A Word for Changing Race Relations

Pre-racial • (pri-ray-shel) • adjective

Definition: Before Race; a prioritization of the culture and existence that precedes racial divisions and classifications.

Origin: The Sustainable Culture Lab

The Sustainable Culture Lab’s emphasis on culture disrupts the conventional American discourse that seeks to elevate and legitimize notions of race. Racial divisions have defined America since colonization. Europeans distanced themselves from other “races” in America, and the separation of colonizers from people of color has been the foundation of our divided society. Regardless of whether we celebrate or denigrate the language of our normalized division, articulating our racialized language actually bestows legitimacy upon and further normalizes our systemic division. 

For example, if we know that race is merely an illegitimate construct but only have a racialized language to articulate it, then we by default legitimize these illegitimate ideas every time we speak.

At SCL, we accept that it is impossible to rapidly shift from America’s divisive and unequal discourse into a more equitable dialogue, but in order to make incremental progress, we must inject new words into our discourse and implement a pre-racial approach. This newsletter, The Word, is one of our efforts to cultivate this progress.

What is Pre-racial?

To understand pre-racial, you first need to understand ethnocide. Via ethnocide, European colonizers extracted and destroyed African culture but kept African bodies in order to create a chattel slavery system in the Americas. The racial division of white and black was how European, soon-to-be white, Americans decided to sustain ethnocidal division. Racial mixing, therefore, needed to be outlawed because it would have been nearly impossible to distinguish the oppressor from the oppressed.

The one-drop rule, which stated that one drop of African blood made someone black, and the banning of interracial coupling and marriage became the de facto and/or de jure law of the land. This “racial” separation also manifested itself into the anti-miscegenation laws of the mid-1800s to prevent Asian immigrant workers from marrying white women. It was a way to keep a low wage labor force intact, isolated, treated as unassimilable, and ineligible for citizenship. America seeks to legitimize and imprint notions of race so that perpetual division and inequality become such an entrenched norm that we can neither speak nor imagine an alternative to ethnocide.

As an organization that combats ethnocide, SCL cannot legitimize ethnocidal ideas, and that includes American concepts of race. Being either post-racial or anti-racist legitimizes race far too much. Moving beyond or countering race still validates the idea of race, but by concentrating on before race we can negate race and focus on an uncharted and undefined equitable space. To de-legitimize race as a construct created to divide people in America, SCL is pre-racial and focuses on the culture that precedes race. 

African people had vibrant cultures prior to being taken from their homes, experiencing the terrors of ethnocide, and being redefined by a racial identity fabricated by their oppressors. Similarly, Europeans also had vibrant cultures prior to deciding to live off of the destruction of the culture of the “other.” By focusing on culture, we can intellectually precede the divisive and racialized constructs that we have always known, and foster with greater clarity the equitable society we aspire to create. Culture precedes race. This is why we are pre-racial.

The Impact of Pre-racial Words

Every installment of The Word has featured words that fall within the framework of being pre-racial, and this is due to SCL’s consistent focus on culture. Ethnocide is a pre-racial idea.

Ethnocide is both an act of destruction and also a dystopian culture that European colonizers chose to live by. American white ethnocide is not a racial distinction, but a cultural one. Culture changes and evolves, so white ethnocide is not an immutable racial stamp, but a cultural choice one makes. Being born white does not mean that you have to perpetuate the culture of ethnocide that created whiteness. White Americans can combat ethnocide, foster Eǔtopia, and convivir with their Freecano brothers and sisters by consciously cultivating equitable culture. The notion of race does not adequately allow for this progress because we are stamped with an unflinching, static identifier that sustains division. Without the pre-racial language of ethnocide, it is much harder for people to recognize the destructive, debilitating nature of the racialized language they have always known and lived by.

Freecano is also a pre-racial word because the foundation of the word is the cultural bond that African people needed to create in order to escape ethnocidal oppression. The culture of African people under ethnocidal oppression in the Americas has always been freedom. Defining people of the African diaspora via their culture and not their race is an act of liberation from ethnocide. The word speaks to the necessity of fostering language that elevates culture ahead of racial divisions.

By applying a pre-racial perspective, we will give ourselves a better chance at creating the free and equitable culture we all hope to live within. 

For this week, please think about how a pre-racial perspective could change how you see the world and share your thoughts with us via email, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter using #TheWord to join the conversation.

Also starting this week, Barrett will be hosting a live Q&A session on Instagram each Sunday in order to answer your questions about today’s word. Please bring your thoughts and tune in with us on our Instagram Live every Sunday at 5PM EDT to be a part of the discussion. We can’t wait to hear your thoughts and ideas!

P.S. - SCL Partner News

Our good friends at DC Scores are hosting Our Words Our City, an online poetry and spoken word festival, on Thursday, April 30th at 7pm EDT. The event will include professional spoken word artists and the children from the DC Scores program. 

DC Scores uses soccer and art to provide thousands of children in Washington, DC with a safe space to play and build community outside of school. Black and Latino children make up over 95 percent of the children in their programs. Not only do children learn how to play soccer, but they receive an education in poetry and the arts that they otherwise would not have been exposed to.

With the impact of COVID-19, DC Scores is working extra hard to ensure that these children can still have the community they need to thrive. The event is free, so if you are available on Thursday please tune in to their event. You can register for the event here.