Racialized White

Race isn’t real, science says. Advocates want the census to reflect that. A small but vocal group of professionals and academics imagine a future where categories don’t matter

By Sydney Trent Updated October 16, 2023 at 9:27 a.m. EDT|Published October 16, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

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Comment Add to your saved stories Save The notice from the federal government arrived in Carlos Hoyt’s inbox last August. It was looking ahead to the 2030 Census and inviting Americans to give feedback. A request for help with the “challenge” of properly counting members of racial minority groups piqued his interest.

The moment Hoyt and others had been waiting for had finally arrived. The chance to tell the federal government, and send a bold message to the public: We shouldn’t be asking people to identify by “race” at all.

Racial categories, assigned to people based on their appearance, geographic origin and other supposed attributes, got their start during the dawn of Western science in 18th century Europe. White Europeans, who then had no knowledge of human genetics and little meaningful contact with other cultures, placed themselves at the pinnacle. For centuries now, the categories have been used to divide and perpetuate every version of harm — enslavement, violence, an eclipse of opportunity. The reality of it all sometimes moves Hoyt to tears.

In 2003, the completion of the Human Genome Project — which found that humans globally share 99.9 percent of their DNA — gave waste to the notion of “race” among the vast majority of scientists. But the public appears barely to have noticed. The idea still lives everywhere — in discrimination and criminal profiling, in the rise in hate speech and acts, in the recent Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, in the rhetoric of social justice advocates and the new capitalization of Black and White in the media. Racial categorization persists on job applications, medical forms, and most critically to Hoyt due to its high visibility, the Census.

The 63-year-old educational consultant and psychotherapist is part of a small but increasingly vocal group of people who favor phasing out racial categories. A diverse cohort of highly educated professionals and academics, they are trying to gain broader societal acceptance for their beliefs through a cottage industry of books, articles, websites, conferences and training.

Yet they recoil at the idea of being confused with people who call themselves “colorblind,” those “who are trying to deny that there is racism in the world,” Hoyt said. The government must account for harms caused by “race,” but without resorting to debunked categories that suggest it is biological, he said.

Hoyt read aloud the Census Bureau’s caveats, that “the racial categories included in the Census Questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country, and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.”

“To recognize that race … is a false concept but to keep doing it anyway, there’s something intellectually problematic about it.” — Carlos Hoyt, psychotherapist and educational consultant He sighed. “To recognize that race … is a false concept but to keep doing it anyway, there’s something intellectually problematic about it.”

But it’s a long distance from here to there, so he and his fellow racial-category resisters are proposing a middle ground until society catches up. They don’t advocate for the cold-turkey method of the French, whose laws strictly limit data collection on race and ethnicity amid protests of racial discrimination.

“There’s a principle in psychotherapy that says you don’t take away a client’s defenses unless you have something to replace it with, because it’s serving a purpose, right?” said Hoyt, the author of “The Arc of a Bad Idea,” who has given a TEDx talk, developed a website with a “nonracial world view library” and frequently consults at schools and universities on the topic.

In the email last August, Hoyt learned that the federal government for the first time was allowing people to present their solutions in 25-minute Zoom presentations. The offer may have been “all marketing,” Hoyt said, but he decided it was worth a try.

Soon Hoyt received his date: May 4, 2023.

The ‘dangerous myth’

Carlos Hoyt, a 63-year-old educational consultant and psychotherapist, is part of a small but increasingly vocal group of people who favor phasing out racial categories. (Katye Martens Brier for The Washington Post) To outsiders, such efforts might seem like so much tilting at windmills. It’s a formidable task to dismantle a centuries-old system that persists like air, omnipresent, its twisted origins largely invisible.

In fact, there have long been thinkers who have questioned the use of racial categories, as well as people who sought to escape them and the harm they’ve posed.

Early 20th century anthropologist Ashley Montagu famously wrote “The word race is racist” in his landmark 1942 book, “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race.” Franz Boas, the German American anthropologist, argued over a century ago that race was solely a social construct, as did African American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. More recently, Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, urged the nation to devise a new language for talking about race given what is now known about human origins.

Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, seen in 2019, has urged the nation to devise a new language for talking about race given what is now known about human origins. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post) In the United States, where racial categories have been particularly rigid, there has been a long history of “passing” for another racial identity, a practice that has only served to underscore the unreliability of racial categories based first on physical features.

