Recently, my seven-year-old daughter pointed to my skin and said, I thought that was black. What do you mean? I said. I thought that was black skin, she said. It’s tan, I said. But aren’t you from Africa? Yes, I am. And do people from Africa have black skin? Well, generally, yes they do. So, she said, looking at me triumphantly, it’s black. You just invented a syllogism, baby, I said. Aristotle would have been proud.

This brought to mind another situation, years ago, when my oldest daughter was in elementary school. She was telling me a story, and in the story, she was trying to identify a fellow kid who was African American. She searched for adjectives. She’s tall, she said. She’s funny. She has curly hair. She has nice teeth. Blue shoes. Pigtails. My daughter ran the gamut of adjectives. It never occurred to her to call the kid black, because, to her, the kid wasn’t black. She was something else. Mahogany, perhaps, but definitely not black.

Blackness, as an idea, didn’t exist yet. The category of Black didn’t exist. For her to understand shades of skin color and their connection to an intricate web of historical power structures clustered around ideas of White and Black, she would need to be ‘educated’. The rules of how categories like White and Black work are not personal. They are social. They are formed over hundreds of years. Regardless of how little sense they make, it falls to parents to pass the bullshit on. It’s part of the job. The drivel that is taken for normal in a given society flows through parents like wine and garlic. In this case, the parent was me, and my society is America. In the words of William S. Burroughs: Thanks, America.

Anyone who has tried to explain race to a child knows it isn’t easy. To define whiteness and blackness as categories requires examples and variations. Yes, but is so-and-so black? Why is tan not black? At what point is mahogany black? It’s appalling to see the whole machine of separation settle upon a young child’s mind. It’s worse to feel that one is the conduit through which the system flows. What system? Racism. Because while the concept of race as an identifier of tribal or local affinities is ancient, the concept of race as an external category, as meaning grouped into the “White” or “Black” skin-shade spectrum, evolved in the seventeenth century, in tandem with the slave trade. The slave trade was what European Imperialism, especially British Imperialism, was built on. White racism, as we understand it in the modern world, is a function of White Imperialism.

The roots of racism run deep. The very concepts of White and Black are loaded in Western Civilization. They come with implications cultivated in the binary opposites of our mythologies and languages. Light and dark. Good and evil. Man and woman. As Jacques Derrida, a French Algerian Jew, demonstrated, these binary opposites are not neutral. They are pillars that support a power hierarchy. In each case, the first element is the supposed superior category, and the second the supposed inferior. Language is not neutral but is part of a system of control. This control, via the binary opposites, is baked into our thinking. Thus, when Europeans started colonizing the world, they had a ready-made metaphysics in place with which to justify their capture and enslavements of entire peoples. Hey, they were White and the slaves were Black. Makes sense! Their race justified slavery, no less than Aristotle had when he stated that some people were natural slaves, and some weren’t. The same logic was deployed by British slavers two thousand years later. The same logic undergirds Western Civilization.

The categories of White and Black are essential to Western Imperialism. The categorical violence of racial definitions is part of the apparatus of colonialism. Colonial laws defined the categories and what they meant. This then passed into newly independent nations that no longer had a colonial framework to justify the racism upon which they were built. To preserve it, new institutions had to be developed. The battery of laws passed from 1950 onward in South Africa, for example, sought to codify the racism for a new, freedom-loving Republic. The Office of Race Classification was set up to determine whether a person was Black, White, Coloured (mixed), or Indian (South Asian). These definitions were the key to where you lived, what education you received, what economic status you could expect, and most importantly, the level of violence you could expect to receive from the state. It was the same old system, updated for the Age of Eugenics.

But, just like explaining race to a child isn’t easy, neither, it turns out, is explaining it to an entire nation. It doesn’t take at first. We are more messy than we initially appear. Our genetic inheritances too intermingled. Our social histories too intertwined. The best the Office of Race Classification could manage was that White people were those who were considered white. And Black people were those who were considered African and not Coloured. And Coloured people were neither White nor Black. This tautological genius actually reveals a lot about racism. Race exists because everyone agrees that it exists. A board was established to oversee who was considered what race. It carried out its grim task with results that might be comic if they weren’t sickening. For example, when a child was sufficiently tan, a member of the board might conduct a so-called “pencil test”, in which a pencil was inserted into the child’s hair. If it stayed in place, then the child was considered Coloured. If it fell out, the child was considered White. Congratulations, mom! May I have my pencil back? Of course, even the good burghers of the Race Classification Board fucked it up every now and then.

