[*PG145]“EXPERT” KNOWLEDGE: INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS ON RACE CONSCIOUSNESS

Reginald Leamon Robinson*

Introduction

Race defines us all, and race consciousness4 destroys us and our divine humanity.5 We think through it, and regardless of whether we [*PG146]wish it true, it has a life of its own and thinks through us.6 Race consciousness forms the social lens through which we assign value to experiences.7 If I were to ask us who we are, I would imagine that each of us would be rather expert8 in knowing precisely the “answer.”9 Among all of the ways we would label ourselves, we would certainly include our race or ethnicity.10 In one panel at the First National Meeting of the Regional People of Color Legal Scholarship Conferences, panelists did precisely that. They “voluntarily” assigned three labels to themselves, and then, as if to suggest that the labels had very stable meanings, told us all what they thought the labels meant. As I sat watching them, I thought that they could not control how we reacted to their labels, and, as they continued to talk, I realized that they could not determine precisely the meanings of their chosen labels either. Despite this neo-pragmatist moment, they were “expert” in knowing what they thought about themselves. None of the panelists said that he or she did not know how to label himself or herself. In this sense, they had to know, and thus they had to pick something. After all, they were “experts.” I can imagine someone saying to me that if they had not chosen these labels, then we could not have en[*PG147]joyed their rather dynamic and brilliantly presented thoughts.11 Even if I concede this point, this hypothetical question fails to address the issue, and I still wonder what would have happened if one of them had written “nothing,” i.e., if he or she had declared no expert knowledge about who he or she must be or might have been. “Nothing” could have invited an existential, paradigmatic shift.

Perhaps I have hit on our existential difficulty. Given the manner in which we have been socially constructed through race, sex, gender, class, ethnicity, culture, or racialized experiences, we have become experts. We think through this expertise about who we must be. This thinking reinforces how we must act. Who we must love. What we must say. Where we must live. Why we must think as we do.12

Once we acquire this expertise, especially as young children, we do not devote much time to questioning it.13 At this point, the “beginner’s mind”14 dies. That mind knows emptiness. It fears nothing. It loves everything. It gleefully lives without habits. It readily accepts. It openly doubts. It embraces all possibilities.15 After one becomes an expert, however, one operates within obvious boundaries and deals with “common sense.”16 Life is not only three-dimensional, but it is also self-evident. Rather than strike out into the supposedly stable world, questioning all and doubting everything, the expert prefers the safety of conventions, and thus she has no inner strength. She prefers [*PG148]what is known and accepted, and she embraces the madness of mainstream conformity, avoiding the heresy of the wayward thinker. She lives not in the lonely place of the true artist or scientist,17 but rather in a crowded room filled with racialized lemmings who, in mantra-like fashion, can name their race as they await the order to leap to their mainstream deaths. The expert needs no new answers because she never asks critical questions.18

Given the foregoing thesis, I question in this essay the need for race consciousness and challenge the “expert” knowledge about what race and its consciousness mean and whether we need a racialized lens in order to operate in this country, this world.19 As a corollary to this argument, I also ask historically marginalized people to reject using white racist behavior or racialized experiences as reasons for their current behavior.20 I do not deny a white supremacist context exists out of which black, white, and other behavior or experiences might originate.21 I take the position, however, that blacks, for example, [*PG149]must move beyond behaviors or experiences that reinforce the power of race consciousness, principally because I posit that we need not have such a consciousness in order to know who we really are.22 If true, then I seek to empower minorities in a manner little different from the way Derrick Bell’s Slave Scrolls empower the fictional blacks in his allegorical move.23 From my perspective, however, I do not think that sinking blacks, for example, further into race consciousness moves historically marginalized people toward a self-empowerment24 that does not depend on white recognition and acceptance of oppressed minorities and on black paralysis toward white oppression.25

Unfortunately, this essay lacks the depth of analysis or breadth of research to alter our current course of thinking—a lofty goal indeed. Despite this limitation and my doubts, I will continue my crusade, my mission, to destabilize race and its consciousness so that we all—blacks, whites, and others—can be free to know ourselves again. In so doing, I risk madness26 and beckon professional isolation.27

Regardless of what I might experience professionally or personally, I believe that race consciousness hinders, if not destroys, us all. We cannot liberate ourselves by using race because, by its inner logic, we must position ourselves against whites or blame others for our predominant experiences;28 if we take Kimberlé Crenshaw’s argument [*PG150]seriously, we must assign the moment-to-moment oppression experiences not to liberal legal consciousness but to white supremacy.29 I cannot imagine blaming white racism for the totality of such experiences.30 Such blaming belies that experiences function dynamically.31 I think that blacks, especially those who rely heavily on race consciousness, actively participate in creating their oppression experiences. (As a corollary, I also implicitly argue that an unconscious race identity aggregates us toward an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness in a manner little different from the legal arguments that Race Crits have leveled against white unconscious racism.) However, I cannot make these statements in polite company without committing a major intellectual faux pas. Alas, so be it.

I.  Race Consciousness: Experts Without Imagination

When it comes to race consciousness (or racial identity), each of us is probably a self-appointed expert. Each of us knows who he or she is. None of us tends to waiver unless we have been intellectually or by particular circumstances focused on the issue. By “expert,” I do not mean that we can speak lucidly about race consciousness like epidemiologists or geneticists talk about biology or DNA. Rather, I mean that we know almost unquestionably that we have a racial lens through which we have understood the world since birth. Most, if not all, of us do not spend much time thinking about race consciousness [*PG151](or racial identity). Race consciousness exists like the Sun; it is just right there. If we question it at all, it is when we might encounter a person who does not quite fit our preconceived ideas about blacks, Latinos, Asians, whites, etc. For example, we might meet a person who has a biracial or multiracial identity. And when we are thinking about race consciousness (or racial identity), we are trying quite hard to redraw the racial map so that the “strange”-looking person can fit exactly where we initially thought she ought to fit.32 Politics often dictates the fit.33 At that point, we can return to the existential slumber where perhaps most of us exist, especially when it comes to race and its consciousness.

