What you don’t get is that the paradigm of race is the root of the problem

Data that, I’m assuming, demonstrates how Black identity politics (known by us as asserting our equality) has helped ushered in Trumpism? I don’t dispute that. I just don’t care, and neither does a growing legion of Black people no longer willing to be “good niggers” in order for a certain class of White people to check their worst impulses.

What you’re failing to take account of is that actions have consequences. You can say “I recognize that a certain aggressive-black-identity-based approach to politics is bringing about a reactive white-identity-based approach to politics, but I don’t care,” but that “not caring” is going to lead straight back to greater racial acrimony. I am not suggesting that you or any other black people need to be “good niggers,” to quote your words, or, in fact, any sort of “niggers,” whether good, bad or otherwise. In fact, I’m suggesting the very opposite. Stop playing the whole “race” game. Transcend that paradigm.

Perhaps — since this issue is obviously very emotional and personal for you — you’ll see my point more clearly in a different context. Just as is the case for the black-white “race” division (an unscientific distinction), Hitler adopted a racial (rather than properly religious or socio-cultural) definition of “Jews” (like the genetic perspective on the black-white racial division, this was likewise a view not supported by genetic research), and then classified the people he deemed “Jews” as an inferior race sullying the purity of “Aryan blood.” After the Holocaust, many Jews reacted, ironically, by adopting Hitler’s classification but turning it from a negative into a positive, embracing their “Jewish” racial identity and making it a point of pride. The result (discussed at length by the philosopher Hannah Arendt) is that Israeli and many non-Israeli Jews have adopted an aggressive species of Zionism, with Israel becoming a nationalist “Jewish” state, offering such things as a “right of return” to Israel to those who can “prove” they’re “Jewish,” etc. This aggressive species of Zionism informing Israeli policies toward neighboring states and peoples (the issues there are complex, so I’m not in any way suggesting the Palestinians have been angels), in turn, has contributed markedly to a worldwide rebirth of anti-Semitism (premised on a total muddled conflation of the religion of Judaism, the socio-cultural category of Jewishness and the national category of Israeli). And so the cycle continues ….

The point is this: instead of transcending the whole unscientific and demeaning “racial” paradigm that Hitler tried to use to oppress and exterminate Jews, many Jews ironically adopted the oppressor’s categories, not realizing that, by doing so, they were stuck within the confines of the very same paradigm and, as such, were subject to the very same dangers because the negative-positive polarity they’d tried to flip could very easily be flipped back on them. (Friends and acquaintances of mine who are Jewish have a variety of perspectives on this issue, as you’d expect, so I’m speaking as an outside observer who’s somewhat familiar with the tenor of many of the discussions and debates on these issues, as I am on American race issues, but I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that my view is a widely accepted one among those disparately situated and genetically variegated people who call themselves “Jews.”)

So, now, let’s come back to the American black-white racial paradigm. I think you and I might agree that would-be-racists earlier in history invented the unscientific category of “race” based on superficial characteristics and for the purpose of demeaning and oppressing those whose race they deemed to be inferior, i.e., other than their own. What you and many other “black” people want to do now is take those categories and flip their valence, turning “blackness” from a negative into a positive. What I’m telling you you’re missing is the very same thing that was missing from the attempt to flip the Aryan-Jewish valence. If I’d been Jewish and had been alive at that time, I’d like to have thought that what I would’ve wanted to do is to completely get past that whole racial paradigm, to say, “Okay, we’ve seen how destructive categorizing people by race is, so let’s stop the madness and start treating each other a bit more like human beings, part of a single family.” And I think that’s the right approach to take to our current race issues as well. It’s why I referred you to my article demonstrating that employing racial categorizations, even as part of a campaign of heavy-handed anti-racism, just cements those racial categories in people’s minds, polarizes them and makes them treat racial divisions as more real. It makes blacks and whites more racist and ultimately hurts everyone.

You say, in response, “I’ll agree with you on this: I’d love to back in time and prevent the concept of race from ever being developed. It’d spare us all a lot of trouble. But that gun can’t be unfired; so feel free to come back at any time with solutions that don’t involve a DeLorean.”

But what I’m telling you is that this isn’t just a matter of historical wishful thinking. Deconstructing and stigmatizing the very paradigm of race is critical to our collective future, if we’re going to be all living in one nation together. As I’ve argued many times on Medium and elsewhere, full-on black-white integration on every level of society is the only way to bring discrimination to an end, but that’s not going to happen when we’re busy radicalizing and polarizing both blacks and whites and bringing out everyone’s worst, basest, most racist instincts.

The gun, indeed, “can’t be unfired,” as you say, but once the smoke clears and the carnage is swept away, what we can do is take the gun away from everyone rather than using that same gun to fire a new volley of bullets in the opposite direction. Remember, we had all sorts of very harsh “inherently” superior/inferior judgments that we used to make about Catholics, Eastern Europeans, Asians and many other so-called “inferior races” in our history, and we’ve largely moved past that as a result of greater social and economic integration with these people, after they worked their way into the middle class and beyond and proved the whole “inferior race” nonsense wrong. Irish Americans used to be deemed the lowest of the low in this country, but today, they’re simply “Americans,” and hardly anyone even thinks about them as “other” than themselves. That same thing can happen with black people in America as well, but that requires discarding the racial paradigm and its ugly history, difficult as it may be to let those bygones by bygones.