Rex Kerr
2 min readMar 21, 2024

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Because Allison says, and I quote, "Still, her faux pas highlights the fallacy of her “one race” theory. [...] Her upbringing and conditioning as a White woman engrained these connotations."

But this is terrible evidence! Ms. Elliott's website says, "Her mission: One Race." That's her mission. She isn't literally saying that we already live in a culture where we maintain that there is only one race, the human race. She's saying our goal should be to view things that way. If we'd lived in the society that Ms. Elliott was striving for (even granting that it might be a veneer over attitudes that really weren't much changed), surely her ubpringing and conditioning as a White woman would be different. And who's to know if she wouldn't have had the misperception she did in that case?

So--unless Allison just likes besmirching Ms. Elliott--the claim has to be that in striving for a One Race perspective, Ms. Elliott has rendered herself more prone to these kinds of gaffes than if she took another approach. But that's also terrible evidence because, among other reasons, we don't have anyone to compare to who took another approach.

Maybe Allison had something else in mind and didn't communicate it clearly, but certainly readers shouldn't be wowed by the evidence. That's why I didn't comment on Allison's post directly; I commented on the commenter who was unreasonably impressed.

I agree that Allison is trying to do anti-racist education here. Part of that is to expose bad ideas as genuinely bad, but her use of Ms. Elliott's inadvisable words don't form a useful critique of Elliott's ideas about how to improve race relations.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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