We can rely so comfortably on our racial reflexes because time, custom, and norms34 have conditioned us to act and feel like experts on race and its consciousness.35 Let me begin with whites. Traditional, perhaps conservative, white thinkers believe that race exists as a stable category. Little different, liberals implicitly agreed with conservatives.36 Accordingly, these whites denounced racial intermingling.37 Regardless of the color variations among blacks (e.g., mulattos), the [*PG152]one-drop rule would govern racial line-drawing.38 Thus, blacks are blacks; whites are whites, etc.39 These whites were basically certain that they had reached biologically correct and politically necessary decisions.40 In order to support those decisions, whites relied on law, power, and politics.41 American Negro slavery greatly aided in ensuring that whites at least publicly agreed that whites and blacks differed politically and legally.42 For the simplest offenses, courts imposed capital sentences.43

During the post-bellum era, whites still drew racial lines sharply. In the case of rape charges, whites, in some instances, knowingly lynched a white woman’s black lover because he had the temerity to ignore the sometimes all too visible race lines.44 In addition to experi[*PG153]encing such local repression, blacks were denied legal sanctuary when the Supreme Court decided cases like Plessy v. Ferguson45 and The Civil Rights Cases,46 thus anchoring the idea that blacks and whites differed legally and politically. During this period, blacks were forced through the Black Codes into virtual and economic servitude,47 and decades later the stark reality of protecting the color-line expressed itself most bitterly when Emmett Till was killed after he allegedly whistled at a white woman and then refused to apologize or to act contrite.48

By using these well-known examples, I make the simple point: race consciousness precedes social customs and cultural norms, and, over time, these customs and norms inform law, power, and politics.49 Moreover, they made whites experts on race and its consciousness.50 I do not argue that the race consciousness of the 1740s has not permutated; rather, the opposite must be true. Regardless, race consciousness gradually intensifies to a point where it might become ingrained psychologically and biologically in our socially conditioned human makeup.51 In any event, time, custom, and norms root us in racial [*PG154]thinking, and we act on this thinking as if it were unquestionably true. To this extent, whites have acquired expertise on racial categories, identities, and consciousness.

Through time, custom, and norms, blacks, like whites, have acquired expert knowledge of racial identity and black inferiority.52 To illustrate this point, I take us back to American Negro slavery. Slavery undoubtedly brutalized Africans who were brought through the Diaspora into America’s “peculiar institution,” and what the voyage must have left undone, the social institution of slavery completed. This brutalizing process effectively transformed Africans into slaves.53 Slaves were legally, socially, culturally, and politically oppressed, and these limitations became an integral part of their psychology and identity.54 History proffers many examples of slaves such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Denmark Vesey, and David Walker who, while completely reared in American Negro slavery, worked to advance humankind. Yet they were certainly scarred by it, and they devoted their lives to helping themselves and others to overcome its most venal features.55 Although slaves lived this most wretched experience, they resisted its most dehumanizing practices.56 Nevertheless, they were infected with a slave’s consciousness, and, as I have recently argued, slaves generally were conditioned by white masters to focus on their legal, political, and social limitations.57 Social scientists have also [*PG155]documented the lingering effects of slavery, Jim Crow, and formal American apartheid on blacks.58

Accordingly, through historical and social practices, whites and blacks became experts on at least two fronts. First, whites were superior. They, even the poor ones, were better than any non-white.59 I do not mean to suggest that they did not have their doubts. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on Virginia, publicly vented his doubts.60 These doubts notwithstanding, whites fostered a political, social, economic, and cultural climate that reinforced their superiority. For example, blacks could not vote until 1865,61 and, once they were allowed to vote, states developed tools to dilute the black vote.62 In addition, blacks were denied the right to serve on juries by state law, and after the Supreme Court struck down this West Virginia rule in Strauder,63 prosecutors used peremptory challenges to excuse minorities from juries.64 And, as the O.J. Simpson case showed us, when blacks serve on juries, whites will question the sanctity of their judgment if they reach a result that conflicts with the “mountain of evidence.”65 Furthermore, education promoted, and still privileges, the white race and [*PG156]its values.66 One way to institutionalize this superiority was to advance the idea of a melting pot that privileges white norms. Recently, some white legislators promoted English-only statutes so that they could effectively privilege white values as a language process over the Spanish language and Hispanic norms.67 In any event, this front established that whites, as Justice Harlan pointed out in his Plessy dissent, would be the dominant race in America.68

Second, after decades in which whites explicitly oppressed blacks and other non-whites, they have adopted an aversive (or unconscious) racial practice and metaracism.69 Basically, this practice occurs when whites do not explicitly speak or publicly act in traditionally racist ways, yet the effect remains the same.70 These whites segregate their personal lives and residential areas from blacks and other non-whites, often pointing to the decline in the fair market value of their homes, poor schools, or crime-ridden neighborhoods. By these actions, whites show that they feel great discomfort if they have to live near or next to blacks.  I am certain that none of them would describe themselves as racists. If one were to ask them to explain their decisions in ways unrelated to the changing neighborhood—for example, increased presence of minorities—I imagine he or she would have some difficulty. What drives this desire for hypersegregation71 must follow from expert [*PG157]knowledge about the races. It must be what these experts find normal and acceptable. This expert knowledge operates on both explicit and tacit levels.72 Whites, therefore, can probably explain some part of their decision based on race, but they probably do not consciously connect all of their mental processes to race. In this way, expert knowledge about race does its most effective damage and has its most concrete effects at this tacit level of the unconscious.