My father is from Scotland. He has sandy hair and blue eyes. My mother has darker skin than I do. She has thick black hair and brown eyes. When she was a child in South Africa she would sometimes be refused access to White buses. She tells a story of her mother calling her away from some “Coloured” kids one day, saying, ‘they’ll think you’re one of them.’ (Children of different races often played together. They didn’t know yet know how things worked. That awful realization awaited them, along with Boer music, cricket, and taxes.) My mother’s father was a jazz musician who died young, and his background was shrouded in an intriguing mystery. So I did a DNA test and discovered that, while my father is all Celt, my mother is a blend of Dutch, Spanish, French, Malay, and African. We have Malian blood, Khoisan blood (Bushmen), and other lineages. Since my grandfather went too early, there is no way of knowing if he would ever have been categorized as Coloured. But clearly, not to be defined as Coloured meant everything. To be defined as Coloured would have been to be subject to greater state violence. To have horizons erased. In sociology, this is called hypodescent. The automatic assignment by a dominant culture of lower status to children of a mixed union.

These are categories grouping humans loosely around ideas of White European ancestry and Black African ancestry (the same basic logic applies to any alternate melatonin reality that Europeans have found themselves in). Defining race this way is an existential act. Humans are not born White or Black, they are made so in the social arena. To be made so, the subtleties of ethnicity, of appearance, are negated. In practice, White and Black as categories are achieved by denial. They are negative. It is perhaps the categories themselves that inaugurate the violence by which they are preserved. They mean separation, which is what Apartheid means — separateness. Recuperating definitions of White and Black therefore means existential survival.

In South Africa, once the review board had done its work, the new racial identity was considerately printed on identity cards. On buses and water fountains. On beaches. In the social sphere. The police’s task was to enforce the categories. The police were a post-colonial instrument. They were the fearsome power of an expansionist state turned inward, toward a subjugated population. All former colonial powers follow this script. The police in South Africa, like those in America, like those in Brazil, follow this script. They are still subjugating the Black population. It is actually their primary job, because while police are called upon to do everything from checking vehicle registrations to settling domestic disputes, most of these functions could be performed by, say, social workers, therapists, robots, accountants, or trained monkeys. Armed police signal something else entirely to the populace. They signal social control.

America was born of an Empire and became one itself. It continued Great Britain’s sordid legacy of White Supremacy. Its equivalent of the Office of Race Classification were the many versions of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which was codified into law in multiple states of the old South in the 20th Century. It upheld the one-drop rule, by which a person with even one Black ancestor was considered Black, thanks to the magical category of “invisible blackness”, and therefore subject to greater state violence. Because when slavery was abolished, the idea of White Supremacy didn’t go away. It lingered in the social sphere. In language and mythology. In categories of White and Black that were merely adjusted. The scale was slid. The violence acquired another form. It moved into policing, into economic terrorism. The externally colonized people were made into an internally colonized people.

It hasn’t changed much. If you want to know what a colonial interaction was like in Jamaica in 1840, or Australia in 1880, or South Africa in 1910, you need only watch a routine traffic stop of a Black man by a White officer in one of the countless examples on Youtube, in America today. Every expansionist state has its own internally colonized races. A nation that will dominate the world must believe it has the right to dominate the world. It needs to believe itself superior. So it finds an internal population to subjugate. Jews, Gypsies, Irish, and others have served that purpose through European history. The violence against Blacks in America is the violence of a colonizer toward a subjugated people. This explains the tone of the interactions in all those videos. It really doesn’t matter if the cops involved are considered racist or not. These are not ‘bad apples.’ This is a sick tree. These cops are shock troops of an Empire built on subjugation. The aggressive tone, the immediate escalation, the hand on the weapon, the needless death, are hard to understand otherwise. But it would be immediately apparent to any colonial master. It’s in the DNA of Western Civilization. We’re civilized, and you’re not. We have immunity, and you don’t.

