When The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages was published in 2018—and, before that, when I published a two-part article of the same title in Literature Compass in 2011—race theorists and premodernists had to be actively persuaded that phenomena and practices identified today as race and racialization were palpable in the European Middle Ages, long before the modern eras.
To begin the conversation, I offered a simple, stripped-down working hypothesis: that race is one of the primary names we have—a name we retain for the epistemological, ethical, and political commitments it recognizes—for a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups. Racial formation thus occurs as specific historical occasions where strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned, through a variety of practices and pressures, so as to construct a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment.
To understand race as a structural relationship—a mechanism of sorting—for the articulation and management of human differences rather than a substantive content meant understanding that the differences selected for essentialism would, of course, vary in the longue durée of human history, from nonmodern eras well into the twenty-first century, fastening perhaps on bodies, physiognomy, and somatic differences in one instance; perhaps on religion, social practices, economic conditions, war, or political culture in another; and perhaps a multiplicity of interlocking discourses elsewhere.
One reason we might want a long history of race rather than the abbreviated, truncated histories of racial time we had that only began in modernity, I suggested, might be to recalibrate the present with greater precision. We could see, for instance, if forms of racialization and racial logics at work in modern time, and in the contemporary present, were genuinely novel, or if they were reinstantiations, adapted, reconfigured, and reissued across time—always with differences, never identically as before.
Another reason might be to see how race figured in the emergence of that strange subject homo europaeus in medieval time and the significance of that emergence for understanding the unstable entity we call “the West” and its self-authorizing missions.Footnote 1
At the time, there were medievalists who felt racial practices and racial phenomena could not exist till the word race (in any European language) had first been invented.Footnote 2 Still, a few had begun to identify blackness of skin—so common in medieval art and literature—as the most obvious site of race. Those few could be urged, I reasoned, to extend their thinking beyond the somatic envelope or, at least, to consider also when and how whiteness ascended to supremacy as a paramount category of identity in the definition of the Christian European subject.
To persuade medievalists of the utility of critical race analysis for naming the genocides and expulsions, the herding, tagging, imprisonments, brutalizations, enslavement, demonizations, and killings (both juridical and extraterritorial) of targeted peoples in the medieval period, I suggested that not to name race would be to sustain the reproduction of a sanitized past while keeping the door shut to tools, analyses, and resources that could name and study that past differently.
The long centuries of the European Middle Ages would then continue to be read as a prepolitical time, with only “prejudice,” “ethnocentrism,” and “fear of otherness and difference” as weak descriptions that destigmatized the atrocities of the past, with ramifications for later time.
To persuade race theorists—who were then, as now, largely modernists—I reiterated, then reversed, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s formulation of how an earlier time continues to reinscribe itself in later time and become legible:
humans from any other period…are always in some sense our contemporaries: that would have to be the condition under which we can even begin to treat them as intelligible to us…. [T]he writing of medieval history for Europe depends on this assumed contemporaneity of the medieval [with our present], or…the non-contemporaneity of the present with itself. (109)
This formulation, surely unexceptionable to critical race analysts acculturated to the axioms of modern critical theory, could hatch open moments in medieval time that would enable us to see race.
After all, the ways in which the present was noncontemporaneous with itself were palpable even in everyday life. Religion—the magisterial discourse of knowledge and meaning making in the European Middle Ages—was erupting again, with a vengeance, as a mechanism of race making, with the return of Islamophobia and antisemitism, the racing of religious others at airport security checkpoints, Salafist determination to re-create early caliphates, and US leaders expatiating on crusades and empire as desirable modalities of governmentality.Footnote 3 It would surely not be difficult for most to grasp that the present was still inhabited by the past, by medieval time (another way, perhaps, to understand Faulkner’s dictum that the past is not really past).
To view contemporary time as plural, then, and grant that the present is nonidentical to itself in this way also usefully grants the corollary: an understanding that the past, too, can be nonidentical to itself, inhabited by what was out of its time, and marked by modernities that estranged medieval time in ways that rendered medieval practices legible in modern terms (Heng, Invention 20–23).