That racial expert knowledge resides in the unconscious is probably due to our having learned it as children from adults. Consider the complaint in Burch v. La Petite Academy, Inc.,73 a recent example that effectively links historical and contemporary practices of racial oppression. Muriel D. Burch, on behalf of her five minor children,74 alleged, inter alia, racial discrimination, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent hiring, negligent supervision, and breach of fiduciary duty. Burch alleged the following facts: when the children at the La Petite were outside, the defendant’s employees would only permit white children to re-enter the school to use the bathroom. However, the plaintiff’s children, while in front of their immediate family, were required to urinate in cups. Similarly, white children could drink directly from the water fountain; black children had to use a cup to drink from the fountain. Moreover, during television time, white children were assigned to the rug’s clean area, while blacks, including the plaintiff’s children, were required to sit on the rug’s dirty area. Furthermore, when the defendant served snacks, white children received popcorn balls, and blacks received cheese and crackers. When a black child asked for popcorn balls, she was told that they did not have enough popcorn balls, but if the white children did not eat them all, then she might be “allowed to eat a popcorn ball.”75 On occasion, “[w]hite employees referred to the African American children in derogatory words such as ‘nigger,’ ‘bitch,’ ‘bas[*PG158]tard.’ Dale Jones heard one white employee state: Those black people aren’t worth anything.’”76 As a result of these experiences and others, “Dara Jones has told her mother, Muriel Burch, that because of her experience at La Petite, she does not want to be African American.”77 As an example, the Burch matter shows that significant persons (e.g., parents) teach children their expert knowledge, and this knowledge informs whites that blacks represent an inferior, weak out-group. By implication, white children acquire the expert knowledge that they, the in-group, must be superior.78

Let us now consider how blacks acquired expert knowledge about race and its consciousness. After decades of direct and indirect racial oppression, this expert knowledge manifests itself as self-hatred and black inferiority.79 Blacks have not been equally infected by this psychological malaise.80 Nevertheless, social culture reflects the extent to which self-hatred and black inferiority may widely affect most blacks. I can recall vividly a scene from the Five Heartbeats,81 in which a character’s father tells him that since he, the father, had not amounted to anything, his son would also fail. Basically, he is never going to be anything but a Nigger. These words have power, not only because they come from people whom the child trusts,82 but also because they reinforce what that child may have heard from his or her parents and from others for years. It is axiomatic that every home has [*PG159]a curriculum that it passes onto its children.83 Because we are inherently the same species, race hatred amounts to self-hatred, and this self-hatred depends in large part on what our parents told us long before we encountered a single white person or a dominant paradigm that refuses to recognize a black person’s basic humanity.

In effect then, I am arguing that parents—blacks, Latinos, Asians, and others—bear some fundamental responsibility for shaping their children’s early conception of who they are.84 Parents can reinforce that they live at the social margins by suggesting that they should never let the white man keep them down, thus positioning them to resist something that they do not know or have never encountered.85 Parents can deny their children a fuller range of positive self-conceptions through behavior that informs children more of limits than of imaginations. Parents can make their children Niggers through words and deeds by conveying the perhaps unintended message that these children lack what a human being inherently possesses. Through generations of ineffective modeling or mentoring,86 these parents have become symbols for and sites of white oppression, and they pass these oppressive limitations on to their children.87

Basically, expert knowledge about race and its consciousness, especially this knowledge that becomes the base-line by which one relates to the world, confines one within racial boundaries in which one becomes a model prisoner. As a result, blacks who have such expert knowledge must subscribe to their own inferiority and perforce engage in self-hate. In this way, Gordon Allport aptly argues, “A child who finds himself rejected and attacked on all sides is not likely to develop dignity and poise as his outstanding traits. . . . He . . . listen[s] to [*PG160]their derision . . . and submit[s] to their abuse.”88 Allport further argues that “[h]is natural self-love may, under the persistent blows of contempt, turn his spirit to cringing and self-hate.”89

What follows from such self-hatred—a diminished spiritual outlook that depends on expert knowledge? At the very least, one cannot imagine oneself existing outside of the white master’s message.90 Any outside image resides within white provinces, and any outside perspective first turns on an inner expert knowledge.91 By internalizing this expert knowledge, blacks may fear academic excellence because they believe that they would have to think, act, and talk like whites. We have all heard the phrases “keep it real” and “what are you trying to do, act like whitey?”92 In addition, educators recently have discovered that income variables do not necessarily correlate with how blacks might perform on standardized examinations.93 To improve this performance, educators must consider other, more complex variables.

Peer pressure serves as one vital variable. For example, researchers discovered that black students who perform well suffer ridicule [*PG161]from their minority peers because they associate academic success with “acting like whites.” Why do blacks, and perhaps other minorities, hold this opinion? Is it the point that doing well means that blacks seek to be white? Is it the point that high achievement means that one has figuratively abandoned the minority community? Is it the point that blacks can demonstrate their loyalty to their community by preferring mediocrity to academic excellence? Perhaps, it is better to be black than white, especially if it might mean that one speaks and thinks differently.94

At Howard, among a very small percentage of my students, I have experienced this phenomenon.95 It occurred at two levels—personal and professional. When I first arrived at Howard, students falsely concluded that I was married to a white woman because I spoke differently—like a white man.96 Some speculated that I had only gone to majority white schools. Yet, I am sure that the reason this small percentage questioned my black personal or professional authenticity was that I demanded that they work harder and use analytical, logical reasoning. (In this instance, I had done no more than my first-year Torts Professor, Gary Francione, had done when he forcefully and steadfastly demanded that we work harder.) Later, my student evaluations revealed that I treated them as if they are at a majority white institution. One student suggested that I learn more about Howard Law School’s culture. On a much more professional level, one of my stu[*PG162]dents told me that he rejected legal reasoning because he associated it with whites’ thinking. In order for these students to react in this manner, they had to have acquired an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness on which black authenticity in part perforce depends.

Recall the movie Drop Squad,97 in which right-minded, left-leaning, authentic blacks, led by Ving Rhames’ character, would kidnap brothers who emulated whites almost to a stereotypical fault, so that they could re-educate them in the ways of black authenticity (or expertise). In the end, the kidnapped brother (played by Eric LaSalle) reverts to his “authentic” ways, and in so doing he rediscovers his blackness as an answer to racial oppression. In effect, he became reacquainted with his racial “expert” knowledge, and in so doing, he re-learned how to act black. At the same time, I would argue that he limited his imagination to that bounded by his re-educators (e.g., parents or peers). Ultimately, then, I would ask: Why would young, otherwise intelligent blacks reject this rhetorical and seemingly logical approach simply because they believe that to reason or think in this manner requires them to give up something? Give up what? Blackness? Do they believe that they must abandon their expertise on race and its consciousness?

