BUT WHAT ARE YOU REALLY? by Charles Mills

The US continues to struggle with the concept of race, at least the thoughtful parts of it do, but there is so much baggage about it (it is wrapped into questions of intention, the social vs the real, our own personal worthiness, competition between the disenfranchised, etc) that it can be very challenging to think clearly outside of the boxes that have been produced for us (all of them mostly before we were even born).

Mills is a non-anarchist Caribbean philosopher from Jamaica. He is known for his work in social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He wrote a book called Blackness, Visible that is a collection of essays parsing questions of race in an unusually clear way. This pamphlet is one of those essays, and it is a solid beginning to finding new, better ways to think about the assumptions and stereotypes that we all are subject to, just by being raised in this culture.