Examine the following paragraph from today's Washington Post and you can see a fundamental North American white supremacist paradigm shifting and giving way:
In fact, in the above paragraph, Johnathan Capehart demonstrates that it is entirely possible and, yes, preferable to discuss skin chromaticity, and monochromaticity, without every using the term "race."
In a feat that many Black and white writers still believe to be impossible, Mr. Capehart writes his entire article, explaining every proposition about skin color without ever using or relying upon the anachronistic and unscientific "race" fallacy. It's instructive to read the comments to the article as well, since the word "race" is used twenty-nine times in the comments to an article that never mentions "race" at all. Apparently, many misinformed readers still believe that they cannot discuss skin color without reference to "race," and so that pejorative epithet persists in the conversation.
To see how revolutionary is the reference to chromaticity instead of "race," consider how often the word "race" is used in an opening paragraph of a 1896 ex-slave autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, by Harriet A. Jacobs, and how much the term defined and circumscribed the writer's sense of who she was and what that meant:
We, as the Negro Race, are a free people, and God be praised for it. We as the Negro Race, need to feel proud of the race, and I for one do with all my heart and soul and mind, knowing as I do, for I have labored for the good of the race, that their children might be the bright and shining lights. And we can see the progress that we are making in an educational way in a short time, and I think that we should feel very grateful to God and those who are trying to help us forward. God bless such with their health, and heart full of that same love, that this world can not give nor taketh away.There are many doors that are shut to keep us back as a race, but some are opened to us, and God be praised for those that are opened to the race, and I hope that they will be true to their trust and be of the greatest help to those that have given them a chance.
Clearly that slave narrative reflects a fundamental acceptance of the difference and otherness that the term "race" implies, with separate aspirations based on skin color as a fact of life, but which paradigm a substantial number of white-skinned American voters rejected in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, when they decided that brown-skinned Barack Obama was more similar to them and their aspirations than was white-skinned John McCain and Mitt Romney, while rejecting the paradigm in which skin-color = race = fundamental and over-arching difference.
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