The Illusion Of Race | Subrena Smith and David Livingstone Smith

Sacred Tension

In this episode of Sacred Tension, I’m joined by philosophers Subrena Smith and David Livingstone Smith to discuss the challenge and necessity of abolishing race. Subrena tells her story of moving from Jamaica to the deeply racialized culture of the USA and explains why she is Race Queer instead of Black. We discuss the many ways the ideology of race obscures actual human diversity, the difference between race and ethnicity, the similarities between race and witchcraft, and much more.

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Subrena E. Smith is associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. Her research is focused on philosophy of biology, in particular how biological thinking is misappropriated both in science and in popular culture.

David Livingstone Smith is a professor of philosophy who has been studying dehumanization for almost twenty years. He has written three books on this subject. The first, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (St. Martin’s Press, 2011), received the Anisfield-Wolf award for non-fiction. It was followed by On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford University Press, 2020), and Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization (Harvard University Press, 2021).

They both write at Dehumanization Matters on Substack:

Read their article The Trouble With Race and Its Many Shades of Deceit in New Lines Magazine.

Email David at [e-mail] and Subrena at [e-mail].

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