“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 more obvious and egregious example involves racial stereotyping. Overly rigid generalizations about the behavior of racially defined groups are a common feature of social life, as a cursory review of recent political debates will show. If Zoe has heard anyone discuss police brutality in the US, UK, or France, or if she’s heard anyone push back against attempts to describe COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus” or the “Kung Flu,” she almost has to know something about race.
In addition to shaping our experiences, languages are shaped by our experiences: they are devices not just for interpretation but also for capturing and expressing a sense of the world that a society inhabits. The Sami and Inuit people reside in arctic regions, and so have more and more varied experiences with frozen precipitation than inhabitants of more temperate climes. As a result, their languages have what outsiders like me would regard as an unusually discriminating and varied vocabulary for describing the things I think of simply as snow and ice.1 This is because languages express the conditions under which they and their speakers have taken shape.
Race-talk is also expressive in this way – again, notoriously so. For example, it expresses the conditions under which some people came to regard others as inferior or obsolete or otherwise problematic models of humanity, and then as obstacles to or resources for the expansion of their states or economies. The history of racial politics has impacted and marked our everyday social practices the way eons of space debris have left the moon pockmarked with craters, and race-talk provides some of the clearest reminders of these impacts. If Zoe knows anything about the history and culture of the contemporary world, she will know things that would make no sense without race. Think of Mildred Pierce, the great 1940s Hollywood film in which one character shrugs off her mother’s interest in her affairs and declares her independence by asserting that she is free, white, and twenty-one.2 Or think of the professional American football team in Washington DC that finally stopped calling itself the “Redskins” in 2020, after years of controversy. If Zoe knows anything about either of those things – more precisely, if she knows almost anything about American sports, popular culture, or film – then she almost certainly knows something about race.
Finally, languages are also intuitive and practical: using them involves knowing how more than knowing