I have never lived, nor has any of us, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a world, one free of racial hierarchy, is usually imagined or described as dreamscape …

Race matters. It matters because of the meanings we give to it. How and why race has come to matter, and how and why we continue to make race matter, has to do with ways in which history, power and politics shape the frames within which meaning is made, contested and renegotiated.

The foundation of the enduring effects of race lies in the racialisation of what it means to be human. The human is not ontologically given in a way that is independent of the mind. We create our human-ness as we open ourselves up in the interactive presence of other sentient and non-sentient beings. We forge our human-ness in the midst of changing social forces and power relations (historical, cultural, political, psycho-social, scientific and economic) and over the duration of our lives. These constellations of social forces produce particular interpretive frames and practices with which we make meaning of the human. If becoming human is something we do with other humans and with other sentient and non-sentient beings, then, in the words of Tim Ingold, ‘to human is a verb’. Where there are humans, ‘what goes on is humaning’ (Ingold 2015: 115–20).

Humaning is a different activity from humanising. To human is a lifelong process of life-in-the-making with others. To humanise is to impose upon the world a preconceived meaning of the human (Ingold 2015: 115–20). There is no one way of humaning. There is no perfect way of going about it.