In the end, whites and blacks who have acquired this expertise lack imaginations, beckoning almost certain existential death. They lack the ability to imagine a world in which race will not define people a priori, if at all. They lack an imagination in which whites, blacks, Latinos, Asians, etc., can practice cultural norms without rejecting people whose race emanates, if not originates, from social practices of white supremacy. In this way, we are all part of the problem: blacks and other historically marginalized groups play central roles in the continued viability of racialized experiences and racial oppression. I accordingly do not subscribe to the victim, or innocence, theory of racial discrimination.98 I do not argue that blacks, for example, do not suffer lost opportunities in the workplace, in housing, in education, etc.99 Quite to the contrary, such lost opportunities remain a social [*PG163]“reality.”100 Still, should not blacks use such racially discriminatory practices as explicit or implicit reasons for changing how they understand who they are and how they can change the world, not by basing their identity on resisting white people, but by seeking an identity that transcends racial politics? By resisting white people, how will I know myself except as fighting white racial injustice? By transcending racial politics, and thus fighting for justice for everyone, I imagine that my identity—racial or otherwise—cannot be limited to the political meaning of race, ethnicity, or color. In this way, I recognize that an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness impedes a genuine existential search for a consciousness that does not narrow, but broadens my life’s meaning.

Basically, then, expert knowledge, especially about race and its consciousness, delimits one’s perspective and narrows one’s options. It imprisons us all, and then it sentences us to death row. None of us—blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, etc.—benefits from this approach. In the end, whites can claim with ignominy that they have stifled blacks and other racial minorities. Whites can assert that social and economic opportunities go wasted on blacks and other minorities, save perhaps Asians.101 Blacks can reassure themselves that they will never act, think, or talk like whites, and they can proclaim that the white “man” will always exploit, discard, and oppress the black man. Unfortunately, this approach galvanizes whites, blacks, and others into a hopeless cycle of ignorance, desperation, and despair.102 Equally important, blacks, for example, can vitiate taking personal responsibility for their choices, preferring instead to lay the day-to-day consequences of, say, gun violence and murder on their white oppressors’ doorsteps. Keep in mind that I accept that America continues to operate on a white cultural matrix, in which all things Anglo get privileged over non-Anglo norms.103 Again keep in mind that I am aware [*PG164]of ideological hegemony arguments in which the white elite maintains and perpetuates psychological, social, economic, and political barriers to minority liberation and freedom. This acceptance and awareness notwithstanding, I have never known a white oppressor to place a gun in a black person’s hands and say, “Go kill thy neighbor.” 

My point seeks larger ears for which Thomas Kuhn provides excellent concepts: Competing paradigms can and do coexist in the same institutional and social space. As such, a paradigm of personal responsibility, however fledgling, can coexist with a paradigm of racial oppression. Yet, by adopting expert knowledge on race and its consciousness, whites and blacks at the very least abdicate that responsibility by essentially positing that neither group can choose freely and differently. Such a determinist position reflects in its most damning form the consequence of expert knowledge.

II.  Race Consciousness: Perceiving Nature, Questioning Race, and Dynamics of Racial Experience

With an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness, how do blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, etc., perceive nature? I posit that expert knowledge denies its holder any critical moments in which she can reject nature. For my purposes, nature represents anything that appears objective and real, rational and scientific, necessary and permanent.104 Experts assume that they have a firm grasp on the objectivity, nature, or logic of race,105 and from this expert repose, they can sufficiently relate racial norms and parameters to others (e.g., refer[*PG165]ents).106 Yet, by proceeding in this fashion, it is the expert who gets drawn in and controlled by apparently logical, necessary, or objective parameters. She may not ask any of the difficult, unpopular or marginalizing questions—an approach often associated with the artists or zealots who may wish to make an institutional or professional name for themselves.107 Rather, she complies with the rules of the game so that she at once mainstreams herself and her thinking.108 Consider the manner in which scientists at Harvard and other institutions reacted to Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, which attempted to refute the expert knowledge that had governed astronomy for decades and on which these experts had relied to produce academic textbooks.109 Rather than engage Velikovsky directly on his scientific premises and conclusions, the elite experts attempted to prevent the publication of Velikovsky’s works. He persisted, was published, and changed well-established expert knowledge on astronomy.110 Expert knowledge depends on a stable, predictable, and constant nature, and as a consequence expertise ends all critical questions and revolutionary ideas.111

With expert knowledge, whites and blacks resist radical ideas about race and its consciousness. For both groups, race qua nature [*PG166]seems, falsely, to represent a stable, relatively concrete concept.112 To this extent, biracial and multiracial people function like living deconstruction, effectively using themselves to question critically the binary nature of race.113 And it is to this extent that legal scholars resist biracial categories because, having acquired expert knowledge about how race and its consciousness operate, they can only imagine the worst consequences that attend altering how we think, use, and talk about race.114 By not giving political support to biracial and multiracial identities, blacks appear to critique race as nature in a manner that reinforces their expert knowledge. It matters not that blacks proffer political reasons for this limited questioning. What matters is that by relying on their expert knowledge, blacks continue to rely on a limited idea of race as nature.