This was one way to deal with the charges of presentism and anachronism hurled at efforts of critical analysis that recognize and acknowledge the dialogical, dialectical character of transactions between present and past—charges that were also leveled at the earliest feminist readings and the earliest queer readings of the deep past—and a way forward that critical race theorists might find persuasive.
To persuade modernist scholars not versed in critical theory—and, as Nahir I. Otaño Gracia and Tiffany N. Florvil dismally note in their introduction to this cluster, charges of presentism and anachronism have reared their head again, leveled, this time, by no less than a president of the American Historical Association—other ways would need to be found.
In the end, The Invention of Race (with 504 pages, more than 283,000 words, and eight chapters) argued too many things to be adequately summarized here, but determinedly showed, across a multiplicity of archives, how the treatment of Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native North Americans, the Mongols, and the Romani, across centuries, constituted racial treatment.
The book indicted medieval England as the first racial state in the West for England’s treatment of its Jewish minorities; tracked ideological representations of the Islamic enemy in crucibles of war and commerce that offered Muslims as less than human; analyzed Latin Christendom’s politics of the neighbor in internal colonizations within Europe and key innovations developed for the overseas colonial experiments known as the Crusades; plumbed the racial sensorium of black and white, and what Africa could give to Europe, in art and literature; scrutinized the killing, cheating, and abduction of Native North Americans half a millennium before Columbus; detailed the Latin West’s evolving responses to Mongols as a global race; and followed centuries of anti-Romani persecution and enslavement, when “Gypsy” became the name of a slave race, and Romani children targets for identity erasure.
That the book sold thousands of copies and has been taught in a variety of disciplinary formations perhaps suggests that its accumulation of evidence proved persuasive beyond its intended audiences. But the pendulum swings, and revanchism in academic studies is back in force today.
James H. Sweet’s accusation, in his 2022 presidential column in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History, that the study of the past by critical race analysts is “presentist,” “anachronistic,” and “political” is the tip of the iceberg and was announced, moreover, by an academic leader with a very large audience. Clearly, it is no longer solely critical race theorists and medievalists who today need to be convinced of the importance of race in the deep past.
Additionally, in our current historical moment, revanchists are appearing at a highly problematic time when white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and alt-right extremists are actively supported at the highest levels of government—that is, by those who favor shutting down the critical study of race across any historical timeline. Restating the case for the importance of critical race analysis in the academy—and for a long, rather than an abbreviated, history of race—thus seems timely, and imperative.
All the contributors to this cluster restate that case, in their own ways. The cluster’s editors impressively and excellently find connective tissue between the contributors’ work and mine, so I will dedicate this response primarily to arguments aimed at empiricist historians like Sweet, and other empiricists, including literary empiricists who might be having second thoughts about critical race studies. I do this, of course, in the belief that there is a large audience of scholars of goodwill who are open to persuasion and who are not entrenched right-wing ideologues. My essay thus addresses, in this way, the nexus of important questions raised by Otaño Gracia and Florvil and all the contributors.
What the Archive Reveals When Scholars Do Not Ignore Evidentiary Data
Those who think premodernist scholarship on race is presentist need only consult the archives. The archives repeatedly show not only that historically, racial form, racial thinking, and racial institutions were visible in the European Middle Ages but also that they often crisscrossed with, and found expression through, other hierarchical systems of distinction and categorization such as class, gender, or sexuality.
For instance, in medieval Europe, the fourteenth-century Cursor Mundi relates that when four “Saracens” (a slur for Muslims) who are “blac and bla als led” (“black and blue-black as lead”; Morris 8072) meet King David and are given three rods blessed by Moses to kiss, they transform from black to white on kissing the rods, taking on the “hue” of “noble blood”: “Als milk thair hide bicom sa quite / And o fre blode thai had the hew” (“Their skin became as white as milk / And they had the hue of noble blood”; 8120–21).Footnote 4 Humans at the apex of the socioeconomic pyramid have a color, and white—the color of milk, not the pinko-gray flesh tones of E. M. Forster’s idea of epidermal whiteness—is the defining feature of their class identity.Footnote 5
Those of “noble blood,” who were raced as white—and white is the medieval color designating saints, purity, and sanctity—characterized peasants during the Peasants’ Rebellion of 1381 as having the attributes of brutes. Peasants were animal-like, lower orders—insensate laboring creatures concerned with nothing but what would fill their bellies, and who possessed neither “mind or notion” (Justice 142–43).
