1
The Language of Race

Prologue - Black Power mixup

The first thing I notice when I enter Mona's Country Kitchen is the glorious smell of frying fish. The second thing I notice is the frown on Jesse Semple's face.

"I see you, sister," he says. He's in the booth closest to the door, so of course he sees me. When I point this out he shakes his head and says, "what I mean is, I know what you're trying to do."

I walk over to his table, take off my coat, and drop it on the seat opposite him. "Are we going to get some food? The line isn't too long yet," I say. I smile and nod in the direction of the people queuing behind the order here sign.

His frown deepens. "I said, I know what you're trying to do." He remains firmly rooted in his seat.

I sigh, move my coat aside, and slide into the booth. "What's that?"

"You ain't here to pay me back for fixing your icebox," he says. "What you really want is to counsel me about Zoe."

Jesse calls himself a handyman, but he can fix or build or rebuild pretty much anything, which I take to mean that he is either an incredibly good handyman or that he is a retired contractor or engineer or something. I don't know his background because whenever I ask about it he unspools a story or a rant that is never as relevant to my questions as he thinks it is. Still, people I trust recommended him very highly when I moved here, and he's proven them right. He's also become a friend.

I know what he can fix and build because he has almost completely remade my townhouse, bit by bit, since I bought it a year ago. During most of this time he has been living with my next-door neighbor, Zoe, despite having a house of his own nearby. Apparently now there is some problem.

"Counsel you? About what?"

"You want me to stay in good with Zoe so I don't move out."

"I didn't even know you and Zoe were having trouble. What happened?"

"What happened is that something is very wrong with that woman. You seen 'Black Power Mixtape?'"

"The documentary with the archival footage from the '60s and '70s?"

He nods. "I was telling Zee about it and she had no idea what I was talking about."

"I only know about it because you told me, and I still haven't seen it. So you had to tell her about it. So what?"

"Listen. She had no idea what I was talking about. Not just about the film. She was a bunch of, 'what's Black Power?' So I told her about Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks and all that. And the whole time she was just looking straight confused."

"Not everyone knows those names," I say.

"I had the same thought," he says. "Thought maybe I was being too specific. So I told her never mind the individual people. I told her I was talking about what happened to civil rights when they realized Jim Crow wasn't all there was to it. I told her I was talking about race relations."

"That didn't help?"

He shakes his head. "She just said, 'what kind of relations? Which relations?'"

"Maybe she didn't hear you."

He taps his index finger to the side of his head, uses the same finger to point at me, then smiles and says, "Way ahead of you. I said it again, louder. 'Race relations.' She just stared at me, like I was speaking Sanskrit. That's when I decided." Here he leans forward, like he's about to tell me a secret. "She is not all there." He returns to his original position and looks at me expectantly.

The would-be diners are now lined up all the way to the sidewalk. The glorious smell races out to join them, riding the draft from the propped-open door right past our table. I'm too distracted to work up the sympathy or outrage that Jesse seems to require. All I can say is, "that does sound like a problem. But I'm not sure why it's my problem. Why would I invite you here under false pretenses to - how did you put it?"

"To counsel me."

"Yes, that. Why would I do that?"

"Because you need me to stay next door, so I can come round to your place whenever something knocks or pings and get you fixed up. And because this business is making me wonder if I need to be under the same roof as that woman."

"Jesse, you have your own house two blocks away. Even if you split up with Zoe you could still come around."

"A couple of blocks can make all the difference when madwomen are on the loose."

"That's a little dramatic."

"Think about it. How could a grown woman in the United States of America not know what race means?"

"I'm not sure I know what race means. Are you?"

"You're damn right I'm sure. And I don't trust anyone who isn't. Who knows what other basic stuff she doesn't know? If I ask her to put some cream in my coffee, will she reach for the bleach? If I ask her to get some food delivered will she call the SWAT team? I'm not getting shot because she don't know the difference between pizza and the police. This may be the last time you see me on this side of town."

"I guess I better go on and pay you for the icebox, then."

"Buy me lunch and we'll be even. And get a couple of extra to go platters. Who knows when I'll be back this way."

1.1 Race-talk and the invitation to philosophy

Let's assume that Jesse is right: Zoe didn't just mishear him. Let's also assume that she isn't pretending ignorance to make some point and that she is (otherwise) a perfectly competent speaker of the English language. She just doesn't know what the word "race" means.

Is this easy to imagine? Can you envision someone reaching adulthood in the twenty-first-century United States without learning how to speak the language of race? Is it possible to live a more or less ordinary life in a place that takes race seriously - even if you don't - without becoming fluent in race-talk?

I use expressions like "race-talk" and, soon, "racial discourse" because the concept of race belongs to a complex system of meanings that in important ways works very much like a language. This may be what makes Zoe's situation so hard to imagine for us and so difficult for Jesse to bear. In the society that Jesse and Zoe inhabit, racial discourse is nearly as pervasive and intuitive a device for expression and interpretation as any natural language.

Languages are pervasive in the sense that they are all around us. Language is the medium of human culture and cognition, and we are immersed in it the way fish are immersed in water. One might in fact think that the sophistication with which we manipulate systems of signs, symbols, and meanings - which is what I'm taking "language" to mean, and which is not limited to speaking or writing in words - is what truly distinguishes humans from the other animals. We think in language, we flirt and pray and plead in language, and we start to learn our way around the world as children by, or while, learning our way around our native tongues.

Race-talk is similarly pervasive. It is deeply woven into the basic fabric of contemporary social life and human relations. In order to think responsibly about citizenship, freedom, virtue, education, crime, poverty, style, and much else besides, one has to account for the impact of race on those subjects. Could Zoe know anything about any of these other things and not know something about race?

Languages are pervasive in part because they provide the materials for the acts of interpretation and categorization that we use to make sense of the world. To think is in part to use concepts to sort the world of experience into manageable chunks and relationships and tendencies, all of which we can then use our concepts to discuss and study. Languages store up these concepts, and the shape and contents of the storehouse help set the parameters for the world that future experiences will disclose.

The interpretive and shaping function of language becomes particularly apparent when cultures change. The flaneur - the quintessentially modern Parisian loafer or stroller - was not really a thing until Baudelaire invented the term in 1863, at which point it became something people could recognize and aspire to be, and the idea became a lens for examining modern societies. Something similar is true for wage-laborers (as opposed to serfs and slaves) before feudalism gave way to capitalism, and for stretch-fours in NBA basketball (as opposed to regular power forwards) before the three-point line made long-distance shooting more of a priority.

Race-talk is notoriously, sometimes disastrously effective at facilitating this sort of interpretive activity. We often see the world, ourselves, and each other through racial lenses. This is evident in the ways people imagine themselves as members of racialized communities, for good and for ill; but a perhaps...