George A. Yancey - Beyond Racial Division: A Unifying Alternative to Colorblindness and Antiracism

IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE ON A JOURNEY. You are headed toward a specific destination. Suddenly you come to a fork in the road. You see two clear paths ahead of you, but both make you uncomfortable. You consider the first path. As you look down it, you cannot tell whether it reaches your destination. You ask questions of some who have walked this path before. They say it just circles around back to the start. Oh, it is a pleasant enough path, easily trod. But no matter how long people walk on it, they get no closer to their objective. While this path may be a nice comfortable walk, it will not help you reach your goal.

You look at the other path. It seems to head toward your destination but appears dark and foreboding. Fewer people have returned from this path. Those who have come back warn of dangerous animals ready to pounce. Even though it seems to offer a way to where you want to go, it is a conflict-filled path. You watch as more individuals weaponize to protect themselves. No one comes back to tell you they made it to the end. You do not have any good choices. Either you select the path leading nowhere or the path full of wild animals.

But then you see a third path! You did not notice this one before. You can see your destination, but brush and fallen debris block the way. There are no signs of wild animals, which brings you relief, but this path is a difficult one. Few if any have traveled this way before. You could ignore this path and choose one of the others, but if you do, it will be harder to get back to this promising third path.

This book offers a way to travel the third path. The path that goes nowhere represents racial colorblindness, which ignores the damage our racialized society has sustained. It seems an easy path, but ultimately it sends us around in circles. The path full of dangerous animals represents antiracism. Evidence suggests that antiracism creates more racial hostility and polarizes us more than it brings us together. The third path is the mutual accountability approach. It promises to be hard. Since not many people have traveled this path, we cannot know all the problems that await us. But we know the other two paths do not work. So why not take this new path?

This illustration reveals the options before us. In these pages I will point out evidence and highlight arguments that support mutual accountability. There is a lot of work involved in implementing this approach, but research indicates it is a superior way to solve our racial problems. This path becomes more difficult to find the longer we stay on the pathways of colorblindness and antiracism. Those efforts have failed, and the longer we pursue them, the harder it is to transition to something with more potential. By the time you reach the end of this book, I hope you will have decided to join me on this journey and see what it holds for us.

WHO AM I , and why should you even listen to me? I am a black man. When you are a black man in the United States, it is difficult to escape your racial status. So it should not be surprising that soon after receiving my doctorate in sociology I started conducting research on issues of race and ethnicity. About fifteen years ago I believed I had reached the pinnacle of my career as a race scholar with the publication of two important books (Emerson & Yancey, 2010; Yancey, 2006). Well, at least