America Must Be Redeemed From Race
American racism was evil, but it was never supposed to be America’s political theology. The tragedy is that race has now become the very category through which America is taught to understand itself.
The problem with American racism begins with the racial category itself.
Race is anti-humanist because it divides human beings according to variables that are not morally or spiritually essential. It treats the accidental facts of body, color, and ancestry as though they reveal the inner meaning of a person.
That is the deepest corruption of racism. It does not merely discriminate. It replaces the human being with a category.
Thus racism is not only about hating one race or another, it is about accepting and internalizing it - as fundamental.
But the interesting thing about American racism is that, unlike in Nazi Germany, it did not fully attach itself to the philosophical core of the American political project.
In Germany, racism became not only a political doctrine, but a philosophy of state. It became a theory of destiny, salvation, peoplehood, empire, and world order. Race was not merely used to justify power. It became the metaphysical foundation of the regime itself. America was different.
American racism was brutal, biological, economic, social, legal, and often defended through pseudo-science. But that pseudo-science was never fully integrated into the official philosophy of the American government. The American political tradition remained, at its core, liberal, constitutional, and rooted in the language of rights, property, liberty, and human equality. Despite blacks not being allowed to enjoy any of these.
That is why Hannah Arendt was partly right when she argued that Nazi Germany imported into Europe many of the horrors that European empires had practiced in the colonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But Arendt missed something essential: only in Germany did racial theory become a true philosophy of national redemption.
The white man in America did not need to enslave the black man in order to redeem or define himself metaphysically. He enslaved him for power, labor, wealth, hierarchy, and social domination. That is terrible enough. But it is not the same thing as building an entire political theology around race.
This distinction matters.
Because if America’s founding political philosophy remained classically liberal, then the deepest American answer to racism was not to replace one racial essentialism with another. It was to return America to its own promise.
That was the role of Martin Luther King Jr.
King did not try to destroy America’s founding language. He tried to force America to live up to it. He appealed to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bible, and the moral conscience of the republic. His genius was that he understood the American promise as a humanist promise.
America had betrayed that promise. But the promise itself still mattered.
This is why it is so strange that, in modern America, racial essentialism has returned with such force from right and left. America’s classical political language was not built on race. It was built on rights, property, citizenship and the individual. Yet today, race has become one of the main ways Americans are taught to understand politics, culture, morality, and identity.
That is a dangerous regression.
Many behaviors and social pathologies that are automatically described as “structural racism” may also reflect something else: the way Americans have been trained to perceive race as the deepest source of identity and conflict - is a pathology in of itself.
This does not mean racism is imaginary. It means that racial interpretation can itself become a prison.
The difference between the Jewish and Black experiences in America helps clarify the point. Jews arrived in America with an external civilizational inheritance: religion, text, law, memory, exile, language, and peoplehood. Black Americans, by contrast, were violently stripped of much of their ancestral inheritance through slavery. Their names, languages, tribes, and historical continuities were often broken by force.
That created a tragic vulnerability. When a people is robbed of its inherited civilizational memory, race can become the substitute identity imposed upon it.
But as long as race constitutes the core of identity, the group remains trapped inside a continental, almost European logic.
It becomes less American in the best sense and more Germanic in the worst sense: defined by blood, body, category, and fate. The American idea, at its best, is supposed to overcome that. The Jewish people, paradoxically, show another possibility. Although often treated by others as a racial group, Jews have historically carried a universal message through a particular covenant. Jewish peoplehood does not reduce humanity to biology. It carries law, ethics, memory, obligation, and a vision of universal moral order. Race, by contrast, establishes finitude. It creates conflict, binary thinking, resentment, and permanent suspicion. It tells human beings that they are not souls, citizens, or moral agents, but representatives of bodies and categories.
That is not liberation. It is another form of captivity.
Black Americans, were enslaved due to their race, but now many of them choose to enslave themselves, because of race.
The American promise was never racial.
It was human.
And if America is to survive its current crisis, it must recover that humanist foundation before race becomes the very religion of the republic.