An expert knowledge about race as nature amounts to reactive thinking. By reactive thinking, I mean that blacks, whites, and others have strongly linked their current racial identities with past racialized experiences. Although none of them has perhaps immediately experienced racial hatred, they—blacks, whites, and others—may share that pain with some immediacy. As a result, they may hate the guilty and empathize with the innocent. By historical accounts or personal anecdotes, blacks can claim that they all “know” the horror personally. On this point, Patricia Raybon writes:

White people—that relentless, heavy presence. Never benign. . . . innocent. “White people” as a category embodied . . . a clear and certain evil—an arrogant malevolence—that had done unspeakable things that I couldn’t ignore because I knew the facts. . . . And the facts haunted me and . . . justified my hate for all the evil that . . . white people had done.115

[*PG167]Why did Raybon internalize this expert knowledge about whites and, thus, about blacks? She had placed trust in those who helped her acquire her expertise. She adds that: “I knew the stories. I had heard them in childhood, at the knees of people I loved, in the presence of people I trusted. Terrible stories. Horror stories.”116 By acquiring an expertise based on familial trust, blacks, like whites, will assume that past racial practices determine present-day racial relations; this acquired mindset influences day-to-day experiences.117

In this regard, expert knowledge of race and its consciousness depends in part on a reactive process. As such, blacks, for example, do not move toward an identity that transcends a history of racial oppression. Rather, they have an identity that Stanley Fish calls “deeply inside” or that Thomas Kuhn refers to as “tacit knowledge.” That is, blacks, like whites, rely on a cognitive process that correlates experiences with causation. In this way, they assume that past experiences determine exactly the manner in which present events will unfold. With this kind of cognitive and determinist process, neither group can change easily. Blacks will suspect that present changes will simply and necessarily yield past results. I do not suggest that all whites operate in the best interest of blacks or other historically marginalized people. Rather, I suggest that new policies can benefit people regardless of their race or that such policies might be specifically designed to alleviate present effects of past discrimination. Yet, it is equally true that all blacks do not seek to benefit all blacks. Unfortunately, some whites hold profound doubts about blacks, especially because they view black males as murderous criminals or potential rapists of white women. Likewise, some blacks view whites as oppressors and exploiters of black communities. As a consequence, each group holds to an expert knowledge, and thus a racial identity, that has its roots in past and recent histories. Neither group has vested time in knowing itself (and each other) outside of a reactive process.118 Expert knowledge of race and its consciousness, therefore, grounds itself on past and re[*PG168]cent histories, all reacting to racialized experiences or to experiences that they have recast in present racial terms.

How do blacks overcome an expert knowledge that denies them a skeptical read on race as nature119 and mires itself in a reactive cognitive and determinative process? In part, this question suggests that blacks who have suffered horrible racial experiences ought simply to forgive and forget. I do not make this recommendation. However, I do suggest that they have a choice: live in the past, even the recent past, or let go and move forward, even if in fits and starts, toward a future that they can proactively create. Otherwise, they will simply remain stuck in the injurious past, indignant, however righteously.

Such indignation can produce several reactions. First, blacks so injured can conclude that whites hold evil intent for blacks, and they can hate them. They can refuse ever to forgive them. Second, blacks can say with fervor that whites will never keep them down, and thus they can use the injury and its pain as a catalyst, a belly fire of enduring force and power, a passion source of unending dedication and focus. Third, blacks can experience the injury and its pain, and they can conclude that the actor should never have acted as he or she did. Thereafter, they can undergo a healing process that requires them to ask how they helped to create the experience. They can question why they chose to react, to feel, and to internalize as they did.120 In so doing, they can note that experiences operate dynamically. As such, they cannot blame whites without blaming themselves too.121 In my view, all human life begins with free will, and blacks must choose their fate.122 As a society, however, we should not privilege one of these three (or more) choices over the other, and if we have the free will to choose, then on whom can we—blacks, whites, and others—credibly place blame? If we live without free will, then God or some lesser demi-god (e.g., the white elite) has imposed structure upon historically oppressed people, and, to this extent, blacks exist totally as vic[*PG169]tims.123 If white America simply victimizes blacks, then blacks can hate whites and blame them until they decide to be kinder and gentler rulers or blacks can become feared liberation warriors like Mau Maus. And when blacks have vanquished whites, then does the real revolution begin in which blacks take personal responsibility for their day-to-day choices when they have never had the personal responsibility experience?

In any event, the third response perhaps yields the healthiest outcome, principally because blacks can take personal responsibility for how they might heal and get on with their lives. Such an approach allows blacks to reacquire their abandoned agency.124 The second response troubles me because blacks, ostensibly moving forward, still remain reactive to the past, and, thus, they are not true to their inner, centered, dare I say, “spiritual” life. Rather, they might deepen their scars by constantly revisiting the horrible event and by perennially resisting a bright, healing future. Without these horrible demons, blacks may not choose an inner strength that mandates personal responsibility. If the belly fire burns out eventually, on what will these injured blacks rely for political, personal, or spiritual guidance? Can they effectively rely on an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness? The first response returns us to the difficulty of expert knowledge. Patricia Raybon writes, “So I hated quietly and politely and pleasantly and I smiled a lot. . . . White people especially would approve of me, [and they] . . . were important and prevailed.”125 In the end, Raybon suffered. She states that “the effort of it—the sheer idiocy of it—made me utterly[,] thoroughly[,] [m]entally [a]nd physically sick. . . . Indeed, if hate and stress are synonymous—perhaps symbiotic—my body responded accordingly. My medicine chest was full.”126 In this way, Raybon’s expert knowledge, her certainty about whites, contributed to her limitation, her illness.

As such, an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness gives rise to emotional, psychological, and physical illness. This malaise centers itself in the first and second responses, and, unlike the third [*PG170]response, the first and second do not promote the degree of personal responsibility that requires oppressed people to create their own oppressionless future. They do not require blacks to accept that experiences work dynamically. One does not experience what one does not believe.127 To this extent, an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness intensifies the likelihood of responses one and two, and in this way, blacks, whites, and others draw themselves into isolation, hatred, doubt, and fear. They will also reinforce the idea that racialized experiences victimize them. Accordingly, an expert knowledge works against personal responsibility—the third response—and encases blacks in the ancient wisdom, long since dispatched by Kant128 and Heisenberg,129 that experiences exist in an objective, empirical world.130 Worst of all, this expertise rejects “nonsense”: When one knows, when one has certainty, one cannot remain open to seemingly outrageous, but potentially liberating, possibilities.

