Flickr/Raymond June. Some rights reserved.
In the recent furore over Trevor Phillips’ Channel 4 show ‘Things we won’t say about race that are true’ the one thing that really needed to be said about race was pretty much overlooked. And that is the fact that race is the most overused, misunderstood and, above all, useless concept that we have for talking about difference and the sooner we jettison it the better as it adds nothing to our understanding of social relations in the wider world.
We should certainly talk about racism, the belief in the existence of races and the value judgements that are, and have been, used to evaluate people on the basis of physical characteristics, with often brutal consequences. But talking about races as if they actually existed, as if they were something concrete and real and tangible, that’s part of the problem - even if it might get you some nice ratings, a slap on the back from the Daily Mail and a whole bunch of other media attention.
