It is not new, or radical, to suggest that ‘race’ is a social construct. The idea has been prominent in social, political and philosophical discourse for decades. The bold challenge put forward by Jon Ivan Gill is that this idea is just a halfway house – questioning the fixity of race while doing nothing to lessen the trauma caused by its continued presence as a category of human identity. Can we truly end racism before we dissolve the notion of race itself, and if we do then what are we left with?
Showing the role that philosophy of religion has played in reifying ideas of race and racial categories, Gill looks beyond that legacy to a world after and beyond those ideas. With seemingly immutable notions of race still baked into our societies at the level of law and legislation, process philosophy can remind us that being, and how we define it, is dynamic and will change over time. If race as a category is impermanent, then it can be undone. Dispelling this ‘powerful apparition’ has deep-laced significance for contemporary society, from cancel culture and reparations to mixed race identity and the suppression ethnicity and nationality. This is at once a keen dissection of colonial apparatus and a practical, creative vision for a new way of organizing ourselves.