“Feudal society is the key,” Cedric Robinson urged (9). The racialization of feudal hierarchies, with their vested interests, underscores Robinson’s intuition that modern capitalism “was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and economic relations” (10).
Whether or not you agree with Robinson, categorial distinctions of an absolute and fundamental kind positioned relations of class and race overlappingly, in both medieval and modern eras. In the modern era, Étienne Balibar notes that the “aristocratic representation of the hereditary nobility…as a superior ‘race’” deploys “the myth of ‘blue blood’” (207, 208)—the modern iteration of “noble blood”—to perform an “[a]ristocratic racism” that elevates the nobility “to the status of a ‘race’” (208). The “laboring classes,” no longer specifically the peasantry but now on backbreaking assembly lines, still constituted a “‘race’ of laborers” who are presented as degenerate and dangerous, in a modern performance of “class racism” and the “racialization of manual labor” (209).
Premodern archives of literature, history, and art abound with other examples—of non-Christians, Black people, colonized peoples, “heretics,” women, the sexually nonnormative, foreigners, the disabled, and the diseased, among others—as differentiated subjects and populations who could be racialized as absolutely and fundamentally different.
Jews were forced to wear identifying badges; herded into towns where their lives and livelihoods were monitored; disciplined by church and state laws; juridically executed for popular fictions of their villainy, like the ritual murder libel, blood libel, and other lies; periodically exterminated through mob violence; and expelled from country after country.
Muslims were targeted by theological writing that defined them as less than human, so that the killing of a Muslim did not constitute homicide—the killing of a person—but malicide, the destruction of personified evil.Footnote 6 The Romani, felt to be essential laborers by the boyars and monasteries of southeastern Europe, were enslaved as a race.
The archives remarkably disclose what today might be called intersectionality: a dynamic by which hierarchies of essentialized distinctions found expression through other hierarchies of essentialized distinctions, in overlapping, intertwining, complementary, and intersecting systems of exclusion and domination (Crenshaw).Footnote 7 Is a reading of these archives, then, presentist and political when it takes stock of the evidence that is there?
Or would ignoring key parts of the archive so as not to read the glaring evidence of overlapping systems of exclusion and domination be the truly, ideologically, political act? Such refusals to read, and to witness, are responsible for the “undernarrated” histories of today that Angelica Pesarini and Justin Randolph Thompson identify in their conversation in this cluster.
The Creation of False Histories by Ignoring the Archives
I have argued in the past that modern state racisms, like apartheid in South Africa and the Japanese American internment camps of the United States during World War II, were preceded by the state racism of medieval England’s totalizing apparatus of bureaucratic, administrative, and infrastructural governmentality, in the herding, tagging, disciplining, surveillance, control, imprisoning, killing, and expulsion of its minority Jewish population (see Heng, England).
To know that undernarrated history of England is to begin to grasp the degree to which Jewish lives were constitutive, not epiphenomenal, in the formation of early English identity. Acknowledging that history, then, duly unsettles the inherited foundational narratives of dominant English historiography.Footnote 8 Surely, truth-telling of this kind is what empiricist scholars would want?
More widely today, as Otaño Gracia and Florvil remind us, another kind of medieval past is being summoned: white supremacist and Christian nationalist groups are advancing fantasies of past glory in their presentation of an ascendant white Christendom—undivided, pure, homogeneous—in a medieval Europe imagined as uncontaminated by the presence of multifarious ethnoracial communities. Extremist intentions to revivify that glorified past fuel the extremist drive to create white ethnostates that would return the contemporary world to a fantasied medieval world order. Their imaginary legacy of a pure-white-Europe-that-once-was-Latin-Christendom pivots, of course, on ignoring a long history of race—“the West’s willed ignorance of its own past,” as Otaño Gracia and Florvil put it.
