Rethinking race, revealing dilemmas: Imagining a new racial subject in race traitor

Questions of race, racism, and essentialism continue to garner academic and public attention, often provoking debates about how to rethink and/or eliminate race and produce new identities separate from race and racial categories. In this essay, we explore one racial discourse, a contemporary project titled Race Traitor, that seeks to destroy whiteness and replace it with race treason. Drawing on the insights of critical rhetoric, we explore this discourse and argue that one productive approach to race entails consideration of the racial paradox, or the tension between imagining identities beyond race while still recognizing the material reality of race as a fundamental organizing construct. We maintain that strategies of mobility and political solidarity can assist us in navigating the racial paradox.