The Cause For Race

What if skin color really is just an attribute? Like the color of a car — sitting on the surface, telling you nothing about what is underneath?

McKinley Garland III has believed this his whole life. He grew up Black in a predominantly white neighborhood in Suffern, New York, navigating the specific education that comes from being the only one in the room — the room-reading, the code-switching, the accusations of "acting white," the neighbors who were clumsy and the friends who were genuine and the long accumulated evidence that people, most of them, are worth knowing.

This book is what that life taught him.

The Cause for Race makes the case — honestly, directly, and without anger — for every group that has ever been reduced to a category.

It makes the case for Black people: thirteen percent of the American population, operating under conditions designed to produce nothing, producing the traffic light, the blood bank, open-heart surgery, the personal computer, the COVID-19 vaccine, and the music that the entire world listens to. The argument is not charity. It is arithmetic.

It makes the case for white people and Western civilization: the airplane, the internet, the printing press, the scientific method, penicillin, democracy. Not a case for perfection — the record contains colonialism and slavery alongside everything else — but a case for honest acknowledgment of what was built, alongside its honest accounting.

It makes the case for Latino, Asian, Arab, South Asian, and Indigenous people — for algebra and the concept of zero and color television and the USB port and corn and chocolate and the hammock and six hundred years of medical education built on one Persian physician's textbook.

And then it says the hard things.

About what the media is selling young Black men and young women — and who profits from it. About the crisis of single motherhood and absent fathers. About the difference between Black people and the small group whose behavior goes viral and gets assigned to all forty-two million of them. About where privilege actually lives — in wealth and class, not skin color — and why poor white people and poor Black people have more in common with each other than either has with the people at the top.

About why hating white people for slavery makes no more sense than hating a Russian friend whose ancestors were on a different continent. About what happened to a Sikh man in Arizona four days after September 11, 2001, who was planting flowers and collecting money for the victims' families when someone decided, without a moment of actual thought, that he was the enemy.

This book is for the older generation — the ones taught ignorance by people who were taught ignorance before them, who now have the chance, looking at their grandchildren's friendships, to put it down.

The younger generation is already living the argument. This is the invitation for everyone else to catch up.

Honest. Said with love.

— McKinley Garland III

https://thecauseforrace.com