must never forget," and the election of a person of color to the highest office in the land at a time of profound uncertainty, quelled only by hope, did not change this one bit.If it is to follow the pattern of other such 'post-' constructs, 'post-racial' most appropriately identifies those who have suffered through the crucible of race and come out the other side determined to live/trust beyond race%u2014still in visceral awareness of its worst and unequivocal opposition to even the slightest of its indignities. Long before such 'post-' language became en vogue, Cornel West, one of the great American post-modern thinkers, wrote about the dangers of race as the sum of identity, in his seminal work Race Matters. West advocates the replacement of "racial reasoning" with a "moral reasoning" that engages beyond the arguments of the past, that obliterates the categories of left-right-center or conservative-liberal and that seems to be descriptive of Obama's decentralized post-racial cadre.