III.  Human Consciousness: Toward a Beginner’s Mind and Nonsense

Can blacks, whites, and others who have for hundreds of years immersed themselves in horror, pain, guilt, and fear of white supremacy and racial oppression transcend an expert knowledge about race and its consciousness? In order to transcend this expert knowledge, blacks must do at least two things. First, they must imagine, i.e., really visualize, a new self in a new future, one in which they operate from a spiritual, raceless center. Second, they must change how they perceive [*PG171]race as nature. If blacks can weaken race as nature, then they can perhaps engage race and its consciousness deconstructively, reading the text of race as nature in order to destroy race altogether,131 thereby moving toward a human consciousness. By human consciousness, I mean an awareness of the Great Creator’s expression. As such, through a long-term process of deconstructing an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness, we can choose to return to a beginner’s mind and, thus, to nonsense, an era in which we live spirit-created justice because we—all people—believe in it as a person’s “search for meaning.”132 It is not by attaining the end but by enduring the search that we again experience a beginner’s mind or nonsense. Without this long-term process, we would not place such expert knowledge under erasure; nor would we deliberately reunite with our human consciousness.

In order to place this expert knowledge under erasure, we—blacks, whites, others—must accept that our racial identity and the way we think about that identity emanate from social language and purposeful action. Such language and action lead to habitual and unconscious practices, all of which result in social conventions that undergird “all reflective or conscious thought.”133 What is most challenging is to accept that language, habits, and practices exist interdependently. If this statement is true, we must acknowledge that expert knowledge lacks an objective foundation and essential meaning. As such, an expert knowledge depends on culture and context which, like experience, function fluidly and dynamically.134 With this fluidity, we can shift from an expert knowledge toward a human consciousness, but it requires that we begin by accepting that this expertise locates itself in unconscious, habitual practices of racism that inform how we experience others.135

[*PG172] How then do we, blacks, whites, and others, experience another person when we operate from an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness?136 In seeking a human consciousness, we must address this question.137 A move to human consciousness represents a purposeful act, designed to interrogate an expert knowledge’s continued value. On this point, Ronald D. Laing instructively writes that after we are born, we become damaged personalities, bearing an injured consciousness.138 Why? For Laing, “[w]e are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.”139 One form of this violence must be racial oppression. This violence imposes added injury when blacks and whites tell their children in words or by deeds who they must be—racialized personalities. In so doing, blacks and whites pass on their damaged personalities and injured psyches to their children, and, in effect, their children operate within such limited horizons. As such, Laing can properly ask: “Can human beings be persons today? . . . Is love possible? Is freedom possible?”140

In seeking to shift from expert knowledge to human consciousness, Laing’s point cannot be missed: We are not in touch with our humanity, with our human consciousness. Thus, we do not know who we are because we are not persons. What then is a person? For Laing, a person exists through experiences.141 Yet, more than just understanding who we are through experiences, Laing argues that a person’s experiences come from him or her, and, to this extent, a person constitutes the “center of orientation of the objective universe.”142 Although we know ourselves through experiences, behavior also defines a person,143 actions that begin with the person. At bottom, people [*PG173]transform themselves through their thoughts and actions: “Personal experience transforms a given field into a field of intention and action: only through action can our experience be transformed.”144 Given this definition, a person lives not as a singular, isolated agent, but rather as a part of an interactive system of experience.145 As such, a “person is the me or you, he or she, whereby an object is experienced.”146 A person constitutes the center of her experiences, and from this centered position, she experiences the “objective universe.”147 By moving from this center, her behavior originates action, transforming “simple” space into dynamic space by acting and intending.

It follows then that if we seek to transform ourselves from holders of expert knowledge to centers of human consciousness, giving our lives meaning beyond oppression, then we must intend to change. We must act on those intentions. Yet, at this point in the process of bringing meaning unrelated to racialized experiences into our lives, we—blacks, whites, and others—must garner specific experiences in which we relate to others without regard to race. I do not argue that blacks should ignore racism or discriminatory practices, or that whites should continue to live by the expression that they do not “see” race. I posit that blacks and whites must first acknowledge that we live in a social context in which race has always played a major role.148 Then we should make a conscious decision to seek out role models, even if blacks and whites must leave the comfort of their groups or communities to practice the intent and then act on that intent to deal specifically with individual attributes rather than with racial stereotypes. In effect, I am asking people who are committed to changing how they experience others to take risks. Without role models, none of us can begin to alter effectively our experiences. Furthermore, we cannot move from expert knowledge to human consciousness without intent, action, and risks.149

[*PG174] In making this move, why take risks to leave our groups or communities? Laing provides an answer that is axiomatic: “behavior is a function of experience; and both experience and behavior are always in relation to someone or something other than self.”150 Laing goes further by placing experience and behavior in a social context in which most of us operate as alienated—and racialized—selves. Laing posits, “When two (or more) persons are in relation, the behavior of each toward the other is mediated by the experience by each of the other.”151 That is, I cannot know another person. Rather, I know my prejudices, and these prejudices inform the manner in which I simply experience my already preconceived prejudices. As such:

the experience of each is mediated by the behavior of each. There is no contiguity between the behavior of one person and that of the other. Much of human behavior can be seen as a unilateral or bilateral attempt to eliminate experience. A person may treat another as though he were not a person, and he may act himself as though he were not a person.152

In the end:

There is no contiguity between one person’s experience and another’s. My experience of you is always mediated through your behavior. Behavior that is the direct consequence of impact, as of one billiard ball hitting another, or experience directly transmitted to experience, as in the possible cases of extrasensory perception, is not personal.153

