Our guest for this episode, Jon Ivan Gill (Gustavus Adolphus College), argues in his most recent book Multi/Race/Less/Ness (Bloomsbury, 2025) that race is trauma. Not that race “causes” trauma, but rather that the assignment of metaphysically fixed and static racial categories to people is itself a trauma.  Gill contends that we are coerced to accept the limitations imposed by racial categories, which not only severely restrict our life possibilities, but cause us to fundamentally misapprehend the dynamic, ever-changing, and ever-evolving reality of human being and human identity, which is always in flux.

In an innovative reformulation of well-worn race-abolitionist positions, Gill rejects racial categories as “useless abstractions” and refuses to adopt them as identifiers. While acknowledging that he cannot stop others from identifying him racially, he recommends to the rest of us what he calls “multi/race/less/ness,” a dynamic category (inspired by Whitehead’s process philosophy) that provides more breathing room for navigating the often suffocating metaphysics of race.

Grab a drink and join us for this frank and substantive exchange, with many significant disagreements unpacked along the way about what is and is not worth preserving in the category of “race,” and how.

In thefollowing episode, we discuss the following thinkers/texts/ideas/etc.:

• Jon Ivan Gill, Multi/Race/Less/Ness: A Process Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2025)
• Alfred North Whitehead (SEP)
• Afrofuturism 
• Naomi Zack
• Public Enemy
• The Moorish Science Temple of America
• Kanye West 
• Our previous HBS Season 3, Episode 34 on “Cancel Panic”
• David Livingston Smith, “What is Race Abolitionism?” (2023)
• Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
• Scientific racism and the modern taxonomy of race 
• Carl Linnaeus on race
• Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995)
• Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (NYU Press)
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
• Process philosophy (IEP)
• Whitehead, Process and Reality (the 1927–28 Gifford Lectures) 
• Brian Massumi on useful and useless abstractions 
• Sheena Michele Mason, The Raceless Antiracist: Why Ending Race Is the Future of Antiracism 
• Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997)
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1977)
• Hotel Bar Sessions, “Panopticism (Foucault’s Discipline and Punish)” 
• The private language argument (SEP)
• Rachel Dolezal 
• KRS-One 
• Talib Kweli