I use “arbitrarily defined group” instead of “race” rather than beginning by acknowledging that the word “race” has no meaning and then proceeding to use it as if it did. The human race is certainly one: as the Sufi teacher Imam Bilal Hyde has said, the esoteric meaning of “La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammadun rasul Allah” (there is no deity but the One God, Muhammad is the Messenger of the One God) is “One God, one human race.” And “to live as one race and one family,” says Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, “that is Islam.” A whole host of other people in other spiritual traditions, all around the world, have been saying the exact same thing for a long time: we are all of one family. So no, there are not different races of human beings. And yes, there are arbitrarily defined groups of human beings that are systemically, and systematically, slotted into the kyriarchy of abuse in any given culture and treated, or mistreated, accordingly. Or as has so often been said, race is a fiction; racism is a fact.
And if the mere mention of Islam or a quote from that tradition just freaked you out, you can skip right to chapter Six and tap your Islamophobia away.
We might even say that the definition of racism is the belief that there is more than one race, and from there it all goes downhill: once we have more than one of anything we can compare—and I, of course, belong on the most flattering end of that comparison. Does “arbitrarily defined group” seem like a pretty clunky term? “Clunky” would be a nice word for the whole concept of slicing and dicing humanity and then slotting us into a kyriarchy of abuse. Our continual discomfort with the ever-shifting nomenclature—ever-shifting because we never seem to be able to land for very long on a label without starting to feel uncomfortable with it—might just be a clue.
I’m using preferred pronouns where they’re known to be preferred, just because it isn’t hard to refrain from calling people out of their names, or their pronouns. Also, “they” and “them” are so much easier than “he or she” and “him or her.”
All of our many brain parts have fancy names and other, easier ones. Resmaa Menachem speaks of the neocortex, the mammalian brain, and the lizard brain, the neocortex being the part that has evolved most recently—the more human part of our brain amidst all the parts that might constitute a whole menagerie. The parts of our brains that are not so evolved play a large part in keeping our fears and phobias running, so they want gentle treatment and healing, always bearing in mind that the whole point of the exercise of being human is that they don’t get to run the show. “Lizard brain” will recur here, without apologies to the lizards—they know who they are.
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