At root, we can move from expert knowledge to human consciousness if we appreciate that experiences are dynamic and contextual. Without this appreciation, can we know ourselves? If we are alienated from others, especially due to such difficult issues as race and its consciousness, who are we? As alienated people, we cannot reach our divine humanity, where I would argue a beginner’s mind, or nonsense, resides. For Laing, we are alienated, lesser forms of what Rollo [*PG175]May called our “human potentiality.”154 What is this potentiality? Does it depend on people asserting that they are persons regardless of the racial paradigm that awaits them, much like Laing’s alienation? Our potentiality lies in our unconscious (or our human consciousness or beginner’s mind). According to May, our potentiality holds power that we perhaps fear to actualize.155 Yet, if a so-called black person were to declare that she has no race, but is first a person, has she tapped into her human consciousness or what May termed her non-being? Is her statement like blacks abandoning their expert knowledge of race and its consciousness? How should we react? Should we label her a black conservative for seeking her truth privately or publicly? Should we dismiss her declaration as false consciousness? Should we delimit it as “vulgar constructivism”?156 Perhaps prior to the moment that we were informed that we were black or white, each of us related to our unconscious or human consciousness. If true, who were we first? When did we first cognitively experience race?157 I think that this first racializing moment can be both personal and historical. I recently argued that blacks perpetuate oppression by white slave masters by adhering to identities and consciousness that were features of American Negro slavery.158 Even if one rejects this proposition, what is clear is that we—blacks, whites, and others—have imbued ourselves with an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness, thus effectively losing touch with our inner potential.

If we now fear reclaiming our non-being potentialities, then we will not undertake the quest of eschewing our expert knowledge of race and its consciousness. We will fear human consciousness and the be[*PG176]ginner’s mind. Instead, we would prefer the “minimal requirements for bio-social survival—to register fatigue, signals for food, sex, defecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing.”159 In forcefully making this point, Laing argues that “[o]ur capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited.”160 He further argues that “our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.”161

According to Laing, people live alienated lives.162 They do not know themselves or each other. When people experience each other, they do so through a veil of constructivism. It would follow that this disability colors their experiences, and, as such, they live disconnected from their selves. If true, we cannot truly know what normal means.163 If normal means perforce alienation, then we have embraced illusion, or maya, with gusto,164 perhaps even defending it with our precious lives. Laing argues that “[w]hat we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being.”165 Although I accept that race operates as a highly contingent category,166 I would still prefer to adopt an idea that makes experiences interdependent and dynamic, rather than the alternative view: that very powerful social groups deliberately and successfully manipulate others into serving and protecting very oppressive social [*PG177]institutions.167 Therefore, “normal” positions us for an alienated existence, regardless of our socially conditioned race experience, and in this way, we do not immediately, if ever, choose to live meaningful lives without an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness.168

How did I first come to live a life without meaning, a life alienated from my human consciousness? Assuming that I cannot know myself because I have long since abandoned my beginner’s mind,169 who first introduced my consciousness, my epistemological process, to the complex and interdependent variables called behavior and experience? More than that, how do we get to an existential place where we can ask this question and have a real hope of a comprehensible answer? I think we cannot comfortably ask these questions or faithfully expect an answer because we—blacks, whites, and others—do not imagine living without an expertise on race and its consciousness. We do not intend to tap into that powerful reservoir of our unconsciousness where human consciousness or the beginner’s mind resides. It is our commitment, wittingly or unwittingly, to race that positions us for alienated, meaningless lives. W.E.B. Du Bois predicted that the color-line would be the twentieth-century’s problem when he recognized that blacks were imbued with a “double consciousness.”170 What he did not foresee was that blacks and other historically marginalized and oppressed people would fatally hold onto this consciousness. In this way, blacks reinscribe themselves as victims,171 deeply miring themselves in a very oppressive, alienated existence.172 If we ever hope to live truly nonsensical, integrated lives, then we must question what, if any, continued value we draw from an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness, and we must seek a life that centers itself in human consciousness.

In order to attain a human consciousness, blacks must intend to take personal responsibility for how they experience their world and [*PG178]to abandon an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness. In this life-long process, we must look critically at the law and legal paradigms, especially antidiscrimination laws that focus our social institutions and individual consciousness on race and its consciousness. Note that I do not suggest that we should not root out racist behavior and discriminatory practices that seek to diminish the life chances of historically marginalized groups, all in the name of a cancerous idea of white supremacy. This injunction reaches beyond a black-white paradigm. Rather, it applies to everyone, regardless of what Michael Eric Dyson calls racial context.173 My point is simple: the law focuses our minds on race, and in so doing it reinforces the idea that we all do, and should, possess an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness. None of our current laws mandates that we seek a beginner’s mind where laws might look different and could establish principles on which we could live whole, connected lives.

Why critically look at the law in our hopefully collective desire to live meaningful, purposefully fulfilling lives? Law works interdependently with history, culture, and social practices. At the very least, law has reinforced what we can and cannot do socially. Keep in mind what Plessy v. Ferguson174 did to reinforce the legal and social inferiority of blacks. The Civil Rights Cases175 were equal to the task, and historical accounts illustrate exactly how whites intensified their maltreatment of blacks during the rise of Jim Crow. Under America’s Apartheid, blacks were segregated from whites and vice versa. Equally important, Congress granted blacks rights, civil abilities, or constitutional protections no greater than whites possessed. Ever since the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that citizens can discriminate, not publicly, but privately,176 whites and blacks, at the very least, have continued to practice racism (or ignorance) in the confines of their homes and private organizations. As a result, people, especially when they cannot avoid encountering the racialized “Other,” enter the public domain saddled with a private language about what race means and harboring a race consciousness.177 The state cannot effectively reach such private [*PG179]discrimination because it does not recognize that it has politically harmful effects unless the state, through its courts, concludes that private behavior has such a public effect, thus mandating regulation by the state. Bowers v. Hardwick was such a case.178 As a result, the present effects of past discrimination create new opportunities for people to suffer, to feel small, and to live on the marginal, oppressed edges of our communities. Should we limit our potentialities to the narrow imagination of legislators, regardless of their race, who have explicitly or implicitly committed themselves to an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness? In this regard, I believe that we—blacks, whites, and others—must go beyond the permissible limits of what the law requires in placing an expert knowledge under erasure. We must recognize that the easy comfort of legal parameters has not ended race oppression. The law provides blacks and whites with ample fodder to blame others for their experiences and to resist taking personal responsibility for how they live their lives. In effect, the law provides little to enable us to move from an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness to a human consciousness.