Yet unlike in decades past, more ordinary Americans are coming to see “race” for what it is, Hoyt maintains. In interviews he conducted for his doctoral thesis and book, these people describe gradually awakening to the idea — through traumatic personal experiences with discrimination, through foreign travel or something they read — that they had been sold a bill of goods. “Race,” they decided, does not exist.

As with religion, some people never bought in to begin with, Hoyt said. He puts himself into this category.

He was about 3 when his parents, poor Costa Ricans of West African and Jamaican descent, immigrated to the United States, where the family was plunged into the country’s system of racial categorization.

“I thought ‘What are these attachments?’ … I was a cultural straddler from the beginning.”

In seventh grade, Hoyt became part of a racial busing program that carried him from his home in Dorchester to Dover or, as he describes it, “a black-identified environment to a white-identified environment,” where he said he did not experience discrimination.

In the late 1970s, he went off to college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In her 1998 sociology classic “Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” Beverly Daniel Tatum, an alumnus, psychologist and educator, referenced the very Wesleyan cafeteria where Hoyt dined, a sunken space with windows allowing an elevated view of how students chose to self-segregate.

Carlos Hoyt, left, as a child with his family: parents Carlos and Winnifred and his brother, Kevin. Hoyt was about 3 when his parents, Costa Ricans of West African and Jamaican descent, immigrated to the United States. (Family photo) Tatum affirmed the practice as a healthy way to cope in a racist society. Hoyt viewed it differently. “I would never want to relegate myself to sitting with only one type of person,” he recalled thinking.

Thus was born his own interest in the development of racial identity and the harms caused by racism — and how to undo them.

Most of the people in his book and others who share his beliefs haven’t escaped racism themselves. “But they felt strongly that there was no validity or usefulness to [race] and that, as a matter of fact, they found it harmful to be reduced in such a way,” said Hoyt, who has a doctorate in social work.

Yet Ellis Monk, a sociology professor at Harvard University who researches race, inequity and colorism, is among those who think eradicating race is impractical. Although he knows that biological race does not exist, there’s no getting away from race “in a world where race has mattered,” Monk said.

Some argue that identifying collectively by race has also enabled members of minority groups to more effectively fight for equal rights; others, like Harvard professor Tommie Shelby, assert that battling oppression does not require a common Black identity.

The pride many minority group members have come to take in their identities can be viewed as a resistance in itself, Hoyt said. “But while reclamation feels good, it’s always incompletely successful,” because it fails to challenge the delusion of race at the heart of racism, he said.

To tide Americans over to a more egalitarian time, Hoyt and others suggest that people use alternatives for self-description.

For example there’s “classified [insert racial category ],” “[insert racial category]-identified,” and Hoyt’s personal preference, “racialized [insert racial category],” which refers to the way in which one is perceived or what has been done to a person, in contrast to who one is down to a debunked genetic notion. Such descriptors could still allow the government to account for possible harms caused by modern and historic discrimination, Hoyt and others believe.

On an individual level, these new terms of describing oneself can also create a psychological buffer against the assault of racist assumptions and stereotypes and feelings of otherness embodied in the centuries-old racial categories, said Sheena Mason, an assistant professor of English at SUNY Oneonta.

Mason first categorized herself as Black, in part because she had been a victim of racism in childhood growing up in the tiny town of South Glens Falls, NY. “I was called the N word,” Mason said. “You know, you name it, I probably experienced it.

“I grew up being told that I was Black … and I believed it was biological because that’s what we teach our children: that it is biological.”

Sheena Mason, an assistant professor of English at SUNY Oneonta, views herself as "raceless," even as she knows others perceive her as Black. (Kellie Finch at KFinch Photography) As an undergraduate, she switched to believing that race is a social construct rather than a biological reality. Mason increasingly embraced her identity as a Black woman as she followed her interest in race and racism. By the time she finished her PhD in English from Howard University, however, she had come to view herself as “raceless.”

“I came to recognize that the thing I had always noticed in the literature and through my study of the history was that to undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race,” she said. " … And so I can acknowledge racism, that is other people’s racialization of me, while seeing myself outside of those confines.”

