Notes on race, diaspora, and humanism

A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly he knew that he was apart from the people around him. Apart from the pain which they had unconsciously caused. Suddenly he knew that people saw, not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference.

Jean Toomer, Cane

Abstract

The essay discusses, in chronological order, three important black texts on race: DuBois’s 1897 speech “The Conservation of Races,” Charles Johnson’s collection of essays Being and Race (1988) and, finally, Paul Gilroy’s critical assessment of postcolonial identity politics in Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000). Though in ways significantly differing, all of these texts struggle to undo the limitations of racialized discourse and, in its stead, introduce new forms of theorizing racial differences. Rather than being grounded in biological or even cultural differences, here race appears to be geared to variations of behavior that need to be conceptualized with respect to highly ideological structures of perception. Since postcolonial texts on race usually respond to longstanding assumptions about the nature and role of racial differences in human society, I begin by briefly delineating the history of the race concept as it evolves from late eighteenth through the nineteenth-century seems appropriate.