I remember being around twelve years old and living back in Durban again, albeit briefly. I was sitting in the passenger seat of my mother’s black Ford Escort, and we were stuck in traffic, moving slowly up the highway toward our new house in a very White neighborhood in Pinetown. By the side of the road, a Black man was kneeling, while a White man beat him with a whip. No one intervened. He did it because he could. He did it because he was entitled to do so by a racist society. No doubt, the passersby rationalized it. The Black must have done something to deserve it. I hear the same sort of rationalizations in American media today, every time a White officer shoots a Black man in the back, or strangles him on the floor, or shoots her in her own home. The anchors and experts pour over the previous ten minutes of body cam footage to work out what the Black did to deserve it. They rake the Black’s background to find out whether he had ever been arrested before. Whether she had taken drugs. As if these things are to be reasonably taken into account when discussing a summary execution.

To watch the killing of George Floyd is to watch a cold-blooded murder by someone who knew he was entitled to do it. Chauvin knew no one would intervene. He knew he would be protected by his fellow cops, by the police union, by Qualified Immunity (a legal principle that would be familiar to any slave owner). Chauvin stayed firmly on the neck of George Floyd until the man didn’t move anymore, and he and the others knew he had murdered him. The video is appalling. But one has to watch it. Firstly, because violence of this kind is taking place every day, in every city in America, against Blacks. Secondly, because Chauvin clearly knew exactly how to do what he was doing, which suggests he had done it before. Thirdly, the look on Chauvin’s face. The look that says, ‘I’m killing this guy and you can’t do a fucking thing about it.’ Nobody did anything that day in Minneapolis in 2020 for exactly the same reason no one did anything that day in Durban, in 1985. It was assumed that the White had a right to do what he was doing, because he was considered White, and the man on the floor was considered Black. He was civilized, and the dying man was not.

That is Imperialism in action. The people considered Black are still colonized by such violence, in this American Empire. By contrast, the people considered White are hurt too, but in a different way. They have categorical violence done to their minds.

In the same year that I sat in the Ford Escort watching a Black man being beaten within an inch of his life, military vehicles could be seen on the roads. South Africa was being led by a strongman, who was expected to announce reforms to quell the growing unrest in the Black townships, the perpetual glow of burning ghettos, somewhere just beyond the horizon of White privilege. It was a highly anticipated speech. Perhaps he might affirm the inherent dignity of Black people. Perhaps he might ease restrictions, and signal the impending release of Nelson Mandela. But Botha was known as The Crocodile. He was stubborn, authoritarian, and contrary. Instead of announcing reforms, he doubled down. On August 15, 1985, he gave a speech announcing that South Africa was “Crossing the Rubicon.” (An allusion to Julius Caesar’s breaking of the ancient Roman prohibition against an unelected official bringing an army into territory directly controlled by Rome, thus triggering a Civil War, and leading to Caesar’s dictatorship.) Botha affirmed and extended the State of Emergency, which in effect meant the militarization of policing, the suspension of due process and civil liberties, detention without trial, censorship of the media, the curtailing of freedom of expression, etc, etc. This is, of course, the playbook for strongmen. It’s what they learn in strongman school, along with how to wave their hands around while talking, and how to confidently free-associate gibberish in public.

That glow on the horizon is the glow of a burning Empire. Of the end of colonialism. At least in its external form. When my daughter asks me what race is, that is what I think of. I think of a monstrous thought-system that, when it collapses, breeds monsters. I think of the negative categories supported by violence, and what must be lost to regain the vast subtlety, dignity, and nuance of human experience. And then I think, damn the categories. To hell with Western Civilization. You cannot unpick the slave master’s whip. Better to burn it altogether. It is time to think otherwise. To see otherwise. So, what is race? Race is an idea we who are considered White came up with to take other people’s stuff and make them work for us. Baby, race is the reason there’s a revolution.