Conclusion

Our expert knowledge of race and its consciousness cannot be reached by the law. When the law reaches any racist or discriminatory behavior, it focuses on whites who have been labeled individual perpetrators. However, the law has nothing to say directly about the behavior of blacks when they might engage in conduct that intensifies a community’s commitment to an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness. Such behavior reinforces the status quo of race relations between majority and minority groups. To the extent that the state focuses on blacks at all, it tends to maintain that blacks are criminals or welfare queens. Consider the criminal context. Recall how easily Charles Stuart in Boston and Susan Smith in South Carolina could draw the state’s (read: whites’) attention to blacks as criminals.179 In this way, when whites engage in racist or racially discriminatory conduct, they suffer a legal sanction, and rightly so. By not legally punishing such behavior, the state endorses illegal conduct toward statutorily protected groups or historically oppressed minorities.

Yet, how does the state undermine the expert knowledge that blacks hold about race and its consciousness? In the face of histori[*PG180]cally oppressive and racially discriminatory conduct, the state enacted civil rights laws, such as Title VI and Title VII, and in so doing it carved out special legislative protection for, at the very least, blacks. By not challenging directly how blacks use race consciousness to reinforce racial dynamics, however, we have overlooked this expertise’s dynamic energy. In essence, whites can discriminate privately, and blacks can reinforce their feeling that they can explain every aspect of their lives by looking to white racism. Unfortunately, the law cannot imagine reaching private practices if they do not demonstrate an impact on the public sphere. Yet we cannot explain ongoing and extant public racial discrimination without also addressing our private expert knowledge about race and its consciousness.

In the end, we—blacks, whites, and others—must accept that our expert knowledge of race and its consciousness keeps us focused not on our “non-beingness” and its potentialities—a beginner’s mind—but on the immediate or historical past where most of us learned about the evil ways of the other races. It is too bad that we have not learned to move collectively away from such expertise. But why should we? At present, our society and its laws require us to examine the racialized Other in terms of legal protections and social benefits. In so doing, we rely on our expertise and, thus, on our inherent prejudices and cognitive limitations. We do not appreciate that each of us reinforces our racialized experiences and fears by co-creating and transferring our expectations to the other person. Thereafter, we rationalize our experiences, racial or otherwise, by assigning blame and responsibility to others such as whites. In this essay, I directed my remarks principally toward blacks. I did so for one vital reason: America will in all likelihood be a racist nation for at least the next forty years, and by assigning blame and responsibility to whites for black experiences, blacks have abdicated their powerful agency. By and large, blacks operate like impotent victims. As such, they have consigned themselves to waiting for help, for recognition, for justice. Justice remains an active concept, and I believe that blacks must accept that they co-create racialized experiences. If it “just happens” to them, then they are victims, bearing no personal responsibility for their fate. In this case, justice, liberty, and freedom remain the exclusive province of whites, and they will not acknowledge finger-pointing guilt accusation. As such, neither of the groups will come close to accessing their “non-beingness,” nor will they progress to human consciousness as a collective, dialogic process. In the end, both groups will remain fixated on their expert knowledge about the other.

[*PG181] However, a beginner’s mind or nonsense thinking can move us beyond this expert knowledge. Let us first consider a popular example, and then a historical one. Recall Linda Hamilton’s character, “Sarah Connor,” in Terminator 2.180 She faced certain death from an apparently unstoppable Terminator 2000, and Earth and her inhabitants were doomed to Armageddon. In Connor’s despair, especially for her son, she blamed everyone. She felt that she could not do anything. For whatever reason, Connor refused to concede fate to an event larger than herself. Before deciding to assassinate the scientist at Cyberdyne, she etched in the picnic table: “Fate is what you make.” She attempted the assassination and failed. Thereafter, Connor and the T1 model educated the scientist about what he and his company had done from the perspective of a probable, horrible future. The scientist understood, and Connor relented in her desire to kill him. Rather than lob fault, they worked together, facing certain death to change their future. They changed their position by remaining open to new ways that did not consign either of them to idle hand wringing, emotional paralysis, and political finger pointing. In so doing, Connor had to let go of her expert knowledge of how the enemy would act and what her future held. In the end, Earth’s future would terminate in the year 2000, unless people like the Sarah Connor character—you and me—take personal responsibility for contributing to a different, better one. It took a beginner’s mind—nonsensical thinking—to make a future, thus granting us all a chance to move beyond our expert knowledge—nuclear Armageddon—to human consciousness (e.g., social peace and personal responsibility).

Like this popular fictional story, history also proffers an example of the beginner’s mind or nonsense thinking, all in the pursuit of eradicating our expert knowledge and moving us toward a human consciousness. Consider Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Although whites and blacks angrily resisted him, he advanced a message of love, peace, forgiveness, and racial tolerance. Perhaps he had accessed his non-beingness, and he saw beyond the expert knowledge of race and its consciousness that was held by whites (i.e., powerful agents) and blacks (i.e., impotent victims). Perhaps he viewed a human consciousness in which people were “judged [not] by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”181 In the end, our society in the [*PG182]person of James Earle Ray killed this self-actualizing visionary. However, Reverend King knew the risks, and, despite what must have been prolonged moments of deep mortality, he preached love and peace anyway. Like other civil rights leaders, Reverend King refused to concede our future to self-hatred by both whites and blacks and to white supremacy and institutional racism. Rather, he took personal responsibility for recognizing the limits of an expert knowledge of race and its consciousness, and he shared his vision of a society oriented toward human consciousness. Before this recognition and vision, however, Reverend King must have acquired a beginner’s mind. He must have allowed himself to question race as nature. He openly doubted and readily accepted. He truly embraced possibilities. He loved everything. In this way, Reverend King exemplifies how a beginner’s mind reorients us away from expert knowledge to human consciousness, a cognitive and epistemological process that begins, not just with blameful finger pointing, but also with personal responsibility.182