The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism, by Sheena Michele Mason, Pitchstone Publishing, 256 pages, $17.95
Is race real? In The Raceless Antiracist, a follow-up to her 2022 book Theory of Racelessness, Sheena Michele Mason argues not only that it isn't, but that trying to stop racism while keeping the concept of race is like fighting "a flood by pouring water on it."
Mason, a literature professor at SUNY Oneonta, suggests that these futile approaches fall into two categories: "anti-racist resistance" and "color-blindness." While the first reifies race by making it the key to understanding most social phenomena, the second reifies it by treating it as a real thing that ought to be ignored, thus downplaying the reality of the racism that relies on it.