That dual perception has been liberating, she said. “I realized that everything I love about Sheena Mason has nothing to do with race. And that’s the problem. Race is only the dehumanization. It’s only the attending racism. It’s the erasure of the individual.”

“So in letting go of race … I have a better understanding of who I am. I have a deeper understanding of the roles of culture, and ethnicity and class and so on.” She calls her philosophy “The Theory of Racelessness,” the title of her first book. She also spreads the theory through her work as a consultant and in the classroom.

Her students, Mason said, tell her “Please teach me how to not internalize this stuff, because it’s killing me. It’s getting me down. I move on campus, and I feel like I don’t belong, or I’m not wanted, and I want to free myself from that.’”

‘Am I complicit?’

Hoyt with his children, Lauren and Evan, in 1996. (Family photo) But racial categories can’t be unraveled by pulling a string. First, they must be confronted in the real world.

Share this article No subscription required to read Share To Hoyt and many in his cohort, deciding whether to check the race box requires deliberation. The box at the doctor’s office, which can lead to false inferences that are sometimes detrimental, is often nixed — for herself and her three young children, Mason said. Marriage license applications are a no-brainer: No.

Boxes in which aggregate data is used to correct past wrongs are greeted with some hand-wringing. That includes the racial category boxes that were included on college admissions applications, before the U.S. Supreme Court in June struck down their use as unconstitutional.

As the founder of a nonprofit that seeks to eradicate the concept of race, Adrian Lyles believes the Supreme Court made the right decision.

“Where there is race there is inherent racism or hierarchy,” Lyles said, who also owns an investment firm in Georgia. Harvard is “saying is that those who are members of the black class are inferior, therefore we must level the standard by giving them preferential treatment.”

“Race has no quantifiable metric. Where you have unreliable input, your data is trash.” — Adrian Lyles, investment firm owner The truth, Lyles, 37, said, is that “race has no quantifiable metric,” like socioeconomic status, for example, he said. “Where you have unreliable input, your data is trash.”

Hoyt believes the boxes are problematic, but then “one wants to ask, well, what about the persistence of racism?” he said. His hope is that the court’s decision “will be the mother of a better invention, which is not to invite people to express their corporeal reality” but instead share in their essays their experiences with all kinds of adversity.

For his part, if given the chance, Hoyt will sometimes ignore the boxes and write-in “racialized black. ” “X (Others say they will write: “Human.”) But as the Census offers no such option, it’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t, he said.

The racial data in the Census is used at the local, state and federal levels to devise and fund policies and programs. It is also used to evaluate them “to ensure that they fairly and equitably serve the needs of all racial groups and to monitor compliance with anti-discrimination laws, regulations, and policies,” according to the Census website. Significantly, the data is used to draw congressional districts, thereby helping to determine the influence of minority voters and challenge racial gerrymandering.

“If somebody like me doesn’t check the box … then am I diminishing the force of data collection in order to keep track of how people are treated?” Hoyt said. “On the other hand, if I do check those boxes, am I complicit in this problem?”

“I think it's so important for the Census to be able to give me a chance to represent my bearing on identity,” he said. “And right now … it forces me to subscribe to a kind of belief that I don't subscribe to.”

'I’m not here by myself’

Hoyt prefers to identify himself as "racialized black," which refers to the way in which one is perceived or what has been done to a person. Such a descriptor could still allow the government to account for possible harms caused by modern and historic discrimination, Hoyt and others believe. (Katye Martens Brier for The Washington Post ) On May 4, Hoyt retreated to the study of his mid-century modern home in Lexington, Mass. where he lives with his wife, Leslie, a biotech consultant who describes herself as “racialized white.” It was here in this privileged enclave where the couple raised their two children, Lauren and Evan, now in their 30s. The birth of Evan, who looks like much like his father but with fair skin, served to underscore for Hoyt the absurdity of racial categories.

Hoyt, wearing a perfectly-pressed black and cream Henley, sat down at his desk facing a window and fired up his computer. Finally, the Zoom squares appeared — one occupied only by a person named “Bob,” the rest by about two dozen anonymous government employees with cameras turned off.

Hoyt teed up his slides and began to speak.

