[wcerfgba]

There seem to be some conflicting ideas here. On one hand, the concept of 'race' is what allows racism to exist and we need to remove this concept from our collective ideology in order to defeat racism -- people are just people. On the other hand, it is a fact that external biological characteristics (predominantly skin colour and facial structure) result in social clustering and discrimination, at the individual, collective and institutional levels -- racism is real.

I appreciate the principles behind race abolitionism, as I have often applied the same logic to gender, which is arguably even more socially constructed than race, since the appeal to biological characteristics is weaker for defining one's gender than one's race. However, if we remove these ideas from our collective understanding of the world, do we not make it harder to argue cases of legitimate discrimination? If the generally accepted notion is "gender does not exist" or "race does not exist", how does one make the argument "I was discriminated against because of <attributes>?" Or is the idea that once people no longer make the distinction between different groups of attributes, then individual and institutional discrimination will no longer exist? It seems to me that in order for such an approach to be successful, we would need to train ourselves to not notice external characteristics of individuals, effectively becoming colour-blind, a task which not only seems impossible due to the nature of the human mind, but also a dangerous position to take while racism still exists -- since it also blinds us to an understanding of why a person was discriminated against and what factors affected their experience --, and risks destroying our concept of cultural heritage. Perhaps race abolitionism is more suited for a post-racism world?