A Raceless Gospel for Ex-Colored People

A kin-dom beyond race is here for the embracing

Racelessness

A RACELESS GOSPEL FOR EX-COLORED PEOPLE

A kin-dom beyond race is here for the embracing

Starlette Thomas

I bring you greetings from a “kin-dom” that is coming: not a futuristic vision but a reality we can choose to embody in the here and now by moving closer to one another. As a trained theologian and womanist in Christian ministry, I look at race—the deification and demonization of skin and bones by social color-codes—as idolatry. Race posits itself as creator, a deity remaking humanity in its image. But we are all, white people, too, either people of color or children of God, divine in essence or just thorns in each other’s sides.

I refuse to bow down to race no matter how many times society tries to stick it to me or contort my life to its stereotypes to make white supremacy fit into my understanding of human being and belonging. Race is not even a stretch of the imagination. In fact, I go back farther than this centuries-old designation that leaves me dangling on the tip of a European Enlightenment thinker’s tongue. Race could never find the right words for me. 

We have terms of engagement that are so much better, broader, and richer than this four-letter curse word. We are so much better than these flesh fights and carnal quips, all of which we have seen and heard before. All of this has been said and done before. Same old false binaries of minority/majority, inferior/superior, black/white. We will make no progress on these terms but instead will be destined to keep going back and forth. 

Race offers nothing more than false dilemmas. There is no “Negro Problem,” no “Indian Problem,” no “Yellow Peril,” no “browning of America” outside of the ideology of white supremacy. Therefore, we need to talk back, speak up, and against this belief in whiteness, which ceases to exist apart from its supporting racial identities, which are comparative and competing identities, a technique of colonization. 

This is why I am an evangelist of racelessness and a race abolitionist. Because ultimately, nothing good will ever come of race. It was not created for communal salvation but for colonialism’s sake. When we think of ourselves or others as “black” or “white,” we are using colonizer concepts. Racelessness is decolonization. Decolonization is racelessness.

This is not some post-racial diatribe. I’m not simply on the other side of it. No, I’m just over it. I also do not offer a colorblind lens or prescription. I just want to remind us all that people come from countries—not colors. So, if you see me, look again.

Racialization is colonization. It uproots peoples from their homelands, renames them, and reframes their lives in the context of white supremacist oppression. When I say raceless, I am not looking past America’s history of chattel slavery, Jim and Jane Crow segregation, police brutality or mass incarceration. Instead, I am refusing to see myself the way that eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, who is credited with the racialized classification of “the varieties of man,” would have seen me. 

I refuse, then, to frame my sense of somebodiness around race, to repurpose it, to give it another chance or the time of day, when its only purpose is to hold those socially colored black back. No, I am an African American, as I have countries of origin, not color, at my core. And I coined the phrase “socially colored” because we are not physically colored beige (that is, “mixed” race), black, brown, red, yellow, or white. Instead, I will believe what I see with my own two eyes and not what race tells me to look for. 

Consequently, I will not “go along to get along” with race and its progeny. I have no interest in maintaining “that’s just the way it is” realities that do nothing more than prop up “ruling relationships” and a capitalist-driven social hierarchy. Instead, race needs to be de-pedestalized. It is not the supreme expression of our humanity. The identities it offers us do not promote self-discovery. Instead, we are taught to prepare ourselves for how we will be seen by someone else and how that knowledge is the difference between life and what Orlando Patterson called “social death.”

But we don’t have to subject ourselves to race’s hand-me-down depictions of reality, this second-hand existence, or its predictable restrictions on bodies racialized as black, brown, red, yellow, and, yes, white as well. Instead lay claim to your somatic sovereignty and repeat after me, “I am somebody.” Thus, there is no need for African Americans to jump higher or run faster or do twice as much work for the same recognition. Let us no longer participate in unjust systems, ways of being and relating, or employ words that do not serve us. We don’t owe race a thing. 

It is not the price of your ticket, the cost for your entry into the world. Be free of code-switching, doublespeak, and double-consciousness. Such double-mindedness only contributes to a sense of internal instability. Instead, take this pilgrimage with me to a place free from white supremacy. You don’t have to wait another day or for self-determination to be legislated. It is my conviction that you have the power to self-emancipate as a child of God.

In my faith tradition, I am taught: “Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish” (1 Corinthians 15:39, NRSV). In addition, I center my work and witness in the waters of baptism and what is likely the Early Church’s first creed, which confessed the submersion of all other identities as baptized believers: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27-28, NRSV). So, I proclaim a raceless gospel. That’s good news for ex-colored people.

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Rev. Starlette Thomas (MDiv, Rochester Crozer Divinity School, DMin, Wesley Theological Seminary) is an associate editor and the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel,” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church. Follow her on Twitter and on Instagram.