What to do, then, with a premodern archive teeming with evidence of ethnoracial populations of various kinds in the West? Medieval archives show Jews living in every country of Europe, ensconced in cities and towns in the heartlands of Christendom. Islamicate settlements in the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Sicily, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, give the lie to the pretense that Muslims are a recent phenomenon in the West. Saharan Africans, it seems, were everywhere: in Roman Britain, Andalusian Iberia, Frederick II’s Lucera, the Hohenstaufens’ German empire, even Guibert de Nogent’s twelfth-century France.Footnote 9 And the diaspora of the Romani from India in the eleventh century saw a dark-skinned race of Asiatics spread across the face of western Europe and become enslaved in eastern Europe till the nineteenth century.
Human trafficking, in which many societies participated but at which medieval Italians seem to have excelled, dispersed Turks, Africans, Arabs, Mongols, Indians, and others as domestic, field, and commercial labor around the Mediterranean and elsewhere. Considerably higher prices were paid for young women and girls of reproductive age, who were significantly overrepresented in Christendom’s slave markets and records of sale.Footnote 10 Given that these young women and girls were disproportionately sold into domestic servitude and available for sexual use by the paterfamilias and other males of a household, the archive of European slavery suggests that an undisclosed number of today’s “white” Europeans, including nativists, might have forebears descending from intermixed human DNA. Reading the racial archive, we see that even white supremacists fail to be as white as they think they are.Footnote 11
Indeed, even in a far corner of the Latin West, in insular England, a bioarcheological study of a cemetery in East Smithfield, London, has shown through genetic analysis that some twenty-nine percent of the bodies interred there during the plague years of the fourteenth century, in 1348–50, showed Afro-Asian descent (Redfern and Hefner).
This is to say, medieval archives of race deliver a multiracial, multireligious ethnoscape that gives the lie to the fantasy that an earlier Europe was the opposite of Europe today, a continent containing global populations from everywhere and a diversity of faiths. Medieval Christendom, or early Europe, already contained people from everywhere and a diversity of faiths, and its archives—if they are read—refuse the fiction that a singular, homogeneous, communally unified Caucasian race solely inhabited the continent.
The nostalgia for a white Europe that exists as a historical inheritance—and not as an ideological proposition manufactured and maintained by assiduous identity construction and propaganda in the modern era—is thus exposed as the fantasy of contemporary European politics and political factions.Footnote 12 With a long history of race, the archives of race in deep time productively answer to the racial politics of the contemporary now.
Would the former president of the American Historical Association and others still consider studying the racial archives of history, art, literature, and archeology to constitute presentism and anachronism if they knew what the archives contain?
What a Long History of Race Reveals about European Colonialism of the Modern Eras
A critical strain in medievalist scholarship has for some time acknowledged the wars of territorial conquest known as the Crusades as early colonial experiments.
“Here was made the first step of teaching Europe how to colonize,” concludes the redoubtable Joshua Prawer: an early model of the European colonial experience rooted in territorial occupation, resource and skills extraction, ideological reproduction, a “colonial mentality,” and colonial relations, legible in the records of the occupied territories of the Levant (366). “At their peak,” Josiah Russell notes, “the crusading states controlled about three fifths of the land and population of Syria” (56).
Despite the eventual loss of all territories in Syria and Palestine over two centuries, Latin Christendom’s overseas opportunism forged an important economic calculus for the West. Crusader colonization saw the transfer of agricultural, engineering, manufacturing, and other knowledges from the Levant to Europe, not only advancing European agriculture, architecture, and artisanry but also remaking the balance-of-payments calculus between East and West. By the end of the medieval period, the East came to assume the erstwhile role of the West, exporting far more raw materials than manufactures, in a reversal of their trade roles in Europe’s early Middle Ages.
How the dominance of Islamicate and Greek societies was eroded, over the centuries of crusader occupation, in export industries like sugar, textiles, and even fine, transparent glass is well documented. Tourists to Murano today see that it’s Venetian Murano glass, not Lebanese Tyrian glass, that is globally renowned and collected: the result of transfers of technology, materials, labor, and know-how from East to West. In his study of sugar production, William Phillips wryly observes that while “the Crusades may have failed…in economic terms they were successful, as the West wrested economic ascendancy from the East” (“Sugar Production” 403).
