I like writers like Sam McKenzie for making it clear why it is difficult to write about race in a public forum. I wish he would write and read more.

Until then, a few comments.

I highlighted a line from his article citing bell hooks since I find myself in agreement with the surprise McKenzie has that a home could be considered to be “without race”.

Race, not to mention racism, is in the home, and if you think it is not, someone has blinded themself to quite a lot.

But not for the reasons Mckenzie seems to think. The race question is never simply — or even primarily — the paranoiac question that race-racism is on the verge of usurping our homes from the outside, but rather race has always already been inside the home in a very ordinary and domestic way.

For if the word race is not reduced to an ideological use pertaining to the struggle between peoples and ethnic groups, or the classification of peoples according to their biology as was assumed in the immoral science of eugenics, then we discover, race has been used in the home at least since Neolithic times to:

1- distinguish and segregate the sexes;

2- distinguish between the dead and the living;

3- distinguish the cultivation of various cereals — wheat, barley, oats, etc. — and animals — different dogs, cats, cows, etc. — which live in our domestic life.

Looked at this way, which is not explicitly that of McKenzie or Bell Hooks (but underlies the difficulties with their arguments on race), races of people, cereals and animals, are the effects of an art, a technique of cultivation, which is by definition domestic and part of the home.

For example, when I read on my cereal box in the morning, ‘Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions’, I am already engaged in a non-ideological conception of race. For the real question of race is not whether there is a black or white basketball player on the box but already began with what is inside it: the wheat.

When my mother used to segregate me from the bathroom by not allowing me inside when she was using it, I was engaged in a non-ideological use of race.

When I went to the funeral of my grandfather who was buried in a cemetery, I was participating in an act of segregation permitting dead people to be put in a different place than the living.

The problem with reading race ideologically is that it not only blinds us to this ordinary and domestic use of race in our homes, but it becomes paranoiac real quick in reducing questions of race to racism and orchestrated forms of violence against people.

Just a few grains of salt,

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