Freedom from “Blackness”

[Valin]

The American Mind

Renouncing race is the answer to restoring our humanity.

Lason D. Hill

Sept. 2 2021

The fabricated black race should never have been born. It was confected out of false biological taxonomies by Europeans to justify a system of human physical bondage that, paradoxically, brought black people into the historical process. It was a cruel, artificial construct, and blacks have suffered enough under it. If racist whites owe blacks a reparative moral gesture, it is this—terminate your need to see blacks as blacks and refrain from establishing societal configurations that require them to prove their blackness. It is life-denying for blacks to resort to an appeal to their blackness as a legitimizing referent from which to both interpret and make sense of their humanity

Blacks have internalized an identity that was created for them. There were no black people until the Europeans invented them. Why have blacks clung so tenaciously to an inherited identity that was foisted upon them—an identity manufactured to exclude them from the polis and the domain of the ethical? Autonomous, self-respecting persons do not proclaim racial pride when they originally had no race and were given an artificial one that eviscerated their dignity and self-esteem and, concomitantly, created conceptions of agency and personhood around those markers that branded them as biologically inferior and morally immature.

(Snip)

An obsession with justice and entitlement shackles the soul to the compensations of the one who has harmed one. A spirit of grievance, paradoxically, places one in a dependent role on the other. Radical forgiveness frees the soul from resentment and fosters an ethic of care towards those who have harmed one. It not only forges radically new relationships, but it also heralds a model for a new type of humanity, a new planetary ethic and humanism devoid of bitterness. Free and living in that space of radical love and forgiveness, the virtuous man or woman, holding no racial identity as his standard-bearer, stands confidently with palms facing the universe and declares to the world, “I have no history. I have no race. I have only you, and the future.”