“I want to say from the outset, I'm not really here by myself,” Hoyt said. “I feel like I'm speaking for a bunch of folks who have in some ways a unique sort of identity orientation regarding race and who sadly are literally not on the Census's radar right now.”

From this same perch a week before, Hoyt had gathered on Zoom with some of those people — 13 from the U.S. and one from Canada. About half were “racialized black” and half “racialized white.” Evan was part of the latter category.

For an hour and a half, they talked about how they had come to their beliefs, their battles against racism and frustrations with others who can’t see beyond flat-Earth thinking.

Hoyt at home with his daughter, Lauren, and his wife, Leslie. (Katye Martens Brier for The Washington Post)

Hoyt and his son, Evan, on a trip to Costa Rica in 2020. (Family photo) Jason Schriner, who is racialized white, grew up in Northwest Kansas in “a very so-called White space.”

“Even at a fairly young age, I was one of these weird people that internalized the idea that we’re all just human beings, and have inherent dignity and worth,” Schriner said.

As a college student, he read about and met people who taught him “how to move past” the false notion of race “and that started a path of just dedicating myself to try to really work for liberation, and conceptualize what a new human era would look like.”

Greg Thomas, who is racialized black, talked about the frustration of listening to his Southern parents reflexively use race in their speech. “It’s hard for [most people] to even envision the possibility of getting outside of this delusion because everyone reinforces it, every day.”

A change would require more people to think critically and courageously. “But I do believe that, you know, we can get to a tipping point. We just have to keep working at it.”

That was what Hoyt was now here to do on their behalf with the federal government. Holding a highlighted script in his hand, he first raised the fallacy of biological race and then explained the concept of racialization.

He pulled up the slide showing the mock-up of a new Census form.

“How is this person racialized?” the top of the form read. Then: “Mark one or more boxes AND print origins.” After that, there is a box with the option: “I do not identify by race.”

On the left side, ran a column of tiny boxes marked “By Self”; on the right, the tiny boxes were marked “By Others.” In between were the myriad “racial” categories, starting with White and Black or African American and the boxes allowing the person to check or write in ethnic origin or tribe. If the person does not identify by race, they would fill out only the “By Others” category.

He walked his faceless listeners through it all.

Monk, who has worked with the Census before on its racial data collection, doubts that the concept of racialization can be widely grasped.

“When you move to new terms, like racialized … you probably run the risk of people not really understanding,” Monk said.

A better approach might be to educate people about the categories’ origins and “that it’s really about us understanding where we’ve come from, and the different struggles that people have had and how they are not about biology.”

“If the context around these categories changes, then the categories themselves are not inherently problematic.”

Hoyt agrees that education is key. The word comes up continually; many of the race-category resisters are educators after all.

But language that has caused harm for centuries must be attacked from all sides, he believes. The Census could at least run the form through its rigorous testing process. The categories have already shifted greatly over time, he noted.

The federal Office of Budget and Management, which recommends changes in racial and ethnic categories to the Census, began the listening sessions last September. They will run through the fall, a spokesman said, although the agency would not divulge how many sessions or participants will be included.

The OMB declined to comment on the possibility of using other terms for race or the impact its usage of racial categories has on U.S. society.

At his desk, Hoyt starts to wind up his presentation to the Census.

“I hope it does not represent a disruption to what the census has been doing and needs to do,” Hoyt, looking directly now at his laptop camera, said. “ … But for my money, and the folks that I’m representing, this would be the most important correction that we’ve made in terms of how we think and treat each other … since the founding of this nation.”

Hoyt closed his laptop and thought for a moment. He is not sure the government will be more or less apt than its citizens to listen to his message. One thing he believes: the world can’t afford his not trying.

This story follows Post style of capitalizing Black and White, except in some quotes where the speaker opposes it or when using the subjects’ alternative terminology.

Hoyt speaks at ABCD University High School about racialization. (Katye Martens Brier For The Washington Post) Story editing by Mike Semel. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Copy editing by Jasper Smith. Design by Jennifer C. Reed.

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By Sydney Trent Sydney Trent has been a journalist at The Washington Post since 1999. Most recently, she was Senior Editor/Social Issues, supervising award-winning coverage of religion, gender, poverty and other topics. In this role, she ran coverage of the 2013 inauguration of Barack Obama and Pope Francis' U.S. papal visit in 2015. Twitter