Shahrzad Sabet, co-director of the Center on Modernity in Transition, presented research suggesting that conventional social identities, while providing some security, also create persistent instability because they inherently exclude some people.
“A universal human identity, unlike all other identities, is non-exclusionary,” Dr. Sabet explained. “Insofar as the community of human beings goes… it has no parameters of otherness.” She stated that only by “embedding our Americanness firmly within the recognition of our essential oneness as human beings, can we finally free the American story from the instabilities and exclusions that have always plagued it.”
Discussions explored how prevailing frameworks of racial justice can inadvertently reinforce the very categories they seek to transcend. Sheena Mason, a professor and founder of Togetherness Wayfinder, cautioned against what she calls the “epistemic trap of racialization.”
“Many of the dominant narratives about identity in the United States,” she explained, “are not essences but stories—stories written into law, science, media, and education. They are designed to maintain lines of division and antagonism that benefit only a small percentage of people.”
Dr. Mason emphasized that while race is real in its effects, it is not real in essence: “The trap is that we start to believe it tells us something true about our humanity. Even fighting against it often keeps us within its frame.” She invited participants to imagine narratives that move beyond these inherited constructs, creating “actually humanizing, just, and better futures for all people.”
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