It is not new, or radical, to suggest that ‘race’ is a social construct. The idea has been prominent in social, political and philosophical discourse for decades. The bold challenge put forward by Jon Ivan Gill is that this idea is just a halfway house – questioning the fixity of race while doing nothing to lessen the trauma caused by its continued presence as a category of human identity. Can we truly end racism before we dissolve the notion of race itself, and if we do then what are we left with? In Multi/Race/Less/Ness, Jon Ivan Gill challenges us to take the next step and abolish the very category of race. With seemingly immutable notions of race still baked into our societies at the level of law and legislation, process philosophy can remind us that being, and how we define it, is dynamic and subject to change. If race as a category is impermanent, then it can be undone.

At once a keen dissection of colonial apparatus and a practical, creative vision for a new way of organizing ourselves, Jon Ivan Gill offers a fluid vision for moving beyond racial categories into a world free from the colonial structures that they reinforce.

This talk will focus specifically on the metaphysical scheme of multi/race/less/ness and how Gill proposes it offers a way out of the hierarchies of racial identification.