A species of colonial dialect was even invented at the opening of the twelfth century, palpable in the awed, triumphant paean of a key eyewitness chronicler of the First Crusade, Fulcher of Chartres:
Consider, I pray, and reflect how in our time God has transformed the West into the East. For we who were Occidentals now have been made Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank is now a Galilean, or an inhabitant of Palestine. One who was a citizen of Rheims or of Chartres now has been made a citizen of Tyre or of Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth; already they have become unknown to many of us, or, at least, are unmentioned. Some already possess here homes and servants which they have received through inheritance. Some have taken wives not merely of their own people, but Syrians, or Armenians, or even Saracens who have received the grace of baptism…. One cultivates vines, the other the fields…. Different languages, now made common, become known to both races, and faith unites those whose forefathers were strangers…. He who was a foreigner now is a native; and he who was a sojourner now has become a resident. Our parents and relatives from day to day come to join us…. For those who were poor there, here God makes rich. Those who had few coins, here possess countless bezants; and those who had not had a villa, here, by the gift of God, possess a city. Therefore, why should one who has found the East so favorable return to the West?…You see, therefore, that this is a great miracle, and one which must greatly astonish the world. Who has ever heard anything like it? (History 271–72; trans. modified slightly; see Historia Hierosolymitana 748–49)
Who has heard anything like this? Previous empire-formation—the prime example being the Roman Empire—had not invoked an all-powerful Christian god as the force bestowing riches, bezants, homes, servants, villas, cities, and even wives as the reward for successful territorial occupation.
The learned twelfth-century abbot Guibert de Nogent duly presents the new crusader colonies as following the template of old empire, with occupied Jerusalem being a “new colony” (“novae coloniae”), now, of Christendom (245). But we see that crusader neocolonialism has inserted a difference, because this colonization now witnesses the deeds of God through the medium of human actants, Frankish crusaders—“Gesta Dei per Francos.” It is God, now, who authorizes colonization and accomplishes colonization through human surrogates.
The invocation of God, and Christianity, to authorize invasion and occupation and to take responsibility for territorial and economic success thus sets in place a new, creolized colonial dialect.
Later maritime expeditions from Europe would find this medieval innovation indispensable. For modern settler-colonists would arrive around the world not like Rome, bearing merely the sword, but like Christendom, bearing the sword and the Book, in the name of God, and of doing God’s work.Footnote 13 A nonmodern archive that witnesses multifarious peoples racialized as a single Muslim entity presented as nonhuman also witnesses other innovations of key significance for the empires of later modern eras.
Race before the Modern Era and Today: The Romani and Asian America
A view of two diasporic communities across a long racial history—the Romani in the past and Asian America today—captures a final example of what the study of race before the modern era can impart to our time.
Scholars of nonmodern Roma remark the resilience and tenacity of Romani collective identity across time, despite centuries of abuse and persecution, with executions and expulsions in western Europe and enslavement in eastern Europe, and despite efforts to cancel and erase their identity as Roma (Gheorghe 23; Marushiakova and Popov 42; Fraser 44).Footnote 14
Embracing an affirmative racialism of its own, Romani identity shifted and remade itself as groups of Romani immigrants spread through the Near East, Byzantium, and Europe, telling and retelling stories about themselves, adjusting to hostile environments, and securing what means of life were available. Their adherence to an ethnoracial identity of protean and shifting particulars has seemed baffling and paradoxical to some—including today, when the Romani diaspora is spread across the face of the globe.
Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov point to the great heterogeneity of the Romani today, with individuals pursuing “contrasting strategies” of “ethnic identification” (33, 53n10). They remark the complexities: for instance, how Central and Eastern European Romani have a powerful sense of national belonging that colors their ethnoracial filiation and how class differences—including the emergence of highly educated, international Romani elites—complicate group and individual Romani identity (41, 49). Racial intermixing, and racial passing, also complicate the dynamics of identification.Footnote 15
Romani racialization has crucially been forged, of course, by modern persecutions, the deadliest example being the Romani genocide carried out by Hitler during World War II. Persecution, of course, exerts centripetal force on group identity. Yet today, the Romani peoples increasingly constitute a global diaspora inhabiting many nations, speaking many tongues, practicing a diversity of lifestyles in a myriad of cultures, among populations from whom they are sometimes no longer physiologically and epidermally distinguishable and into which they could disappear. An anthropological study by Judith Durst sums up the conundrum of contemporary Romani identity in its very title: “‘What Makes Us Gypsies, Who Knows…?!’”
What does make for the persistence of Romani identity, across numerous heterogeneities? Usefully, adaptations and transformations in Romani identity across a long history of a millennium thematize the fluidity of all human identity, individual and group, which is always, ineluctably, in process, undergoing transition and change.
The racial history of the Roma thus dramatizes the fluidity of ethnoracial identity but also vividly attests its persistence, and the desire of a community to belong to a race and be part of an ethnoracial group, of however mutable or dispersed a kind. With the historical example of the Romani, we see that race can be made from the outside, against a people, and also from the inside, by a people whose identity, in the end, could not be erased and made to disappear.
The example of the Romani productively attests that race as self-identification—not race coded as biology, DNA, or the somatic envelope; forged by colonization, economic conditions, war, religion, law, or theology; or produced by racial (pseudo)sciences—can form a species of affirmative racialization. We, denizens of the twenty-first century, ought not to be surprised by this, since census data collection, if nothing else, has habituated us to viewing race as decided by self-identification.
This is of some importance in societies like the United States, where new ethnoracial communities are dynamically in the process of being formed, named, and characterized. A key example is the Asian American community.
With all Asians in the United States classified under a single racial label by governmental agencies, the media, and census and population demographics, the epistemological and existential existence of Asian America is far from clear. The term Asian American is in fact a metaleptic catachresis: in their countries of origin, the people being grouped under the term would by no means have identified themselves with others from elsewhere in Asia as belonging to the same race.Footnote 16
Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Bangladeshis living in South Asia do not see themselves as belonging to the same race as Chinese living in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the People’s Republic of China, nor would they see themselves as somehow sharing a race with Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Kampucheans, or Vietnamese.
In the United States, the history of Asians also highlights disparity, heterogeneity, and division. Long-duration descendants of the Chinese laborers who built the transcontinental railroads before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 see little commonality between themselves and the new immigrants from Taiwan and the People’s Republic who arrived after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 ended Chinese exclusion. Highly skilled, sought-after technocrats arriving from South Asia on H-1B visas as computer scientists and technologists in California’s Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas, also have little in common with desperate, impoverished refugees from Central Asia or Southeast Asia, like the Afghanis or the Hmong. Piled on top of the historical divides are divides of socioeconomic class, unequal access to education and to technology, and giant disparities of wealth and occupational status.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian American identity was forged and characterized from the outside, of course, from the highest levels (with SARS-CoV-2 nicknamed “the China virus” and the “Kung Flu” by President Donald Trump) to street level, triggering waves of anti-Asian hate and violence in attacks against Asians assumed to be Chinese, and from the People’s Republic, though often they were of Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Pacific Islander, and other descent. The eventual reopening of the national economy, welcomed by the population at large, for Asians meant the increase of opportunities for attacks.
Given the thicket of details that suggest heterogeneity, division, and differences among Asian populations in the United States, it’s easy to assume that the racialization of Asian Americans today happens as a dynamic issuing from the outside—as the outcome of hate crimes and racist attacks, or through bureaucratic, governmental systems of naming and characterization.
Yet a collective identity in the process of formation is visible in Asian America today, the result of concerted efforts by activist groups, college students, nonprofit organizations, NGOs, community organizers, philanthropic foundations, and academics in disciplines like ethnic studies, race studies, and Asian American studies, driven by a projective optimism in the possibilities of a coalitional identity as an act of will, and as an outcome of the pragmatic politics of collective action.
Asian American identity, forged through coalition-building, pragmatism, education, collectivist organizing, and self-identification, has, for its encouragement, the historical example of the Romani, who demonstrate the salience of ethnoracial identity as a performance of collective and individual will.Footnote 17 These modalities of affirmative racialism do not need to posit essences of group identity: instead, they point to the constructedness of identity, presenting race as a collective venture, a hopeful catechresis, in human lives of the past, present, and future.
Given all this, why would we not want a long history of race?Footnote 18
